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This article contributes to research that aims to better understand and describe the rural context for rural computing. We argue that the particularities of rurality are heightened by the experience of ‘islandness’. We report on our experiences of engaging on one small island as islanders established community radio using a novel platform. Data comes from 12 semi-structured interviews with community members and ethnographic field notes assembled through eight researcher visits to the island. Transcripts and notes were analysed using thematic analysis. We discuss how rural islandness as a socio-cultural lens influenced technology appropriation and factors to support participation. We explore the elements of rural islandness that can be used as an analytic tool for rural HCI and HCI more broadly, through three main contributions of rural islandness that we believe have not yet been sufficiently explored in HCI. These are (1) separateness, (2) pushing things ahead, and (3) publics and rural pluralities. This article contributes to research that aims to better understand and describe the rural context for rural computing. We argue that the particularities of rurality are heightened by the experience of ‘islandness’. We report on our experiences of engaging on one small island as islanders established community radio using a novel platform. Data comes from 12 semi-structured interviews with community members and ethnographic field notes assembled through eight researcher visits to the island. Transcripts and notes were analysed using thematic analysis. We discuss how rural islandness as a socio-cultural lens influenced technology appropriation and factors to support participation. We explore the elements of rural islandness that can be used as an analytic tool for rural HCI and HCI more broadly, through three main contributions of rural islandness that we believe have not yet been sufficiently explored in HCI. These are (1) separateness, (2) pushing things ahead, and (3) publics and rural pluralities.

Dental treatment provided under general anaesthesia (DGA) is an expectation for many children and young adults (CYA) diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Planning and delivery of DGA requires consideration of morbidity and mortality risks and implications for families and healthcare services. One hundred patient records of CYA with special healthcare needs were analysed to examine characteristics and experience of DGA revealing that 79% of CYA had a diagnosis of ASD. Forty-seven percent of CYA diagnosed with ASD had at least one previous hospital admission for DGA. For 24% of this repeat DGA group, the previous DGA was within a two-year period. Results highlight a high rate of DGA and need to investigate more effective primary dental care strategies.

Online health communities provide a space where people seek out and provide support for weight loss activities, including tracking. Our study examined the experiences of members of an online community (r/loseit on Reddit.com) who posted about using digital tracking tools for weight loss. A targeted search garnered 379 public posts, which were analyzed using Thematic Analysis. Four themes reflected members’ individual and shared experiences: Tracking as gaining insight, Tracking as a vehicle of control, Confronting challenges in sustaining tracking and Teaching and learning the skills of tracking. We highlight complex socio-technical processes that members developed around tracking tools and discuss how knowledge of these appropriations can be applied to designing future user-centered tracking tools to support weight loss. We discuss how the social context of an online health community can shape both the usage of tracking tools and self-regulatory processes for health behaviour change.

We argue for a new way of using pictorial publications to communicate the social, cultural, and material contexts in which "in the wild" research is carried out. Such research often allows for partial researcher perspectives, as the researchers travel to, encounter, and leave those places. However, in HCI research, the journeys and interactions in and around those places are rarely reported directly in archival papers. We argue that those journeys and interactions directly inform how we make sense of the project, and thus should be recorded and shared appropriately. We argue that pictorials can be a format that breaks the boundary between "supplementary materials" and archival publications, and allows us to do that sharing function. We illustrate this argument through reporting of our Research Journey to a number of islands off the west coast of Ireland as part of a project that is developing technology to support rural community radio.

In this paper, we make an argument for using "the absurd" as a useful lens through which to critique modern developments in interactive technology. We argue that absurd positions are generative and engaging; they provide scope and direction for developing artefacts that people want to talk about and discuss. We argue for adopting absurd positions because; 1) as publicly funded academics, unbeholden to commercial interests, we can, 2) it's fun, and 3) doing so draws out, highlights, and plays with the often weird, fake, nonsense, bizarre, and surreal aspects of modern interactive technology artefacts - and the often weird situations that arise when interacting with those artefacts. In order to illustrate this argument, we present a number of case studies drawn from 10 years of our absurd research papers, many of which were published at previous iterations of this conference.

Rural communities often lack platforms to support civic engagement and local deliberation. Community radio is intended to facilitate such functions, yet, radio technologies can be expensive and complex to use. To tackle this challenge, low-barrier radio technologies are becoming available. We argue that technology to support civic engagement and local deliberation are important, and design of such platforms must take into consideration specific community needs. We contribute by exploring the needs of three rural European communities. Findings indicate that communities are now distributed beyond place. Platforms for deliberation must include both hyper-local and geographically dispersed populations. Rural values of accountability, reliability and maintaining social harmony are important design considerations. Community radio platforms should support geographically distributed community connections, sharing of health and emergency information, preservation of heritage and as a space for advocacy and civic action.

