Rainmaker: A Tangible Work-Companion for the Personal Office Space

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Rainmaker: A Tangible Work-Companion for the Personal
Oice Space
Sujay Shalawadi Anas Alnayef Niels van Berkel
sujay.shalawadi@uni-weimar.de anas.alnayef@uni-weimar.de nielsvanberkel@cs.aau.dk
Mobile Media Group, Bauhaus Mobile Media Group, Bauhaus Department of Computer Science,
Universität Universität Aalborg University
Weimar, Germany Weimar, Germany Aalborg, Denmark
Jesper Kjeldskov Florian Echtler
jesper@cs.aau.dk oech@cs.aau.dk
Department of Computer Science, Department of Computer Science,
Aalborg University Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark Aalborg, Denmark
(a) User working with Rainmaker in the background (b) Turning over Rainmaker to tick o a task
Figure 1: Two photos of the Rainmaker in use by a study participant.
ABSTRACT
Routines are an important element of day-to-day work life, support-
ing people in structuring their day around required tasks. Eectively
managing these routines is, however, experienced as challenging by
many – an issue further amplied by the current work from home
lockdown measures. In this paper we present Rainmaker, a tangible
device to support people in their working life in the context of their
own homes. We evaluate and iterate on our prototype through two
qualitative studies, spanning respectively three days (N = 11) and
15 days (N = 2). Our results highlight the perceived advantages of
the use of a primarily physical rather than digital tool for work
support, allowing users to stay focused on their tasks and reect
on their work achievements. We present lessons for future work in
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International
4.0 License.
MobileHCI ’21, September 27-October 1, 2021, Toulouse & Virtual, France
© 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8328-8/21/09.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3447526.3472032
this area and publicly release the software and hardware used in
the construction of Rainmaker.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Human-centered computing → User centered design.
KEYWORDS
Work from Home; Self Reection; Multimodality; Reward; Work
Routines
ACM Reference Format:
Sujay Shalawadi, Anas Alnayef, Niels van Berkel, Jesper Kjeldskov, and Flo-
rian Echtler. 2021. Rainmaker: A Tangible Work-Companion for the Per-
sonal Oce Space. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on
Mobile Human-Computer Interaction (MobileHCI ’21), September 27-October
1, 2021, Toulouse & Virtual, France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3447526.3472032
1 INTRODUCTION
The ability to develop routines is a critical skill for both produc-
tivity and well-being while working from home (WFH). Current

MobileHCI ’21, September 27-October 1, 2021, Toulouse & Virtual, France Shalawadi et al.
global lockdowns as a result of the global Covid-19 pandemic have
forced many to temporarily abandon their typical workspaces, with
research indicating that WFH will remain a popular and common
conguration beyond the current pandemic [
3
]. While current as-
sessments of this work setup highlight numerous benets, including
some reports pointing to increased productivity [
11
], reduced in-
frastructure costs for oce spaces, and the reduction of commuting
time, thereby encouraging organisations to support WFH [
13
], sev-
eral clear downsides of the current lockdown have also emerged. A
recent survey among 1014 participants from countries most severely
aected by the pandemic shows that the most common disadvan-
tage of WFH is the lack of social contact, followed immediately by
the lack of work-life balance and an inability to focus on work [
32
].
While people appreciate the exibility of work timings in WFH, a
negative impact on their job satisfaction can be seen due to lack of
eective time boundaries between work and private life [4].
Time management during working hours is crucial in order to
ensure subsequent leisure time. As the passage of time is perceived
relatively rather than physically, task engagement plays a large role
in this process (e.g., time passes by more slowly when completing
a boring or challenging task) [
12
]. Time management can become
challenging when creating new work routines, an issue highlighted
by the wide range of available desktop and smartphone applications
that aim to support eective time management techniques (e.g., Po-
modoro, Get Things Done, Eisenhower matrix) and as extensively
studied by the HCI community (see e.g., [
1
,
7
,
24
]). Although these
applications provide people with the opportunity to experiment
with structured and guided approaches to improve their task man-
agement skills and build towards a productive work routine, these
applications often lack comprehensive support in relation to task
visibility, reminders to refocus after interruptions, and a sense of
progress. Additionally, the presence of these solutions within the
digital working environment (desktop apps) or on potentially dis-
tracting personal devices (smartphone apps) may negatively aect
their users’ ability to switch between dierent contexts.
In this paper, we present the design and eld evaluation of a
prototype, named Rainmaker, designed to improve people’s time
management while WFH through multimodal interactions. The
goal of our prototype is to introduce a tangible companion that
enables people to develop their productivity and organisation of
tasks in the context of WFH. Rainmaker, as shown in Figure 1,
makes use of visual, auditory, and embodied interactions to support
task organisation and execution for people during everyday work
hours – supporting the process of having routines even in unfa-
miliar circumstances. We conducted two qualitative user studies to
understand the eects of the prototype on productivity and ecient
time management, as well as its ability to support positive work-life
balance during the challenging times of physical isolation.
The subsequent sections of the paper are organised as follows:
Section 2 describes existing works with multimodal interactions
for representing time along with other prior work that has used
tangible principles for supporting routines. Section 3 describes the
salient features that t our goal and the implementation of building
a high delity prototype and an Android application. Section 4
presents the qualitative user study and the underlying research
questions. Section 5 and 6 describe the procedure and participants
of the two subsequent user studies along with the collected results.
Section 7 opens a discussion on our prototype and the use of tangible
devices to support in WFH, while highlighting potential areas for
future work. Finally, in Section 8 we conclude the paper.
2 RELATED WORK
Balancing activities in one’s life in order to support well being is
extensively researched and much has been written in the HCI com-
munity in relation to quantied self (QS) [
29
,
37
]. Here, we explore
existing works in the scope of quantied self, tangible rewards,
self reection, and physical interfaces for providing awareness and
quantication between people and their work time. The latter can
also be termed as quantied self at work (QSW) [
27
]. The works
discussed below inspired the design of the Rainmaker.
