Carbon Dioxide Equivalent (CO2e) avoided is increasingly communicated to individuals through digital media. Too Good To Go – a food waste app – presents users with a personalised CO2e avoided figure. Each time they collect food from a supermarket, café or restaurant their number increases. How do users experience CO2e avoided on the app? We explore this question through a longitudinal research project with 10 households in Oxfordshire, involving three interviews, five self-report surveys and a 28-day trial of the app. In general, participants did not see the figure as particularly valuable – best demonstrated in how little it influenced their usage of the app. This was largely due to issues of truthfulness. Each time a participant travelled and collected a bag, the CO2e avoided data point would increase by a fixed amount. This was at odds with the considerable variation in user experiences. Instead of CO2e avoided, participants put forward alternative impact data that was less individualised and more relatable. We use the concept of data experiences, as developed by Hoeyer et al. (2024) , to think through the findings. In doing so, we provide empirical support to the utility of the four-part concept and put forward an additional cross-cutting theme of intensity. The paper also highlights how organisations cannot assume that certain metrics will influence peoples’ opinions and behaviours. To have an impact, their audiences’ data experiences need to be properly understood.

This study explores the impact of Voice User Interface (VUI) devices, exemplified by the integration of Amazon's Echo Dot with Alexa, a Virtual Assistant (VA), on household chores and leisure activities. Prior research has primarily focused on the 'what' aspects of user interactions, such as music playback and weather inquiries; scant attention has been given to the equally crucial 'where' dimension. Understanding how the placement of VUI devices influences their usage is pivotal for the continued development of VAs in domestic settings. Our investigation probes into the influence of spatial context on user interactions with VUI devices at home, revealing various factors that drive device placement decisions and their implications for usage patterns. We found that homeowners consider numerous factors when determining the optimal placement for their VUI device. The configuration and layout of a home are often overlooked aspects that contribute to the perceived usefulness of a VA. The study revealed that user frustrations with their VAs were frequently influenced by the spatial context of usage and misunderstandings regarding the device's capabilities. By considering contextual surroundings and addressing user misconceptions, we can significantly improve the user experience of VAs.

Transitioning to electric cooking in East Africa offers established health benefits and promising economic, time-saving, and environmental advantages for everyday cooks. Furthermore, battery-supported e-cooking systems can facilitate earlier adoption in regions with unreliable grid quality. However, successful adoption necessitates understanding of how the needs and behaviors of everyday cooks can be effectively translated into e-cooking practices. This nine-month study engaged 20 participants from Nakuru, Kenya, observing their transition to e-cooking with battery supported appliances. Qualitative methods were used to understand changes in cooking practices. The findings comprehensively analyze participants' preferences and concerns about traditional cooking and e-cooking and summarize the cooking experiences in journey maps. The study addresses the benefits, challenges, and unresolved issues of transitioning to e-cooking, including time savings, appropriateness of e-appliances, cost implications, and gender roles. The study raises questions about appliance design, fuel stacking and the co-benefits of biomass cooking. It highlights the importance of addressing safety concerns and providing training on electricity usage alongside e-cooking adoption. The economic benefits, particularly when systems include battery storage, remain uncertain due to potential appliance inefficiencies and behaviour changes that can impact energy consumption, undermining anticipated benefits. These findings inform avenues for comprehensive e-cooking services that support the transition to e-cooking.

This exploratory paper challenges the prevailing ‘participatory orthodoxy’ in design and politics by questioning whether participation alone is enough to envision alternatives that resonate with collective aspirations. We argue for complementing emancipatory PD discourses with the idea of prefiguration and introduce 'ludic prefiguration' as a holistic and dynamic framework that interweaves elements of game design, cooperative play, and iterative collective playtesting to foster a deeper level of collaboration across the creative and political spectrums of design. This framework advocates for interactions that are not only playful but also ‘inefficient’ in their exploration, thereby redefining the influence of play on decision-making and questioning traditional perceptions of efficiency in design. At the heart of this approach is an activist commitment to radical imagination and meaningful inefficiency, seeking to reshape the contours of participation and pave new prefigurative pathways in democratising design and politics.

In safety-critical automatic systems, safety can be compromised if operators lack engagement. Effective detection of undesirable engagement states can inform the design of interventions for enhancing engagement. However, the existing engagement measurement methods suffer from several limitations which damage their effectiveness in the work environment. A novel engagement evaluation methodology, which adopts Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, has been proposed. It was developed using motorway control room operators as subjects. Openpose and Open Source Computer Vision Library (OpenCV) were used to estimate the body postures of operators, then a Support Vector Machine (SVM) was utilised to build the engagement evaluation model based on discrete states of operator engagement. The average accuracy of the evaluation results reached 0.89 and the weighted average precision, recall, and F1-score were all above 0.84. This study emphasises the importance of specific data labelling when measuring typical engagement states, forming the basis for potential control room improvements.Practitioner summary: This study demonstrates an automatic, real-time, objective, and relatively unobtrusive method for measuring dynamic operator engagement states. Computer vision technologies were used to estimate body posture, then machine learning (ML) was utilised to build the engagement evaluation model. The overall evaluation shows the effectiveness of this framework.

