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Today's video-conferencing tools support a rich range of professional and social activities, but their generic, grid-based environments cannot be easily adapted to meet the varying needs of distributed collaborators. To enable end-user customization, we developed BlendScape, a system for meeting participants to compose video-conferencing environments tailored to their collaboration context by leveraging AI image generation techniques. BlendScape supports flexible representations of task spaces by blending users' physical or virtual backgrounds into unified environments and implements multimodal interaction techniques to steer the generation. Through an evaluation with 15 end-users, we investigated their customization preferences for work and social scenarios. Participants could rapidly express their design intentions with BlendScape and envisioned using the system to structure collaboration in future meetings, but experienced challenges with preventing distracting elements. We implement scenarios to demonstrate BlendScape's expressiveness in supporting distributed collaboration techniques from prior work and propose composition techniques to improve the quality of environments.

Wearables, mobile devices and Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors are enabling us to monitor our environment, understand our social connections, and track our personal health. However, most of these systems communicate data through information visualizations that are often ‘hidden’ inside devices, such as mobile phones and tablets, requiring users to undertake explicit actions to reveal them. Novel interfaces and devices embedded in people’s everyday life have the potential to help users visualize, use, and appropriate their collected personal data. To this end, we designed the physical artifact LOOP, which provides an abstract visualization of the user’s activity data by changing its shape. In this paper, we elaborate on the design and present a one-week field study in which LOOP was deployed in the homes of five end-users. We found that the physical presence of LOOP facilitated reflection and the layered visualization supported various personal tracking.

Wearables, mobile devices and Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors are enabling us to monitor our environment, understand our social connections, and track our personal health. However, most of these systems communicate data through information visualizations that are often ‘hidden’ inside devices, such as mobile phones and tablets, requiring users to undertake explicit actions to reveal them. Novel interfaces and devices embedded in people’s everyday life have the potential to help users visualize, use, and appropriate their collected personal data. To this end, we designed the physical artifact LOOP, which provides an abstract visualization of the user’s activity data by changing its shape. In this paper, we elaborate on the design and present a one-week field study in which LOOP was deployed in the homes of five end-users. We found that the physical presence of LOOP facilitated reflection and the layered visualization supported various personal tracking.

Sketching is universal. It enables us to work through problems, communicate complexity, work with people who have diverse needs, and document work processes we employ within Human-Computer Interaction. Increased interest in sketching as a methodology within HCI has led to increased attendance of interactive courses, meet-ups, and discussion groups, from those who are complete beginners, to seasoned researchers with the skills and knowledge to support others. By bringing together these individuals, we are able to advance the understanding of how sketching underpins research, and how we might work with sketching as technology advances. SketCHI 2.0 aims to support ongoing discussions and collaborations around sketching in HCI, and further build the Sketching HCI community. As well as drawing on location, feedback, and discussion, we will form collaborative working groups to further our collective interest in this area and conduct high-level discussions about the practical applications and outputs of sketching in HCI.

Freehand sketching is a valuable process, input, output, and tool, often used by people to communicate and express ideas, as well as document, explore and describe concepts between researcher, user, or client. Sketches are fast, easy to create, and - by varying their fidelity - can be used in all areas of HCI. Sketching in HCI will explore and demonstrate themes around sketching in HCI with the aim of producing tangible outputs. Attendees will leave the course with the confidence to engage actively with sketching on an everyday basis in their research practice.

Designing interfaces or applications that move beyond the bounds of a single device screen enables new ways to engage with digital content. Research addressing the opportunities and challenges of interactions with multiple devices in concert is of continued focus in HCI research. To inform the future research agenda of this field, we contribute an analysis and taxonomy of a corpus of 510 papers in the cross- device computing domain. For both new and experienced researchers in the field we provide: an overview, historic trends and unified terminology of cross-device research; discussion of major and under-explored application areas; mapping of enabling technologies; synthesis of key interaction techniques spanning across multiple devices; and review of common evaluation strategies. We close with a discussion of open issues. Our taxonomy aims to create a unified terminology and common understanding for researchers in order to facilitate and stimulate future cross-device research.

Freehand sketching is a valuable process, input, output, and tool, often used by people to communicate and express ideas, as well as document, explore and describe concepts between researcher, user, or client. Sketches are fast, easy to create, and - by varying their fidelity - can be used in all areas of HCI. Sketching in HCI will explore and demonstrate themes around sketching in HCI with the aim of producing tangible outputs. Attendees will leave the course with the confidence to engage actively with sketching on an everyday basis in their research practice.