2.1 Physical Interfaces for the Quantied Self
Apart from a multitude of generic tness and learning apps that
attempt to drive engagement through rankings and metrics, there
are also more experimental interfaces that employ tangibility to
create a bridge between users and their data. For example, the Mem-
stone [
5
] is a tangible interface to control sharing of personalized
video data with others. Physio-Stacks [
31
] and TOBE [
16
] follow a
similar approach, however, the focus is on sharing personal physi-
ological data with others to support extrospection. Other related
interface concepts which focus on exploring one’s own data, i.e.
introspection, include Teegi [
15
], a tangible interface showing the
user’s brainwave data, or the prototypes by Aslan et al. [
2
], which
provide tangible representations of the user’s heartbeat and breath-
ing.Similarly, various projects analyze users’ engagement with their
own tness data through tangible means, e.g. Activity Sculptures
[
36
] and LOOP [
35
], which tend to result in an increased amount
of self-reection among users during the prototype deployment.
2.2 Physical Interfaces for Time Management
While extensive research exists on the mechanisms and philoso-
phies for personal time management, there appears to be little
work using tangible physical interfaces to address task manage-
ment. Monomizo [
19
] by Jang et al. follows a hybrid approach by
providing a digital calendar widget on the user’s desk while also
being capable of printing a tangible single-use paper calendar to
take along. Similarly, Hojmose presents DailyStack [
17
] which uses
a metaphor of stacking colorful wooden blocks on a platform to
represent a stack of tasks to be completed. Ahmed et al. [
1
] have
implemented a tangible approach to time management by extend-
ing on the classic marble answering machine by Bishop et al. [
6
].
The concept is novel and utilises Pomodoro technique to minimise
interruptions by embodying characteristics of ambient displays and
tangible user interfaces (TUIs). This work has yet to be evaluted
in the wild, which motivated us to conduct user studies to learn
from user feedback on the perception of physical interfaces for
time management. Another notable work with physical interfaces
is done by Yuzawa et al. [
39
], who used a sociotechnical approach
through the concept of a Japanese Garden to support multitask-
ing. Their user study of their prototype reported no signicance
towards productivity, although collaborating partners sent signi-
cantly fewer coordination messages, fewer inappropriate messages,
and produced fewer interruptions. This directly aects reduced

Rainmaker: A Tangible Work-Companion for the Personal Oice Space MobileHCI ’21, September 27-October 1, 2021, Toulouse & Virtual, France
stress levels in their users. Another recent tangible prototype, Day-
Clo as developed by Lee et al. [
26
], presents the advantage of em-
bodying physical interaction onto an everyday object like a table
clock. Their longitudinal user study showed that DayClo stimulated
users’ casual access to their upcoming daily schedules and brought
the user’s soft alertness, which was not perceived as a pressure but
rather as a motivation to self-track to perform their schedules as
planned. The tangible interface concepts can be seen in Figure 2.
2.3 Self Reection to Develop Routines
Routines are a series of actions or type of behaviour that are regu-
larly and invariably followed by someone. Moreover, they give a
start- and endpoint to a process and thereby provide a feeling of sat-
isfaction. However, people often are in doubt of their productivity
in the absence of feedback such as time spent and task engage-
ment [
30
]. The role of self reection as a personalised medium
to support data interpretation, especially of user generated data,
has been described by Ruckstein et al. [
33
]. In the context of sup-
porting routines, awareness and consciousness of a person is in-
creased when there is a possibility to reect. This can be seen
through the material representation of user generated data like
heart beats during an activity into physical artifacts and drink-
able souvenirs [
20
]. People shared experiences of feeling rewarded,
pleasantly surprised and a positive indicator to develop a healthy
routine (see e.g., [
21
,
22
]). There have also been some contradictions
regarding self reection developed through user generated data as
shown by Nim et al. [
28
]. Their observations reported increased
anxiety and stress in people due to the burden of staying consistent
with routines everyday. This occurred due to excessive tracking of
multiple data features and frequent notications from smartphone
applications. This brings us to the understanding of the importance
of integrating self reection as an ambient form of connection that
people can associate with awareness as a positive process.
2.4 Tangible Rewards
Rewards are signs of recognition towards the eorts made by a
person. HCI research has understood this relevance and studied
this perspective in relation to developing routines for people. A
recent longitudinal study conducted by Cherubini et al. [
10
] has
shown an unexpected downside when monetary compensation was
given to people for collecting step counts. Additionally, motiva-
tional notications were sent to people in the hope of positively
nudging them towards collecting more step counts. Both had detri-
mental eects as the people were unable to associate themselves
with such a rewarding system to maintain a routine of walking a
certain number of steps everyday. This negative eect was related
to the non-personalisation of goals and was not benecial to trig-
ger motivation for people who are at the initial phase of building
exercise routines. Furthermore, the standard predened goals do
not instill a sense of appreciation due to generalising the reward
for the people. There are other works that explore personalised
reward systems and show the positive eects of tangible rewards.
This can be seen through the feature of storing reward by Botros et
al. [
9
] and using it on a day when the person is unable to full their
goals which increase consistency. Edipulse by Khot et al. [
23
] show
how the use of surprise personalised messages on ‘eatables’ creates
curiosity and increases motivation for people to exercise regularly.
The above listed research papers show us a spectrum of the
pros and cons associated with multimodal interactions for QSW in
building routines to people. We will now utilise this information
towards developing design criteria for a prototype that can be
evaluated in the wild with people which we hope would benet
from ecient task organisation and execution while WFH.