Participatory social innovation projects often involve the coming together of design researchers, community development groups, and community members to develop (often technological) solutions to social problems or challenges. “Intermediaries” are specific individuals and organisations who contribute to these projects by translating intentions, values and experiences between design researchers and communities. Previous research has not yet critically examined the role of intermediaries in such projects. This paper does so in a project carried out in rural areas of Europe, which sought to test and develop a technology to support the creation of FM community radio stations in isolated areas. We present the project as a biography of infrastructures to provide an account of intermediaries’ interactions during the project's unfolding. We find that how intermediaries shape the social base and ends of the project, and the interpretation of the technology involved, is influenced by their position, goals, and relationships in the process. Participatory social innovation projects often involve the coming together of design researchers, community development groups, and community members to develop (often technological) solutions to social problems or challenges. “Intermediaries” are specific individuals and organisations who contribute to these projects by translating intentions, values and experiences between design researchers and communities. Previous research has not yet critically examined the role of intermediaries in such projects. This paper does so in a project carried out in rural areas of Europe, which sought to test and develop a technology to support the creation of FM community radio stations in isolated areas. We present the project as a biography of infrastructures to provide an account of intermediaries’ interactions during the project's unfolding. We find that how intermediaries shape the social base and ends of the project, and the interpretation of the technology involved, is influenced by their position, goals, and relationships in the process.

Standard mindfulness-based interventions have significant at-home assignments of formal mindfulness practice as a key component. Engagement with formal home practice has been correlated with treatment outcomes, but participants often complete less than the assigned amounts. Here, we explore the requirements for technology tools that can support and encourage home practice, in a way that is appropriate and consistent with the core principles of mindfulness-based interventions. Interviews were held with a group of five highly experienced mindfulness teachers and a group of five participants who had previously completed an eight-week course. Data was subjected to thematic analysis. A key finding was that providing teachers with information on how students practice could support communication around difficulties with home practice. We also identified questions around the appropriateness of adapting the course in response to participant difficulties and participant preferences. Both teachers and students made numerous suggestions for ways to augment their training using technology, such as via practice reminders and provision of teacher-specific content. Finally, a major design issue for technology developers is how to support participants in reflecting on their experiences of mindfulness practice, and subsequent learning, but not to critically evaluate their practice.

Gamification is now a well-established technique in Human-Computer Interaction. However, research on gamification still faces a variety of empirical and theoretical challenges. Firstly, studies of gamified systems typically focus narrowly on understanding individuals. short-term interactions with the system, ignoring more difficult to measure outcomes. Secondly, academic research on gamification has been slow to improve the techniques through which gamified applications are designed. Third, current gamification research lacks a critical lens capable of exploring unintended consequences of designs. The 14 articles published in this special issue face these challenges with great methodological rigor. We summarize them by identifying three main themes: the determination to improve the quality and usefulness of theory in the field of gamification, the improvements in design practice, and the adoption of a critical gaze to uncover side-effects of gamification designs. We conclude by providing an overview of the questions that we feel must be addressed by future work in gamification. Gamification studies would benefit from a wider use of theories to account for the complexity of human behavior, a more thorough exploration of the many opportunities coming from the world of games, and an ethical reflection on the use of game design elements in serious domains.

Access to wheelchair skills training is important for the mobility and independence of wheelchair users, but training rates are low - particularly among young people. In this paper, we present Geometry Wheels, a movement-based experience prototype to explore the potential of interactive technology to support basic wheelchair skills training for manual wheelchair users, designed with the support of occupational therapists. Results of an evaluation with 15 participants (10 young wheelchair users and 5 parents) show that interactive systems can deliver engaging and challenging activities that encourage wheelchair navigation and activity. However, the project also revealed challenges in designing for individual differences in physical abilities, in conflicts between children's and parents' perceptions of ability, and barriers to home use. We outline strategies for the design of rehabilitative technology to help young people with disabilities build physical abilities.

