Category: Articles

by Xinhui Ye et al.

Exploration is central to the design process, as it fosters creativity and improves design outcomes. Within design teams, exploration becomes co-exploration—a collaborative and dynamic practice that this study examines. We conducted a five-month longitudinal observational study with 61 students across 16 design teams, using weekly diary interviews to trace the dynamics of co-exploration. From this, we developed a four-dimensional framework that identified five distinct patterns of co-exploration activities. Our findings reveal how co-exploration emerges across diverse activities and team interactions, fostering togetherness and keeping design teams open-minded. This engagement cultivates collective intelligence and enables teams to share knowledge, build upon each other’s ideas, and achieve results that exceed individual contributions. We argue that co-exploration reflects the trajectory of design success and warrants further study. Finally, we provide actionable insights for practitioners seeking to enhance co-exploration in collaborative design.

Yuan Feng et al.

The conceptualisation and deployment of immersive sensory environments for therapeutic purposes have attracted a growing interest within the field of dementia care. In contrast to virtual immersions, tangible augmented virtual experiences offer a promising avenue to foster the self-engagement of people with dementia (PWD) through intuitive and multisensory interactions. However, empirical exploration of the added value conferred by tangible augmentation in such contexts remains limited. To address this, we investigated the impact of adding tangible augmentation in virtual sensory engagement, analyzing its influences on user engagement, agitation, and apathy. A field experiment was conducted with 15 residents diagnosed with dementia using mixed methods of video coding analysis and observational rating scales. Two experimental conditions (with and without tangible augmentation) and one control condition were adopted. The experimental findings highlight the significant role of tangible augmentation in enhancing engagement in terms of ‘attention’ aspects while enabling the recollection of memories through verbal communication. The findings also indicate a trend to promote positive emotions and reduce apathetic behaviours by adding a tangible layer to the virtual sensory experience. This study advances the understanding of tangible augmentation’s role in influencing cognition and perception aspects of PWD’s engagement and contributes to a more informed design of future immersive sensory technologies.

by Shanshan Chen et al.

Sleep diaries are essential self-reporting tools for understanding children’s sleep patterns, but maintaining sustained engagement and high-quality self-reporting remains challenging. While voice input has been explored in child-computer interaction research as a method to improve engagement, limited evidence exists regarding its effectiveness in supporting sustained self-reporting over time. To address this gap, we conducted a five-day field study with 20 children aged seven to twelve, using a multimodal sleep diary that integrated both voice and text input modalities. Our findings reveal that voice input significantly supports younger children in maintaining engagement over five days, though their response quality remains lower than that of older children. Two distinct response quality patterns over time also emphasize the importance of accounting for individual differences in task performance. Furthermore, input modality preferences varied by age: older children consistently favored text input, while younger children generally preferred voice input over time. These results highlight the potential of incorporating voice input into text-based sleep diaries to better accommodate the diverse needs of children, enhancing both sustained engagement and response quality. Future studies with longer observation periods are needed to validate and extend these findings.

By Jhon Adrián Cerón-Guzmán et al

• Our findings reveal the preponderance of the lifestyle profile in locating peers.
• Seeking normalcy, individuals may favor suggestions from peers with similar lifestyles.
• Peer recommendations, enabling user control and potentially reducing search efforts, were favored.
• Design should attend to the everyday self-care strategies community members can contribute.

Users of online health communities have difficulty finding others with similar health experiences. They are often asked to use keywords when searching for their peers, but it is not uncommon for them not to know the right terms. This becomes particularly complex when unsure what or whom they are looking for. Moreover, the richness of patient perspectives is lost in the volume of discussion threads. In this paper, we investigate how to design to facilitate locating peers and learning self-care ideas from them. We created a prototype mimicking a mobile application for an online health community. The application recommended other community members to connect with and suggested self-care ideas based on what they had tried. Following a user-centered qualitative evaluation, we explore what ten people with cardiovascular disease and three clinicians thought of the prototype. Our findings reveal the preponderance of the lifestyle profile in locating peers. In light of this, we argue that, as individuals seek to lead as normal a life as possible, the most helpful suggestions in their quest may come from peers most similar to them in terms of habits and activity level. We translate the research findings into recommendations to inform future design.

Mengyan Guo, Jun Hu & Steven Vos

Representing fitness-related data physically can better help people gain awareness and reflect on their physical activity behavior. However, there has been limited research conducted on the impact of physicalizing personal data in a public context, particularly regarding its effect on motivations for physical activity. Augmenting the physical environment with interactive technology holds great promise in facilitating outdoor physical activity. To explore the design space of data physicalization-based interactive environments, we created TIDAL, a design concept that provides physical rewards in the form of tiles on the road to acknowledge runners’ goal achievements. We created a video prototype as a probe to gather insights through semi-structured interviews with six recreational runners to evaluate TIDAL. The co-constructing stories method, a participatory design technique, was employed during these interviews to facilitate qualitative evaluation. The results of our study showed that TIDAL has the potential to increase runners’ motivation. We reported the key insights derived from participants’ feedback and co-constructed stories and discussed the broader implications of our work.