Katta Spiel

TU Wien | TU Wien · Visual Computing and Human-Centered Technology

Games research within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community currently draws most of its understanding of immersion, engagement and player experience from Psychology. However, these phenomena are also studied by the humanities, i.e., Media Theory, a field that conceptualises these parameters as affective and situated in specific contexts. H...

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,...

Play presents a popular pastime for all humans, though not all humans play alike. Subsequently, Human–Computer Interaction Games research is increasingly concerned with the development of games that serve neurodivergent ¹ players. In a critical review of 66 publications informed by Disability Studies and Self-Determination Theory, we analyse which...

Online communities are important spaces for members of marginalized groups to organize and support one another. To better understand the experiences of fat people - a group whose marginalization often goes unrecognized - in online communities, we conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with fat people. Our participants leveraged online communities...

Online communities are important spaces for members of marginalized groups to organize and support one another. To better understand the experiences of fat people -- a group whose marginalization often goes unrecognized -- in online communities, we conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with fat people. Our participants leveraged online communitie...

Interactive sex toys shape how we understand sexual intimacies and pleasures on an individual and societal scale. Yet analytical and critical research on actual devices is scant. To help address this, we conducted an in-depth Feminist Content Analysis of interactive products offered by one Dutch manufacturer, including text and video material that...

Representation of disability in games is important to facilitate inclusive experiences. In our work, we address this issue through an exploration of the representation of ADHD in games. First, we engage in interviews with 15 young people with ADHD to understand their lived experience of ADHD and their perspective on its integration in games. Second...

Sign Language Machine Translation (SLMT) has emerged as a promising solution to enhance accessibility for deaf communities across various services, applications, and products. However, ethical challenges persist in the development of SLMT due to the complex nature of sign languages (SL) and the limited involvement of deaf communities in the develop...

Technology for neurodivergent people has been developed in the past to align them with expectations by neurotypical people. Participants in the widest sense are encouraged to discuss the major challenges and opportunities in designing technology for neurodivergent persons in the context of education, work and for leisure. A key focus is to address...

Recent years have seen a strongly increased visibility of non-binary people in public discourse. Accordingly, considerations of gender-fair language go beyond a binary conception of male/female. However, language technology, especially machine translation (MT), still suffers from binary gender bias. Proposing a solution for gender-fair MT beyond th...

Recent years have seen a strongly increased visibility of non-binary people in public discourse. Accordingly, considerations of gender-fair language go beyond a binary conception of male/female. However , language technology, especially machine translation (MT), still suffers from binary gender bias. Proposing a solution for gender-fair MT beyond t...

This panel aims to generate conversation toward creating a more equitable CHI. In recognizing our community's hard work thus far, this panel seeks to engage panelists and participants with thought-provoking questions to garner and promote actionable items for the community. We intend to have an open dialogue on allyship, diversity, equity, and incl...

Selbstoptimierung ist allgegenwärtig: Körper und Gesundheit gelten ebenso wie Beziehungen, Elternschaft und Karriere längst als Bereiche, die von Individuen aktiv gestaltet und verändert werden müssen, um den gesellschaftlichen Schönheits- und Leistungsnormen zu entsprechen. Der Band versammelt Beiträge von Wissenschaftler*innen und Aktivist*innen,...

Selbstoptimierung ist allgegenwärtig: Körper und Gesundheit gelten ebenso wie Beziehungen, Elternschaft und Karriere längst als Bereiche, die von Individuen aktiv gestaltet und verändert werden müssen, um den gesellschaftlichen Schönheits- und Leistungsnormen zu entsprechen. Der Band versammelt Beiträge von Wissenschaftler*innen und Aktivist*innen,...

With the increasing attention non-binary people receive in Western societies, strategies of gender-fair language have started to move away from binary (only female/male) concepts of gender. Nevertheless, hardly any approaches to take these identities into account into machine translation models exist so far. A lack of understanding of the socio-tec...

The Player Experience Inventory (PXI), initially developed by Abeele et al. (2020), measures player experiences among English-speaking players. However, empirically validated translations of the PXI are sparse, limiting the use of the scale among non-English speaking players. In this paper, we address this issue by providing a translated version of...

Putting laypeople in an active role as direct expert contributors in the design of service robots becomes more and more prominent in the research fields of human–robot interaction (HRI) and social robotics (SR). Currently, though, HRI is caught in a dilemma of how to create meaningful service robots for human social environments, combining expectat...

Emotional self-reliance is a key factor in psychological well-being. Individuals with Allism Spectrum Disorder often face challenges in interpersonal communication and social settings. Especially experiences of emotion echolalia, the mirroring of others’ emotions, can cause not only impairment in communication and relationships with others, but sig...

In a world where technologies often serve to amplify the persistent rendering of disability as an undesired deficit, what we need are empowering utopias concerning bodies, disabilities and assistive technologies. Specifically, I use Barad's article ‘Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings’ to illustrate how we mig...

Wie verändern sich gesellschaftliche Praktiken und die Chancen demokratischer Technikgestaltung, wenn neben Bürger*innen und Öffentlichkeit auch Roboter, Algorithmen, Simulationen oder selbstlernende Systeme einbezogen und als Beteiligte ernstgenommen werden? Die Beiträger*innen des Bandes untersuchen die Neukonfiguration von Verantwortung und Kont...

