Christopher Frauenberger

TU Wien | TU Wien · Research Group of Human-Computer Interaction

The effects of social media on our society are heavily researched and discussed, but few insights about the role of aesthetic design therein have been gained to this date, despite research in related areas providing precedent: drawing from existing theory on persuasive design, nudge, dark patterns, and advertising, we suggest the term Aesthetic Des...

The last decade has witnessed the expansion of design space to include the epistemologies and methodologies of more-than-human design (MTHD). Design researchers and practitioners have been in- creasingly studying, designing for, and designing with nonhumans. This panel will bring together HCI experts who work on MTHD with different nonhumans as the...

In the light of demographic change, Active and Assisted Living (AAL) technologies promise to support older adults in their everyday lives and promote a self-determined lifestyle. However, empirical evidence for their effectiveness is fragmented and mixed. Thus, literature has called for more rigorous studies – including randomized controlled trials...

Children and designers have divergent, sometimes contradictory notions of what “design” means. Unrestricted by the lens of adulthood and the shackles of formal creative education, children ask unexpected questions, draw unlikely conclusions, and have a different experience of creation. How do we recognise, address and adapt to these differences of...

Social play is a key factor in children’s positive development. Children with different interactional styles, such as neurodivergent children, face challenges to create opportunities for playing with peers to practice and acquire complex social skills, putting their social and emotional wellbeing at risk. We report on the design of social play tech...

Engaging marginalised children, such as disabled children, in Participatory Design (PD) entails particular challenges. The processes can effect social changes by decidedly attending to their lived experience as expertise. However, involving marginalised children in research also requires maintaining a delicate balance between ensuring their right t...

This article argues that our intimate entanglement with digital technologies is challenging the foundations of current HCI research and practice. Our relationships to virtual realities, artificial intelligence, neuro-implants or pervasive, cyberphysical systems generate ontological uncertainties, epistemological diffusion and ethical conundrums tha...

Autistic children are increasingly a focus of technology research within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community. We provide a critical review of the purposes of these technologies and how they discursively conceptualise the agency of autistic children. Through our analysis, we establish six categories of these purposes: behaviour analysis,...

Mobile applications have a great potential in making everyday environments more accessible from the cognitive point of view, allowing neurodiverse people, such as individuals with autism, dementia, or ADHD, to gain independency and find continuous support. This workshop will discuss the main technological, methodological, theoretical and design iss...

An innovative, entry-level informatics course enables students to ponder CS problems in different ways, from different perspectives. Find the full text at ACM for dowload: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3342113.3329674

We present Sensorstation, a research product to explore the effect of smart sensors and services on the communal life within a shared apartment. Sensorstation utilizes wireless sensors and a shared output device displaying a steady data stream of sensor based notifications. It was deployed on the kitchen table in a shared apartment for 19 days to e...

Interaction Design and Children (IDC) as an academic field, and as a community, has a responsibility to engage with the many and diverse ethical challenges that arise from work that concerns the creation of digital technology for and with children -- both in terms of research and industry contexts. This panel builds on a short history of similar ev...

Participatory design (PD) with heterogeneous groups poses particular challenges, requiring spaces in which different agendas or visions can be negotiated. In this paper we report on our PD work with two groups of neurodiverse children to design technologies that support co-located, social play. The heterogeneity in the groups in terms of abilities,...

In previous work, we have developed the theoretical concept of Critical Experience and the Participatory Evaluation with Autistic ChildrEn (PEACE) method. We grounded both in a series of separate case studies which allowed us to understand how to gather more and richer insights from the children than previously. This is crucial for child-led resear...

An ongoing challenge within the diverse HCI and social computing research communities is understanding research ethics in the face of evolving technology and methods. Building upon successful town hall meetings at CHI 2018, GROUP 2018 and CSCW 2018, this panel will be structured to facilitate audience discussion and to collect input about current c...

The Interactions website (interactions.acm.org) hosts a stable of bloggers who share insights and observations on HCI, often challenging current practices. Each issue we'll publish selected posts from some of the leading and emerging voices in the field.

