Ambient intelligence (AmI) relying on electronic devices employing information and communication technology (ICT) and artificial intelligence (AI) embedded in the network connecting these devices tends today to be insufficiently used. This deficiency implies that spaces are uncomfortable and considerable energy dissipates due to distribution losses, excessive or unnecessary climate control of little- and unoccupied spaces, etc. Building operations are responsible for ±27% of annual carbon dioxide (CO ₂) emissions, and infrastructure materials and construction are responsible for an additional ±13% annually; both need to be addressed integratively to meet sustainability goals. ^1,2 This paper addresses this in three AI-supported AmI test simulations of applications focusing on illumination and ventilation systems embedded in the built environment.

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With current advancements in Cyber-physical Systems (CpS), data-driven design to both production and operation processes has been increasingly incorporating aspects of robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). These aspects are the focus of architectural exploration implemented in the Robotic Building lab at Technical University (TU) Delft using Design-to-Robotic-Production and -Operation (D2RP&O) methods. In the presented project implemented in collaboration with the Landscape Architecture and Informatics departments from TU Delft and the University of Fribourg, respectively, new habitats are developed for various animal and plant species by introducing small-scale interventions in residual space. The intention for these inserts is to support biodiversity by engaging humans in interaction with them and each other. In this context, the inserts are not only produced by computational and robotic means, but they also contain sensor–actuator mechanisms that allow humans to interact with them by establishing bio-cyber-physical feedback loops. The aim is to identify the challenges and potential of such systems to improve spatial experience, increase social interaction, as well as support biodiversity, in urban environments.@en

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a sudden shift to virtual work and events, with the last two years enabling an appropriated and rather simulated togetherness - the hybrid mode. As we return to in-person events, it is important to reflect on not only what we learned about technologies and social justice, but about the types of events we desire, and how to re-design them accordingly. This SIG aims to reflect on hybrid events and their execution: scaling them across sectors, communities, and industries; considering trade-offs when choosing technologies; studying best practices and defining measures of "success"for hybrid events; and finally, identifying and charting the wider social, ethical, and legal implications of hybrid formats. This SIG will consolidate these topics by inviting participants to collaboratively reflect on previous hybrid experiences and what can be learned from them.

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This article provides an ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic investigation of visually recognisable aspects of shared work spots in co-working office rooms. We focus on the phenomenon of holding a place in such environments, and document the participants’ practices which constitute distinguishing between empty and taken places. Our investigation leads to a conceptualisation of designed andad hocplaces, noting that objective assessments of rooms’ occupation status are problematic. We propose the notion of markers of presence, i.e. the material objects and their configurations, which participants use to indicate to others that a certain place is taken. Finally, we identify an observation area within the office space which participants recurrently use to assess the availability of work spots. We conclude by pointing out that rather than being tied to static features of material objects, the evidently visible occupational status of shared work spots is dynamically re-produced in participants’ ongoing courses of action.

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The current mechanisms that drive the development of AI technologies are widely criticized for being tech-oriented and market-led instead of stemming from societal challenges. In Human-Centered AI discourses, and more broadly in Human-Computer Interaction research, initiatives have been proposed to engage experts from various domains of social science in determining how AI should reach our societies, predominantly through informing the adoption policies. Our contribution, however, seeks a more essential role for social sciences, namely to introduce discursive standpoints around what we need AI to be. With a focus on the domain of urbanism, the specific goal has been to elicit - from interviews with 16 urban experts - the imaginaries of how AI can and should impact future cities. Drawing on the social science literature, we present how the notion of "imaginary"has essentially framed this research and how it could reveal an alternative vision of non-human intelligent actors in future cities.

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Minimal interventions that provide various microclimates can stimulate both biodiversity and social accessibility of leftover spaces. New habitats are often developed for different animal and plant species based on studies of the microclimates typical of such residual spaces. By introducing interventions of 0.5-1.0 m diameter ‘planetoids’ placed at various locations, existing and new life is supported. The ‘planetoid’ described in this paper is prototyped by means of Design-to-Robotic-Production and -Operation (D2RP&O). This implies that it is not only produced by robotic means, but that it contains sensor-actuator mechanisms that allow humans to interact with them by establishing a bio-cyber-physical feedback loop.@en

