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Policymakers and environmental organizations are increasingly implementing gamification because of its ability to stimulate playful learning and transform human attitudes and behavior. Although it has become a prominent development for climate change engagement, the literature does not adequately address how the underlying motivational systems depend upon user-centered design mechanisms. If gamification is to realize its potential for climate change engagement, it is crucial for designers to apply solid user-centered design principles, as suboptimal designs may do more harm than good. Therefore, we conducted a systematic literature review on gamification for climate change engagement to investigate the application of user-centered design and find key links between design choices and outcomes in 64 articles. We develop the findings into a user-centered design agenda and framework for game-based climate change engagement. This agenda includes design aspects–team multidisciplinarity, context dependence, user involvement, iterative testing, and design choice explication–and outcome aspects–value to users, game mechanics for learning, game content for learning, affective engagement, social engagement, changing real-world behavior, and using game data for research. The agenda is intended to inform gamification academics and practitioners aiming to design effective games for climate change engagement and its recommendations may apply to other complex issues.

This paper proposes the notion of ‘Organized User Experience (UX) Professionalism’ to describe the nature of the UX work in organizations and support the development of the UX profession. The conceptual model of Organized UX Professionalism is observed in practice and evaluated using data from a survey of 422 UX professionals in five countries. The model recognizes that the UX profession and work are guided not only by the principles of user experience and usability, but also by organization and management issues. The empirical evidence shows that indeed Organized UX Professionalism consists of a management-minded work orientation, innovative tool use, highly social best practices, organizational user centeredness, community participation, and the maturity of the UX and usability concepts in the local society. The study also shows that UX professionals largely adopt system-oriented definitions of usability and UX, rather than changing their conceptions towards organizational and human-oriented definitions. We discuss implications of the findings and possible actions of returning to ‘certified usability professionalism’ versus ‘going beyond the idea of the UX professionalism’ towards organization specific UX only. From the human work interaction design perspective, we believe that the notion of Organized UX Professionalism helps conceptualize, measure, develop, and manage the work of UX professionals in different social contexts as well as understand the outcomes and role of this work in the organization. Further, we propose a few concrete research directions to continue this research.

This paper presents preliminary ideas, process and results related to the design of a learning analytics dashboard for supporting student engagement with learning during a course. Understanding students’ needs is important in designing effective learning analytics dashboards. Thus, the design should follow a user-centred or student-centred approach as understanding the needs of the user represents a significant part of the first stage in a user-centred design approach. Students needs are defined in relation to students’ activities and context of use of the system to be designed. A learning analytics dashboard (LAD) is designed to support students’ learning in a course scenario. Students needs are conceptualized based on literature and collected evidence. Among other things, students need meaningful feedback on their performance in various study tasks and support of progression of studies. These student wishes are discussed in what follows from the perspective of LAD design. The paper proposes a student-centred, theory-driven design framework for eliciting and including the students’ needs in the design. Implications for design and pedagogical practice and research are discussed.

We examine the use of 360-degree video technology in a live music event with the aim to explore the factors leading to acceptance of the VR use case and technology, to reduce the knowledge gap about this topic. We collected self-reported, quantitative data from 23 participants and investigated the user experience during the VR mediated 360-video concert and the acceptance of the 360-video for concert participation and VR technology use. We found that acceptance of the novel VR-based communication approach was correlated mainly with perceived usefulness. Furthermore, the perceived usefulness was only correlated with fun, but not flow and immersion. We outline the results in a new theoretical framework for studying and predicting the relationships between individual characteristics, user experience, VR evaluation, content and device, and the acceptance of 360-video mediated musical events and VR technology. Implications for VR acceptance theory and design practice are discussed.

Engaging citizens with climate change is an urgent and complex issue. Gamified initiatives such as game-based learning are used to promote awareness, emotional connection, and action, but we would benefit from more examples of how players truly play serious games and learn through them, especially regarding climate change, which presents unique characteristics as a learning topic. Thus, we developed a digital game about climate change and pandemics and thematically analyzed 12 players’ experiences with it, including their relationship with the designed path, their possible deviations, and their engagement with the topic. Among our findings, we observe that progressing does not always involve interacting exactly as designed, and that game features that would be problematic otherwise can be accepted in the context of education. We also found that players may resist engaging in morally controversial in-game actions, give up in advance, or progress without understanding their actions’ meaning. They also take actions diverging from a purely learning-oriented purpose, such as talking to and trying to interact with characters. Furthermore, game-based climate change engagement is complex and transcends learning new information. The results imply that game-based learning experiences cannot be completely guided, but designers are encouraged to clarify instructions to avoid moments of confused progress. In addition, players can frame educational games as different from entertainment ones in, e.g., their acceptable text amount, but not necessarily in terms of playful affordances. Accessibility and transparency should be addressed too. Importantly, the pedagogical and engaging value of adding playful interactions allowing for player autonomy, surprise, and character attachment should be considered. These can support player engagement and therefore maximize the educational value of games. Regarding climate change, we provide cognitive, affective and behavioral implicatio

There is a shortage of employees in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field, including Information Systems (IS). Student recruitment is a challenge in IS in many countries despite different student marketing efforts and extensive research on the topic. We conducted a survey with first year students in a Finnish university to understand what factors seem to affect their career choice. Our findings indicate that ICT students mostly share their view of ICT with other students, with the exception that they seemed to see the field as more creative, and people oriented. We highlight the creative aspects of the work in IS to potentially attract new students, including more women, to study in IS.

Researchers in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field study, design and encapsulate the rich interaction between different kinds of users, information technology systems, and contexts of use in personal and organizational levels with implications to shaping society at large. HCI addresses different levels of analysis in human-technology interaction, utilizes different theoretical perspectives, practices, and paradigms from other disciplines, cooperates with other academic disciplines to study human-technology interaction, crossing boundaries and contributing to other disciplines, and has the design of human-technology interaction in its core. As research and practice field, HCI is very suitable for and oriented towards inter- and multi-disciplinarity, but transdisciplinarity in HCI is not yet fully explored. This paper outlines and reflects upon the concepts of transdisciplinarity, HCI, and transdisciplinarity in HCI.

This editorial summarizes the background and findings of the First Mini-Conference on Transdisciplinary Research and Design (TRaD 2022) held in Oulu. We describe the aim and vision of the conference, the conference theme, the articles presented and published in the conference proceedings, and the history of the research groups organizing the conference. Furthermore, in the editorial we highlight the main findings in relation to the conference aim. We discuss the conceptualization of transdisciplinarity and directions for further research and collaboration on this topic.