Antonella De Angeli

Libera Università degli Studi di Bozen-Bolzano · Computer Science

The design of robust and trustworthy Generative AI (GenAI) requires a deep understanding of the agencies emerging from human interactions with them. To contribute to this goal, we retrospectively studied an art project involving a visual artist, a computer scientist, an artistic director, and a generative model (GPT-2). The model was fine-tuned wit...

Aggression as a social behaviour towards technology has been highlighted in Human-Computer Interaction over a decade ago and recently found a renewed interest in the niche of robot abuse. However, a lack of operationalisation and definition of this behaviour resulted in specific-domain observations that hinder generalisations of the determinants th...

Self-tracking describes capturing and analysing the body and life using digital technologies. Its popularity is propelled by the widespread availability of enabling technologies like smartwatches or fitness-trackers. However, given the broad consensus on the co-productive relationship between technologies and social realities, reducing this phenome...

With the development of generative AIs, we are witnessing the potential of collaboration that goes beyond the perception of AI as a work tool. However, many open questions on the nature of these partnerships arise. In this paper, we present And We Thought, an eleven months case-study that facilitates co-creation practices between an artist and GPT-...

The distinctiveness of human creativity skills is increasingly challenged by algorithms, as demonstrated by emerging literary works produced with the support of Large Language Models. Although the first attempts by machines at artistic production can still be considered naive, humans cannot compete with them in terms of productivity. However, speed...

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has led to an expansion of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) possibilities, including the use of AI as a collaborator in creative endeavors, such as art. However, the implications of this cooperation remain unclear. To gain insights into the experience of artists, we conducted a study that investigates...

In this workshop, we aim to present some preliminary reflections on the role of robot failures, which were derived from studying aggression against robots. We present preliminary findings from a workshop conducted during two Physical prototyping courses in Computer Science with 29 students. Participants were asked to envision and write a scenario o...

According to recent legislative initiatives, non-consensual pornography is a crime in several countries and social media providers have a duty to provide their users easy to use mechanisms to report abuses. In this paper, we analyse the state of the art of the interfaces for reporting non-consensual pornography from the victim’s perspective. Firstl...

In modern societies, training reading skills is fundamental since poor-reading children are at high risk of struggling both at school and in life. Reading relies not only on oral language abilities but also on several executive functions. Considering their importance for literacy, training executive functions—particularly, attentional control has b...

Research on human-AI interaction is receiving increasing attention in recent years because of its potential widespread application in critical decision-making contexts in our society. An essential aspect is how to enable collaborations with AI systems. This new stream of research has mainly focused on the effects and establishment of positive human...

Despite a growing interest in player-centred methods for serious games, little is known on how to achieve this goal in practice when prospective users are children. Foundational questions remain unanswered, such as to which design dimensions children should contribute, and how and when they should be engaged. This paper presents the methods and res...

In our research, we focus on the response to the non-consensual distribution of intimate or sexually explicit digital images of adults, also referred as “revenge porn”, from the point of view of the victims. In this paper, we present a preliminary expert analysis of the process for reporting revenge porn abuses in selected content sharing platforms...

Active aging technologies are increasingly designed to support an active lifestyle. However, the way in which they are designed can raise different barriers to acceptance of and use by older adults. Their designers can adopt a negative stereotype of aging. Thorough understanding of user requirements is central to this problem. This paper investigat...

Active aging technologies are increasingly designed to support an active lifestyle. However, the way in which they are designed can raise different barriers to acceptance of and use by older adults. Their designers can adopt a negative stereotype of aging. Thorough understanding of user requirements is central to this problem. This paper investigat...

Dyslexia is a specific learning disability affecting 1 in 10 people nationwide. Literature acknowledges the need for greater understanding of the educational needs of learners with dyslexia in UK Higher Education (HE). Research in this field often stems from neuropsychological viewpoints and neglects the perspectives of students. This study was des...

Children's role in the design of new technology has been widely investigated. Recently, the research focus has shifted, from the technology they help create, towards what children gain by participating in design workshops. This paper intercepts this line of research. It reports on a design workshop with 27 children, aged from 11 to 14 years old, id...

Several technological devices have been developed over the last decade to support an active lifestyle as people age. Despite substantial investment, they have failed to reach widespread acceptance. Limited adoption can be linked to little involvement of prospective users in the design process and overreliance on deficit models of ageing that portra...