Unlike traditional workshops, SensiBlend is a living experiment about the future of remote, hybrid, and blended experiences within professional and other social contexts. The interplay of interpersonal relationships with tools and spaces—digital and physical—has been abruptly challenged and fundamentally altered as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. With this meta-workshop, we seek to scrutinize and advance the role and impact of Ubiquitous Computing in the new “blended” social reality, and raise questions relating to the specific attributes of socio-technical experiences in the future organization of interpersonal relationships. How do we better equip people to deal with blended experiences? What dimensions of socio-technical experiences are at stake? To this end, we will utilize the occasion of a virtual UbiComp in combination with novel remote-working tools and participatory sensing with attendees to collectively examine, discuss, and elicit the potential routes of augmenting social practices in a discourse about the future of blended working, socializing, and living.@en

Open-plan workspaces are becoming common because of their compact footprint, economic advantages, and capacity forfostering communication. However, users of open-plan workspaces often report a high level of distraction, undermining theirperformance especially on individual cognitive tasks. Existing common solutions require recurrent physical changes, which areneither practical for companies and employees nor desired by interior architects. In this paper, we examine the use of augmentedreality (AR) midair pervasive displays and visual separators to address the problem of visual distractions in open-planworkspaces. While past applications of AR in workspaces mostly focused on content creation and manipulation, we use ARto superimpose visual barriers—what we refer to asvirtual partitions. To evaluate the impact of virtual partitioning on theoccupants’cognitive performance, we conducted two user studies with a total of 48 participants. The design of assessed virtualpartitions was informed by interviews that we conducted with 11 professional space designers. The analysis of collected datasuggests that virtual partitions can reduce visual distractions and enable users to personalize the visual attributes of their spaceleading to an improved experience of shared workspaces.@en

Recognizing the relation between inhabitants and their built environmentsas a feedback loop, our aim is to capture the temporality of this loop in various sce-narios of adaptation. We specifically focus on the emerging types of adaptation thatare motivated by digitally acquired personal data, leading to either automation oraction taken by the building stakeholders. Between the microscopic daily mutations(e.g. automated adaptation to occupants’ presence or activity) and the macroscopicevolution of built environments, we identify a “mesoscopic” scale and argue forbroadening its consideration in the research domain of adaptive built environments.In mesoscopic adaptations, inhabitants’ data undergo a process of thorough analy-sis and scrutiny, the results of which inform the re-envisioning of building designfor its next cycles over the course of months-years. This contribution distinguishesand elaborates on four temporal scales of adaptation (minutes-hours, days-weeks,months-years, decades-centuries) and then exemplifies the meso-scale with a studyconducted over three years within a living lab context. Through this example, wealso aim to demonstrate the opportunity for living lab methodologies to contributeto the research on adaptive built environments at the mesoscopic scale.@en

he architectural built environments, which so ubiquitously, act as shelters and shape our daily personal and social experiences, can soon be envisioned as being interacted with and mediated through wearables. This conjecture is becoming salient with the increased interactivity of our built environments, and a sustained drive to render them energy efficient. This entails for the upscaled re-design, appropriation, and assessment of functions that are typically ascribed to wearable technologies, as well as the grounding of users’ socio-technical interactions and experiences within the built environments. In this position paper, we discuss this inevitable shift in the role of wearables and the expansion of its functional spectrum to include the built environments and the constituent social constructs, thus facilitating a comprehensive experience of inhabitants’ well-being.@en

The vision and mission of research under the banner of Ubiquitous Computing has increasingly moved from focusing on the realm of “artifacts” to the realm of “environments”. We seek to scrutinize this very transition, and raise questions that relate to the specific attributes of built environments that set them inherently apart from artifacts. How does an interactive environment differ from an interactive artifact, a collection of artifacts, or an integrated suite of artifacts? Consequently, we ask what are the new user experience dimensions that HCI researchers should merge into their considerations, for example, by supplementing usability and engagement with occupants' comfort across multiple dimensions, and shifting attention from (often) short lifespan and discretionary to durable and immersive experiences? In this contribution, we bring arguments from the literature of environmental psychology and architecture that highlight the points of divergence between artifacts and architecture, and then translate them into challenges for Human-Computer Interaction, and particularly for the emerging domain of Human-Building Interaction.

