Amid growing environmental concerns, there is an increasing demand for creative research that addresses impending crises while simultaneously imagining sustainable modes of living for humans, non-humans (materials) and other-than-humans (nature) to coexist in urban regions. We engaged a mixture of junior and senior scholars from a variety of disciplines in a forward thinking, collaborative grant writing process inspired by an embodied experience of and exposure to a mixture of sustainability projects at the edges of society. Our UNA Europa writers collective aimed to answer the following question: how can urban regions be revitalized to build a more sustainable and inclusive living environment? Guided by the concepts circularity and patchwork methodology, we focused on neglected, wasted spaces in society with potential. We explored how co-creation through collective proposal writing rooted in living lab experiences can spark scholar’s imagination about what the nearby future could look like. We cognitively hacked or sensed interesting spaces and mapped out what could potentially be done to initiate meaningful change in order to move from the idea of wasted spaces to wasteless societies. This resulted in a patchwork of relevant, testable ideas for interventions in the urban sphere, inspired by seven types of intelligences answering ‘what-if’ questions that popped up during our process of engagement with the field; artificial, artisanal, kaleidoscopic, systemic, energetic and spatial intelligence. In conceptualizing our ideas we were mindful about creating conditions for engaging citizens with the speculative revitalization interventions in the urban sustainability sector.

As digital news continues to evolve, data visualization has become an important instrument for enhancing storytelling and fostering emotional engagement. Interactivity is often assumed to deepen this engagement, yet its effects on emotional response and perceived trustworthiness remain underexplored. This study examines the impact of interactivity in data storytelling using The Uber Game published by the Financial Times. A between-subjects experiment was conducted with 60 participants, randomly assigned to either an interactive game condition or a non-interactive video condition. Data were collected through Likert-scale questionnaires and open-ended responses. Results show that the interactive version significantly increases emotional engagement. It also affects perceived trustworthiness, although more moderately, with some participants expressing skepticism toward specific elements of the experience. These findings suggest that while interactivity can enhance engagement, its influence on trustworthiness is more complex and context-dependent, with implications for the design of interactive news experiences.

With the ability to reach a global audience, opening ceremonies of mega-events such as the Olympic Games are a relevant stage for cross-cultural storytelling and shared experiences. The narratives of these opening ceremonies are often composed of the host country’s rich history and cultural heritage. While organising committees adopt novel platforms such as Virtual Reality to support engagement, new narrative challenges emerge–particularly for designers, who are increasingly expected to cater to global audiences and help them interpret the cross-cultural narratives embedded in these spectacles. In this research, we analyzed the visual and narrative design of an existing Olympic opening ceremony. Based on these insights, we designed a low-interactivity VR viewing experience that leverages the affordances of VR and employs spatial narrative strategies, aiming to enrich the traditional broadcasting format. This experience was then evaluated in a controlled study involving 30 participants from several backgrounds. Our contributions include the design process and empirical results, as well as design recommendations for designers of cross-cultural experiences.

Missing and sparse data and the associated uncertainty are inevitable in science, and their accurate portrayal in media is essential for upholding scientific transparency and credibility. Yet, in an era of conflicting information and deceptive sources, revealing uncertainty can be seen as unfavorable, in particular for science engagement media. Our study focused on conveying incomplete data on Venus’s upper atmosphere to an adolescent audience using a scientific visualization designed for a planetarium’s dome. Through a comparative study of visualizations with an unprocessed versus a processed dataset, we found that translating data into a Voronoi diagram can make the concept of sparse data understandable and aesthetically pleasing to a broader audience, yet it can come at costs of lower perceived details and accuracy. Additional results hint that participant’s preference for visualization can differ from their perceptions of clarity and that neither the preference nor the clarity appears to be linked to participants’ science literacy. Finally, we discuss the potential to design immersive science media experiences in planetariums and dome settings.

