Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Weaving Textile-form Interfaces: A Material-Driven Design Journey

A woven textile-form is a form that is constructed simultaneously as the textile is woven. Interfaces designed with this approach hold undisclosed potential for rich interactions. However, the design of woven textile-form interfaces requires specialised tacit knowledge, which is limited even in craft and practice spaces; and it is therefore inaccessible to HCI designers. To bridge this gap, we present the material-driven journey of a multidisciplinary team to design a woven textile-form interface using various techniques such as paper models and diagrams to design for multi-layer weaving. Replacing traditional yarns with conductive yarn, we achieved woven textile-forms with electronic sensing capabilities. By outlining our process, the pictorial highlights the challenges and opportunities of textile-form thinking for HCI designers. Additionally, its printed version serves as a ‘paper prototyping tool’ for designers to gain hands-on experience developing textile-form interfaces.
Miracle Machine in the Making: Soulful Speculation with Kabbalah

What does it mean to design for a miracle—an ineffable phenomenon that might just exist in the world, but might also transcend it? Focusing on an esoteric strand of Jewish mystical thought known as Kabbalah, we draw from speculative interview activities with 11 Jewish creative interlocutors to describe a process of designing a “miracle machine.” Interweaving foundational Kabbalah literature with design inquiry, we find that lived experiences of miracles span life-saving events, effortful acts of love, and ineffable forms of knowledge. We also learn that people envision miracle machines as natural, cosmic, and sensory systems with transcendent capacities. These insights rework a normative focus on the human mind (cognition) and body (embodiment) by embracing the all-too-often overlooked soul as a design resource. We end with a reflection on what soulful speculation entails and the purview that it expands, reorienting our understanding of what machines are altogether.
DiVRsity: Design and Development of Group Role-Play VR Platform for Disability Awareness Education

Role-playing can be an effective method for disability awareness education (DAE), and the immersive nature of virtual reality (VR) holds promise for enhancing DAE experiences. However, existing VR applications for DAE often pay less attention to the social aspects of disabilities, resulting in a lack of ability to simulate implicit social discrimination experienced by individuals with disabilities. To bridge this gap, we developed DiVRsity, a customizable VR group role-playing platform for DAE. To identify design requirements for DiVRsity, we conducted a formative study with VR and DAE experts. In an evaluation study, 28 participants engaged in role-playing exercises using DiVRsity, simulating discriminatory interpersonal situations experienced by individuals with vision impairments. Findings revealed that participants’ disability awareness significantly increased after engaging in role-playing activities using DiVRsity compared to before. We discuss the potential of VR as a role-playing platform for DAE and provide design implications for future VR-based DAE tools.
The Pragmatics of Sustainable Unmaking: Informing Technology Design through e-Waste Folk Strategies

Technology is becoming increasingly embedded within our material worlds, resulting in an exponential rise in the production and consumption of consumer electronics. Rapid innovations in technological systems reduce technology lifecycles, deprecating digital systems, rendering devices obsolete or incompatible with supporting infrastructure, resulting in the generation of electronic waste (e-waste). Sustainable unmaking practices are a promising avenue for harnessing and repurposing resources used in technology production, enabling us to move closer towards sustainable technology design. This paper presents an applied study investigating the pragmatics of sustainable unmaking, reporting on 12 semi-structured interviews conducted with domain experts engaged in unmaking with e-waste across diverse contexts in the consumer technology lifecycle. We present folk strategies — from rich first-hand accounts, revealing real, vivid, and current perspectives, as well as motivations, passions, and frustrations, of engaging with unmaking e-waste. These strategies inform five declarations as actionable provocations for unmaking in the HCI and design communities.
Flourishing in the Everyday: Moving Beyond Damage-Centered Design in HCI for BIPOC Communities

Research and design in human-computer interaction centers problem-solving, causing a downstream effect of framing work with and for marginalized communities predominantly from the lens of deficit and damage. Frameworks such as assets-based design and designing for resilience have emerged to highlight the strengths of these communities. However, we observe an additional need to center positive aspects of humanity, such as joy, pleasure, rest, and cultural heritage, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. In this paper, we present three case studies of existing technologies that center BIPOC flourishing to provide an alternative path for HCI. We propose six actionable tenets for designing for flourishing in the everyday: (1) seek opportunities to design for self-actualization, (2) identify and center the desire to flourish, (3) collaborate and distribute power, (4) refrain from damage-centered reductionism, (5) bring the humanity of a community into the design process, (6) and evaluate for self-sustainability.
Goals for Goal Setting: A Scoping Review on Personal Informatics

