Search

Gifting is socially and economically important. Studies of gifting physical objects have revealed motivations, values, and the tensions between them, while HCI research has revealed weaknesses of digital gifting and explored possibilities of hybrid gifting. We report an ‘in the wild’ study of a hybrid chocolate gift deployed as a commercial product. Interviews reveal the experiences of receivers and givers, as well as the producer's friction points and tangible benefits. We reveal how in hybrid gifts the digital elevates the physical while the physical grounds the digital. We discuss how hybrid gifts bridge the tension between receiver-preference and relationship-signalling motivations, the need to further strengthen the exchange and reveal stages of hybrid gifting, and to manage the privacy of sensitive personal messages. We propose to extend the concept of hybrid wrapping to include a finer-grained interleaving of digital into complex packaging and multi-layered wrappings to create more holistic gifting experiences.

We examine the experience of Thresholds , a virtual reality (VR) recreation of the world's first photographic exhibition, which has toured to multiple museums. Following the method of performance-led research in the wild, we provide an account of the artist's design rationale and the experiences of visitors as the work toured. We reveal how the overlaying and juxtaposing of virtual and physical spaces established a VR architecture that underpinned the extended user experience. Overlaying was used to layer a virtual model onto a corresponding physical set to deliver physical sensations of touch and movement alongside visual and audio stimuli. Juxtaposition was used to embed the VR installation within the surrounding gallery space at each host museum, dealing with the challenges of entering, exiting, spectating, and invigilating the experience. We propose that museum designers can use these techniques to deliver VR installations that are compelling but also scalable and tourable.

The capture and analysis of diverse data is widely recognized as being vital to the design of new products and services across the digital economy. We focus on its use to inspire the co-design of visitor experiences in museums as a distinctive case that reveals opportunities and challenges for the use of personal data. We present a portfolio of data-inspired visiting experiences that emerged from a 3-year Research Through Design process. These include the overlay of virtual models on physical exhibits, a smartphone app for creating personalized tours as gifts, visualizations of emotional responses to exhibits, and the data-driven use of ideation cards. We reflect across our portfolio to articulate the diverse ways in which data can inspire design through the use of ambiguity, visualization, and inter-personalization; how data inspire co-design through the process of co-ideation, co-creation, and co-interpretation; and how its use must negotiate the challenges of privacy, ownership, and transparency. By adopting a human perspective on data, we are able to chart out the complex and rich information that can inform design activities and contribute to datasets that can drive creativity support systems.

We explore how a combination of manipulations and transitions can extend Substitutional Reality to create a highly personal Virtual Reality experience. Our design aimed to meet two challenges faced by museums: the limitations of object handling and the desire for visitors to create their own interpretations. Using a Research-through-Design methodology, we built a performance-led Mixed Reality (MR) experience that lets museum visitors physically handle 3D prints or scans of museum objects to share personal stories about them. The stories are recorded and donated to the participating museum. We reflect on the complex design and the findings gained from a two-day in-the-wild deployment to explore engagement and disruption through manipulations of physicality, visuals, and scale; the transitions between spaces; and a trajectory of storytelling performance. We chart a wide scope for Performative Substitutional Reality and draw implications for VR, MR, and performance-led research in any context.

The Memory Machine is an ambitious project that aims to develop a device to capture people's memories to create a blend of personal and factual data that builds identities, and contextualizes personal recollections. The Memory Machine has been guided by co-production and user-centred design principles to ensure users' input has a critical role in the development of the technology. Through a series of creative workshops, we facilitated participants to discuss and represent their perceptions of memory making and recollection, towards the design of the Memory Machine. This paper investigates how a creative, participatory process enabled technical topics to be explored together, as well as enabling the participants to address more challenging issues of memory; such as painful memories, memory loss, and memories at end-of-life, with a particular focus on dementia, to inform the future design of the Memory Machine.

We explore how usage data captured from ideation cards can enable reflection on design. We deployed a deck of ideation cards on a Masters level module over two years, developing the means to capture the students' designs into a digital repository. We created two visualisations to reveal the relative co-occurrences of the cards as concept space and the relative proximity of designs (through cards used in common) as design space. We used these to elicit reflections from the perspectives of students, teachers and card designers. Our findings inspire ideas for extending the data-driven use of ideation cards throughout the design process; informing the redesign of cards, the rules for using them and their live connection to supporting materials and enabling stakeholders to reflect and recognise challenges and opportunities. We also identified the need, and potential ways, to capture a richer design rationale, including annotations, discarded cards and varying card interpretations.