This article offers a synopsis of and a critical reflection on the research project OutsideTheBox Rethinking Assistive Technology with Autistic Children. The aim of the 3-year project was to develop digital technology that would holistically respond to the complex life-worlds of autistic children, affording positive experiences that they could shar...

Social play, and the role of technology in it, is a topic of central concern to the CHI PLAY and HCI community. In this paper we provide an overview of philosophical, psychological and sociological concepts and theories of social play and use these as a lens to conduct a literature review of research on interactive technologies in play contexts. Ou...

Insights: →Existing digital technologies exacerbate the biases of the human mind, inhibiting diversity initiatives. →Diversity computing is a new framework incorporating innovation in theory, methodology, and technology that embraces diversity and avoids normative ordering.

Identities, particularly marginalised identities, are renegotiated continuously within participatory design research. In two case studies, one drawing from a project in collaboration with individual autistic children and one with groups of neurodiverse children, we show how different identities are reflected in the materials used and objects create...

Within the Social Play Technologies project, we co-design interactive playthings with two groups of neurodiverse and neurotypically developing children, aged 7 to 9 years. We investigate how technology can support social play activities in those groups by applying participatory design (PD) methods. In this paper we present preliminary design result...

The Participatory Design (PD) community is committed to continuously refine its technological, social, political, and scientific agenda, and as a result, PD has become more widely adopted, robust, and sophisticated. Yet, PD's advancement cannot end here. The gap between those who can contribute to the shaping of future technologies and those who ar...

Marginalised children are uniquely vulnerable within western societies. Conducting participatory design research with them comes with particular ethical challenges, some of which we illustrate in this paper. Through several examples across two different participatory design projects (one with autistic children, another with visually impaired childr...

The argument for participation of stakeholders in design is functional as much as political and moral. It revolves around building better technologies or services, empowering partic- ipants as well as democratising the shaping of future alter- natives. Participation, however, is inherently local and situ- ated and a common criticism is that it refu...

This paper examines the educational efficacy of a learning environment in which children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) engage in social interactions with an artificially intelligent (AI) virtual agent and where a human practitioner acts in support of the interactions. A multi-site intervention study in schools across the UK was co...

Designing technology for and with children comes with unique ethical challenges and responsibilities, related both to the inclusion of children in the research and design processes and to the outcomes of that work. With this panel, our intention is to create a forum for critical reflection and debate about best practices, underlying drivers and per...

Over the past two years, we have engaged autistic children in a participatory design (PD) process to create their own, individual smart object. In this paper, we reflect on our methodological choices and how these came about. Describing the design process with one of our participants as a case, we show how we developed participatory activities by c...

With this workshop we aim to bring together researchers who explore interactive technologies in the context of autistic children. At a point at which considerable effort has been invested in this area and results are promising, but hardly conclusively convincing, we argue that it is time to critically reflect on our work. We do this by posing three...

Since 2012 six AAL pilot regions were launched in Austria. The main goal of these pilot regions is to evaluate the impact of AAL technologies in daily use considering the entire value chain. Additionally, go-to market strategies for assistive technologies based on an involvement of all relevant stakeholders are developed. Within this paper an overv...

As interactive technologies evolve and reach into every aspect of modern life, research practices in human-computer interaction (HCI) have changed. The methodological and epistemological foundations of the field are shifting to reflect the diversity of contexts in which rapidly changing digital technology is being used. Alongside these changes, new...

Whether it is in the form of software, system architecture or interface design, anything digital is inevitably affected by values: the organizational values of the project sponsor, the values of the research partners, and the values of each developer and designer. Some values (e.g. commercial success, academic prestige) are easier to quantify than...

Designing for reflection is becoming an increasingly important part of many HCI systems in a wide range of application domains. However, there is a gap in our understanding of how the process of reflection can be supported through technology. In fact, an implicit assumption in the majority of existing work is that, just by providing access to well-...