3 CONCEPT AND PROTOTYPE
The design of the prototype plays a crucial role in our proposed user
studies. Our design goal was for the prototype to enable a sense
of focus and awareness in the user’s work, thereby supporting
people’s ability to detach from their work during leisure time. An
online survey was conducted with 15 people working at a univer-
sity, all of whom had their work routines signicantly aected by
the lockdown measures. The goal of the survey was to understand
the data features in which people are interested in when assessing
their work day productivity and to observe their preferred modal-
ity to set task reminders. Additionally, the survey indicated that
respondents continued working both at the university and at their
home oce while adhering to social distancing rules. The survey de-
scribed the context of use for the prototype along with a short video
explaining the Rainmaker percussion instrument. This ensured that
participants were familiar with the form factor and interaction
possibilities. The survey contained the following questions:
(1)
What is your work environment situation at the moment?
(Example: Working only at home or also at the oce).
(2)
How many tasks do you usually schedule on average? (Exam-
ple: Noting down some points on sticky notes to be scratched
throughout the work day).
(3)
Please pick your preferred colour choices in an ascending
manner that could represent your work versus break time
ratio (three choices could be picked, see Appendix Figure 8).
(4)
Imagine you forget to switch the ‘Rainmaker’ back into
‘work’-position but have already continued working. Would
you want to receive a reminder either from the smartphone
or from the rainmaker itself (e.g., through haptic vibrations
or audio)?
(5)
What is the amount of time where you can usually work
continuously without taking a break? (To learn if there can
be an intervention such as vibrations to help people become
consistent with work intervals).
(6)
What colour do you associate with tasks pending and done?
(a choice of red, blue, and green were provided).
Based on the survey responses, we determined three design
criteria for the prototype. An illustrative interaction ow with
Rainmaker, in which all of the three aforementioned design criteria
are represented, is shown in Figure 3.
Metaphorical relation
Our rst criteria was to design a device that oers a physical handle
to manipulate a virtual to-do list while taking advantage of multiple
sensory channels of human interaction with digital information.
The choice of embodying the percussion instrument Rainmaker
showed the ideal properties of taking advantage of people’s well

MobileHCI ’21, September 27-October 1, 2021, Toulouse & Virtual, France Shalawadi et al.
(a) DayClo: Embodying Self Reection [26] (b) Japanese Garden for Multitasking [39]
(c) Tangible Pomodoro Timer [1] (d) DailyStack [17]
Figure 2: Existing Tangible Time Management Models
entrenched skills and experiences of interacting with non-digital
objects; in our case the association with the ‘Rainmaker’ instrument
as suggested by Jacob et al. [
18
]. Those familiar with the instrument
have a strong analogy between the interface and actions in the real
world, thereby supporting the metaphor as proposed by Fishkin
et al.’s tangible interaction framework [
14
]. The simulated rainfall
sound can also be expected to have a stress-reducing eect, as
discussed by Gould van Praag et al. [
38
]. Green seemed to be the
preferred choice for people to associate with their tasks. When
further probed, we learnt that green provided them with a positive
feeling of accomplishing the tasks. The survey participants seemed
positively intrigued by the audio created from the rainfall eect
in the survey video, which shows a Rainmaker being played by a
musician. The participants suggested the use of this feedback in
the context of a work companion prototype (e.g., the rainfall audio
giving them a positive indicator of achieved progress). This further
supported our choice of embodying a multimodal interaction onto
the Rainmaker while validating the ndings from Lee et al. [26].
Portability and ease of use
Second, it is important that people can easily transport the proto-
type in order to use it at dierent locations both within their house
and outside (e.g., their oce). The survey indicated that most of the
participants preferred working in their university oce space 2-3
times per week, with the remaining days spent working at home.
Additionally, ease of use of the prototype was critical in order to
avoid distracting users from their actual work or introducing ad-
ditional barriers to use. We minimized the initial setup process to
establishing a Bluetooth connection between a smartphone appli-
cation and the prototype. Finally, we ensured that the casing was
able to protect the electronics in case of incidents in the use of our
prototype during the user studies.
Minimising screen interaction
Third, in contrast to many existing work-routine solutions that
are completely digital, our aim was to focus primarily on a phys-
ical device. While an extra smartphone application may seem to
contradict the purpose of a fully tangible approach for time man-
agement, the main intent for the app is to acts as a place to list
the task names before beginning to work, creating a starting point

Rainmaker: A Tangible Work-Companion for the Personal Oice Space MobileHCI ’21, September 27-October 1, 2021, Toulouse & Virtual, France
and bringing awareness of planning the list of tasks. The app also
supports rmware updates on the prototype in case of any tech-
nical diculties faced by the participants during the user studies.
Additionally, we wanted to keep the option to display the statistics
related to time used per task and to have a visualisation of weekly
and monthly work times in order for people to track their routines
if desired.
3.1 Implementation
The outer casing of the prototype was 3D-printed around an ex-
isting Rainmaker toy. This toy already contained metal balls that
created the audio eect of rainfall when the prototype was physi-
cally manipulated. The electrical components consist of a Huzzah
ESP 32 micro-controller, an addressable LED strip, 6-axis inertial
measurement unit (IMU), and a rechargeable battery. Figure 4 shows
an exploded view of the Rainmaker. The LED strip has 10 LEDs
in order to support the mean number of tasks of the people we
surveyed. The choice of green as blinking (pending task) and solid
green (completed task) was also selected as based on the outcomes
of the survey. The work versus break time colours on the LED were
chosen to be blue for work time and orange for break time, this was
done based on the most preferred user choice being option 1 from
Figure 8. An Android application was developed to connect to the
Rainmaker and manipulate (e.g., add, edit, remove) the tasks. We
publicly share the code of the Android application and microcon-
troller, technical specications of the electronic components, and
the circuit diagram for connecting the electronic components1.
A second iteration of the Rainmaker was developed based on the
feedback from the rst user study. The rechargeable batteries were
changed from 350 mA to 1000 mA to reduce power discharge during
usage of the prototype. We further decided to log usage data of
people in the second iteration in order to supplement our interview
questions with usage data logs. The communication process can be
seen in Figure 5. We furthermore modied the interactions for the
second iteration, see Figure 6, as based on the results from the rst
user study. A Pomodoro timer was added so the LED strip could
represent the 25 minutes interval work times and the corresponding
interaction of ipping the prototype to activate the timer resonates
with the cylindrical form factor providing the user a feeling of
handling a physical hour glass.
