The EmpathiCH Workshop aims to blend a diverse set of expertise to expand upon the nascent field of Empathy-Centric Design. Building on the discussions in previous editions of the workshop, this iteration invites contributions which scrutinize the use of empathy as a design principle in digital interfaces. We encourage inquiry in a number of research dimensions: examining the multifaceted nature of empathy; establishing both the requirements and shortcomings of empathy in design research; discussing key post-human stakeholders in digital interfaces (social groups, causes, digital avatars, artificial agents etc.); and expanding the scope of empathy research beyond preliminary perspective-taking. The workshop, structured as a combination of author panels, expert discussion, and interactive activities, provides the ideal venue to foster a critical discussion on the nature of the suitability of empathy in digital design, especially in the rapidly approaching context of its role in post-humanist HCI.@en

Social interactions play a crucial role in promoting personal development, mental health, and overall well-being. Despite the importance of collocated social interactions, HCI research has focused on initiating encounters rather than sustaining meaningful relationships. To address this gap, we designed Boost, a conversational aid tool that monitors the quality of social interactions between users and introduces movie-trivia based on their interests aimed at enriching their social interactions. We evaluated Boost through a study with 38 participants, findings reveal that it has potential to minimize silent moments, reduce negative feelings, enhance engagement, and improved interaction quality. Our results highlight the importance of designing future HCI tools that are context-aware, respect privacy, and enhance social interactions by supporting, not controlling, human interaction dynamics. We advocate for a balanced approach that acknowledges the complexity of social interactions, recognizing the value of silence and user autonomy.@en

This one-day studio aims to catalyze discussions and experimentation around non-textual academic documentation methods. With the understanding that human knowledge transcends written words, we aim to explore innovative ways to present and disseminate research outputs in diverse forms and of varying materiality. By bringing together researchers, practitioners, and academics from different disciplines and backgrounds, we seek to challenge the status quo of textual output and envision a future where knowledge production embraces the multisensory nature of human data.

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Empathy is considered a crucial construct within HCI and CSCW, yet our understanding of this complex concept remains fragmented and lacks consensus in existing research. In this scoping review of 121 articles from the ACM Digital Library, we synthesize the diverse perspectives on empathy and scrutinize its current conceptualization and operationalization. In particular, we examine the various interpretations and definitions of empathy, its applications, and the methodologies, findings, and trends in the field. Our analysis reveals a lack of consensus on the definitions and theoretical underpinnings of empathy, with interpretations ranging from understanding the experiences of others to an affective response to the other's situation. We observed that despite the variety of methods used to gauge empathy, the predominant approach remains self-assessed instruments, highlighting the lack of novel and rigorously established and validated measures and methods to capture the multifaceted manifestations of empathy. Furthermore, our analysis shows that previous studies have used a variety of approaches to elicit empathy, such as experiential methods and situational awareness. These approaches have demonstrated that shared stressful experiences promote community support and relief, while situational awareness promotes empathy through increased helping behavior. Finally, we discuss a) the potential and drawbacks of leveraging empathy to shape interactions and guide design practices, b) the need to find a balance between the collective focus of empathy and the (existing and dominant) focus on the individual, and c) the careful testing of empathic designs and technologies with real-world applications.@en

Rising sustainability concerns in the food industry have driven the need for innovative approaches in culinary operations. Redesigning the menus and recipes from a sustainability perspective is a promising approach to reducing restaurants' environmental impact. Chefs, as crucial decision-makers in menu and recipe planning practices, play a vital role in promoting sustainable food services. However, the literature lacks insights into chefs' sustainable recipe planning practices and how information and communication technologies (ICTs) could support these practices. This paper addresses this gap by conducting individual interview sessions (n=10) and recipe generation workshops (n=10) with 20 chefs in total. It reveals four dimensions of sustainable recipes (locality, seasonality, frugality, and food quality) based on semi-structured interviews. It presents a novel interactive recipe planning concept called KNOBIE, which was designed to support chefs' sustainable recipe planning practices by using insights that gathered from the interviews. Lastly, based on an assessment of this concept through online recipe generation sessions with chefs, it provides five design implications for integrating ICTs into the sustainable menu and recipe planning practices to promote sustainable food services in restaurants.

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The kitchen is one of the busiest and messiest hubs of a home, where the hands are usually spoiled with food. In this setting, gestural interaction can offer several advantages: efficient, intuitive, and touch-free orchestration of interactive devices. Yet, research scarcely investigates the user's perspective on gesture-based systems in the kitchen and lacks designs developed through a user-centred process. With the contribution of 234 participants, we conducted formative studies that investigated users' expectations, perceived benefits, and concerns of gesture-based control in the kitchen. These studies guided our conceptual design ‘2HandTouch’, an information display controlled by Hand Specific On-Skin Gestures (HSoS). Then, we evaluated the user experience of this design through a summative user study. We introduced four perceived benefits of HSoS use in the kitchen that has not been visible in such detail. These are i) hygiene, (ii) time management, (iii) imminent control, and (iv) an uninterrupted cooking practice. We also provided broader implications of our work for designing gesture-controlled devices in the kitchen context.