Although participatory design (PD) is currently the most acceptable and respectful process we have for designing technology, recent discussions suggest that there may be two barriers to the successful application of PD to the design of digital games: First, the involvement of audiences with special needs can introduce new practical and ethical challenges to the design process. Second, the use of non-experts in game design roles has been criticised in that participants lack skills necessary to create games of appropriate quality. To explore how domain knowledge and user involvement influence game design, we present results from two projects that addressed the creation of movement-based wheelchair-controlled video games from different perspectives. The first project was carried out together with a local school that provides education for young people with special needs, where we invited students who use wheelchairs to take part in design sessions. The second project involved university students on a game development course, who do not use wheelchairs, taking on the role of expert designers. They were asked to design concepts for wheelchair-controlled games as part of a final-year course on game design. Our results show that concepts developed by both groups were generally suitable examples of wheelchair-controlled motion-based video games, but we observed differences regarding level of detail of game concepts, and ideas of disability. Additionally, our results show that the design exercise exposed vulnerabilities in both groups, outlining that the risk of practical and emotional vulnerability needs to be considered when working with the target audience as well as expert designers. First participatory study designing games for young people using wheelchairs.Reflection on relative contribution of game design expertise and experience.Explores representation of mobility disability by participants in design process.Reflection on how vulnerability of participants exposed through design process.

Fiction has long been important to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research and practice. Through familiar tools such as personas, scenarios and role-play, fictions can support the exploration and communication of complex psychological, social and technical requirements between diverse collections of designers, developers and end-users. More recently, HCI and design research has embraced the development and evaluation of make-believe technologies as a way to speculate and study the possible future effects of technological innovation, since it enables us to unpack and understand the implications of technology that does not yet exist. In this chapter we explore the weird relationship between fiction and technology research through the lens of a fictional conference, a playful project that gathered ideas about fiction in research through fictional research, and explore the fluid relationship between the real and unreal in HCI.

The increasing capability of smart mobile devices to use geolocation and networking has resulted in a proliferation of digital mobile computing services that respond to the social and physical places we visit as we move through the world. This chapter reports and comments on a series of four provocative design projects undertaken in order to better understand location data as material comprising complex social, psychological, and physical properties, and to problematise the growing trend of services uncritically built upon these data. We describe how approaching these goals in a playful and mischievous manner allowed us to explore surprising, jarring or under-reported qualities of geolocation data. In each project, the design process began with ideation around the subversion of stereotypical uses of this data. Working prototypes were designed and implemented using contemporary hardware and software services. Through playing, using, or reading about these prototypes in the media, participants raised new questions and new concerns about how location data is mediated by smart devices, which were developed further in subsequent projects. We believe that this series of projects highlights the value of mischief and fun as a valid design position through which to explore sociocultural aspects of new technologies.

The design, development and deployment of new technology is a form of intervention on the social, psychological and physical world. Whether explicitly intended or not, all digital technology is designed to support some vision of how work, leisure, education, healthcare, and so on, is organised in the future [11]. For example, most efforts to make commercial systems more usable, efficient and pleasurable, are ultimately about the vision of increased profits as part of a capitalist society. This workshop will bring together researchers, designers and practitioners to explore an alternative, post-capitalist, "grand vision" for HCI, asking what kind of futures the community sees itself as working towards. Are the futures we are building towards any different from those envisioned by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, which are typically neoliberal, absent of strict labour laws, licensing fees, tax declarations and the necessity to deal with government bureaucracy?

Voice Communication (VC) is widely employed by developers as an essential component of online games. Typically, it is assumed that communications through this mechanism will be helpful and enjoyable, but existing literature suggests that the entry into VC can be problematic. In this paper, we present a study that attempts to mitigate player discomfort when first engaging with VC with strangers, through the use of traditional icebreaking tasks. We integrate these into the game RET, an online cooperative first person shooter which requires effective communication for players to succeed. An online user study with 18 participants suggests that icebreaking tasks can contribute to a positive VC experience, but their inclusion also creates further issues to be considered for successful integration.

Player involvement in the process of game development has become a de-facto standard in both industry and academia. Participation is intended to empower players, while helping designers create better games. However, participation also introduces uncertainty regarding players' and designers' relative roles, and creates new concerns over the exploitation of players, marginalization of designers, and the quality of game design outcomes. In this workshop, we invite the games research community to critically reflect on methods used to facilitate player participation, with the goal of establishing dialogue around meaningful and constructive player involvement.

In this paper, we explore the coupling of mobile facial recognition technology with the exploitation of non-players as a powerful mechanic in locative augmented reality games. A prototype game is presented which asks players to "capture" the likeness of members of the public. Driven by free-to-play models, and inspired by the phenomenal success of Pokémon GO, we have created an experience where players hunt for and "capture" real creatures in a real world.

In CHI papers, citation of previous work is typically a shallow, throwaway action that demonstrates little critical engagement with the work cited. We present a citation context analysis of over 3000 citations from 69 papers at CHI2016, which demonstrates that only 4.8% of papers cited are presented as anything other than uncontested fact. In 43% of CHI papers sampled, we found no evidence of any critical engagement. Lack of discussion and critique of previous work can encourage the spread of misunderstandings and errors. Authors, reviewers and publication venues must all change practices to respond to this failure of scholarship.