Wie verändern sich gesellschaftliche Praktiken und die Chancen demokratischer Technikgestaltung, wenn neben Bürger*innen und Öffentlichkeit auch Roboter, Algorithmen, Simulationen oder selbstlernende Systeme einbezogen und als Beteiligte ernstgenommen werden? Die Beiträger*innen des Bandes untersuchen die Neukonfiguration von Verantwortung und Kont...

Wearable activity trackers are routinely applied in physical activity (PA) interventions in late life, but there is little research that focuses on older adults' perspectives on the technology. We conducted a qualitative study with 24 older persons to explore their perspective on wearables and PA. First, we discussed their relationship with PA and...

The arts and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) have a lot in common. As part of computer science HCI is ground breaking, interdisciplinary and focused on the interactions that form part of our everyday world. As part of the arts, HCI is a lens on technology, showing us spaces where there is room to interact and create new and meaningful blended expe...

Due to increased societal awareness of gendered dimensions of inequality, funding bodies in Western societies increasingly require researchers to address gender in their proposals — though often exclusively framed around binary notions. With oppressive power structures being prevalent and persuasive, these seep into current practices of Computer Sc...

Physical activity (PA) positively impacts the quality of life of older adults, with technology as a promising factor in maintaining motivation. Within Computer Science and Engineering, research investigates how to track PA of older adults for various purposes. We present a systematic review of 204 papers and discuss wearable tracking systems accord...

Managing continence in nursing homes comprises a large economic and emotional factor, not only in residents’ Quality of Life but also in staffs’ Quality of Care. Notwithstanding increased engineering efforts in this area, nursing home continence care remains underexplored in HCI. To lay the groundwork for the technological design of human-centered...

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...

An ever-increasing body of work within HCI investigates questions of around “Women’s Health” with the aim to disrupt the status quo of defaulting to an implicit norm of cis-male bodies. This laudable and feminist project has the potential to drastically improve the inclusivity and availability of health care. To explore how this research attends to...

Designing with marginalised children often produces detailed insights about their lives and communities. Whilst it is possible to extract methodological and artefact-centred knowledge from existing design cases, it can be difficult to utilise and build on some of the more complex and multifaceted issues that these generate, for instance, how resear...

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers more and more challenge the notion of technologies as objects and humans as subjects. This conceptualization has led to various approaches inquiring into object perspectives within HCI. Even though the development and analysis of games and players is filled with notions of intersubjectivity, games resear...

Game map interfaces provide an alternative perspective on the worlds players inhabit. Compared to navigation applications popular in day-today life, game maps have different affordances to match players' situated goals. To contextualize and understand these differences and how they developed, we present a historical chronicle of game map interfaces...

SIGACCESS has been on the forefront of hosting accessible scientific conferences and providing guidelines for other ACM SIGs. However, promoting and assessing adoption of best practices is an area that benefits from shared work and attention across multiple SIGs. For the past five years, Access SIGCHI, a growing community of Human-Computer Interact...

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...

With idle games, active withdrawal from the game comprises an essential part of gameplay as players wait for the game state to change over time. This mode of interaction is paradigmatic for the change of roles technologies have in our lives. However, the design elements of idle games are less well understood, particularly from the perspectives of d...

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...

Digital games are a hugely popular activity enjoyed for the diverse experiences and relationships that they offer players. In 2019, games are more accessible to an increasingly diverse audience of disabled players through both new gaming technology and in-game options that allow people to tune their experiences. As a significant cultural medium, it...

Games User Research (GUR) focuses on measuring, analysing and understanding player experiences to optimise game designs. Hence, GUR experts aim to understand how specific game design choices are experienced by players, and how these lead to specific emotional responses. An instrument, providing such actionable insight into player experience, specif...

Fitness trackers are rigidly defining what it means to be healthy and who "counts" as healthy. Body-positive computing can provide an alternative that allows people to engage with technologies more on their terms.

Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole. --- Sheena Erete, Editor

Embodied design methods are gaining popularity among design researchers. They leverage the physical and situated experience of designers to access and better understand present and future situations, humans, and design opportunities. Here, we propose a workshop to learn about, engage with, and discuss larping (live action role playing) as an embodi...

Our objective is to explore distributed forms of creativity that arise in play to help guide and foster supportive research, game design, and technology. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers, game designers, and others to examine theories of creativity and play, game design practices, methods for studying creativity in play, and creati...

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,...

Due to policies supporting the inclusion of disabled children in mainstream schools and the use of technologies to enable personalized schooling, there are broad research incentives and opportunities to design technologies for disabled children in educational contexts. A workshop at CHI 2018 with researchers and practitioners working on accessible...

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...

The increasing corpus on queer research within HCI, which started by focusing on sites such as location-based dating apps, has begun to expand to other topics such as identity formation, mental health and physical well-being. This Special Interest Group (SIG) aims to create a space for discussion, connection and camaraderie for researchers working...

Non-binary people are rarely considered by technologies or technologists, and often subsumed under binary trans experiences on the rare occasions when we are discussed. In this paper we share our own experiences and explore potential alternatives - utopias, impossible places, as our lived experience of technologies' obsessive gender binarism seems...

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...

Care can be treated as an attitude: it is routinely exercised by people in daily life and surfaces when challenging incidents are encountered. We use care as a lens to explore normative processes in online community moderation. This position paper addresses the importance of care in online communities, and what it might mean to approach an analysis...

Collaborative mixed reality games enable shared social experiences, in which players interact with the physical and virtual game environment, and with other players in real-time. Recent advances in technology open a range of opportunities for designing new and innovative collaborative mixed reality games, but also raise questions around design, tec...

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...

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...

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...