The interactions mentioned in Figure 3 and 6 are detected by
the micro-controller using the output from the (IMU), specically
the Y-axis readings. For this purpose, the rotation angle on the
Y-axis is constantly being stored and checked. A turn-over event is
triggered if the change in rotation is above a certain threshold in one
direction and under a limited period of time. The same applies for
the shake event, however, the threshold here is smaller and has to
be reached 3 times in both directions alternately. These conditions
also have to be met under a limited period of time. The time limit
and the threshold for the rotation change are important to avoid
false positive detection, i.e. unintentional turning over/shaking.
4 QUALITATIVE USER STUDIES
While our primary research goal of exploring the eective use
of multimodal interactions drove the design and implementation
1https://github.com/mmbuw/RainMaker.git
of Rainmaker, we wanted go further at evaluating our choice of
features through a qualitative user study. Referring to Boehner et
al.’s discussion of probes in HCI [
8
], our approach can be considered
a ‘technology probe’, i.e. an exploratory study and not so much
a usability study of a nearly-nished product. We conducted two
separate user studies on two iterations of the prototype, using semi-
structured interviews after the participants had spent time using the
prototype. The user studies were guided by the research questions
below.
• RQ 1:
In the context of working from home, what is the
role of multimodal interactions in triggering a positive eect
towards productivity in accomplishing tasks?
• RQ 2:
Does intermediate reection on the utilized time with
a ratio of working versus break time increase the awareness
of the working hours?
• RQ 3:
Does the integration of the Pomodoro timer technique
in the form of a tangible interactive medium encourage its
use for a more focused time management along with the
tasks organization feature in the prototype?
RQ 1
and
RQ 2
were explored during Study 1, whereas
RQ 3
was
explored in Study 2 along with additional feedback to answer
RQ
1
. Table 1 shows the dierences between the two user studies that
were conducted on the prototype.
RQ 1
and
RQ 2
were generated at
the start of the Study 1 and eventually
RQ 3
was generated for Study
2 based on the feedback we received from Study 1. The primary
motivation to conduct Study 2 was to learn more about the inuence
of TUIs on work routines as the time spent by participants in Study
1 allowed us to mainly understand about the pragmatic and hedonic
eects of the Rainmaker, but we were unable to establish relations
between the participants and their work routine. Therefore, we
focused on a longer study duration in Study 2 with a lower number
of participants.
5 STUDY 1
In Study 1, participants were encouraged to integrate the use of
the Rainmaker into their regular work day to allow us to learn
from their interactions and perceptions developed in the time spent
with the Rainmaker over the course of the user studies. We encour-
aged participants to keep their normal schedule of either working
from home or their oce space, and participants could carry the
prototype with them if needed.
5.1 Participants
We recruited 11 participants for Study 1. Eight participants are
researchers at a university, one participant is a student currently
working on his thesis, and two participants are engineers working
for a company. All the participants were actively working from
their homes or isolated in their personal oces during the course of
the user study. The participants were expected by their employers
to work 8 hours everyday from Monday to Friday while the student
self-managed his work hours with no xed limit. The median age
of the participants was 27.5 years.
5.2 Procedure and Analysis
An explanation on the background of creating the prototype along
with a demonstration of the functionalities of the Rainmaker in

ToDo Shake to Place on Rotate 180° to Place horizontally Place vertically - Shake to end Place horizotally to
Setup Activate work-desk collect accomplished - start break time continue work-time work-day de-activitate
task
\111 I// I \\ 11 j //I
~
A
~
,~,
~~
.
~l '~ (_ ......... 31 C••••••••••ll
. '
I
I· .I- :!
2 3 4 7
work-time
break-time
0 D • • Task Title
• Time Ratio
• Frequency of Use
Android Firebase Analytics
Rain Maker Application
MobileHCI ’21, September 27-October 1, 2021, Toulouse & Virtual, France Shalawadi et al.
Figure 3: Rainmaker interactions for Study 1.
Figure 4: Components of the Rainmaker. 1) Inertial measurement unit, 2) Electronic components locking cap, 3) ESP32 , 4)
Battery, 5) LED, 6) Layers to control ow of the acoustic balls, 7) Outer Casing.
Figure 5: Rainmaker Communication Cycle.
coordination with the Android app was provided to participants
at the start of the study. A manual, see Appendix Figure 9, with
all available interactions was also handed out to familiarise our
participants with the prototype during the rst use. Participants
were met again after three days for a semi-structured feedback
interview. The minutes of the interview were audio recorded during
the course of the conversation after taking the consent from the
participants. We probed on the eects of the form factor, the choice
of metaphor and interactions, the information perceptions, and the
overall gratication of the users.
5.3 Results Study 1
The below emergent themes are inuenced by the questions from
the semi-structured interview conducted with the eleven partici-
pants of Study 1 at the end of their three days of using the prototype.
5.3.1 Form Factor and Material. The size and width of the Rain-
maker was felt indierent by most participants. Two participants
stated while in the horizontal position, they had to make space for
the Rainmaker to be placed on their work table. One participant
stated that when there are more than seven tasks, little fatigue
was felt in the forearm while ipping the rainmaker for every task
completed. Four participants would prefer to have the Rainmaker
in a wood casing for aesthetic reasons.

Work period
ToDo Place on Rotate 180° to switch Place horizontally Place vertically- (25 min) passed Rotate 180° to swtich Shake to collect
Setup work-desk Pomodoro timer on - show pending/ show Pomodoro timer -All LED's flash Pomodoro off finished task
finished tasks for 5 min (break)
~
A ~,~,
' . / i
, . '
: / t!,
~
·~·
, . '
,I / I ... : ,,. : i; ·~
.
