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Dealing with complex information regarding cyber security risks is increasingly important as attacks rise in frequency. Visualisation techniques are used to support decision-making and insight. However, the use of visualisations across different stakeholders and cyber security risk data is not well explored. This work presents an exploratory study in which participants use sketching to represent cyber-risk data. We critically discuss the method and our results demonstrate the usefulness of the method to identify new, diverse visualisation approaches, as well as the richness of stakeholder visualisation conceptualisation.

This thesis presents three papers relating to the qualitative exploration of using mental health smartphone applications (MH apps) through the perspectives of 1) young people, 2) people living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and 3) a critical appraisal of the research study. Section one presents a literature review of 12 qualitative research papers exploring the experiences and perspectives of young people who have used MH apps. These were analysed through a thematic synthesis approach and three themes were developed: 1) Readily available bite-sized support; 2) Reclaiming agency; 3) Normalisation through connection and anonymity. The findings highlight the perceived value of MH apps in enhancing autonomy for young people and acting as a gateway to mental health support by reducing internal and systemic barriers to mental health support. Section two presents a research study exploring the perspectives and experiences of using MH apps by eight people living with OCD. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant, and the data was analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Three themes were developed: 1) Finding a way into OCD support; 2) The value of human guidance; and 3) The quandary of connections. Participants described the value of using MH apps to overcome barriers to support, as a way of increasing guided support to engage with challenging OCD outside of therapy and becoming connected to the OCD community. Section three presents a critical appraisal of the research study. The author has reflected upon the research study and literature review findings, exploring areas of commonality and difference. Furthermore, strengths and limitations of the research study are explored, as well as clinical implications and areas of future research, reasons for conducting the study and reflexivity.

Software development is a complex process requiring aspects of social, cognitive, and technical skills. Software engineers face high levels of uncertainty and risk during functional and security decision making. This preregistered study investigates behavioral measures of cognitive reflection, risk aversion, and optimism bias among professional freelance software developers and computer science students, to expose relationships between uncertainty-associated language and risk sensitivity. We employ content analysis with a mixed-effect model to understand how psychological dimensions influence risk sensitivity in secure software development. We show an interaction between cognitive reflection and optimism bias in the proportion of uncertainty-related language used. Overly optimistic outlooks combined with higher cognitive reflection drives up expressions of uncertainty, while pessimistic or realistic individuals reduce uncertainty as cognitive reflection increases. Software engineers who hold average or pessimistic views on the security of their code are more likely to speak more intuitively about security and risk. We discuss the potential of our findings in relation to understanding how to leverage language used by engineers as markers of risk aversion. Encouraging increased discourse could be used as a catalyst for increased cognitive reflection and grounding optimistic behaviors, leading to more careful decisions.

Digital transformation is increasingly blurring the line between what is software and what is the world, requiring designers to harmoniously blend digital and physical products, services and spaces if they want to orchestrate meaningful experiences that are specifically aimed at the interweaving relationships between people, places and things. Traditional approaches to product design, interaction design, and user experience design do not often take this new context into account. The pictorial details the results of a twelve-day workshop focusing on real-world audience and performer problems during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: it illustrates how two distinct tools, the Blended Experiences Tool and the Evaluation Tool, focusing on the creation of a blended experience and respectively meant to provide a structured way to approach the generative and reflective stages of the design process, can be used to address this gap. This pictorial illustrates the theoretical framing supporting the Blended Experiences Tool; describes how the workshop produced Laugh Traders, a speculative experience centering on attending and reviewing comedy shows; provides a page-by-page pictorial storyboard of the Laugh Trader experience; introduces the Evaluation Tool and applies it to Laugh Trader to measure the relevance, complexity, and attractiveness of the resulting blended experience. Preliminary reflections conclude the pictorial. © 2023 ACM.

The standard definition for ‘physicalizations’ is “a physical artifact whose geometry or material properties encode data” [47]. While this working definition provides the fundamental groundwork for conceptualizing physicalization, in practice many physicalization systems go beyond the scope of this definition as they consist of distributed physical and digital elements that involve complex interaction mechanisms. In this paper, we examine how ‘physicalization’ is part of a broader ecology – the ‘physecology’ – with properties that go beyond the scope of the working definition. Through analyzing 60 representative physicalization papers, we derived six design dimensions of a physecology: (i) represented data type, (ii) way of information communication, (iii) interaction mechanisms, (iv) spatial input-output coupling, (v) physical setup, and (vi) audiences involved. Our contribution is the extension of the definition of physicalization to the broader concept of ‘physecology’, to provide conceptual clarity on the design of physicalizations for future work.

Sketching is recognised as an important tool in the journey of research and practical processes of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and User Experience Design (UX). However, it is not always included in higher education curriculum, in which HCI and UX is often a single module in one year group amongst more “traditional” approaches in computer science. The benefits of sketching and visualisation practice can be used by students across the board in computing degrees, but especially so within HCI and UX, where novel approaches and ideation are valued and practiced. By the time learners leave higher education, they may or may not have engaged with this valuable skill. HCI has a lot in common with UX, and the two are commonly conflated to be the same thing, though despite this, there is not a focus on practical sketching and visualisation skills. In comparison, within the UX workplace environment, sketching is part of design thinking and vital for the structuring of ideas, storyboards, user journey maps and more. We focus on the incorporation and exploration of sketching as an educational tool, technique and output within HCI, and how this learning is given and received over a number of contexts. This paper outlines case studies where sketching has been included in both formal and informal learning with both undergraduate, postgraduate, and post education populations, and how this knowledge exchange has been both enhanced and changed by the recent compulsory move to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. We discuss practice and learning in the context of four case studies: Data-Sketching in a First Year Minor; Sketching in a 2nd Year HCI Cohort; Sketching as a Foundational Tool for MSc User Experience Design; and, Sketching in HCI for Peer-to-Peer Learning. Further, we make recommendations for incorporating sketching practice and theory into both undergraduate and postgraduate university programs, as well as for peer-to-peer learning in both public and private con

