Anja Thieme

Designing beyond habit: opening space for improved recycling and food waste behaviors through processes of persuasion, social influence and aversive affect

Disposing of waste is a common part of our everyday life, yet we do not pay much attention to the process. For many it can be considered a habitual, unconscious process. Disposed goods and materials, however, do not simply disappear. This issue has been approached widely and in a variety of disciplines and arenas, including HCI. We add to this growing literature by considering recycling and food waste as habitual behavior and investigate the potential to design toward conscious reflection on waste disposal intentions and behaviors through social influence and aversive affect. That is, we aim to design beyond habitual performance of waste disposal behavior in two phases of (1) awareness raising and (2) supporting subsequent intentions for behavior change. We present results of a rich qualitative and explorative evaluation of the BinCam system, a two-part persuasive technology, which replaces an everyday waste bin with one enabled to capture and share images of disposed of waste on an online social network. Findings suggest that awareness raising leads to self-reflection and re-evaluation. The re-evaluation causes feelings of shame, where individuals perceive a disparity between their attitudes and their behaviors. Results also highlight the importance of a person’s perceived behavioral control (e.g., a person’s recycling competences or facilities) for enabling behavioral change and confirm the significance of providing “signal triggers” to individuals to remind them about performing the desirable behavior in its required context. Furthermore, as the present research extends its focus beyond the lone individual, it contributes to our understanding and study of social influence processes and group movements.

Design to promote mindfulness practice and sense of self for vulnerable women in secure hospital services

In the field of mental health care technologies, very limited attention has been given to the design of interventions for individuals who undergo treatment for severe mental health problems in intense care contexts. Exploring novel designs to engage vulnerable psychiatric patients in therapeutic skills practice and expanding on the potential of technology to promote mental health, the paper introduces the design concept of the Spheres of Wellbeing. A set of interactive artifacts is developed specifically for women with a dual diagnosis of a Learning Disability and Borderline Personality Disorder, living in the medium secure services of a forensic hospital in the UK. The women present a difficult to treat group due to extremely challenging behaviors and a fundamental lack of motivation to engage in therapy. The Spheres are designed to assist the women in practices of mindfulness, to help them tolerate emotional distress and to strengthen their sense of self, all of which are vital components of their specialist treatment Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). The Spheres are intended to supplement the therapy of the women and to contribute to our understanding of designing technology to enhance mental wellbeing and quality of life more generally.

Syrian Refugees and Digital Health in Lebanon: Opportunities for Improving Antenatal Health

There are currently over 1.1 million Syrian refugees in need of healthcare services from an already overstretched Lebanese healthcare system. Access to antenatal care (ANC) services presents a particular challenge. We conducted focus groups with 59 refugees in rural Lebanon to identify contextual and cultural factors that can inform the design of digital technologies to support refugee ANC. Previously identified high utilization of smartphones by the refugee population offers a particular opportunity for using digital technology to support access to ANC as well as health advocacy. Our findings revealed a number of considerations that should be taken into account in the design of refugee ANC technologies, including: refugee health beliefs and experiences, literacy levels, refugee perceptions of negative attitudes of healthcare providers, and hierarchal and familial structures.

Panopticon: a parallel video overview system

Panopticon is a video surrogate system that displays multiple sub-sequences in parallel to present a rapid overview of the entire sequence to the user. A novel, precisely animated arrangement slides thumbnails to provide a consistent spatiotemporal layout while allowing any sub-sequence of the original video to be watched without interruption. Furthermore, this output can be generated offline as a highly efficient repeated animation loop, making it suitable for resource-constrained environments, such as web-based interaction. Two versions of Panopticon were evaluated using three different types of video footage with the aim of determining the usability of the proposed system. Results demonstrated an advantage over another surrogate with surveillance footage in terms of search times and this advantage was further improved with Panopticon 2. Eye tracking data suggests that Panopticons advantage stems from the animated timeline that users heavily rely on.

BinCam: Designing for Engagement with Facebook for Behavior Change

In this paper we continue work to investigate how we can engage young adults in behaviors of recycling and the prevention of food waste through social media and persuasive and ubiquitous computing systems. Our previous work with BinCam, a two-part design combining a system for the collection of waste-related behaviors with a Facebook application, suggested that although this ubiquitous system could raise awareness of recycling behavior, engagement with social media remained low. In this paper we reconsider our design in terms of engagement, examining both the theoretical and practical ways in which engagement can be designed for. This paper presents findings from a new user study exploring the re-design of the social media interface following this analysis. By incorporating elements of gamification, social support and improved data visualization, we contribute insights on the relative potential of these techniques to engage individuals across the lifespan of a system’s deployment.