.. : '
(•···· !) -~- : : .::- '- : .,
, . ' , . ' , ., , . '
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Rainmaker: A Tangible Work-Companion for the Personal Oice Space MobileHCI ’21, September 27-October 1, 2021, Toulouse & Virtual, France
Figure 6: Rainmaker interactions for Study 2.
Parameter Study 1 Study 2
No. of participants 11 2
Study duration 3 days 15 days
Context Isolated oce space Isolated oce space
Data logging No Yes
Feedback Recorded interviews Recorded interviews
Data Features Number of Tasks, Work vs Break time Number of Tasks, Pomodoro Timer
Reection Trigger Ratio of time Ratio of tasks
Pending Tasks Blinking Green Orange
Completed Tasks Solid Green Blue
Time Feedback Work vs Break time Time passed on Pomodoro Timer
Interactions See Figure 3 See Figure 6
Table 1: Overview of our two user studies.
5.3.2 Metaphor. The positions of vertical and horizontal symbol-
izing work and break were understood immediately by the par-
ticipants. Seven participants explicitly stated that they liked this
idea of positions reecting work and break mode. Two participants
mentioned that the vertical position of the Rainmaker on the ta-
ble was visualised as their coworkers sitting across and working.
This motivated them to reduce their procrastination and continue
working towards the end of their work day. One participant stated
“the routine of starting my work by shaking the rainmaker gets me
motivated to tick o the tasks scheduled for the day”.
5.3.3 Visual Eects and Acoustics. The LED lights received posi-
tive feedback towards immediate satisfaction in synchronisation
with the reward of the rainfall eect. All participants from Study
1 were looking forward to this interaction during their work day
which made them aware of the tasks to be completed. However, one
participant stated “The LEDs are too bright when facing me directly
as they strain my eyes and especially when I work in the night without
background lights, the LEDs further strain my eyes. It would be cooler
to have an option to dim the LEDs or put them o when needed”. This
prompted us to look into changing the intensity and colours of the
LED lights for future iterations. Most participants appreciated the
sound of the rainfall eect, while were two participants who felt the
rainfall eect could be shortened or varied for dierent tasks. One
participant stated, “I enjoy the sound when my work environment
has been silent for sometime, the rainfall sound brings me joy that
one task is out of my way and I could mostly take a break. I could
relate this (the rainfall sound) to moving on with my day”.
5.3.4 Reflection mode. The work vs break time ratio represented
intermediate and nal feedback when placed horizontally. While
participants appreciated this feature during the demonstration, it
was later learnt from their feedback that most forgot to place the
Rainmaker horizontally to start the break time. This misrepresented
the nal ratio that was to be reected. The process of starting the
work day by turning the Rainmaker on and adding tasks through
the smartphone provided a preparation phase for participants to
decide their tasks for the day. Some participants would prefer the
Rainmaker rewarding them with break times while progressing
on a huge task similar to the Pomodoro concept so they can still
receive some reward in between large tasks when they are unable
to ip the Rainmaker more frequently. The Rainmaker provided
a sense of work organisation and one participant also said “The
Rainmaker works well to break bad habits of procrastinating that
aect my work.” Similar thoughts were echoed by other participants
about making them more conscious on their pending tasks through
the physical presence of the Rainmaker. One participant stated “The
work vs break time is useless to me as I am not interested in reecting

MobileHCI ’21, September 27-October 1, 2021, Toulouse & Virtual, France Shalawadi et al.
this as it brings a negative feeling when the break time shown is
signicant while I actually worked as expected. And, when I want to
take a break like go have coee, this is more important for me than
remembering to place the Rainmaker horizontal to measure my break
time”. Further, participants noted that it was not always easy to
distinguish work from breaks “it was dicult to categorise work and
break on few occasions when I multitask mundane tasks with eating
snacks”. This feedback was valuable in redening reection for the
second iteration.
Figure 7a shows the Rainmaker being used by a Study 1 partici-
pant for learning about the cumulative work time versus break time
made so far in the day. The Rainmaker helped in increasing the
awareness of the tasks, which were organised as sub-tasks on each
sticky note and as a single main task on the rainmaker. Figure 7b
shows a participant using the task mode of the Rainmaker to refer
to what is completed and pending by placing it on a side table close
to the working table.
6 STUDY 2
Study 2 followed the same overall structure as Study 1, but ran over
a longer period of time and with a lower number of participants.
The feedback from participants of study 1 were considered and the
Pomodoro feature was added to the Rainmaker as a result and
RQ 3
was subsequently added to the objectives of the overall user study.
6.1 Participants
Study 2 was conducted with two participants. The rst participant
was a part-time student who also worked part-time at an architec-
tural company. She is currently working on her master thesis. Her
work environment is her home oce for both company-related
work and her thesis. The second participant worked at a university
as a full time researcher. She mostly worked from her home and
also worked at her personal oce space at the university at least
once per week.
6.2 Procedure and Analysis
In Study 2, we once again handed out the prototype along with the
Android application. A manual was not necessary as this was not
found very useful from Study 1 as we observed the participants
learning the functionalities immediately during the demonstration.
We conducted three semi-structured interviews during the course of
the 15 day study - an initial interview to understand their current
state of work routines, an intermediate interview to learn their
experience after a week with the prototype, and nally a feedback
interview to seek their views and to understand the eect of the
device on their productivity.
6.3 Results Study 2
The following emergent themes have been gathered from the semi-
structured interviews conducted at dierent phases of Study 2
with the two participants. The participant with an architectural
background will be referred to as P1 and the participant with a
research background will be referred to as P2 in this section.
6.3.1 Type of Tasks. We observed from the log les that both partic-
ipants used the prototype for a similar type of task. Upon analysis,
it could be observed that these tasks were mundane, repetitive,
and reminders. Some examples from the P1 were Sketch oor plans,
Complete layout drawing, Finish electric grid sketches, and Complete
the references for the document. P2 also had similar types of tasks
namely Upload presentation, Write a mail to Mr. X, Finish Paper, Start
proposal, and Ask Mrs. Y.