Designing interfaces or applications that move beyond the bounds of a single device screen enables new ways to engage with digital content. Research addressing the opportunities and challenges of interactions with multiple devices in concert is of continued focus in HCI research. To inform the future research agenda of this field, we contribute an analysis and taxonomy of a corpus of 510 papers in the cross- device computing domain. For both new and experienced researchers in the field we provide: an overview, historic trends and unified terminology of cross-device research; discussion of major and under-explored application areas; mapping of enabling technologies; synthesis of key interaction techniques spanning across multiple devices; and review of common evaluation strategies. We close with a discussion of open issues. Our taxonomy aims to create a unified terminology and common understanding for researchers in order to facilitate and stimulate future cross-device research.

Sketching is of great value as a process, input, output and tool in HCI, but can be confined to individual ideation or note-taking, as few researchers have the confidence to document events, studies and workshops under the public gaze. The recent surge in interest in this sometimes-overlooked skill has manifested itself in courses, workshops and live-scribing of high-profile events – and a renewed enthusiasm for freehand sketching as a formal part of the research process at all levels. SketCHI aims to address both research interests and sketching practice in a combined approach to define, discuss and deliver theory and methods to a broad audience. As well as structuring high level discussions and collating information and resources, this SIG will allow attendees to practice and explore observational sketching on location around the conference, with feedback and encouragement from industry professionals. Finally, attendees will be encouraged to collaborate and form a research community around sketching in HCI.

Hand-drawn sketches are an easy way for researchers to communicate and express ideas, as well as document, explore and describe concepts between researcher, user, or client. Sketches are fast, easy to create, and – by varying their fidelity – they can be used in all areas of HCI. The Applied Sketching in HCI course will explore and demonstrate themes around sketching in HCI with the aim of producing tangible outputs. Those attending will leave the course with the confidence to engage actively with sketching on a day-to-day basis. Participants will be encouraged to apply what they have learnt to their own research.

The Interactions website (interactions.acm.org) hosts a stable of bloggers who share insights and observations on HCI, often challenging current practices. Each issue we'll publish selected posts from some of the leading and emerging voices in the field.

To study and understand group collaborations involving multiple handheld devices and large interactive displays, researchers frequently analyse video recordings of interaction studies to interpret people's interactions with each other and/or devices. Advances in ubicomp technologies allow researchers to record spatial information through sensors in addition to video material. However, the volume of video data and high number of coding parameters involved in such an interaction analysis makes this a time-consuming and labour-intensive process. We designed EagleView, which provides analysts with real-time visualisations during playback of videos and an accompanying data-stream of tracked interactions. Real-time visualisations take into account key proxemic dimensions, such as distance and orientation. Overview visualisations show people's position and movement over longer periods of time. EagleView also allows the user to query people's interactions with an easy-to-use visual interface. Results are highlighted on the video player's timeline, enabling quick review of relevant instances. Our evaluation with expert users showed that EagleView is easy to learn and use, and the visualisations allow analysts to gain insights into collaborative activities.

The availability of mobile device ecologies enables new types of ad-hoc co-located decision-making and sensemaking practices in which people find, collect, discuss, and share information. However, little is known about what kind of device configurations are suitable for these types of tasks. This paper contributes new insights into how people use configurations of devices for one representative example task: collaborative co-located trip-planning. We present an empirical study that explores and compares three strategies to use multiple devices: no-overview, overview on own device, and a separate overview device. The results show that the overview facilitated decision- and sensemaking during a collaborative trip-planning task by aiding groups to iterate their itinerary, organize locations and timings efficiently, and discover new insights. Groups shared and discussed more opinions, resulting in more democratic decision-making. Groups provided with a separate overview device engaged more frequently and spent more time in closely-coupled collaboration.

Toolkit research plays an important role in the field of HCI, as it can heavily influence both the design and implementation of interactive systems. For publication, the HCI community typically expects toolkit research to include an evaluation component. The problem is that toolkit evaluation is challenging, as it is often unclear what ‘evaluating’ a toolkit means and what methods are appropriate. To address this problem, we analyzed 68 published toolkit papers. From our analysis, we provide an overview of, reflection on, and discussion of evaluation methods for toolkit contributions. We identify and discuss the value of four toolkit evaluation strategies, including the associated techniques that each employs. We offer a categorization of evaluation strategies for toolkit researchers, along with a discussion of the value, potential limitations, and trade-offs associated with each strategy.