Insufficient operator engagement poses danger to public safety. Identifying and validating the factors that influence Control Room Operator (CRO) engagement and choosing suitable research methods for collecting interview data is a crucial element of informing user experience design (UXD) interventions for enhancing engagement. However, this knowledge has been largely neglected. With the goal of filling this gap, a total of 18 CROs in two motorway control rooms were recruited. They were asked to participate in a two-stage interview to capture the influential factors of operator engagement. The findings corroborate that the factors influencing engagement in non-safety-critical domains still apply in the more safety critical control room context. This helps build a solid theoretical foundation for designing UXD interventions for enhancing operator engagement. In addition, this paper describes some inherent obstacles in using interview-based techniques for collecting the operator working experience -- especially engagement --, and makes suggestions for alleviating these obstacles.

Eco-conferences like COP26 in Glasgow (UK) in 2021 have brought the debate on energy consumption and climate change to the fore. Given that a third of the energy produced worldwide is consumed in the home, it is pertinent to investigate how households use emerging technologies that allow households to monitor their energy consumption. This paper investigates how Danish households use green IT to monitor and manage their energy use and studies the related meaning householders attach to the green IT. We present qualitative data collected through interviews with 14 households, electric car owners mostly, who have adopted an application to monitor green energy availability – and its derived consumption. The paper highlights these householders’ green energy monitoring practices with an emphasis on the meaning they make of the green IT application they used. Our study found that households can use more green energy without interacting continuously with the green IT application. This contrasts with a common assumption in the field of green IT design that consumers must continuously engage with the green IT to consume more green energy. We also posit that including householders in future green IT design is paramount for designing successful green IT applications. Finally, this paper calls for household energy consumption studies to view energy consumption as a service where specific practices are matched to energy sources – rather than viewing energy availability as a solitary incident.

This paper extends current research on Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) within Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), focusing on how future virtual agents and communication robots can support the temporal structures and routines within the home. We recruited representatives from 15 households with varied compositions, ranging from single inhabitants to full nest families. Drawing upon P.G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves as an inspiration, the methodology sought to imitate the relationship between a recruitment agency worker (researcher) and an employer (participant) seeking to hire a personal assistant (e.g., a virtual agent or communication robot device) for their home. A ‘household audit’ comprising a guided household tour and an architectural survey was conducted to ascertain the nuanced spatiotemporal routines within the home. The study analysed the responses of participants using the Labovian narrative schema, a traditional method in linguistics research. The findings were then examined through the lens of Reddy et al.’s temporal features of work to understand how domestic work unfolds within the home from a temporal perspective. We argue that the temporal concepts discussed by Reddy et al. provided valuable insights into the temporal dynamics of everyday activities and could inform the design of virtual agents and communication robotic devices to fulfil their roles as domesticated ‘personal assistants’.

This paper develops an understanding of the tasks that provide a basis for generating reliable design recommendations for the introduction of future technologies into Chinese motorway traffic control room systems. Studies involving comprehensive and practical task analysis of the operations in motorway control rooms face a significant research gap. This study aims to broaden the understanding of Control Room Operator tasks related to motorway safety. Building on existing documents, a field study was conducted in two motorway control rooms in China. Eighteen operators and four engineers participated in the study. The study uses a user-centred approach to investigate the operators' tasks in terms workflow, goals, sub-goals and related cognitive aspects. Four categories of tasks stakeholders believed related to motorway safety were presented in the form of a hierarchy and goal-based and cognition-based description were identified. The analysis revealed the unexpected importance placed on reporting tasks by the Control Room Operators and associated stress, as well as providing an in-depth description of the tasks involved in responding to incidents.

Digitally mediated touch is an emerging and significant area for technology and therefore for design and design education. However, the design of digital touch is a challenge, especially for novice designers, compounded by low awareness and understanding of the sociality of touch and the complexity of communicating felt sensations. This paper presents a qualitative study of a two-part educational intervention on the design of digital touch using a design-based research methodology. Findings are presented and discussed on the design challenges faced by novice designers in relation to touch and digital touch (the focus of part one of the intervention) and the development and piloting of the Designing Digital Touch (DDT) toolkit (the outcome of part two). The paper discusses how the toolkit can be used to foster and support novice designers to respond to the future facing complexity of digital touch design.

