Welcoming behavior is a fundamental and indispensable component of human social interaction, necessary for establishing positive initial encounters and effectively conveying interaction intent. This study aims to gain a deep understanding and quantify such behaviors, thereby laying the foundation for designing more effective, contextually appropriate, and emotionally resonant welcoming behaviors for smart systems. We conducted a content analysis of welcoming behaviors observed in film scenarios featuring human and anthropomorphic characters (e.g., animated figures), identifying 13 terms that summarize various welcoming contexts. Subsequently, utilizing semantic differential scales and exploratory factor analysis (EFA), we identified five underlying dimensions of welcoming behavior: support and acceptance, energetic, ritualistic, resonance, and intimacy. These findings provide a foundation for a framework that enables Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers and practitioners to apply these dimensions of welcome, derived from human and human-like behaviors to the design of smart systems that foster welcoming behaviors.

This paper adopts the perspective of 'authenticity' within existentialist aesthetics and reflects on the lack of shifts in power dynamics in co-design activities. We advocate that designers empower non-design-expert clients, guiding them to express their aesthetic views, values, and preferences in design decisions and stimulating their imagination. Based on previous authenticity theories and bespoke design processes, we propose a bespoke design process for authenticity, which includes key phases such as empathy, definition, ideate, prototyping and testing. Within these phases, we elaborate on the roles and responsibilities of clients and designers and the evolving material they utilise to maintain consistent communication. Finally, we share this framework's implementation details and reflections through a case study of bespoke artefacts for Airbnb hosts in the tourism industry.

This paper revises aesthetics theory through the lens of authenticity and investigates practical applications using a co-design approach. We encourage designers to include ordinary clients as co-creators in the co-design process, guiding them in expressing their aesthetics, values, and preferences while stimulating their creativity. This paper proposes a bespoke design process framework for authenticity aesthetics that incorporates empathy, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing. This framework delineates the roles and responsibilities of clients and designers at different phases and highlights evolving material mediums that enable their communication. The paper concludes by reflecting on consumerist aesthetics, advocating for designers to focus on the insights of ordinary clients, design for their authentic uniqueness, and recognize the broad prospects of bespoke design methods.

Airbnb is well known for providing guests with local experiences by regular people worldwide. Many pioneer hosts experiment with emerging smart products to improve guests’ experiences. However, these initial efforts often merely provide functionality, neglecting to offer guests authentic experiences motivated by hosts’ authenticity. We addressed this gap by using bespoke design methods to understand hosts’ stories and co-develop interaction concepts that can express their authenticity and fit their Airbnb. We implemented a set of Digital Concierges (DCs) and deployed them in a real Airbnb to investigate guests’ experiences. Our results show that our design enhanced guests’ sense of welcome, fostered their discovery with serendipitous cues, and built richer connections with the host and locals. We concluded with the design implications of co-designing artifacts to embody hosts’ authenticity and use multiple modalities to enhance perceived authentic experiences. Most importantly, we shared our insights about working with hosts as co-creators.

The creativity of an excellent design work generally comes from the inspiration and innovation of its main visual features. The similarity among primary visual elements stands as a paramount indicator when it comes to identifying plagiarism in design concepts. This factor carries immense importance, especially in safeguarding cultural heritage and upholding copyright protection. This paper aims to develop an efficient similarity evaluation scheme for graphic design. A novel deep visual saliency feature extraction generative adversarial network is proposed to deal with the problem of lack of training examples. It consists of two networks: One predicts a visual saliency feature map from an input image and the other takes the output of the first to distinguish whether a visual saliency feature map is a predicted one or ground truth. Unlike traditional saliency generative adversarial networks, a residual refinement module is connected after the encoding and decoding network. Design importance maps generated by professional designers are used to guide the network training. A saliency-based segmentation method is developed to locate the optimal layout regions and notice insignificant regions. Priorities are then assigned to different visual elements. Experimental results show the proposed model obtains state-of-the-art performance among various similarity measurement methods.