Enabling empathy in health and care: design methods and challenges

The role of empathy has come to prominence in HCI as the community increasingly engages with issues in medical, health and emotionally charged contexts. In such settings empathizing with others is crucial in understanding the experience of living with specific conditions, or in being sensitive to the concerns and emotions of potentially vulnerable participants. Researchers in these areas become implicated in designing new tools and technologies that support empathic relations. This workshop therefore aims to build an interdisciplinary community of researchers, designers and practitioners to share and discuss their work and the challenges they encountered when establishing empathic relationships within health or care contexts. We will work towards developing a richer conceptual and practical understanding of empathic engagement and design methods in this context to support and shape an agenda for future research.

Ethical Encounters in HCI: Research in Sensitive Settings

With HCI researchers conducting studies in increasingly sensitive and difficult settings, ethics is emerging as a key concern for the HCI community. New technologies are now being designed and evaluated in settings that involve vulnerable or marginalized participants and that can be emotionally challenging for researchers. Research in these settings can produce complex ethical dilemmas that are often emergent, diverse, and highly contextualized. In addition, there may be discrepancies between the realities of HCI fieldwork and the formal and often rigid processes of obtaining ethics approval in research institutions. Given these issues, it is important for researchers to communally reflect on ethical encounters in HCI research. This workshop will provide a forum for researchers to share experiences about ethical challenges they have faced. These discussions will be used to develop a handbook of practical lessons representing the breadth and depth of ethical issues emerging in HCI research in sensitive settings.

Designing for mental wellbeing: towards a more holistic approach in the treatment and prevention of mental illness

To date, HCI for mental health has primarily responded to challenges in the treatment of mental illness, with a focus on therapy access and engagement. However, approaches to improving and protecting peoples mental wellbeing have received less attention. Prompted by recent discussions in Western Healthcare and Psychology, we argue for a more holistic approach to promoting mental health that expands the fields focus to include strategies for enhancing mental wellbeing. A closer consideration of mental wellbeing can increase the effectiveness of mental health interventions, help in preventing mental illness and relapse, and extend our knowledge as to how we can support people to flourish as individuals and enhance their quality of life more generally. Our aim is to encourage more research on positive aspects of mental health in the treatment and care provision of people with mental health problems, and to support preventive approaches. To this end, the paper provides a comprehensive definition of mental wellbeing as positive emotional, psychological and social health; presents a review of HCI literature illustrating how the field is beginning to respond to the mental wellbeing agenda; and proposes avenues for future design and research in this area.

HCI in the press: online public reactions to mass media portrayals of HCI research

HCI researchers working in publically funded institutions are increasingly encouraged to engage the public in their research. Mass media is often seen as an effective medium with which to communicate research to large parts of the population. We present an account of three HCI projects that have used engagements with mass media in order to communicate research to the public. We describe the motivations for working with mass media and the mechanics of writing press releases. A grounded theory analysis of online public responses to the projects in the mass media leads us to identify a number of concerns about how research is portrayed by news outlets and thus interpreted by the public. Tensions about technologies and wider societal issues were revealed that might normally be hidden when using traditional user-centred methods. We critically reflect on the efficacy of using the mass media in research and provide guidance for HCI researchers wishing to engage in dialogues with the public in the future.

Co-creating & identity-making in CSCW: revisiting ethics in design research

The evolving philosophies, methods, and products of CSCW design research are more collaborative and value-active than ever. Researchers and participants may co-construct designs, thus sharing power; they may share intimate life stories over design probes, thus pushing socio-cultural boundaries; they may seek personal fulfillment through the products or the process. How do these experiences affect researcher and co-creator identity in the moment of co-work? How do these changes reconfigure other relationships and encounters? This workshop invites discussants from across disciplines to consider phenomenological aspects of identity-making and to unpack ethical dilemmas that arise when we appreciate the potential for design research itself to significantly harm or help participants. At stake are CSCW policies, best practices, and collective understandings of what it means to be a design researcher.