The article opens a window on the complex knowledge generation processes shaping large, cross-national Research-through-Design projects. We describe and discuss the distributed fieldwork and co-design activities conducted along a period of over two years in a European project, to consider the implications that a cross-national field brings forward...

Webpage reading is ubiquitous in daily life. As Web technologies allow for a large variety of layouts and visual styles, the many formatting options may lead to poor design choices, including low readability. This research capitalizes on the existing readability guidelines for webpage design to outline several visuo-typographic variables and explor...

The paper concerns the development of digitally-mediated technologies that value social cooperation as a common good rather than as a source of revenue and accumulation. The paper discusses the activities that shaped a European participatory design project which aims to develop a digital space that promotes and facilitates the ‘Commonfare’, a compl...

Gender is a major variable affecting identity and life opportunities from a young age. Our research aims to explore the persistence of gender stereotypes in multimedia stories created by children with the final purpose of attenuating this stereotypical thinking by proposing new processes and tools. The paper investigates the following research ques...

This paper presents a model to codesign interpretively flexible artefacts. We present the case study of Beatfield, a multimodal system that allows users to control audiovisual material by means of tangible interaction. The design of the system was coauthored by individuals with different background and interests to encourage a range of difference i...

Playful technology has the potential to support physical activity (PA) among wheelchair users, but little is known about design considerations for this audience, who experience significant access barriers. In this paper, we lever-age the Integrated Behavioural Model (IBM) to understand wheelchair users' perspectives on PA, technology, and play.Firs...

Effortless reading remains an issue for many Web users, despite a large number of readability guidelines available to designers. This paper presents a study of manual and automatic use of 39 readability guidelines in webpage evaluation. The study collected the ground-truth readability for a set of 50 webpages using eye-tracking with average and dys...

This paper presents the co-design process of a wearable device for rock climbing, an extreme sport that requires high physical, emotional, and cognitive involvement. From the preliminary investigation of climbers’ needs, it emerged that their acceptance of wearables is mainly influenced by climbing sport-specific values like self-efficacy, trust, a...

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) of low visual complexity tend to have higher aesthetics, usability and accessibility, and result in higher user satisfaction. Despite a few authors recently used or studied visual complexity, the concept of visual complexity still needs to be better defined for the use in HCI research and GUI design, with its underl...

Social isolation in urban areas is a societal challenge. It affects people of all ages but particularly elderly who struggle to maintain social ties into later-life. Interventions in social isolation primarily focus on elderly in clinical care, overlooking the existence of older adults who live independently. Despite facing dwindling social contact...

In this paper, we present a design tool, the positioning cards that we have developed, validated, and used in different projects. These cards are built to allow CI4CG and Participatory Design researchers to discuss the political alignment of design projects, in iterative processes of design involving people in the definition of the technological fe...

The purpose of this paper is to present Robinflock, an al-gorithmic system for automatic polyphonic music generation to be used with interactive systems targeted at children. The system allows real time interaction with the generated music. In particular, a number of parameters can be independently manipulated for each melody line. The design of th...

This research addresses the issue of the memory-experience gap, the disconnect between momentary perceptions and post experience reporting as relates to HCI research methodologies and the study of immersive technology-mediated experiences in particular. The paper presents an overview of contemporary understanding of immersion and examines HCI metho...

End-User Development (EUD) is a topic that finds application in varied domains but so far it has only been marginally considered in digital games research. However, there are several games that would benefit from a EUD approach, in particular for those games designed for a purpose other than entertainment, such as learning or training. These proces...

Design scholars have been focusing more of their attention to public controversial “things”, through the focus on “making public things” or on the “formation of publics” in relation to design projects. With this in mind, this paper describes a design case contrasting and challenging the main media narrative through the production of digital artifac...

The purpose of this paper is to present Robinflock, an al-gorithmic system for automatic polyphonic music generation to be used with interactive systems targeted at children. The system allows real time interaction with the generated music. In particular, a number of parameters can be independently manipulated for each melody line. The design of th...

This paper investigates the involvement of preschoolers in the late stages of the design of Child Orchestra, a musical interactive playground for the kindergarten. The study presents a retrospective analysis of the design of Child Orchestra. The system was iteratively prototyped and developed following UCD methods and a design in use approach in a...

Reading is fundamental to interactive-system use, but around 800 million of people might struggle with it due to literacy difficulties. Few websites are designed for high readability, as readability remains an underinvestigated facet of User Experience. Existing readability guidelines have multiple issues: they are too many or too generic, poorly w...