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This contribution exemplifies how the study of space perception and its impact on space-use behavior can inform sustainable architecture. We describe our attempt to integrate the methods of user research in an architectural project that was focused on optimization of space usage. In an office building, two large office rooms were refurbished to provide desk-sharing opportunities through hot-desking. We studied the space-use behavior of 33 office workers over eight weeks in those two rooms as well as their occasional presence in ten other areas (cafeteria, atrium, meeting rooms, etc.). Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed to understand the nature and nuances of space occupancy at the scope of the building and within the refurbished offices. While at the scope of building the patterns of movements between rooms were found to be related to the professional profile of the users, at the scope of office the occupancy patterns were influenced by the spatial design of workspaces. More precisely, certain visual attributes of a workspace, namely Visual Exposure and Visual Openness, could determine whether or not it was regularly used. In this paper, we describe our findings in detail and discuss their implications for sustainable building design.@en

Social sciences have been always formed and influenced by the development of society, adjusting the conceptual, methodological, and theoretical frameworks to emerging social phenomena. In recent years, with the leap in the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the proliferation of its everyday applications, “non-human intelligent actors” are increasingly becoming part of the society. This is manifested in the evolving realms of smart home systems, autonomous vehicles, chatbots, intelligent public displays, etc. In this paper, we present a prospective research project that takes one of the pioneering steps towards establishing a “distinctively sociological” conception of AI. Its first objective is to extract the existing conceptions of AI as perceived by its technological developers and (possibly differently) by its users. In the second part, capitalizing on a set of interviews with experts from social science domains, we will explore the new imaginable conceptions of AI that do not originate from its technological possibilities but rather from societal necessities. The current formal ways of defining AI are grounded in the technological possibilities, namely machine learning methods and neural network models. Butwhat exactly is AI as a social phenomenon, which may act on its own, can be blamed responsible for ethically problematic behavior, or even endanger people’s employment? We argue that such conceptual investigation is a crucial step for further empirical studies of phenomena related to AI’s position in current societies, but also will open up ways for critiques of new technological advancements with social consequences in mind from the outset.@en

We present a structured discussion of the concept of driverless car as a major Ubicomp project, and particularly of its hypothetical integration into the fabric of city. The analytical framework is borrowed from the Transportation and Urban research domains, which provides us with a list of agreed-upon subject matters when accounting for car mobility in urban design. We pose concrete questions about each of these subjects as how self-driven personal vehicles could have a positive or negative impact on them. Out of the six discussed topics, this initial examination showed that driverless car could have a negative impact on five, suggesting smoke detected, and thus the need for broadening such inspections.@en

Comfort as a technical term in the domain of architecture has been used meticulously to describe, assess, and understand some of the essential qualities of buildings, across four dimensions: visual, thermal, acoustic, and respiratory. This body of knowledge can be drawn upon to shed light on the growing branch of HCI that pursues a shift from “artifact” to “environment” (and from “usability” to “comfort”). We contribute to this conceptual-contextual transition in three consecutive steps: (1) sketch the outline of comfort studies in the scholar field of Architecture and the ones in Human-Computer Interaction, (2) propose a schematic model of comfort that captures its interactive characteristics and, (3) demonstrate an interactive tool, called ComfortBox, that we prototyped to help answer some of the research questions about the perception of comfort in built environments.@en

Although not unheard of, there is a scarcity of intermediate-level concepts (not as generalizable as theories, but with an applicability wider than a single technology or intervention) in technology-enhanced learning (TEL) research. In this paper we propose ‘strong TEL concepts’, as intermediate-level bodies of design knowledge that are both grounded in research evidence from multiple technologies and contexts, and have clear theoretical connections. We describe the main features of this kind of concepts, along with a practical method for developing them as valuable research contributions. We also propose ‘purposeful disengagement’ as an example of strong TEL concept, to ignite the dialogue in our community about the necessity and benefits of this kind of knowledge to support both TEL design and theory advancement.@en

To investigate the relationship between occupants’ perception of control over building elements and their comfort, we conducted a study where two prototype office rooms were compared: while the first room allowed occupants to open or close the window and configure the shading, the second one was fully automated. The quantitative analysis of collected data a) supports the existing results in the literature reporting higher satisfaction where manual control is maintained, and b) uncovers a new impact of highly automated systems: lower control over building elements can increase the occupant's consciousness of the environmental factors and the saliency of comfort parameters.@en