Research has extensively explored how personal informatics tools can support people's health goal setting practices. To understand the current state and reflect on the future of goal setting in personal informatics, we report the results of a scoping review of 51 papers that use and provide design implications for implementing goal setting. Our review highlights six implications for using goal setting in personal informatics tools (clarity, transparency, flexibility, framing and reframing, personalization, and reflection). We find that goal setting is becoming increasingly complex as the number of goals and their characteristics increase. We discuss these insights and point towards the importance of supporting self-efficacy during goal setting, showing adaptive goal evolution over time, reducing burden during goal setting, and framing goals to understand the complexity of health goals and support a holistic view on goal setting.
Spatially Distributed Robot Sound: A Case Study

The potential of spatial sound to immerse, guide, and affect humans is well-known, but has so far received little attention in the field of human-robot interaction. In this paper, we therefore explore how a robot emitting spatial sound affects a human’s impressions and behavior. Following a Research-through-Design (RtD) approach, we created two immersive robot sound designs which are emitted across the robot’s body and through speakers in the environment. In an evaluation study, participants interacted with the robot and shared their impressions through semi-structured interviews. Reactions showed that spatial robot sound had a notable effect on participant behavior and impressions, influencing, among others, how much attention they paid to the physical robot and how much animacy and agency they attributed to it. We report on our insights into how spatial sound may provide social robots with new ways to inform and engage the humans around them.
Teaching technical and societal aspects of IoT - A case study using the Orbit IoT Kit

Increasingly, IoT kits are used in pedagogical contexts to support learning experiences and teach students about IoT. However, few of them focus on both the technical aspects and the societal implications of IoT, such as cybersecurity and privacy. In this paper, we describe the Orbit IoT Kit, a micro:bit-based toolkit that supports teachers in IoT activities. The kit combines the microcontroller with relays and a web application, enabling students to connect everyday objects to the Internet and visualize the devices’ data flow. Based on an intervention in a secondary school with 3 teachers and 20 students of ages 12-13, our results indicate that the design and features of the kit — internet communication and data visualization — support teachers to engage students in learning about a holistic perspective of IoT. We reflect on our research propositions, discuss design strategies, and present three design recommendations for IoT toolkits: Connectivity, Visualization, and Openness.
Making Data-Driven Articles more Accessible: An Active Preference Learning Approach to Data Fact Personalization

Data-driven news articles are widely used to communicate societal phenomena with concrete evidence. These articles are often accompanied by a visualization, helping readers to contextualize content. However, blind and low vision (BLV) individuals have limited access to visualizations, hindering a deep understanding of data. We explore the possibility of dynamically generating data facts (texts describing data patterns in a chart) for BLV individuals based on their preferences to aid the reading of such articles. We conduct a formative study to understand how they perceive system-generated data facts and the factors influencing their preferences. The results indicate the preferences are highly varied among individuals, and a simple preference elicitation alone induces noise. Based on the findings, we developed a method to personalize the data facts generation using an active learning approach. The evaluation studies demonstrate that our model converges effectively and provides more preferable sets of data facts than the baseline.
Architectural Narrative VR: Towards Generatively Designing Natural Walkable Spaces

The current state of Virtual Reality (VR) presents a limited and underwhelming user experience. Users are restricted from naturally walking beyond the physical boundaries of the real world, unable to fully explore large virtual environments. The virtual manifestation also often mirrors the physical features of the real world, neglecting the limitless possibilities of the virtual universe. In response to this limitation, this pictorial introduces Architectural Narrative VR, a generative environment that dynamically designs spaces on-the-fly. This approach enables users to roam freely within the constraints of their physical space, while the architectural proportions and rhythm of virtual spaces are designed to relate to external factors such as the sequential presentation of content and user behaviour. This work contributes to VR research by exploring new ways of generating virtual spaces that prioritise user-dependent rather than predefined manifestations of the architectural narrative, offering greater potential for immersive and multidimensional user experiences.
Affordance-Based and User-Defined Gestures for Spatial Tangible Interaction

Although mid-air hand gestures have been widely adopted by VR/AR products (e.g., Quest 2 and HoloLens), some drawbacks remain due to their lack of tangibility and tactile feedback. Opportunistic Tangible User Interfaces could address these shortcomings by repurposing existing objects in one's physical environment. However, there has yet to be a systematic investigation of the gestures that would be desirable when using opportunistic objects or how such gestures would be impacted by such objects. In this work, we conducted an elicitation study to investigate the desirability of object and gesture combinations across a variety of interactions. The results contribute (1) an opportunistic tangible UI gesture set for spatial interfaces, and (2) an Affordance-Based Object Selector Scheme that identifies ideal objects for tangible input given a desired input gesture, based on that object's physical affordances. Arising from these findings is the vision of the Adaptive Tangible User Interface, which supports the on-the-fly composition of tangible interfaces based on the affordances found in the physical environment and a user's input task.
Upper bounding the number of bent functions using 2-row bent rectangles