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The quality of social interaction has great importance for psychological and physiological health. Previous research indicates that smartphones have adverse effects on collocated social interactions. Most HCI works addressed this issue by restricting smartphone use during social interactions. Diverging from previous work, we designed WHISPER, an audio narrative box that aims to enrich collocated social interactions without restricting mobile technology use. We conducted a user study in a café environment with 21 participants to understand how users react to WHISPER and how it would influence their social interactions. In this paper, we present the result of this study and discuss four implications for technologies designed to enhance collocated social interactions (Respectfulness, Balanced Ambiguity, Adaptability, and Being Targeted) and two implications for research touching upon the HCI work on Design for Behavior Change and Collocated Interactions (Designing responsible interventions for accommodating unintended outcomes and Quantifying the quality of social interactions).

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Reducing the environmental impact of current food production and consumption practices is a significant challenge for a more sustainable future. Even though previous HCI studies illustrated that design interventions could support more sustainable food practices in domestic contexts, little attention has been given to hospitality contexts (e.g., restaurants). Addressing this gap, we first investigated food preparation practices in restaurants (i.e., how recipes, menus and meals are prepared) through interviews with 10 chefs and instructors of culinary arts. Then, we designed KNOBIE, a design intervention aimed at supporting chefs' sustainable food preparation practices through better recipe and menu planning. In this paper, we present the results of these interviews, KNOBIE as a concept to support sustainable recipe planning and how interviews guided its design.

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Taking on the challenge of motivating users to drink water regularly, we designed a smart water bottle that can track water intake behavior and inform users about this behavior through ambient feedback. We then conducted two studies to explore the bottle's feedback design from the perspective of users and designers. First, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 prospective users and found that they would like to receive personalized, precise, gamified and reminding feedback. Second, we conducted a design workshop with 13 professional designers to explore the range of visualizations that can be used to give feedback. Analyzing these visualizations, we identified three reminder types (augmenting, restoring and balancing) and six visualization styles grouped according to three dimensions of ambient displays (representation fidelity, notification level, aesthetic emphasis). In this paper, we first explain our water bottle concept along with existing solutions. Then, we report the results of these studies. Finally, we discuss the potential implications of the results for our own work as well as for designing ambient displays aimed at supporting users' water intake tracking practices.

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Excessive smartphone use has negative effects on our social relations as well as on our mental and psychological health. Most of the previous work to avoid these negative effects is based on a top-down approach such as restricting or limiting users' use of smartphones. Diverging from previous work, we followed a bottom-up approach to understand the practice of smartphone use in public settings from the users' perspective. We conducted observations in four coffeehouses, six focus group sessions with 46 participants and three design workshops with 15 designers. We identified five themes that help better understand smartphone use behavior in public settings and four alternative design approaches to mediate this behavior, namely enlighteners, preventers, supporters, and compliers. We discuss the implications of these themes and approaches for designing future interactive technologies aimed at mediating excessive smartphone use behavior.

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What for and how will we design children's technologies in the transhumanism age, and what stance will we take as designers? This paper aims to answer this question with 13 fictional abstracts from sixteen authors of different countries, institutions and disciplines. Transhumanist thinking envisions enhancing human body and mind by blending human biology with technological augmentations. Fundamentally, it seeks to improve the human species, yet the impacts of such movement are unknown and the implications on children's lives and technologies were not explored deeply. In an age, where technologies such as under-skin chips or brain-machine interfaces can clearly be defined as transhumanist, our aim is to reveal probable pitfalls and benefits of those technologies on children's lives by using the power of design fiction. Thus, main contribution of this paper is to create diverse presentation of provocative research ideas that will foster the discussion on the transhumanist technologies impacting the lives of children in the future.

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Food is an essential nutritional source for all humans, yet tons of food is wasted at an increasing rate each year. Although previous HCI studies examined this issue, most of this work focuses on the domestic context. To the best of our knowledge, no study explored the food waste in hospitality sector from a design perspective. Addressing this gap, we made observations and interviews in a high-end hotel restaurant kitchen to better understand the sources of food waste in restaurants. From our findings, we envisioned three design speculations which can inspire HCI researchers and practitioners explore this issue further.

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Excessive smartphone use has negative effects on our social relations. Previous work addressed this problem by allowing users to restrict their smartphone use. However, as this strategy requires users to have high levels of self-regulation, it may not be effective for individuals without an explicit intention to change their behavior. We propose an alternative approach to this problem, i.e. identifying ways of reducing smartphone use without restricting its use. We illustrated this approach with a study examining smartphone use during social interaction in public settings. Based on four unstructured observations in different coffeehouses and three exploratory focus groups with different age groups, we identified two themes in relation to smartphone use in public settings and discussed their implications for designing solutions that aim to enrich social interaction without limiting smartphone use.@en

Water is an essential nutrient for human health. However, individuals may ignore drinking enough water due to the rush of everyday life. We present Grow, a conceptual smart bottle prototype designed to encourage users to drink water regularly. Our concept utilizes bottle surface as an ambient display instead of a traditional screen-based display to give feedback. Grow tracks daily water intake through an embedded liquid level sensor. It gives positive, abstract, non-intrusive and aesthetic feedback through heating up different parts of a thermo-chromic print on its surface (a tree image). We also present the results of a user study exploring 10 prospective users’ reactions to Grow as well as their expectations of smart water bottles in general.

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