Clarity and ease of interaction are critical for mobile devices that users rely on daily. As smartphone use time rises, manufacturers are exploring e-paper displays for their advantages, including longer battery life and reduced eye strain. Yet, e-paper technology comes with inherent design limitations, such as reduced responsiveness, constrained color ranges, and ghosting. To address these limitations, we present the first version of our E-Paper Design System comprising a set of design components and guidelines developed specifically for e-paper smartphones, with a particular focus on minimalist devices. The E-Paper Design System is released as a free, open resource on Zeroheight and documented in the Appendix for reference. Our design decisions are grounded in technical constraints, prior research and insights from designers and developers using this pilot version of the design system to create custom mobile applications. We also report findings from an exploratory in-house UX study (N=24) testing developed applications, highlight remaining e-paper-specific design challenges and outline future research directions.
Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence have enabled powerful generative models, yet few are tailored to dancers’ practices. We present a long-term collaboration with a Voguing and Dancehall collective to design movement generation models trained on their repertoire. Our initial study with the dancers revealed that, despite limited {physical} realism, the generated movements inspired them. Iterative development led to Korai, an interactive tool for monitoring training, visualizing motion data, and prompting generation, which improved output quality. A subsequent structured observation study compared three model variants with high, medium, and low fidelity to the original dataset's {style}. Results show that dancers favored either highly faithful or highly unfaithful outputs, rejecting medium fidelity as neither authentic to their style nor creatively stimulating. Our findings highlight how direct collaboration with dancers not only informs model design but also deepens understanding of AI’s role in supporting creative movement practices.
Calls for participatory AI development often assume that stakeholders can and should substantially shape a system's design. However, this agency may be constrained by competing demands, e.g. those safety-related. We explore this tension through a case study in Air Traffic Control (ATC) system development. Interviews with ATC operators and a focus group including R&D staff uncovered that operators’ input was confined to small changes, with major decisions made through opaque processes. Safety-related considerations often limited how operator input could be incorporated. Importantly, operators acknowledged that safety should take priority but called for more transparency over decision-making processes and the factors considered thereby. Our findings highlight how general calls for stakeholder empowerment can contradict safety-critical (and other) requirements. We show the importance of engaging broad perspectives to explore conflicting demands before aligning/prioritising these in the application context. We further outline implications for participatory practice relevant for responsible AI and HCI communities.
Storyboarding is a key method in design research and practice, widely used for ideation, communication, and critique of design prototypes. This article repositions storyboards as critical design artifacts with discursive and material power that mediates expertise and imaginaries of design futures. Drawing from a case study of a participatory speculative design project with Black older adults and youth, I advocate for a participatory turn in storyboarding, demonstrating how it can serve as a generative space for storytelling, collaboration, and learning. By asking how we might redistribute the power to storyboard, I argue that participatory storyboarding opens up new possibilities for rethinking the epistemic, representational, and performative stakes of this practice. I conclude with practical implications for human-computer interaction design research and user experience education, calling for approaching storyboarding as a relational, political, and situated method that can challenge dominant narratives of technology design and expertise.
Direct interaction with digital synthesisers using audio signals can offer opportunities for intimate and nuanced interaction in digital musical instrument designs. Unlike acoustic instruments, these hybrid instruments tend to follow a unidirectional interaction structure: tactile gestures generate audio signals that are fed into a synthesiser, but there is no vibrotactile feedback from the instrument back to the musician. This paper presents the HaptiCoupler system that enables bidirectional tactile interaction with digital musical instruments using a single voice coil transducer. A study is undertaken with experienced digital musical instrument designers to explore the design implications of introducing closely coupled, collocated haptic feedback in musical systems. The potential creative implications for designers are discussed.
Since its introduction, the 9-1-1 emergency call system has served as a critical lifeline for individuals in urgent crises. However, the traditional audio-only model has limitations in supporting effective communication between callers and call takers. In this paper, we present a mixed-methods study—including a survey, interviews, and participatory design workshops—to examine the challenges and unmet needs of callers during medical emergencies, as well as their visions for the next generation of 9-1-1 communication. Our findings highlight key pain points, including difficulties in conveying precise location and contextual information, language and cultural barriers, a lack of transparency regarding dispatch, and challenges in providing medical history when calling on behalf of others. The study also revealed design opportunities, such as multimodal communication, AI-assisted triage and translation, mobile applications for frequent ambulance riders, and features that prioritize both informational clarity and emotional support. We conclude by discussing the design implications of these findings.
Menstrual pain is an embodied, unpredictable, and diverse lived experience. However, current menstrual tracking technologies mainly adopt medicalised and quantitative approaches, reducing pain to numerical data, concealing its organic and messy nature. To uncover the felt, lived experience of pain, we explored soft robotics as a tactile, dynamic medium. Through a series of material workshops, we designed MenstaRay, a novel artefact that mimics the temporality and fluctuations of menstrual pain. Findings from sensory interactions with MenstaRay show that soft robotic materials sensitise and enhance menstruators’ bodily awareness, supporting them in contextually recalling, introspecting, and reflecting on their pain experiences, and encouraging a sense of self-care, self-acceptance, and companionship toward menstrual pain. We frame MenstaRay’s dynamic entanglements with fluid bodily experiences as a meaningful material practice through a feminist lens, highlighting the creative potential of novel programmable interactions of knitted soft robotics to express nuanced pain characteristics, extending to other somatic experience design beyond menstruation.