Capturing and describing the multi-faceted experiences autistic children have with technologies provides a unique research challenge. Approaches based on pragmatist notions of experience , which mostly rely on empathy, are particularly limited if used alone. To address this we have developed an approach that combines Actor-Network Theory and Critic...

Participatory Design (PD) has become a standard methodology in HCI, however, the evaluation of the outcomes of participa-tory processes is often exclusively driven by researcher defined measures of success. Through our work with autistic children, who have radically different life worlds from our own, it became evident that their criteria for the s...

Experiences of autistic children with technology are often assessed by neurotypical researchers, although their perceptual and sense-making processes differ fundamentally. Empathy, as the underlying mechanism to infer another person’s experience, is of limited use in cases where life-worlds radically diverge. The same holds true for indirect assess...

Since 2012 six AAL pilot regions were launched in Austria. The main goal of these pilot regions is to evaluate the impact of AAL technologies in daily use considering the entire value chain. Additionally, go-to market strategies for assistive technologies based on an involvement of all relevant stakeholders are developed. Within this paper an overv...

Participatory design is inherently concerned with creatively inventing alternative futures. From this perspective we argue that facilitating meaningful participation is configuring processes that allow for the unfolding of creative potentials of participants. To this end, we have developed the concept of "Handlungsspielraum" -- the conceptual creat...

Participatory Design has developed methods that empower people with impairments to actively take part in the design process. Many designed artifacts for this target group likewise aim to empower their users in daily life. In this workshop, we share and relate best practices of both empowering methods and empowering designs. Participants are therefo...

The emergence of 'third paradigm' Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) was driven by the shortcomings of existing approaches to adequately describe and understand the ways people interact with a new breed of pervasive digital technologies in everyday life. In response, new approaches became situated, value-driven and participatory with a shift towards...

Abstract Participatory Design (PD) processes provide a limited glimpse into participants' life worlds. Projects developing technologies more holistically embedded in these lives, however, require a deeper understanding. We envision a novel technique named Playful Inquiry allowing PD participants to talk about their lives in game terms via the devel...

This paper describes the design work being conducted as part of the OutsideTheBox project. Within the time-frame of eight months, we engaged four children with autism in a participatory design process to develop their own smart object. We re-interpreted Future Workshops and Co-operative Inquiry to demonstrate that a) autistic children can lead proc...

Against the backdrop of the current debate about HCI's relationship with science and its ways to produce and argue for knowledge, this paper seeks to develop a novel philosophical foundation that rests on the central ideas put forward in critical realism. While it affords many of the features of the post-modern theories that shaped modern HCI, crit...

Technologies designed for people with autism are often focused on their particular functional limitations. We argue that this ignores a rich design space in which technologies could play more meaningful and multi-faceted roles in the complex life-worlds of people with autism. This one-day workshop will explore how to go beyond technologies that nar...

The development of strong social and emotional skills is central to personal wellbeing. Increasingly, these skills are being taught in schools through well researched curricula. Such social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula are most effective if reinforced by parents, thus transferring the skills into everyday contexts. Traditional SEL programs ha...

With few exceptions, technology for autistic children tends to be focused on the regulation of perceived deficits. With OutsideTheBox we focus on the strengths of the children as design partners and created in our first year four technological objects together with them. They all have common that they are embedded in the children’s lives and share...

Assistive technology (AT) as a field explores the design, use and evaluation of computing technology that aims to benefit people with disabilities. The majority of the work consequently takes the functional needs of people with disabilities as starting point and matches those with technological opportunity spaces. With this paper, we argue that the...

The Institute for Design & Assessment of Technology (IGW) is part of the Faculty of Informatics at the Vienna University of Technology and is historically comprised of two groups: Multidisciplinary Design and Human Computer Interaction, which also includes the Centre for Applied Assistive Technology. The institute is highly interdisciplinary, withi...

Participatory Design is seen as a particularly valuable approach for creating technology for vulnerable people or people with special needs. The shift away from requirement engineering in this context is driven for both, ideological and pragmatic reasons: ideologically, empowerment is particular relevant with target groups that are typically margin...