We are witnessing the work of user experience (UX) designers expanding beyond single digital products towards designing customer journeys through several service touchpoints and channels. Greater understanding of the service design approach and the interplay between service design and UX design is needed by UX researchers and practitioners in order to address this challenge. This course provides a theoretical introduction to service design and practical activities that help attendees understand the principles of service design and apply key methods within their work. It is targeted at UX design practitioners, teachers, and researchers, and those interested in systemic approaches to design.

PurposeThis paper discusses how service design can be used to activate a transition of textile artisan communities towards a sustainable future.Design/methodology/approachTwo participatory case studies were undertaken with textile artisans in the UK and South Africa. These led to the development of an original methodological framework for “crafting situated services” – services designed to be meaningful to the local communities within which they are embedded. An evaluation study assessed the originality of the framework, its relevance for tackling real-world problems, its extensibility and the rigour of the research process.FindingsThe framework brings together a variety of roles, methods and tools that designers can adopt in order to enter communities, make sense of sustainable futures, facilitate the co-design of situated services and activate legacies within communities. Building on emerging anthropological approaches, the framework makes a bridge between service management and service design for social innovation, advancing the field towards design for social entrepreneurship.Originality/valueArguing against the idea of the designer “parachuting” into communities to create services regardless of the local context, the concept of “situated services” is proposed in this paper, alongside a process for “crafting” meaningful social innovations. This requires the service designer to adopt a more situated and embedded approach to designing with communities in order to align with their needs and aspirations, interweave places, time, people and practices within the process, and co-design contextually better services.

The increasing adoption of smart meters and smart home technologies in domestic dwellings affords new opportunities to collect data about householders' everyday lives, including their energy use. Current services designed to support householders in reducing their energy use predominantly push 'feedback' at householders with limited effect. New services are needed that better engage householders with their energy data and energy saving options in more meaningful ways, and/or facilitate broader energy saving behaviours. After householders had spent a year being immersed in their energy data, this study used a co-design approach with householders, researchers, designers and building energy technologists to generate a set of future energy-related services that would benefit householders. The results present 11 co-designed concepts for future services that support householders in making structural and behavioural changes around energy use, alongside concepts that use energy data to impact positively on future lifestyles. Opportunities, challenges and the implications for the design of future energy services are then discussed. The article closes with reflections on the role of the collaborative design approach used to generate these visions of the future.

This paper analyses the workplace engagement of operators in traffic control rooms (OTCR) through two examples from a qualitative study of two traffic control rooms in a southwestern China province. It aims at providing an empirical basis for subsequent User Experience (UX) Design research and practice within a workplace environment. In previous research, engagement in the workplace has been well-documented to be closely related to productivity in groups and organisations. In traffic control rooms, the work performance of operators largely depends on the varying levels of their engagement with their work, which is of great importance to road safety. However, how UX design could be used to enhance the work engagement of OTCR is an area that has been largely, if not entirely, overlooked in existing literature. This paper presents the research methodology and a theoretical understanding of engagement that seeks to provide theoretically informed and empirically grounded strategies for UX based design of effective and satisfying interaction between OTCR and the technologies they use.

This study, with 19 households, set out to analyse the expected benefits and anticipated challenges to the introduction of smart home technology (SHT), and to compare these to post-use experiences after living with the technology for 1 year. Contextual interviews were undertaken with householders during the installation of a range of SHT, and again approximately 1 year later, when householders had the option to keep the technology or have some or all of it removed. This identified whether initial expectations were met, whether initial concerns persisted and whether new issues, concerns, and benefits (that had not been initially anticipated) arose after an extended period of use. Initial expectations from all households were high—related to comfort, convenience, improved control, energy demand reduction, and integration of technologies. There were also many initial concerns, including reliability, usability, and how these systems would be ‘domesticated’ to fit existing routines. After living with the systems for 1 year, many expectations were met, but the added value (and hence the match between expectations and reality) was higher for households with varied routines and large, partially occupied houses. Some of the anticipated challenges—such as concerns over aesthetics—largely disappeared, issues to do with the awkward location of network components persisted and new issues arose relating to the usability of some components and the time and effort required to configure them. Recommendations are given to maximise the added value that SHT can provide to householders.

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has huge potential for influencing the use of geographic information systems. However, there is a wide range of individuals involved in this process, each with their own motivations for contributing and using volunteered data. This paper investigates the range of stakeholders involved with VGI, their relationships and the main tensions and issues involved. The research was based on a series of detailed interviews and theory-driven coding of data. From this, a Rich Picture (Monk, Howard 1998) was developed to graphically present and relate stakeholder relationship information. The findings have implications for how stakeholder groups may be described, and how VGI can lead to enhanced products and services.