In this paper, we present a close reading of work in ubicomp of applications for older people. Starting from three lines of enquiry defined in the inaugural issue of this journal, we discuss how ubicomp research has presented the relationship between technologies and older users. We base our reasoning on a review of papers published in Personal and...

Design scholars have been focusing more of their attention to public controversial “things”, through the focus on “making public things” or on the “formation of publics” in relation to design projects. With this in mind, this paper describes a design case contrasting and challenging the main media narrative through the production of digital artifac...

This paper presents spazioD, a design case around the topic of dyslexia. Building on selected contributions from the literature on infrastructuring in participatory design and publics, it proposes that digital platforms are artefacts that can help infrastructuring the formation of publics and study their biography. The paper then unfolds describing...

We present an empirical study on facilitating the adoption of user-centred design (UCD) in small Agile companies. To this end, we introduced a curated set of qualitative design practices in an Agile organisation, engaging developers in a lightweight series of workshops. Our results suggest that the approach followed enhanced internal communication...

Critical design is gaining momentum in interaction design, yet little CSCW research has focused on articulating the cooperative potentials of critical design artefacts. We address this gap by reflecting upon a design project aimed at overturning the prevailing narrative regarding dyslexia in Italy. The adversarial propositions embedded in our criti...

Multidisciplinary research recently has been investigating solutions to offer new experiences of music making to musically untrained users. Our approach proposes to distribute the process of music making between the user and an autonomous agent by encoding this collaboration in the emotional domain. In this framework, users communicate the emotions...

In this paper, we present a field study on the learning of climbing aimed at defining the design space of wearable devices to support beginners. Three main findings have emerged from our study. First, climbing has a strong emotional impact on beginners; therefore, learning to climb requires mastering new motor patterns as well as negative emotions,...

Webpages vary drastically in their look and feel: the presence of images is a major discriminating factor. Some webpages contain mainly text; others exploit flashy ads and a variety of eye-catching pictures. In this paper, we investigate the impact of graphics on webpage aesthetics perception and computation. We split webpages in three categories -...

Despite several calls for a more systematic integration of User-Centred Design and Agile development methodologies, no satisfactory agreement has been found yet. We articulate three breakdowns that may occur when integrating these two software engineering approaches, namely a variable interpretation of user involvement, a mismatch in the value of d...

This paper presents the results of 11 interviews to beginner climbers aimed at investigating the role of emotions in learning climbing. Climbing is an extreme sport becoming increasingly popular thanks to a higher safety and to the spread of indoor gyms. Although the evolution of this sport from alpinism to indoor practice has made it accessible to...

We compare two different solutions to guide an older adult along a safe path using a robotic walking assistant (the c-Walker). The two solutions are based on tactile or acoustic stimuli, respectively, and suggest a direction of motion that the user is supposed to take on her own will. We describe the technological basis for the hardware components,...

The integration of user-centred design and Agile development is becoming increasingly common in companies and appears promising. However, it may also present some critical points, or communication breakdowns, such as a variable interpretation of user involvement, a mismatch in the value of documentation, and a misalignment in iterations. We refine...

A wide spectrum of research has been in done in designing technologies for older people that address different aspects of the ageing process, such as physical, mental, and emotional health. Recently, technology-based interventions that promote physical activity have gained momentum. Prior to designing the interventions, the key questions we need to...

This volume presents the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP 2016). The conference is a venue for multidisciplinary research contributing to the design, assessment and analysis of cooperative systems and their integration in organizations, public venues, and everyday life. COOP emerged from th...

Almost any search on Google Play returns numerous app suggestions. The user quickly skims through the list and picks a few apps for a closer look. The vast majority of the apps regardless of how well-made they are go unnoticed. App icons uniquely represent each app in Google Play and help apps to get noticed, as we demonstrate in the paper. We revi...

In this paper, we propose several solutions to guide an older adult along a safe path using a robotic walking assistant (the c-Walker). We consider four different possibilities to execute the task. One of them is mechanical, with the c-Walker playing an active role in setting the course. The other ones are based on tactile or acoustic stimuli, and...

This paper presents Beatfield, a musical installation that allows players to explore an audiovisual landscape by positioning tangible objects on an augmented game board. The underlying idea of the installation was the proposition of an artefact that could encourage heterogeneous interpretations. Beatfield had to offer a multitude of interpretations...

Public design can be understood as a perspective that follows democratic approaches to design, addresses collective conditions, and supports the formation of publics. In this paper, we present our efforts to engage with a public design perspective in a case study addressing the topic of dyslexia. The paper contributes to the understanding of the pr...