This paper presents a co-design study that aimed to explore how to design authentic experiences for prospective guests by collaborating with seven Airbnb hosts. Through contextual inquiry, we investigated the authentic requirements of different hosts and co-created design ideas with them. Together, we generated 58 interactive design concepts, 19 of which were contributed by the hosts themselves. By discussing these concepts with Airbnb participants and systematically analyzing the qualitative data, we identified five new dimensions for designing authentic guest experiences: serendipity of discovery, sense of welcome, extensions and connections, taking or leaving mementos, and co-generating experiences. Our findings provide valuable insights for designers and researchers looking to create more authentic experiences for Airbnb guests.

COVID-19 has caused disruptions in the sharing economy for both platforms and owners, and Airbnb is promoting a contactless service to protect the health of hosts and guests. Through smart technology, some hosts are beginning to support contactless services, allowing guests to check in independently and flexibly. Guests, on the other hand, expect to be greeted upon arrival, and existing contactless services rarely investigate how Airbnb can support the emotional value of a guest’s sense of welcome. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the growing body of research on how smart Airbnb expresses welcome to support the emotional value of guests. We investigate the use of multimodality ambient information displays as welcoming expression systems in the Airbnb context rather than focusing on software solutions on the mobile device itself. We conducted a three-part investigation that began with a guest experience sampling study and co-design initial impressions to support an authentic guest experience with Airbnb hosts. The findings of this study were then used in a design workshop to help us develop three different ways to welcome guests. We present qualitative findings from a subsequent study in which 14 people tried out those modalities in our Airbnb lab. Finally, we compare the initial results of various welcoming modalities and discuss implications for welcome expression design in the Airbnb context. According to our UEQ scale and thematic analysis, sound can be quickly understood but easily ignored during check-in, visuals have better attractiveness but require consideration of information overload, and physicals are the most novel but can cause a sense of loss of control and over-interpretation. Based on our findings, we present design considerations for emotional value-supportive design in smart Airbnb. Our research identifies potential issues and challenges for multimodality in smart accommodations to consider when supporting guests’ emotional values, and designers can use different modalities to express emotional information in their practice.

In the experience economy, many companies invest tremendous resources and budgets in understanding customers' experiences and use the insights to design products or services that can make customers happy and satisfied. However, there is still a lack of further exploration of the details that influence consumers' experience of the journey, one important challenge is to capture and closely understand guests' momentary experience in each touch-point of their stay. These momentary experiences are details that cumulatively compose the whole experience of a guest's stay and imply rich design opportunities to improve the whole service. To tackle this challenge, we developed a low-threshold participatory toolkit 'Check-!n' for capturing customers' momentary experiences at the right moment in the right place based on the user sampling method. We used Airbnb as an example case to investigate this toolkit's usability and usefulness with six participants in 11 different Airbnb accommodations. The results show that the Check-!n toolkit is easy to use for capturing their momentary experience in the context. Moreover, the participants did not consider the toolkit to be interrupting their Airbnb experience. Conversely, the in-suit deliberations caused by the toolkit helped the participants to mindfully reflect on their underlying feelings at the sampling moments, which would otherwise go unspoken in the guest feedback. We demonstrate how the toolkit triggered the guest's momentary reflections in the Airbnb homes and their nuanced articulations in interviews. We therefore contribute a concrete case of sensitizing and capturing guests' experiences of Airbnb shared homes.

Peer-to-peer rental services are continuously growing in the sharing economy era. There also are more and more houses with smarthome system added into the market. The hosts originally designed the automation system to improve the comfort and convenience of their own lives, but also shared it with guests for enhancing their experiences while the hosts were away from home. However, due to the lack of communication, the guests might encounter negative experiences when the automation took place without perceptible in-situ feedforward and feedback in advance. In this study, we developed a web-based application that combines augmented reality and visible light communication to control smart home devices. The tool uses a mobile camera to scan IoT communicators, let users change connected devices’ settings, and visualizes the current set automation. Additionally, guests can use presets to change the atmosphere, creating a won-derful experience. Our user study shows users preferred the web-based system rather than installing new apps. The interaction experience was easy to use and overall positive. Our AR interface provided direct controls of the appliances and clear explanations of the functionalities. While users recognized the usefulness of the physical feedforward shown with LED interfaces, some users could not interpret the meanings initially, and sometimes the blinking lights were distracting. We highlighted several design considerations for improving the understandability and guest experiences for staying in smart accommodations.