Hand-drawn sketches are an easy way for researchers to communicate and express ideas, as well as document, explore and describe concepts between researcher, user, or client. Sketches are fast, easy to create, and – by varying their fidelity – they can be used in all areas of HCI. The Applied Sketching in HCI course will explore and demonstrate themes around sketching in HCI with the aim of producing tangible outputs. Those attending will leave the course with the confidence to engage actively with sketching on a day-to-day basis. Participants will be encouraged to apply what they have learnt to their own research.

The Interactions website (interactions.acm.org) hosts a stable of bloggers who share insights and observations on HCI, often challenging current practices. Each issue we'll publish selected posts from some of the leading and emerging voices in the field.

Over the years, toolkits have been designed to facilitate the rapid prototyping of novel designs for graphical user interfaces, physical computing, fabrication, tangible interfaces and ubiquitous computing. However, although evaluation methods for HCI are widely available, particular techniques and approaches to evaluate technical toolkit research are less well developed. Moreover, it is unclear what kind of contribution and impact technical toolkits can bring to the larger HCI community. In this workshop we aim to bring together leading researchers in the field to discuss challenges and opportunities to develop new methods and approaches to design, evaluate, disseminate and share toolkits. Furthermore, we will discuss the technical, methodological and enabling role of toolkits for HCI research.

We investigated how a physical artifact could support seamless interaction with personal activity data in everyday life. We introduce LOOP (Figure 1), a physical artifact that changes its shape according to the activity data of the owner, providing an abstract visualization. This paper reports on the design process of LOOP that was informed by interviews and co-creation sessions with end users. We conclude with future work on the evaluation of the concept. This paper makes two main contributions. Firstly, LOOP is proposed as an example of an alternative approach to physically represent activity data. Secondly, the design process and rationale behind LOOP are presented as design knowledge.

Real-time tracking of people's location, orientation and activities is increasingly important for designing novel ubiquitous computing applications. Top-view camera-based tracking avoids occlusion when tracking people while collaborating, but often requires complex tracking systems and advanced computer vision algorithms. To facilitate the prototyping of ubiquitous computing applications for interactive spaces, we developed EagleSense, a real-time human posture and activity recognition system with a single top-view depth sensing camera. We contribute our novel algorithm and processing pipeline, including details for calculating silhouetteextremities features and applying gradient tree boosting classifiers for activity recognition optimised for top-view depth sensing. EagleSense provides easy access to the real-time tracking data and includes tools for facilitating the integration into custom applications. We report the results of a technical evaluation with 12 participants and demonstrate the capabilities of EagleSense with application case studies.

We investigated how a physical artifact could support seamless interaction with personal activity data in everyday life. We introduce LOOP (Figure 1), a physical artifact that changes its shape according to the activity data of the owner, providing an abstract visualization. This paper reports on the design process of LOOP that was informed by interviews and co-creation sessions with end users. We conclude with future work on the evaluation of the concept. This paper makes two main contributions. Firstly, LOOP is proposed as an example of an alternative approach to physically represent activity data. Secondly, the design process and rationale behind LOOP are presented as design knowledge.

Over the years, toolkits have been designed to facilitate the rapid prototyping of novel designs for graphical user interfaces, physical computing, fabrication, tangible interfaces and ubiquitous computing. However, although evaluation methods for HCI are widely available, particular techniques and approaches to evaluate technical toolkit research are less well developed. Moreover, it is unclear what kind of contribution and impact technical toolkits can bring to the larger HCI community. In this workshop we aim to bring together leading researchers in the field to discuss challenges and opportunities to develop new methods and approaches to design, evaluate, disseminate and share toolkits. Furthermore, we will discuss the technical, methodological and enabling role of toolkits for HCI research.