Juan Pablo Hourcade shares his views on research that helps to successfully bring the benefits of computing technologies to children, older adults, people with disabilities, and other populations that are ignored in the design of mass-marketed products. Autism is such a neuro-developmental disorder that is extraordinarily diverse in its manifestati...

The field of Participatory Design (PD) has greatly diversified and we see a broad spectrum of approaches and methodologies emerging. However, to foster its role in designing future interactive technologies, a discussion about accountability and rigour across this spectrum is needed. Rejecting the traditional, positivistic framework, we take inspira...

We describe the development of a tool to support the contributions of children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) in a design critique activity. The work is part of the ECHOES project in which we included children with ASC in a participatory design process to create a technologically enhanced learning environment. We start by discussing the gene...

In this paper we discuss participatory approaches to designing interactive technologies for children with disabilities. While participatory design (PD) has been increasingly influential in the field of Human-Computer Interaction as a whole, applying its methods and theories to children with disabilities raises challenges specific to this target gro...

In this paper we describe the development of a tool to support the contributions of children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) in a design critique activity. The work is part of the ECHOES project in which we have included children with ASC in a participatory design process to create a technologically enhanced learning environment. We first dis...

Involving children in the design process of interactive technology can greatly enhance its likelihood of successful adoption. However, children's input and ideas require careful interpretation to reach viable designs and technical specifications, which poses a significant challenge to an adult design research team. In this paper we discuss our appr...

We present an interdisciplinary methodology for designing interactive technology for young children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). In line with many other researchers in the field, we believe that the key to developing technology in this context is to embrace perspectives from diverse disciplines to arrive at a methodology that delivers sati...

Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) to support the development of social communication skills in children with autism is a fast growing area of research. The overarching aim of any TEL system is pedagogical. However, the design space is vast and the development of TEL experiences is a multi-disciplinary process, involving, for example, psychology, d...

Children with ASD have difficulty with social communication, particularly joint attention. Interaction in a virtual environment (VE) may be a means for both understanding these difficulties and addressing them. It is first necessary to discover how this population interacts with virtual characters, and whether they can follow joint attention cues i...

Background: Virtual environments and characters allow individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to practice skills repeatedly, in a way that may be less threatening, less socially demanding, and more controllable than is face-to-face interaction with a human partner. To date, their use as an intervention tool has focused on teaching situat...

This article presents and discusses co-creation techniques for involving children in the design of a technologically enhanced learning environment. The ECHOES project, which involves both typically developing children and children with autism spectrum conditions, aims to create an environment that scaffolds the development of children's social skil...

We present an interdisciplinary methodology for designing interactive multi-modal technology for young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). In line with many other researchers in the field, we believe that the key to developing technology in this context is to embrace perspectives from diverse disciplines to arrive at a methodology that...

The philosophical discipline of phenomenology provides the designer with a framework for studying user experience by affording an intrinsically contextual view of the way we interact with things around us. In this paper we argue that phenomenology also plays a critical role in participatory design when it is undertaken as an interpretive and genera...

The development of social communication skills in children relies on multimodal aspects of communication such as gaze, facial expression, and gesture. We introduce a multimodal learning environment for social skills which uses computer vision to estimate the children's gaze direction, processes gestures from a large multi-touch screen, estimates in...

We present the evaluation of a methodological design framework that supports expert and novice designers in creating auditory artefacts in human–technology interaction. We first motivate the development of our framework by analysing available guidance and the current practice in the field. Subsequently, we recapitulate on the design of the framewor...

The workshop on Recycling Auditory Displays at ICAD 2008 aimed to capture knowledge about the design of auditory displays from the participants in a manner that would be easy to understand and reuse. The participants introduced themselves by providing examples of a good and a bad sound design. These examples raised issues of culture, identity, aest...

This chapter focuses on the nonspeech audio used to display information. Auditory interfaces are bidirectional, communicative connections between two systems-typically a human user and a technical product. The side toward the machine involves machine listening, speech recognition, and dialog systems. The side toward the human uses auditory displays...