Using the representation of bent functions (maximum nonlinear functions) by bent rectangles, that is, special matrices with restrictions on columns and rows, we obtain herein an upper bound on the number of bent functions that improves the previously known bounds in a practical range of dimensions. The core of our method is the following fact based on the recent observation by V. Potapov (arXiv:2107.14583): a 2-row bent rectangle is completely determined by one of its rows and the remaining values in slightly more than half of the columns.
Being Social in VR Meetings: A Landscape Analysis of Current Tools

In the 21st century workplace (especially in COVID times), much human social interaction occurs during virtual meetings. Unlike traditional screen-based remote meetings, VR meetings promise a more richly embodied form of communication. This paper maps the experiential terrain of seven commercial VR meeting applications, with a particular focus on the range of shared social experiences and collaborative abilities these applications may enable or constrain. We examine a range of applications including Spatial, Glue VR, MeetinVR, Mozilla Hubs, VRChat, AltspaceVR, and Rec Room. We analyze and map avatar system strategies, meeting environments and in-world cues, meeting invitation model, and different models of participation. In addition, we argue that commercial applications for meeting in VR that cater to workplace contexts might benefit from borrowing some of the strategies used in more leisure-focused environments for supporting social interaction.
The Use of Smartphone Assisted Picture Word Inductive Models to Improve Basic Literacy

Basic literacy is highly needed to ease students’ understanding of a concept. Therefore, it is necessary to deliver an innovative teaching approach to enhance students’ basic literacy. This study aims to investigate the use of picture word inductive models with the help of smartphones to increase the basic literacy of elementary school students in grade one. This study employed a quantitative approach with quasi experimental methods a pretest-posttest control group design. The population of this study was grade one from elementary school in Bandung City. The sample of this study was two classes (experimental and control) from each school which were selected randomly. The number of samples was 113 consisting of 57 students in the experimental class and 56 people in the control class. To collect data, we used a basic literacy test and analyzed it by using a t-test. This study shows that the use of picture word inductive models with the help of a smartphone can improve basic literacy. The findings of this study are that picture word inductive models with the help of smartphones can facilitate students who have different reading and writing abilities.
Broadening Privacy and Surveillance: Eliciting Interconnected Values with a Scenarios Workbook on Smart Home Cameras

We use a design workbook of speculative scenarios as a values elicitation activity with 14 participants. The workbook depicts use case scenarios with smart home camera technologies that involve surveillance and uneven power relations. The scenarios were initially designed by the researchers to explore scenarios of privacy and surveillance within three social relationships involving “primary” and “non-primary” users: Parents-Children, Landlords-Tenants, and Residents-Domestic Workers. When the scenarios were utilized as part of a values elicitation activity with participants, we found that they reflected on a broader set of interconnected social values beyond privacy and surveillance, including autonomy and agency, physical safety, property rights, trust and accountability, and fairness. The paper suggests that future research about ethical issues in smart homes should conceptualize privacy as interconnected with a broader set of social values (which can align or be in tension with privacy), and reflects on considerations for doing research with non-primary users.
3D Printers Don’t Fix Themselves: How Maintenance is Part of Digital Fabrication

Digital fabrication practice such as 3D printing has increasingly moved into home and hobbyist environments. Beyond running machines, practitioners in these settings undertake maintenance and repair. However, acquiring the skills necessary for machine maintenance is a non-trivial process contingent on experience, equipment, and materials. We seek to better understand how practitioners develop the skills necessary to maintain their 3D printers. We collect interview and survey data from active members of online 3D printing communities to conceptualize themes to characterize current maintenance practice. We find that maintenance is core to our participants' 3D printing practice: practitioners develop maintenance routines that formalize tacit understandings of fabrication processes, advance expertise during required acts of repair, and rely on hands-on testing to reconcile differences between physical prints and digital models. Given our findings, we argue for considering maintenance as a core part of digital fabrication, and discuss implications for the design of future digital fabrication systems.
Adaptive IIR model identification using chaotic opposition-based whale optimization algorithm