HCI often requires scholars to build upon research from fields outside their expertise, creating the risk that foundational work is misunderstood and misrepresented. The prevailing goal of "exergames" research towards ameliorating obesity appears to be built on just such a misunderstanding of health research. In this paper, we analyse all citations to a single influential study, which has been extensively cited to justify research on exergames. We categorise the 375 citations based on whether they represent the findings of that study accurately or inaccurately. Our findings suggest that 69% of exergames papers citing this study misrepresent the findings, demonstrating a systematic failure of scholarship in exergames research. We argue that exergaming research should cease focusing on games as treatment for obesity, and that HCI publications should demand more critical and scholarly engagement with research from outside HCI.

We argue that the huge success of Augmented Reality game Pokemon Go has little to do with clever design. Rather, the success is due to the nostalgic branding, with a franchise for which people already have great affection. As exasperated academics, rather than resist, we have decided to sell out. We suggest that a similar nostalgic branding strategy allows any mildly interesting HCI project to gain similarly huge benefits of public engagement. We provide the HCI community with a crude nostalgification tool -- MC Hammer's Hammer of Nostalgification -- and present a number of case studies that illustrate its power.

HCI research often demonstrates lack of respect for other disciplines, evidenced by the way work from those disciplines are cited in CHI papers. We present 4 case studies that demonstrate; 1) that HCI researchers sometimes misunderstand and misrepresent work from other disciplines, and 2) how initial misrepresentations can become "accepted wisdom" within HCI. This disregard for other disciplines leads to errors such as authors citing work to support "facts" precisely opposite to those demonstrated by the cited literature. We conclude with recommendations for authors, editors, publishers and readers on how to reduce the risk of such failures.

Background Standardized mindfulness training courses involve significant at-home assignments of meditation practice. Participants’ self-reported completion of these assignments has been correlated with treatment outcomes, but self-reported data are often incomplete and potentially biased. In addition, mindfulness teachers typically suggest that participants set aside a regular practice time, preferably in the morning, but the extent to which participants do this has not been empirically examined. Objective This study aimed to analyze patterns of participant engagement with home practice in a mindfulness-based stress reduction course. Methods We used a novel smartphone app to provide 25 participants with access to their daily practice assignments during the 8-week course. We analyzed data collected through our smartphone app to determine usage and listening patterns and performed analyses of the regularity and frequency of participant behavior. Results We found that participants listened to a median of 3 of the 6 practice sessions per week, and they did not typically set aside a regular daily practice time. Across weekdays, participants practiced most frequently in the morning, but there was considerable variation in participants’ practice start times. On weekends, the peak practice time was in the evening. Conclusions We suggest that it is feasible to integrate a smartphone-monitoring approach into existing mindfulness interventions. High-frequency smartphone monitoring can provide insights into how and when participants complete their homework, information that is important in supporting treatment engagement.

We present craft beer as part of an artisan industry case study that demonstrates how the use of social media creates a community narrative that engages both producer and consumer around the artisanal produce and its values. In contrast to mass drinks production, the past decade has seen a resurgence in specialist artisan 'craft beer' producers, making niche, high-quality products. Specifically, we examine the craft beer industry's use of digital technologies as a way of engendering bilateral consumer engagement with their products, and how it can influence brewing practices and support in-the-field quality control. A qualitative approach, using grounded theory, was undertaken to understand the digital relationships between key stakeholders in the craft beer community, including craft brewers, retailers, bloggers, and fans, through a series of interviews, ethnographies, focus groups, and public events. Our analysis reveals future design considerations for these stakeholders, with findings supporting the design of future interactions that can further strengthen the relationship between small, artisan industries and their consumers.

Young people using powered wheelchairs have limited access to engaging leisure activities. We address this issue through a two-stage project; 1) the participatory development of a set of wheelchair-controlled, movement-based games (with 9 participants at a school that provides education for young people who have special needs) and 2) three case studies (4 participants) exploring player perspectives on a set of three wheelchair-controlled casual games. Our results show that movement-based playful experiences are engaging for young people using powered wheelchairs. However, the participatory design process and case studies also reveal challenges for game accessibility regarding the integration of movement in games, diversity of abilities among young people using powered wheelchairs, and the representation of disability in games. In our paper, we explore how to address those challenges in the development of accessible, empowering movement-based games, which is crucial to the wider participation of young people using powered wheelchairs in play.