Science communication predominantly engages individuals who already possess a pre-existing interest in science, thereby limiting its reach to a broader and more diverse audience. Situated approaches that intertwine content with spatial design may overcome interest barriers as it allows for spontaneous encounters with science. This paper describes the design of a multi-modal physicalisation coined Star Listener as the result of a collaboration between scientific experts (in astrophysics), design researchers and media professionals. Star Listener consists of different sensory engagement modalities, including textual information panels, speakers that distribute sonified data of stars, two public video displays with an animated explainer and interactive touchscreens with a mini-game. Star Listener was placed in an entryway of a public library for a period of 2 months. We evaluated this set-up by observing and interviewing passersby, both in an in-the-wild study and as a controlled in-the-wild study. We present design recommendations for the design of situated data representations and narrative physicalisations to support engagement of varied audiences with science.

Amid growing environmental concerns, there is an increasing demand for creative research approaches that address impending crises while simultaneously imagining sustainable modes for humans to coexist with nature. In response, we introduce the concept/practice of "biofuturing," a creative research approach concerned with the co-design of multispecies speculations of worlds to come. We engaged 21 scholars in a 3-day biofuturing event, combining a living lab methodology with futures studies techniques and creative practices. In this article, we present biofuturing in theory and practice, and we discuss how the co-designed futures speculations address existing and emerging challenges from a multispecies perspective.

Diaspora communities in displacement often hold onto objects that they cherish because they contain memories, expressions and ways of life deeply embedded in their culture of origin. This project investigates animation-making with these objects, deploying a participatory approach, and attempts to create a space for memories attached to these objects to be recollected and come to life. Stop-motion can bring life into familiar everyday objects through sequential photography and manipulation. The physical alteration of the objects and the familiarity of tangible items trigger memories in the viewers that appeal to their past experiences. This article reflects on two participatory stop-motion animation workshops with members of the Armenian diaspora community, deploying an auto-ethnographic research method. It was learned that the workshops involved participants in distinct ways with the memories associated with their personal objects. Moreover, the context of the workshop created an opportunity for these memories to be cared for, which shaped a sense of community.

Diaspora communities, such as the Armenian, who lost their tangible connection to their homeland, tend to carry objects with them that are representative of their roots and create a sense of belonging. Stop-motion animation can bring objects into life through sequential photography. As the objects are manipulated by the animator, directly by touching, or indirectly by accidental physical contact, stop-motion is directly linked to the sense of touch and materiality. Through this, we believe the stop-motion animation process can evoke rich memories. In this paper, we report on an exploratory stop-motion workshop, which was organised in collaboration with five Armenian community members with no prior animation making experience. We learned how the participatory stop-motion animation approach evoked memories through its inherent connection to storytelling and tangible manipulation, and how the creative group process supports a sense of belonging that transcends self-representation and bridges different cultures.

Animated film can contribute to evoking and sharing the memories that are embodied by objects. Diaspora communities who are dispersed all over the world, such as the Armenian diaspora, maintain a myth or collective memory of their homeland. They carry objects with them that are representative of their roots and create a sense of belonging alongside objects that depict their everyday life and multicultural identity. Through their tangible and tacit aspects, these objects include rich stories that can be made visible through stop-motion photography, made in collaboration with community members who have no experience in film-making. We learned that the participatory animation approach and the resulting animation can support a collective expression and understanding. In this situated action and exhibition installation, we will present this participatory animation approach and resulting animated film.

As data literacy skills are increasingly important in today's society, scholars have been exploring strategies to engage people with data, for example through storytelling and familiar media such as video. In this paper, we present the design of a video-based data storytelling application that prompts children and their families to explore and interpret historical weather data through a personalised weather forecast. The application was displayed at a 2-month summer exhibition of a popular television channel. In a controlled comparative study, we investigated how the application triggered reflection, as well as emotional and narrative engagement of families at home and at the exhibition. We combined this approach with an in-the-wild study, in which we observed spontaneous interactions of visitors. Our findings indicate that data engagement is encouraged when family interactions occur, which may be facilitated by external environmental conditions and internal story design. Here, we uncover 5 design recommendations for data video storytellers.