Abstract Infinite impulse response (IIR) filter system recognition is a serious issue nowadays as it has many applications on a diversity of platforms. The whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is a novel nature-motivated population-based meta-heuristic algorithm where the hunting techniques of humpback whales are implemented to solve many optimization problems. But the main disadvantage of WOA is its stagnant convergence rate. As the algorithm is population based, the initialization process is very important in finding the best result and to enhance the convergence rate. In this paper, a novel chaotic oppositional-based initialization process is nominated before the start of conventional WOA to improve the performance. To effectively cover the entire search region, a chaotic-based logistic population map consists of both the actual numbers and its corresponding opposite numbers are incorporated into this opposition-based initialization process. When checked out with some classic model of examples, simulation performance authorizes chaotic oppositional-based whale optimization algorithm (COWOA) as a more convenient contender compared to the other evolutionary techniques in terms of accuracy and convergence speed. Convergence profile and mean square error are the performance specifications that are needed to inspect the performance of our recommended algorithm.
Immersive Sampling: Exploring Sampling for Future Creative Practices in Media-Rich, Immersive Spaces

Creative practitioners rely on sampling to understand, explore, and construct problems; or gather resources for later use. Despite practitioners’ ability to experience immersive environments, sampling from them remains limited to primarily visual captures (e.g., screenshots, videos), which overlook the richness and variety of available media. To address these challenges, we describe “Immersive Sampling” as a new way to frame information gathering in the context of immersive environments. In the context of Immersive Sampling, practitioners engage in experiencing immersive environments while capturing, organizing, revisiting, and remixing found content. We situate this subset of tasks in literature and argue for their importance for emerging, future content creation domains. To further explore how Immersive Sampling might take place, we created VRicolage, a proof-of-concept prototype showcasing a set of interactions in Virtual Reality to sample, revisit, and remix captures. Given the democratization of immersive environments, Immersive Sampling provides practitioners with a means to collect, revisit, and remix digital materials.
Ambivalences in Digital Contraception: Designing for Mixed Feelings and Oscillating Relations

The ‘intimate horizons’ of algorithmic, self-tracking technologies have become increasingly important. These applications are no longer perceived as distant, instrumental entities, but offer a more affective and intimate experience. In this paper, we address the long-term experience of living with a digital contraception technology that utilizes self-tracking. We draw upon four design workshops with a total of 14 users of the app Natural Cycles to illustrate moments of ambivalent affects and oscillating relations. Based on our analysis, we concretize four dimensions of ambivalence in different scales and temporalities. We propose three strategies of designing with these unavoidable disruptions, conflicting feelings, and shifting relations to acknowledge users’ agentic engagements, nuanced dynamics of intimate self-tracking experiences, and users as embodied and affective beings. We contend that by attending to these existential ambivalences, digital contraceptive can become better configured to plural modes of life and long-term intimate relations that they engender.
Exploring Think-aloud Method with Deaf and Hard of Hearing College Students

The think-aloud protocol is an effective method frequently used by designers and researchers to understand how users interact with computing systems. However, there is limited research on the use of this method with deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) populations, especially in virtual settings. In this paper, we investigate the behaviors of DHH participants in virtual think-aloud sessions to better understand the challenges of conducting this type of research with this population. We conducted twelve virtual think-aloud sessions with DHH participants using Zoom, and we gathered feedback from surveys, interviews, and observations. Our results identified DHH behaviors leading to a lack of clarity in think-aloud data, such as asynchrony between signing and navigating the interfaces, as well as the use of visual descriptive signs instead of explicit terminology to ambiguously refer to interface components. Based on our findings, we provide methodological and design implications to help researchers effectively carry out virtual think-aloud studies with DHH participants (e.g., when and how to prompt for clarification).
FabriCar: Enriching the User Experience of In-Car Media Interactions with Ubiquitous Vehicle Interiors using E-textile Sensors

This work explores e-textiles in the design space of Human-Vehicle Interaction (HVI) and compares distraction levels between e-textile and screen-based interactions during driving tasks. We developed three prototypes (in the steering wheel, headrest cover, and seat-belt pad) to support tactile interactions (tap, press, and swipe) with car interior elements for non-driving applications (such as media control). Our designs used digital embroidery to achieve aesthetic design qualities and wireless connection. In a deployment study with 16 participants, we collected quantitative and qualitative data through video recording, field observations, and user interviews. The study repeated all scenarios using screen-based interaction for comparison. Our findings present insights into fabric-based sensors including fewer collisions and a 302.7% decrease in eye distraction. These findings suggest new design opportunities, such as retrofitting existing vehicles, designing ideation toolkits for diverse users, devising an e-textile Fitts’ Law for reachability, and expanding vehicle interaction research within the HCI community.