Fares Kayali

• Professor (Full) at University of Vienna

This article examines a project dedicated to comprehensively addressing the social impact of digital transformation. The project also emphasizes the effects of digital transformation on marginalized populations, especially forced migrants and individuals with special needs. The project involves the development of open-access course materials titled...

In the ongoing process of the digital transformation of society, corresponding competencies are required from children more than ever. The concept of computational empowerment (CE) promotes confident and reflective engagement with digital technology, which often falls short in formal education. This work outlines how both entertainment and serious...

The project We:Design delves into the digital inequalities affecting young people in Vienna during their transition from education to employment. It not only investigates the barriers faced by youth in the job market but also collaborates with them to create an accessible and open-source job application mobile app. Employing a mixed-method approach...

Dieser Beitrag präsentiert die Fortschritte des Projekts Teaching Digital Thinking (TDT) der letzten zwei Jahre. Das Projekt zielt darauf ab, neue Konzepte, didaktische Methoden und Lehrformate für eine nachhaltige digitale Transformation in die Curricula der österreichischen Universitäten zu implementieren, indem neue digitale Kompetenzen veranker...

Living and learning in digital contexts have become ubiquitous and pervasive, and it has had impacts on many aspects of the lives of adolescents and young citizens all over the world (Miller et al. 2016). Especially young students and apprentices depend on teaching and learning infrastructures in state-organized—mostly non-digital—settings, but inc...

Structured and sufficient training is a key factor for successful fitting of an upper limb prosthesis. This is especially true for more advanced myoelectric control strategies, or for individuals with comorbidities that require additional treatment. With advances in technology, not only have the control strategies become more complex, but also poss...

With art as research becoming an established paradigm in art education, several questions arise. How do we educate young artists and designers to actively engage in the production of knowledge and aesthetic experiences in an expanded field? What are some of the role models to which we can look when we speak about hybrid practices and artistic resea...

BACKGROUND A growing number of cancer and hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) survivors require long-term follow-up with optimal communication schemes and patients' compliance is crucial. Adolescents and young adults (AYA, age 12-39 years) have various unmet needs. Regarding self-report of symptoms/health status mobile applications (mApp) sho...

Background: A growing number of cancer and hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) survivors require long-term follow-up with optimal communication schemes, and patients' compliance is crucial. Adolescents have various unmet needs. Regarding self-report of symptoms and health status, users of mobile apps showed enhanced compliance. Currently, HS...

Our research project was aimed at teaching high-school pupils game design skills and raising their awareness for the subject area “informatics and society.” A project-based-teaching approach enabled us to incorporate social learning by having teams of pupils work on informatics-and-society topics and subsequently design their own games. The focus o...

We present a study and reflection about the role and use of smartphone technology for a large-scale musical performance involving audience participation. We evaluated a full design and development process from initial ideation to a final performance concept. We found that the smartphone became the design tool, the technical device and the musical i...

In the presented study, the informative content of health data of a handwritten health diary was compared with health data submitted through a serious game. Physicians are able to derive a better and more complete health status of patients with higher informative content in health reports. The serious game was implemented in the project Interacct,...

Gameplay experience is shaped by players' expectations towards the game and how game features are presented to them. We created two modified versions of the classic TETRIS game: one that adapts game difficulty based on players' performance and one that additionally adapts to players' eye movements. An initial analysis of exploratory study results i...

This paper discusses the course 'Gameful Design' held as part of the computer science master curriculum at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). We argue that the challenge of meaningfully teaching serious game design and gamification design is not solved by solely imparting design guidelines. It is a matter of conveying a method of how to eng...

Inclusive education deals with the participation of vulnerable and marginalised - especially disabled - people in learning and with reducing exclusive aspects within and from education. Communication skills under an inclusive perspective are to be understood as more than spoken or written word. Levels of languages used and alternative modes of comm...

Historically, audiences have had various ways to participate in live music performances, including clapping, dancing, swaying, whistling, and singing. More recently, mobile and wireless devices, such as smartphones have opened up powerful new opportunities for audience participation. However, design for technology-mediated audience participation (T...

Background Control of a myoelectric prostheses entails rehabilitative training, based on repetitive exercises with a physiotherapist. However, many patients lack the motivation to continue the exercises in their home environment. Mobile games on the smartphone can provide patients with long-term motivation to continue the repetitive exercises that...

This article discusses the use of game design as a method for interdisciplinary project-based teaching in secondary school education to convey informatics and society topics, which encompass the larger social context of computing. There is a lot of knowledge about learning games but little background on using game design as a method for project-bas...

Background: Prosthetic motor rehabilitation usually relies on the highly repetitive training of movements. Patients might drop out of training because the rehabilitation process is long and often discouraging. Game-based interventions provide a potentially useful alternative to standard myoelectric (electromyographic [EMG]) training and can increa...