Animated film can contribute to evoking and sharing the memories that are embodied by objects. Diaspora communities who are dispersed all over the world, such as the Armenian diaspora, maintain a myth or collective memory of their homeland. They carry objects with them that are representative of their roots and create a sense of belonging alongside objects that depict their everyday life and multicultural identity. Through their tangible and tacit aspects, these objects include rich stories that can be made visible through stop-motion photography, made in collaboration with community members who have no experience in film-making. We learned that the participatory animation approach and the resulting animation can support a collective expression and understanding. In this situated action and exhibition installation, we will present this participatory animation approach and resulting animated film.

Big data is a topic of growing importance in the modern world, these days our lives are shaped by the information we consume. As such data literacy is becoming an increasingly crucial skill to have. However, there are barriers of entry to understanding scientific data for the average person. This workshop will explore ways in which we can overcome those barriers, and attempt to engage people with scientific data through creative, playful, and fun approaches. The goal of this workshop is to promote data inclusivity and literacy, and to demystify the concept of data. This workshop will use art-based approaches as a means of communicating data. It will also involve participants making sense of the data themselves through data storytelling techniques. This workshop will also be a chance to reflect on what barriers to data inclusivity exists, and the role that data plays in building empathy towards others and the world around us.

Public polling displays, i.e. interactive interfaces that offer questionnaires in public space, are promised to engage citizens in a dialog with civic stakeholders around local concerns. Although past studies revealed the core factors that impact their usability, little is known about whether civic stakeholders actually consider the deployment of public polling displays to be valuable. We therefore interviewed 12 members of 10 stakeholder organizations who engaged in four different real-world cases, and analyzed all the underlying activities that ranged from planning the deployments to interpreting the final polling results. We thus report on eight key challenges of public polling display deployments, among which: designing polls so that they are responsive, decisive and accessible yet also generate actionable insights, managing the trust of citizens and stakeholder organizations, and facilitating the accurate interpretation of the polling responses. By understanding the process of public polling display deployments from the perspective of civic stakeholders, we inform its continued evolution towards an opportunistic yet trustworthy civic engagement method.

Compared to other traditional media such as television and newspapers, radio consumption has remained relatively stable over the past decades. Meanwhile, radio is increasingly exploring the rich possibilities that non-linear consumption patterns offer, such as on-demand or personalised radio. Yet from a human-computer-interaction perspective, radio remains a relatively under-researched topic. Therefore, we study how to offer personalised on-demand radio fragments without losing the highly appreciated ‘ease-of-use’ of traditional radio. We designed and developed a high-fidelity smartphone application that allows listeners to catch up informational items on a daily basis. The study was set up in two conditions; a playlist that deploys a content-based recommender without user configuration; and a playlist based on indicated interests and time-to-spend. The results of our study are based on both a quantitative and qualitative evaluation approach, including 13 in-depth interviews. We discuss the main findings and conclude with design recommendations for on-demand radio applications.

Public displays are being increasingly used to entice citizen participation, yet their content often lacks the true voice of local inhabitants. This paper investigates the potential of allowing user-generated videos to be shown unto public displays. We thus evaluated a preliminary version of 'Story Maker', a cross-media platform that invited local inhabitants to contribute video snippets in reaction to a thematic calls to action. The uploaded videos were edited into a weekly story by a professional media moderator, and shown on three large displays located in different semi-public contexts. Our qualitative analysis of a five-week in-the-wild study translates into design considerations that focus on how user-generated content should emphasize a clear purpose, valorise an already existing community, follow immediately actionable expectations with few practical complications, and should be edited by people with local knowledge. We expect these considerations to be helpful towards future public applications of citizen-empowered content creation.

The routines of social media are increasingly integrated in our daily life, including the way we consume and produce audio-visual media. As a result, public service media (PSM) are investing in participatory formats that allow the media consumer to share content for their professional production, thereby causing an overwhelming amount of audio-visual materials that need to be processed manually. In contrast to professional footage, content creators do not have production sheets, scripts or storyboards that indicates the action and camera angles of consumer-produced footage. In this paper, we report on the design and development of Storymaker; a tool that deploys video object recognition to label and categorize video content in order to facilitate the actual storytelling process. As a case study, we present how a first version of this tool was used to create a television item for the Flemish public broadcaster VRT. Then, we present the second iteration and its deployment in a journalistic context. Finally, we reflect on future work within our own organization and beyond.