In this paper we present the creation and deployment of a concerted set of Mixed Reality Technologies designed for creating engaging public experiences and enhanced storytelling opportunities focused on artefacts. Under the title of the Mixed Reality Storytelling (MXRS) project, we combined Internet of Things-inspired approaches and Virtual and Augmented Reality experience technologies, with 3D scanning content creation techniques, to create mobile and adaptable tools suitable for public engagements and industry partners, such as museums and galleries. We present 4 cases of public impact events where the tools were employed over a period of 2 years to create content from visitor contributions, which was then used in follow-on VR and AR engagements. We also demonstrate cases where the tools were used to create content for novel applications of cultural and social informatics.

We address how, framed by the Internet of Things, digitally-enabled physical objects may acquire rich digital records throughout their lifetimes, and how these might enhance their value, meaning and utility. We reflect on emerging findings from two case studies, one focusing on wargaming miniatures and the other on an augmented guitar, that engage communities of practice in capturing and utilising rich digital records of things. We articulate an agenda for future research in terms of four key themes: How can the digital records of everyday things be captured using both manual and automated approaches? How can these records enhance the embodied use of things in suitably discrete ways? How can people generate diverse stories and accounts from these records? How can we revisit current notions of ownership to reflect a more fluid sense of custodianship? The findings of the studies reveal common emergent themes and preferences of the practicing communities that surround these objects and the above questions, while ongoing participatory and probe studies continue to reveal nuances and evaluate possible approaches.

Carolan is an acoustic guitar that has been decorated with interactive patterns that can be scanned using a mobile camera so as to connect to a digital record of how the instrument was made, where it has been and who has played it. Carolan was created as a travelling technology probe to explore the concept of accountable artefects, everyday objects that connect to and draw on rich digital records in order to tell meaningful stories of provenance and use. This demonstration will enable participants to encounter Carolan, scan its inlaid patterns, explore its extensive digital record and to play it and contribute to its record if they wish.

We explore how physical artefacts can be connected to digital records of where they have been, who they have encountered and what has happened to them, and how this can enhance their meaning and utility. We describe how a travelling technology probe in the form of an augmented acoustic guitar engaged users in a design conversation as it visited homes, studios, gigs, workshops and lessons, and how this revealed the diversity and utility of its digital record. We describe how this record was captured and flexibly mapped to the physical guitar and proxy artefacts. We contribute a conceptual framework for accountable artefacts that articulates how multiple and complex mappings between physical artefacts and their digital records may be created, appropriated, shared and interrogated to deliver accounts of provenance and use as well as methodological reflections on technology probes.

We explore the interaction between digital games and human values. HCI as a field is increasingly focused on the importance of engaging with broader discussions around human values. Games are an ideal medium for reflecting on social, ethical and political questions. Accordingly, we propose a multidisciplinary workshop to discuss existing work, consider the future and bring together a range of different epistemological perspectives.

We present an ethnographic study of the practice of miniature wargaming in order to shed light onto the complex lives of physical things and the ways in which they acquire data footprints. We take an extended view of the practice, revealing how people invest great effort into crafting miniatures, playing with them, curating and telling stories about them, and passing them on. Throughout, we emphasise the use of both traditional and digital technologies to build rich data footprints. In discussing our findings, we adopt a "thing-centric" perspective that focuses on the extended lifetimes of the miniatures themselves. This enables us to identify opportunities for digital augmentation in support of capturing "life away from the table" and a need for HCI to focus on designing trajectories of things.

The following paper presents research into the effects of multi- and uni- modal output on virtual immersion. It describes the implementation of a balanced experimental study designed to measure participant immersion in a variety of conditions and presents the resulting findings. These demonstrate the potential of primary and secondary modalities on the perception of the participants. The findings of the study can form part of the basis for a set of HCI guidelines for the creation of highly immersive digital experiences.

In this paper we introduce a novel fuzzy vector quantization algorithm that tries to solve certain problems related to the implementation of fuzzy cluster analysis in vector quantization. The proposed method employs an objective function that combines the merits of fuzzy and crisp clustering in a uniform fashion. The algorithm's structure encompasses two basic design strategies. The first one concerns the transition from fuzzy mode, where each training vector is assigned to more than one codewords, to crisp mode where each training vector is assigned to only one codeword. To accomplish this, we use analytical conditions that are extracted by the minimization of the aforementioned objective function. The second one is a specially designed pattern reduction module that helps to significantly reduce the computational cost. This module acts upon a training vector as soon as it is transferred in crisp mode. The resulting vector quantization scheme is fast and easy to implement. Finally, simulation experiments show that the method is efficient, while it appears to be insensitive with respect to the selection of its design parameters.