While studies point to the positive potential of games for health to increase patient engagement and to a need to consider longer-term perspectives, there is a lack of more tangible knowledge on how to design for long-term engagement in games for health. This paper makes a contribution in this space by drawing a reflective arc across three games fo...

This article discusses the use of game design as a method for interdisciplinary project-based teaching in secondary school education to convey informatics and society topics. There is a lot of knowledge about learning games but little background on project-based teaching using game design as a method. We present the results of an analysis of studen...

Fitness trackers promise a longer and better life for the people who engage with them. What is forgotten in their analysis for HCI, though, is how they re-conceptualise the very notion of what constitutes a 'step'. We discuss everyday edge cases illustrating how fitness trackers fail to address goals and ideals of people using them. They merely re-...

A lot of work required for physiotherapy is done between the actual therapy sessions. Patients receive instructions for exercises to be practiced on a daily basis to regain mobility in their injured joints. These exercises are often tedious and uncomfortable, hence motivation for daily repetition is sought-after. Games may be an answer to this chal...

We discuss a setup for technology-mediated audience participation (TMAP)in live music using smartphones and high-frequency sound IDs in a playful setting. The audience needs to install a smartphone app. Using high-frequency sound IDs music samples and colors can be triggered on the audience’s smartphones without the need to have an internet connect...

We present the INTERACCT system, a smartphone app and a Web page for fostering communication between young patients in aftercare after a stem cell transplantation. In this phase of rehabilitation, daily communication between the patients and their clinicians is key for detecting upcoming possibly deadly crises as early as possible. The app consists...

In this paper we discuss a setup for technology-mediated audience participation using smartphones and high-frequency sound IDs. Drawing from the insights of a research project on audience participation in live music we describe a setup for playful music interaction composed of smartphones. In this setup the audience needs to install a smartphone ap...

This paper presents the evaluation of playful technology-mediated audience participation (TMAP) during three music performances in a recent music event. It captures preliminary impressions from a wide range of perspectives and includes critical reflections of music artists, video analysis and qualitative interviews with audience members to cover hy...

Videogame based approaches are a motivating way to increase entertainment for upper limb amputees during neuromuscular rehabilitation training. Thereby myoelectric signals needed to control the prosthesis are intuitively trained and the functional gain of the prosthesis is increased. This study compares the intrinsic motivation between upper limb a...

Mobile and sensor-based technologies have created new interaction design possibilities for technology-mediated audience participation in live music performance. However, there is little if any work in the literature that systematically identifies and characterises design issues emerging from this novel class of multi-dimensional interactive perform...

In order to empower the influence and usage of Serious Games for Health (SGFH) in science as well as application, a decision-support-system (DSS) based approach for interpreting game data should be developed. This DSS would allow users (patients, physicians) to interpret medical data, gathered by various serious games, as well as the game-scores of...

Rehabilitation concepts for upper limb amputees traditionally rely on the execution of repetitive movements. Video game-based therapies are a stimulating way to increase patient motivation, effort and performance during those otherwise monotonous neuromuscular exercises. Myoelectric signals needed to control an upper limb prosthesis are intuitively...

Difficulty in TETRIS is adjusted by adapting the speed with which blocks fall. In this contribution, we describe results of an exploratory study in which we investigated relationships between players' performance and their subjective assessment of difficulty and fun. We tested five different algorithms that, instead of adjusting game speed, adjust...

Background: A high number of upper extremity myoelectric prosthesis users abandon their devices due to difficulties in prosthesis control and lack of motivation to train in absence of a physiotherapist. Virtual training systems, in the form of video games, provide patients with an entertaining and intuitive method for improved muscle coordination...

The paper deals with developing learning games in the area of informatics and society in an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers, university students, and high school students in Vienna, Austria. In this project, we apply mixed methods to ensure meaningful results. Playing research and game analysis are supposed to prepare secondary schoo...

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...

In this position paper we present a new approach to music interaction design. We propose the TMAP Design Cards as a tool and method to generate and advance ideas for technology-mediated audience participation in live music (TMAP). The first draft set of cards was built on the TMAP Framework, which describes and maps out the design space of TMAP bas...

Children who are treated with hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) are hospitalized for many weeks or even months. Discharge to home is important but sufficient home care is essential. Beside regular physical and laboratory checks in the outpatient clinic, information on the daily health status is mandatory for early detection of possible...

Zusammenfassung Der vorliegende Beitrag befasst sich mit einigen Aspekten einer im Rahmen des Forschungsprojekts „Serious Beats“ durchgeführten Längsschnittstudie mit zwei Erhebungswellen über Wiener Jugendliche mit ArbeiterInneneltern verschiedener ethnischer/kultureller Herkunft. 51 Jugendliche wurden interviewt und ein Teil von ihnen eingeladen,...