Abstract Collaboration is acknowledged as a key element of learning. Thus, it is valuable to develop Information and Communication Technology applications that, implemented on proper devices, can support collaborative learning. Large multi-touch displays appear to encourage collaboration by offering users a shared environment to act upon. However,...

The Music Room is an interactive installation that allows visitor to compose classical music by moving throughout a space. The distance between them and their average speed maps the emotionality of music: in particular, distance influences the pleasantness of the music, while speed influences its intensity. This paper focuses on the evaluation of v...

Live graphical user interfaces (GUIs) do change responding to user actions, unlike GUI screenshots, which are often used in studies. The user experiences and is affected by transitions between the layouts (e.g., webpages or mobile app screens) of interactive systems. Such transitions affect the overall impression of system quality and should be acc...

In this paper, we delve into the role of stereotypes in ICT design for and with older people. We ground our reflections on research experience regarding sociotechnical infrastructuring in the inclusive design field. After elaborating on the role of designer and user stereotypes in influencing the infrastructuring process, we suggest some research d...

In this paper we elaborate on the scalability of Participatory Design (PD) with a special attention towards engagement. We ground our reasoning on the concepts of scaffolding and infrastructuring as instruments for engaging large groups of heterogeneous participants. Scalability is defined with reference to both the number of people and the space f...

This paper discusses our reflections on the potential of creativity as an enabler of cross- cultural conversation and collaboration, within a Participatory Design experience. We build reflections upon our own experience in organizing and facilitating ConstellACTION, a two days design workshop for the creation of a participatory artwork, during the...

People prefer attractive interfaces. Designers strive to outmatch competitors, and create apps and websites that stand out. However, significant expenses on design are unaffordable to small companies; instead, they could adopt automatic tools of interface aesthetics evaluation, a cheaper strategy to good design. This paper describes an important st...

This paper can be framed within the growing interest in the public dimension of technology design: it proposes a framework for the public design of urban technologies by elaborating on the concepts of digital commons, matters of concerns and engagement. The framework is discussed through the case study of a mobility application developed within a w...

There is a significant move toward the use of “robot avatars,” that is, representations of virtual humans, real or imaginary objects acting as virtual salespeople, on e-tail websites and retail stores in virtual worlds. De Angeli, Lynch, and Johnson (2001, p. 198) characterize avatar representations as “social agents,” “intentionally designed to be...

Traditional design approaches have been accused of failing to engage with users in the design process: compromising commercial opportunity and the interactional experience of users. Alternatively, a participatory design approach was applied to the generation of ideas for new product opportunities in the active wheelchair user market and to the init...

In this paper we present a case study about the development and delivery of a mobile application fostering sustainable urban mobility by supporting collaborative behaviours among travellers. This application, called ViaggiaTrento, has been designed based on the requirements expressed by student commuters reflecting on their travelling experience wi...

First impressions are formed very fast but they last. Consecutive approach-avoidance behavior is formed almost instantly and persists over time. The effect of the first impression of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of desktop webpages on subsequent evaluation is well documented in the literature. Less research has focused on mobile interfaces. To...

In this paper we present our experience in building a socio-technical infrastructure for supporting social innovation in Information Technology. We start by describing a case study on the design and use of a smartphone application for the canteen services of a local university; based on this, we propose what we call the hourglass approach to suppor...

Serious games are pedagogical tools used in many domains and considered a viable solution to professional training. Core elements for the construction of effective serious games are the Non-Player Characters (NPCs) which, depending on the quality of the Artificial Intelligence (AI), can make the training scenarios more realistic and engaging. One o...

The last decades have witnessed a significant growth of interest in in- teractive systems that allow the audience to alter the auditory content of an art- work. Generally, the artwork itself is the primary goal of the artist, who arbitrarily maps audience behaviours into musical output following their personal aesthetic. However, given this subject...

This paper presents MINUET, a framework for musical interface design grounded in the experience of the player. MINUET aims to provide new perspectives on the design of musical interfaces, referred to as a general term that comprises digital musical instruments and interactive installations. The ultimate purpose is to reduce the complexity of the de...

In this paper, we reflect on the evaluation of The Music Room, an interactive installation that was designed with the aim of allowing everybody to experience musical creativity. Couples entering The Music Room can compose original piano music by moving throughout the space. The metaphor of emotion mediates the interaction between people's behaviour...