It can be seen that the task names of both participants showed
similarities in the adjectives used to describe the task. This was
later conrmed by the participants that the tasks were repetitive,
but important to be ticked o for their day’s work. P1 stated that
“It was a very good way to organise my boring tasks right at the start
of the work day. The rainmaker helped me do this because it was the
rst thing I saw on my work table”. P2 stated that “The Rainmaker
was really useful to me for getting my tasks that I am not looking
forward to out of my way as soon as possible”.
6.3.2 Pomodoro Timer. The addition of this feature was inuenced
from the participant feedback we received in Study 1. We also felt
the cylindrical form factor of the prototype would be analogous
to an hourglass which would make the interaction of ipping the
prototype natural to turn on/o the Pomodoro timer.
The use of Pomodoro timer was less than expected from both P1
and P2. Interestingly, P1 used the Pomodoro timer that was meant
for 25 minutes of work interval as a break countdown timer when
she was doing her time-intensive creative tasks. She stated “I ipped
the Rainmaker mostly for my lunch breaks as I felt the 25 minutes is a
good break to have lunch and get back to work. I liked the reference of
a countdown timer”. P2 felt the Pomodoro timer worked well for her
mostly towards the end of the work day when she was fatigued and
still had pending tasks. She stated “I usually turned the Pomodoro
on after 4pm when I have the nal emails to be sent out. By having a
countdown timer, I would try to focus and get the work done”.
6.3.3 Visual Eects and Acoustics. This is the backbone feature
of our design and we wanted to strengthen our understanding
from the participants of Study 2 through their longer engagement
with the prototype. As mentioned earlier, the visual eects were
modied to a more eye-friendly colour scheme showing pending
tasks in orange and completed tasks in blue. Both participants
showed positive contention towards the lights in correlation to
tasks. P1 stated “The lights directly aected my work environment
and it was always my intention to see the orange lights turn blue as
I felt satised when this happened”. P2 backed this by stating “The
lights gave me a sense of progress to my boring tasks and having a
physical feedback for this gave me a good experience and also some
motivation to get done with them (tasks)”.
The acoustics of the rainfall eect was the byproduct of com-
pleting tasks and should provide a feeling of reward for this action.
Both participants had opinions about the tangible reward of the
acoustics. P1 stated that “I enjoyed shaking it (rainmaker) whenever
I nished the tasks. I generally like sounds and this eect was good
for me. I was hoping if we could also add sub tasks on the mobile
so I could shake it (rainmaker) more often to feel good”. While P2
also appreciated this acoustic reward, her excitement was less than
P1’s. P2 stated “I liked the rainfall sound in general but when I ip
it (rainmaker) the duration of the sound felt longer. Maybe I would
prefer a shorter and softer rainfall eect”.

Rainmaker: A Tangible Work-Companion for the Personal Oice Space MobileHCI ’21, September 27-October 1, 2021, Toulouse & Virtual, France
(a) Rainmaker placed for intermediate reection. (b) Rainmaker used for task reference.
Figure 7: Rainmaker in the work environment of participants during study 1.
6.3.4 Participant Reflection. Self reection is vital while working
as it allows us to bring awareness of how we are conducting our
work. We wanted to stimulate this eect through the prototype.
The intermediate reection from the rst prototype iteration of
work vs break time was removed. In this user study, we wanted our
participants to share their reective moments from their time of
engagement with the prototype.
Both participants had their own reective moments while using
the Rainmaker, there were similarities in their experience which
showed awareness, sense of progress and excitement to nish tasks.
P1 stated “I enjoy this routine of doing something with my hands
when I nish tasks. It is a satisfaction for me”. P2 stated “I like the
presence of it(Rainmaker) on my table as it motivates me to prepare
the boring tasks to be done and I manage to do this better now(after
having the rainmaker) than before”.
6.3.5 Work Routines. We were able to observe the start and end
times of work days from logging the time when the rst task was
added to the time when all the tasks were done. The routines of
P1 could not be established as consistent. Her start times were
mostly in the morning but the range of start times was 3 hours.
Furthermore, P1 also had start time recorded later in the day and
also in late evenings. This correlates to her background of managing
her own work hours depending on the workload. P2 recorded more
stable start and end times. She mostly started her work sessions
with the Rainmaker late mornings with a range of 1 hour among
all the recorded start times. She only started 1 session at noon. All
her sessions have ended by early evening. This correlates to her
work hours from mornings to early evenings.
7 DISCUSSION
In the previous sections, we listed distinct emergent themes from
both user studies. We will describe our interpretations from both
user studies separately and converge towards the common insights
as obtained throughout this project.
7.1 Study 1
The participants shared a resounding yes to integrating the Rain-
maker into their work environment. The engagement of the multi-
modal interactions that utilised touch, vision, and sound was well
received by the participants. Some participants felt that the Rain-
maker motivated them to break habits of being unproductive. The
work vs break time as a reection mode did not produce the desired
eect we had hoped for. We speculate this is due to the interac-
tion of placing the Rainmaker horizontally to activate the break
time which some participants forgot, as this interaction is the only
dierent spatial position compared to other vertical positions.
On the other hand, the interaction of completing tasks was well
received due to the rainfall eect. From this observation, the lack
of acoustic eect for the break mode may have contributed to
participants forgetting about the reection feature. However, from
the interviews we learnt that participants felt more immediate
satisfaction with taking the break instead of interacting with the
Rainmaker. We also observed that participants did not associate
measuring break times as a strong factor to dene their productivity.
Most participants suggested they would benet more from seeing
time spent for each task, allowing them to reect better on their
work day.
In these unprecedented times, home oce seems to continue for
an indenite time. However, people would still want to collaborate
for work. We tried to explore this direction of a multi-user scenario,
as participants suggested collaboration features such as the LED
strip showing a common task with two or more people and colour
coding to reect the sub-task designation between the team mem-
bers. This could motivate them to nish the tasks sooner and the
tangibility would make the experience more enjoyable while being
physically isolated. In contrast, several participants felt the Rain-
maker is best kept as a personal reection tool since a team mode
could become overwhelming and might encourage unnecessary
competition.