INTERACCT is a multidisciplinary research project, where a communication tool in form of a serious video game was implemented. Target group are young and adolescent patients which suffered leukaemia or similar diseases that indicate a stem cell transplantation as therapy. After the transplantation, patients are required to stay at home for 12–24 mo...

This paper describes a current research project about co-designing an interactive game for pediatric patients after cancer treatment with HSCT (hematopoietic stem cell transplantation) in after care. Objectives of this complex project have been to substitute paper diaries by developing a game with motivational elements. During the last months this...

In this paper we present results from our user-centered and participative design approach using methods from design thinking and explorative design with school children aged 8 - 14 in context with a game created for children after cancer treatment. After stem-cell transplantation, pediatric patients must remain in aftercare due to a high risk of su...

In this paper we present INTERACCT (Integrating Entertainment and Reaction Assessment into Child Cancer Therapy), a multidisciplinary research project aiming at creating a communication tool for pediatric patients after cancer treatment with HSCT (hematopoietic stem cell transplantation) in after care. The communication platform should foster commu...

After stem-cell transplantation, pediatric patients must remain in aftercare due to a high risk of suffering from a plethora of life-threatening organic problems. In this phase, communication with the clinicians is key for an increased survival probability. The multidisciplinary INTERACCT aims at developing a child friendly communication tool based...

This paper describes the design of the learning game Internet Hero, in which the player is transported into a fictional world representing the Internet. The game shall convey learning contents about the technical and social basics of using the Internet. We connect game design to learning principles and evaluate the game through gameplay metrics and...

This paper presents an introduction to using games in transportation. Many organizations are using online games to help explain complicated subjects, increase awareness and encourage participation, three key transportation agency objectives. The Grr-­‐Grr-­‐Bike game was developed to better understand how mobile games could be designed to achieve t...

Today’s museums and cultural institutions face the challenge of how to engage important educational visitor groups like schools, teachers and students. Our presentation will discuss concepts and methodologies of technology-based museum education, and how to engage educational visitors using new, mobile technologies. We will outline ideas towards a...

This contribution describes a series of design sketches for a playful digital application designed to trigger reminiscence in older adults. The goal of the intervention is to be a preventive measure against cognitive disabilities such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Research shows that reminiscence and cognitive activities are beneficial in th...

An increasingly older demographic emphasizes the need to deal with a likewise increasing number of people with cognitive disabilities like dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. While no cure exists the preventive potential of activities in the areas of reminiscence, cognitive, social and physical activity has been recognized. This paper looks at the pos...

The examples of independent games presented in this paper provide fun through strong, innovative and playful game mechanics. The often-resulting combination of retro flair with focused gameplay is what makes the "contemporary retro game". This paper argues that game and especially level design have evolved over time and provides insights on contemp...

At present there is no single satellite-derived global land cover product that is accurate enough to provide reliable estimates of forest or cropland area to determine, e.g., how much additional land is available to grow biofuels or to tackle problems of food security. The Landspotting Project aims to improve the quality of this land cover informat...

In this paper we describe the design and evaluation of an interactive system for audience participation in live per-formances using smart phones to control the stereo pano-rama of the lead guitar. The system was developed through feedback from both spectators and artists. The evaluation was conducted during a live concert and builds on inter-views...

Recent studies show that the second generation of migrants is not adequately integrated into mainstream society but tends to segregate into secluded segments. ‘Internet Use and Friendship Structures of young migrants in Vienna: a Question of Diversity within Social Networks and Online Social Games’1 is a transdisciplinary2 research project with the...

This review highlights the changes made for the futuristic racing game Wipeout HD. Once deemed a hardcore game the Wipeout series has since broadened its appeal. The game's state of the art audio integration and the subtle changes to its gameplay are highlighted in the context of contemporary game design.

Sports videogames need to model a complex reality to a gratifying game experience. This paper suggest a methodology and terminology to describe and explain deviations from pure simulation in sports videogames design. Using the terms of abstraction and transformation and by introducing a graphic representation for those qualities in respect to reali...

In this paper we describe gestures for the interaction with tangible mobile interfaces. These were derived from three prototype instruments we developed over the last year. They were implemented for the Nintendo DS platform and offer different approaches to gestural interaction with music. Our research resulted in a number of suitable gestures for...

This paper gives an introduction into the principles of interactivity in music video games. Music video games are an old but small genre of games. The earliest direct ancestors emerged in the 1970ies. Some recent music video games were hugely successful. Until today, there are only a few different approaches to their design. The purpose of this art...

The emotional side of gaming has been researched extensively over the last years. This paper provides a perspective on how some basic emotions relate to players and gaming situations. The subject of discus- sion are the player's emotions that arise as a consequence of the divergence between an action's expected, intended and actual outcomes. Furthe...