The standard definition for ‘physicalizations’ is “a physical artifact whose geometry or material properties encode data” [47]. While this working definition provides the fundamental groundwork for conceptualizing physicalization, in practice many physicalization systems go beyond the scope of this definition as they consist of distributed physical and digital elements that involve complex interaction mechanisms. In this paper, we examine how ‘physicalization’ is part of a broader ecology – the ‘physecology’ – with properties that go beyond the scope of the working definition. Through analyzing 60 representative physicalization papers, we derived six design dimensions of a physecology: (i) represented data type, (ii) way of information communication, (iii) interaction mechanisms, (iv) spatial input-output coupling, (v) physical setup, and (vi) audiences involved. Our contribution is the extension of the definition of physicalization to the broader concept of ‘physecology’, to provide conceptual clarity on the design of physicalizations for future work.

Our work employs conceptual integration, otherwise known as blending, as a tool for designing interactions that work across and between the digital/physical divide. Theoretical approaches to blends can be difficult to navigate and a hard subject to get to grips with, particularly for novice designers. This paper offers a synthesis of the literature around this topic developed into a framework. We use speculative design as a means for iterating solutions that employ physical/digital transitions. Working collaboratively with thirteen undergraduate university students attending a twelve-day Blended Interactions workshop, we developed speculative narrative st oryboards over the course of a live theatre festival ultimately presentingproposed solutions as part of the festival itself. Narratives drew on data gathered through participant observation and interviews of stakeholders with data and feedback from over 380 festival visitors. Presenting the storyboards to festival participants provided direct feedback. The student storyboards were professionally illustrated affording us a means for evaluating our framework in further work.

The overarching theme for this Conversation was How can we communicate the value of Design Research? This was accompanied by the more specific question, How we can get Design Research into ‘Research Methods 101’? At the Conversa-tion, which was attended by approximately 30 participants, five groups were formed, and a ‘Question Bridge’ format was adopted to explore these themes—a structure which uses question and answers pairs to explore challenges and miti-gation strategies around the theme. The Question Bridge exercise demonstrated that there are clear divisions and contrasting perspectives in the Design Research community. The subsequent plenary discussion showed that while divisions are evident, any disruption caused by the lacking consensus can be straightforwardly mitigated by acknowledging contrasts and adopting deliberate communication strategies to clarify them.

The technologies we use in everyday contexts are designed and tested, using existing standards of usability. As technology advances standards are still based on planar displays and simple screen-based interactions. End-user digital devices need to consider context and physicality as additional influences on design. Additionally, accessibility and multi-modal interaction must be considered as we build technologies with interactions such as soundscapes to support user experience. When considering the tools we use to design existing interactions, we can evaluate new ways of working with software to support the development of the changing face of interactive devices. This paper presents two prototypes which explore the space of user experience design tools, first in the space of contextual cues when looking at multi device interaction, and second, in the space of physical prototyping. These prototypes are starting points for a wider discussion around the changing face of usability. We also discuss extending the scope of existing user experience design tools and rethinking what "user experience"means when the devices we own are becoming 'aware' of their surroundings, context, and have increasing agency.

Technology is changing, which means the design processes supporting it must also change. Digital tools for user experience and interaction design are vital in enabling designers to create appropriate, enjoyable and functional human-computer experiences, and so will necessarily evolve alongside our technological development. This workshop aims to support the futuring of user experience and user interfaces, and will engage with stakeholders, practicing designers, researchers, students and educators in order to understand better the needs for next-generation design tools. We will envisage new forms of design tools that encourage best practice, for example, linking representations, analysis tools, just-in-time evidence, physicality, experience, and crucially, put context at the centre of design.

Art is not Research. Research is not Art. is a multimedia, multi-site participatory installation by a collective of artists and researchers from Calgary, Toronto, and Lancaster; it is informed by these contexts. It reflects the tensions between how "participants"are treated in participatory art and interaction research. It offers a framework through which we can explore how epistemologies might evolve in a blending between Art and Research. Visitors download the paper to read, critically reflect on the relationship between art and research, and experientially engage with the material through a series of creative prompts. A performance variation of the piece will be performed in-person and online through the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems alt.chi track.

Data visualization can be powerful in enabling us to make sense of complex data. Expressive data representation – where individuals have control over the nature of the output – is hard to incorporate into existing frameworks and techniques for visualization. The power of informal, rough, expressive sketches in working out ideas is well documented. This points to an opportunity to better understand how expressivity can exist in data visualization creation. We explore the expressive potential of Data Painting through a study aimed at improving our understanding of what people need and make use of in creating novel examples of data expression. Participants use exact measures of paint for data-mapping and then explore the expressive possibilities of free-form data representation. Our intentions are to improve our understanding of expressivity in data visualization; to raise questions as to the creation and use of non-traditional data visualizations; and to suggest directions for expressivity in visualization.