MobileHCI ’21, September 27-October 1, 2021, Toulouse & Virtual, France Shalawadi et al.
7.2 Study 2
We observed further eects of the prototype with the participants
and it could be seen that a certain type of tasks were well suited
for organisation and execution through the Rainmaker. These tasks
were described as mundane and laborious. Both participants previ-
ously kept tab on these tasks mentally, but the prototype in their
work environment provided them with a reference to completed
and pending tasks. They added these tasks at the start of the work
day on the prototype when they were fresh as compared to without
the prototype. This routine increased their chances of being aware
of the boring tasks while they were engrossed in other work tasks.
They felt more successfully in completing these mundane tasks
with the help of the Rainmaker.
While the use of Pomodoro timer was less than anticipated, the
timer was eective for the participants nevertheless. Both partici-
pants used the timer towards the end of the work day, mostly when
there were one or two pending tasks remaining. The countdown
timer acted as a positive indicator that they needed to work for
a few more minutes to complete the task on hand. The aspect of
countdown timer was further appreciated by P1 when she used the
Pomodoro timer for her lunch breaks, since the countdown timer
gave her a good indication of time left in the break.
The LED lights directly stimulated the work environment of
the participants, as the physical presence of the light allowed par-
ticipants to reect whether it was the right time to procrastinate
from work. Participants positively used the inuence of the lights
to carry on with work when their mind felt like wandering away
from the tasks on hand. P1 suggested that when she sat on her bed
unexpectedly in the middle of work, the awareness to go back and
work was heightened upon on seeing orange lights (pending tasks).
The rewarding eect from the acoustics was subjective for both
P1 and P2 but inclined towards a positive eect. This indicates the
importance of creating a tangible reward suited for an individual,
as mentioned earlier in Section 2.4.
Study 2 was conducted on an iteration of the prototype inu-
enced by the feedback from Study 1 so the choice of interactions
were modied. Both participants were comfortable with the fea-
tures and associated interactions. The shake interaction to tick o
completed task was well appreciated by both participants. They
also preferred to do this action more often and hoped to have sub
tasks listed on the prototype that could be ticked o through a
similar shake physical interaction.
The information gathered for the start and end times of the
work sessions recorded through the prototype resonated their back-
ground of working style. It could be observed that both participants
added more tasks when they used the Rainmaker in the mornings
before 10:00. There were instances of more than one session with
the prototype recorded on the same day, usually after noon. This
happened when the participants were able to nish their tasks listed
in the mornings. This behaviour in the participants was inuenced
due the eect of the physical feedback of the mundane tasks from
the prototype. The tangible presence of the pending tasks made
them aware and this directly nudged them to complete these tasks.
Furthermore, both participants appreciated this positive change
brought through the Rainmaker about increasing their chances of
completing the added tasks that resulted in a satisfactory work day.
7.3 Takeaways & Future Work
It can be seen from our interpretations of both user studies that par-
ticipants were able to associate the interactions with the metaphor-
ical relation to the percussion instrument - Rainmaker. The shorter
Study 1 provided us valuable feedback on what worked well and
and what did not work so well for the participants in the context
of work from home. The important learning we took forward from
Study 1 was that the multimodal interaction, in our case rainfall
eect (acoustics) and lights (visual), was well received. We further-
more noticed that participants experienced satisfaction of ticking
o tasks through a physical action with their hands. We utilised this
learning in Study 2 with a multimodal interaction to trigger a Po-
modoro timer to provide our users with a way to stay focused with
their time. This feature was mostly used by participants towards
the end of the day when their energy levels were low. The eect of
the countdown timer from the LED and its interaction that created
acoustics brought in a sense of motivation to get the tasks done for
the day. Additionally, it could be seen that participants in Study 2
associated strongly to contrasting colours of pending tasks (orange)
and completed tasks (blue) compared to the single-coloured green
light from Study 1. This shows the strong information association
with people when contrasting eect is used for its representation. In
Study 1, we learnt that the prototype promotes breaking habits that
negatively aect work but it could be seen in more detail from Study
2 that participants increased their chances to nish mundane tasks
earlier in the day leading to satisfaction in creating time for creative
tasks. This change was inuenced through the use of Rainmaker
that provided a tangible reference for pending and completed tasks.
From our observations and interpretations developed through
the two user studies, it can be inferred that certain characteris-
tics have to be personalised for every participant. This is evident
through the unanimous inclination for the prototype to be a per-
sonal awareness device while working. The characteristics can be
seen as follows:
• Complexity:
This is associated with the interactions and
the corresponding data representation. While one can ar-
gue that the data representation is a linear mapping of tasks
added through the phone but the tangibility of using hands
to tick o a completed task was eective to the participants.
Such a routine will keep the participants engaged with using
the prototype on a regular basis in supporting their work
routines. Similar aspects of introducing an ideal level of
complexity with data and interaction on other data features
like time spent on tasks can be investigated to provide an
overview of habits related to work for the participants over
varying periods of time. The choice of colours played a piv-
otal role in creating awareness, in Study 1 the use of only
green had a lesser impact as compared to the use of two dis-
tinctive colours in Study 2 for task status. This observation
also corresponds to the use of distinctive colours for tasks
in [39].
• Tangible Rewards:
This remains a highly subjective char-
acteristic to such a prototype as evident from the results of
the user studies. The range of highly appreciated to no ap-
preciation towards the acoustic eect was seen amongst the

Rainmaker: A Tangible Work-Companion for the Personal Oice Space MobileHCI ’21, September 27-October 1, 2021, Toulouse & Virtual, France
participants. This was further subjective with their alternate
desires of haptics, other acoustic eects, and also having
varied level of sound depending on the time spent per task.
