Never mind the bollocks, I wanna be anarCHI: a manifesto for punk HCI

This paper presents two fingers to the HCI establishment. We reject the status quo that defines what language and forms are appropriate “contributions” for this staid “community” of quasiscientific poseurs. We argue that CHI in particular is a tool that serves to reinforce the political and ideological status quo, favouring sell-out researchers wielding arcane verbiage and p-values, all paid for by corporate and government interests that reward the building of systems that distract, subdue and subjugate. We present our manifesto for Punk HCI, which celebrates principles of anarchy and freedom in exploring the impact of technology on human culture, values, social structures and psychology. We encourage research motivated by passion and dissent over patents

Tabletop prototyping of serious games for ‘soft skills’ training

Serious games offer a relatively low cost, highly engaging alternative to traditional forms of soft skills training. The current paper describes an approach taken to designing a serious game for the training of soft skills. A tabletop prototype of the game was created and evaluated with a group of 24 participants. Initial findings suggest that the game successfully created an environment in which it was advantageous to engage in appropriate collaborative decision making behaviors, as well as providing built-in opportunities for a tutor to guide under-performing groups

Gaming on and off the social graph: the social structure of Facebook games

Games built on Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become a phenomenon since 3rd party developer tools were released by OSNs such as Facebook. However, apart from their explosive popularity, little is known about the nature of the social networks that are built during play. In this paper, we present the findings of a network analysis study carried out on two Facebook applications, in comparison with a similar but stand-alone game. We found that games built both on and off a social graph exhibit similar social properties. Specifically, the distribution of player-to-player interactions decays as a power law with a similar exponent for the majority of players. For games built on the social network platform however, we find that the networks are characterised by a sharp cut-off, compared with the classically scale-free nature of the social network for the game not built on an existing social graph

Interaction design and emotional wellbeing

The World Health Organisation has concluded that emotional wellbeing is fundamental to our quality of life. It enables us to experience life as meaningful and is an essential component of social cohesion, peace and stability in the living environment [21]. This workshop will bring together a diverse community to consolidate existing knowledge and identify new opportunities for research on technologies designed to support emotional wellbeing. The workshop will examine uses of technology in mental health settings, but will also consider the importance of emotional needs in physical healthcare and wellbeing more generally. The design of technology to provide social support and to extend traditional care networks will be key workshop themes

How dangerous is your life? Personalising Government open crime data

This paper discusses the use of Government Open Data and how public services based on this data can and should encourage data personalisation. We present our case study Fearsquare, an application that allows people to interact with public UK crime statistics in a way that is specific to their own, individual, everyday life by leveraging the popular social media service FourSquare. This service is used as an example of how Open Data can be tailored for used in the field of personal informatics. Results suggest that the ability to personalise Government Open Crime Data using Foursquare user location history data provides an added value to an already publically available dataset

Power ballads: deploying aversive energy feedback in social media

This paper reports on the pilot evaluation of “Power Ballads”, an evocative social media application which displays aversive feedback based on excessive household energy usage. Work by other researchers in persuasive technologies has previously suggested the use of aversive feedback should be avoided as it leads to a lack of engagement by users. This work evaluates whether punishment of non-desirable behaviour discourages users from engaging with a persuasive application. To this end we recruited 9 households to use the Power Ballads application over a period of 4 weeks. We found the use of aversive feedback did not act as a deterrent to regularly interacting with the application through evaluating user engagement