Real-time tracking of people's location, orientation and activities is increasingly important for designing novel ubiquitous computing applications. Top-view camera-based tracking avoids occlusion when tracking people while collaborating, but often requires complex tracking systems and advanced computer vision algorithms. To facilitate the prototyping of ubiquitous computing applications for interactive spaces, we developed EagleSense, a real-time human posture and activity recognition system with a single top-view depth sensing camera. We contribute our novel algorithm and processing pipeline, including details for calculating silhouetteextremities features and applying gradient tree boosting classifiers for activity recognition optimised for top-view depth sensing. EagleSense provides easy access to the real-time tracking data and includes tools for facilitating the integration into custom applications. We report the results of a technical evaluation with 12 participants and demonstrate the capabilities of EagleSense with application case studies.

In this workshop, we will review and discuss challenges and opportunities for HCI in relation to cross-surface interaction in the wild based on the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) practice. We aim to bring together researchers and practitioners working on technical infra-structures for cross-surface computing, studies of cross-surface computing in particular domains as well as interaction challenges for introducing cross-surface computing in the wild, all with a particular focus on BYOD. Examples of application domains are: cultural institutions, work places, public libraries, schools and education.

Proxemic interaction is a vision of computing that employs proxemic relationships to mediate interaction between people and ensembles of various digital devices. In this chapter, we focus on aspects of peripheral interaction in proxemic interactions. We illustrate how to facilitate transitions between interaction outside the attentional field, the periphery, and the center of attention by means of the Proxemic Flow peripheral floor display. We summarize and generalize our findings into two design patterns: slow-motion feedback and gradual engagement. We propose slow-motion feedback as a way to draw attention to actions happening in the background and provide opportunities for intervention, while gradual engagement provides peripheral awareness of action possibilities and discoverability and reveals possible future interactions.

For digital content curation of historical artefacts, curators collaboratively collect, analyze and edit documents, images, and other digital resources in order to display and share new representations of that information to an audience. Despite their increasing reliance on digital documents and tools, current technologies provide little support for these specific collaborative content curation activities. We introduce CurationSpace - a novel cross-device system - to provide more expressive tools for curating and composing digital historical artefacts. Based on the concept of Instrumental Interaction, CurationSpace allows users to interact with digital curation artefacts on shared interactive surfaces using personal smartwatches as selectors for instruments or modifiers (applied to either the whole curation space, individual documents, or fragments). We introduce a range of novel interaction techniques that allow individuals or groups of curators to more easily create, navigate and share resources during content curation. We report insights from our user study about people's use of instruments and modifiers for curation activities.

In this workshop, we will review and discuss open issues, technical challenges and conceptual models for multi-device spatial or proxemic interaction. We aim to bring together researchers, students and practitioners working on technical infrastructures, studies and designs of spatial interfaces, or domain specific multi-device applications that use space as a unit of analysis. We focus specifically on analysing how such interfaces, tools and tracking technology can be deployed "in the wild". The workshop will facilitate knowledge exchange about the current state of spatial and proxemic interactive systems, identify application domains and enabling technologies for cross-surface interactions in the wild, and establish a research community to develop effective strategies for successful design of cross-device interactions.

In this workshop, we will review and discuss open issues, technical challenges and conceptual models for multi-device spatial or proxemic interaction. We aim to bring together researchers, students and practitioners working on technical infrastructures, studies and designs of spatial interfaces, or domain specific multi-device applications that use space as a unit of analysis. We focus specifically on analysing how such interfaces, tools and tracking technology can be deployed "in the wild". The workshop will facilitate knowledge exchange about the current state of spatial and proxemic interactive systems, identify application domains and enabling technologies for cross-surface interactions in the wild, and establish a research community to develop effective strategies for successful design of cross-device interactions.

Remote controls facilitate interactions at-a-distance with appliances. However, the complexity, diversity, and in-creasing number of digital appliances in ubiquitous com-puting ecologies make it increasingly difficult to: (1) dis-cover which appliances are controllable; (2) select a par-ticular appliance from the large number available; (3) view information about its status; and (4) control the ap-pliance in a pertinent manner. To mitigate these problems we contribute proxemic-aware controls, which exploit the spatial relationships between a person's handheld de-vice and all surrounding appliances to create a dynamic appliance control interface. Specifically, a person can discover and select an appliance by the way one orients a mobile device around the room, and then progressively view the appliance's status and control its features in in-creasing detail by simply moving towards it. We illus-trate proxemic-aware controls of assorted appliances through various scenarios. We then provide a generalized conceptual framework that informs future designs of proxemic-aware controls.