Therefore, we would consider this to be a personal choice
that can be incorporated for every individual’s preference for
a successful eect, e.g. by modifying the amount of acoustic
balls inside the device. This characteristic further supports
the aspects of adding more variations such as storing re-
wards and creating curiosity to the reward system based on
an individual’s preference, as seen in [9, 23].
• Refection:
We observed the importance of reection to
be inuenced through the data that aects the work day.
This was found to be the ratio of pending versus completed
tasks. The routine of using hands to change the ratio of
pending and completed tasks directly created a sense of
satisfaction towards progress in the work day. This was
more clear from our observations in Study 2 when P1 felt the
satisfaction of blue lights increasing and the corresponding
shake interaction that caused the acoustic eect. Therefore,
introduction of reection is most eective through a tangible
change that denes the quality of the work day.The process
of engaging users with multimodal interactions brings about
increased awareness and consciousness to support reective
moments which can be seen here through the visual and
acoustic eects of ticking of the tasks. This prototype also
conforms with other self reection prototypes such as [
25
,
34
] that bring about awareness through reection in the
contexts of mental well being and parent-child interactions
respectively.
8 CONCLUSION
In this paper we presented the development and evaluation of Rain-
maker, a physical prototype intended to support in work routines
in the context of work from home. We evaluated our prototype
in two user studies (N = 11 for three days each, and N = 2 for 15
days each) to obtain insights into participants’ perceptions of and
engagement with Rainmaker. We found that multimodal interac-
tions resulted in a positive eect on task awareness, in particular
for tasks that were considered mundane and time intensive. Partici-
pants made use of the prototype to develop work routines through
which they were able to more eectively nish their more mun-
dane tasks and subsequently free time and mental space for more
engaging tasks and leisure time. Through Study 1, we learnt that
participants reected primarily on their task ratio (pending versus
completed tasks) as opposed to the ratio of work versus break time
– resulting in a negative perception of the work day – and that
our participants required more concrete support to manage their
time. Through the iteration made for Study 2, reection among
participants increased due to a more meaningful visualisation of
pending versus completed tasks and the ability to make use of a
Pomodoro timer. Although appreciated, the timer functionality was
primarily used when participants felt fatigued towards the end of
the day. Interestingly, the visual eect of the countdown timer of
Pomodoro was highly appreciated by both participants of Study 2
and could be used in other scenarios, e.g. for longer breaks such
as lunch. Our study highlights the challenges experienced by the
forced WFH and the opportunity for novel interventions to support
users in their daily professional life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
(DFG, German Research Foundation) through project EC437/1-1.
We thank product designers Leoni Fischer and Pauline Temme
who are former students at Bauhaus Universität, Germany for their
contributions with the prototype illustrations, material and design
suggestions during the initial phase of the project. Finally, we thank
our participants in supporting our work with their feedback during
the user studies.
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A SUPPORTING ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 8: ‘Work’ versus ‘Break time’ colour choices

Rainmaker User Manual
0 Basics
Tum on
Shoke the Device from left to
right to turn on Bluetooth.
Fading LED points appear - this
is the Stand-By mode. Place
the rainmaker vertically on your
desk.
0 Interactions
m
VWorkMode
Keep the Rainmaker standing on
your desk while working. When
positioned vertically the Task-
collection-mode is automatically
switched on. The tasks you set
for the day are shown as faded
light dots.
0 AppFAOs
StartttMApp Tum off
for testing the Ra1nmok&
This page ,so brief guideline on
how to use the device Hove funr
Open the Rainmaker App on your Android phone
and add today·s tasks to the To-Do list on the
opp. Make sure your Bluetooth is switched on to
connect opp and Rainmaker. Today's pending
tasks ore now shown as a number of dimmed
yellow light dots on the Rainmaker. Keep in mind
to work on tasks according to the order of your
to-do list. You con rearrange the order anytime.
At the end of your work day:
2/ Task-Collection Mode
You accomplished one of your
set tasks? Once you finish your
first task, turn the rainmaker
over by 180 degrees. Listen to the
soothing, rainy sounds. A light
dot will brighten in yellow and
drop down on the rainmaker to
mark your task as accomplished.
The tosk is outomotically crossed
out on the apps to-do list os
well!
Place the rainmaker in a horizontal position on
your desk. Reflect on your work/break balance.
Switch off the Rainmaker by shaking it left to
right. Remember to charge the rainmaker using
the charging cable.
3/ Break Mode
Place the Rainmaker horizontolly
to go on a break. Remember
to put the Rainmaker bock into
vertical position at the end of
your break. (When positioned
horizontally, the reflection mode
is automatically switched on.)
& 0
4/ Reflection Mode
To get an overview of your
work/break balance, acess the
reflection mode onytime by
placing the device horizontally.
It tells your current work time
versus break time ratio. Work
time is represented by Blue-
colored light. Break time is
represented by Orange-colored
light. The work-time/break-time
ratio changes as it evolves over
the course of your work day. Your
final ratio is shown at before
switching off.
How to update the list? How to rename a task? Whot happen• to the tasks I don't get done over the courn of the day?
> swipe down to update the list > Swipe right Of1 the tosk you wont > Even when you turn off Sluetooth connection by shaking the Rainmaker. your
to edit. pending toskll will be soved. lf you wont to reset ot the end of the doy, keep the
How to Ht a new task? Rainmaker connected. go to the App ond press "Reset".
> press "odd o task" to open o new Can 1,-rrong• tasks?
te,rt field on the bottom of the Iii!. >yes.you can reorder your tasks by How do I know when the Rainmaker has to
No1Tl4:1 the new tosk. Press "Done· to pressing lt longer ond drog them Into - dlarg-?
confirm. the right position >Goto the opp and check the bottery-stotus
How to delete a task?
> Swipe left on the task to delete I• there a llmft for tasks?
> Let's keep it realistic. There con be
o maximum amount of 10 tosks on
the list
Rainmaker: A Tangible Work-Companion for the Personal Oice Space MobileHCI ’21, September 27-October 1, 2021, Toulouse & Virtual, France
Figure 9: Study 1 User Manual