Non-digital forms of play that allow players to direct brute force directly upon each other, such as martial arts, boxing and full contact team sports,are very popular. However, inter-player brutality has largely been unexplored as a feature of digital gaming. In this paper, we describe the design and study of 2 multi-player games that encourage players to use brute force directly against other players. Balance of Poweris a tug-of-war style game implemented with Xbox Kinect, while Bundleis a playground-inspired chasing game implemented with smartphones. Two groups of five participants(n=10) played both games while being filmed, and were subsequently interviewed. A thematic analysis identified five keycomponents ofthe brutalmultiplayer video gameexperience, which informsa set of sevendesign considerations.This work aims to inspire the design of engaging game experiences based on awareness and enjoyment of our own and others’ physicality.

In the 10 years since the term was coined 'design fiction' has become an increasingly common approach in HCI research. The practice involves working with 'diegetic prototypes', that is prototypes that need not exist in reality, but instead exist from within a 'story world'. Although fictional aspects are not unusual in HCI prototyping methods (e.g. storyboards, personas, Wizard-of-Oz), the breadth and flexibility of design fiction poses new challenges. This paper originally featured quotes from peer reviews of design fiction orientated papers that have previously been submitted to ACM SIGCHI conferences in order to highlight inherent challenges when reviewing research that may be based upon or include elements of fiction. In response to the SIGCHI Executive Committee's request to not directly quote reviewers the quotes have now been redacted. This somewhat changes the paper's tone and also makes very clear that publishing discussions relating to peer reviews (or the reviews themselves) is extremely challenging.

A number of digital platforms and services have recently emerged that allow users to create posthumous forms of communication, effectively arranging for the delivery of messages from ‘beyond the grave’. Despite some evidence of interest and popularity of these services, little is known about how posthumous messages may impact the people who receive them. We present a qualitative study that explores the type of experiences potentially triggered upon receiving such messages. Our findings firstly suggest that posthumous messaging services have the potential to alter the relationship between the bereaved and the deceased, and secondly provide insight into how users make sense of this altered relationship. Through the inference of a set of design considerations for posthumous communication services, we reveal a number of conflicts that are not easily solvable through technological means alone, and which may serve as starting points for further research. Our work extends the growing body of research that is concerned with digital interactions related to death and dying.

The current article reports two experiments designed to examine the effects of creating competing approach and avoidance response functions for 2 stimuli that participate in the same derived stimulus relation. Experiment 1 involved establishing each of 2 distinct members (i.e., B1 and D1) of the same 1-node equivalence relation (A-B-C-D) as a discriminative stimulus for avoidance and approach responses, respectively. During a test phase, participants were presented with equivalence relation members that were of equal nodal distance from each of the discriminative stimuli (e.g., C1). Approach and avoidance responses during this probe phase were highly varied across participants but stable within participants. In general, approach and avoidance responses were observed with equal frequency during probe trials. Experiment 2 addressed several procedural artefacts, including the absence of response time data. Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1. Elongated response latencies during probe trials in Experiment 2 support the idea that an approach avoidance conflict was generated using the current laboratory preparation. These findings have implications for our understanding of the etiology of anxiety disorders.

Gamification has been widely accepted in the HCI community in the last few years. However, the current debate is focused on its short-term consequences, such as effectiveness and usefulness, while its side-effects, long-term criticalities and systemic impacts are rarely raised. This workshop will explore the gamification design space from a critical perspective, by using design fictions to help researchers reflect on the long-term consequences of their designs.

HCI research often (cl)aims to do good for others, but does it actually? We discuss two cases that exemplify how designing for others can in fact be harmful: the Games Against Health paper by Linehan et al. and the Uninvited Guests video by Superflux. We feel that user-centered methods are often considered as a safe-conduct, simply because the end-user is involved one cannot do wrong. We plead for explicit transparency about the origin of research projects and technology designs to put a critical reflection about underlying values of the work into practice. ispartof: pages:512-524 ispartof: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems vol:07-12-May-2016 pages:512-524 ispartof: Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2016) location:San Jose, CA, USA date:7 May - 12 May 2016 status: published

Asking participants to explore and critique prototype technologies by using them in the real-world settings of their communities is a common approach to democratizing design decisions. We report on a project that sought to seed a rural community radio station, and simultaneously test and refine an innovative radio technology. Living on a remote Irish island, community members saw value in the local radio contributing to the island's sustainability and oral history preservation. The novel, but not yet stable, prototype radio platform, however, did not enable them to produce content within the time constraints and quality requirements they considered vital to their goals. In response community members substituted the prototype platform with a more stable and familiar setup. We reflect on participants’ refusal and argue that their technology substitution helped us not only to understand user and technical needs, but also meanings about participation that are integral to ensuring the genuine design democratisation.