Opening Keynote
Ethical Design for Wellbeing and Affective Health
Emotional wellbeing and mental health are topics of much social significance, which are also reflected in the growing HCI work aimed to support them. Research in this area covers a broad space from affective computing to affective interaction approach, and the ethical design of wellbeing and mental health technologies has become much needed. This talk will provide design exemplars of technologies for wellbeing and mental health, with an emphasis on the importance of supporting emotional awareness and regulation. The talk will also highlight the value of existing research for articulating novel design implications for ethical wellbeing and mental health technologies.
Lancaster University
Corina Sas is Professor in Human-Computer Interaction and Digital Health, Lead of Pervasive Systems Group with the School of Computing and Communications, and Assistant Dean for Research Enhancement with the Faculty of Science and Technology at Lancaster University, UK. Her research is in the area of technologies for wellbeing and health. She published over 200 papers, and her work received extensive media coverage as well as 5 Best Paper and Honourable Mention Awards. She has been an investigator on competitively awarded grants totaling over £15.1 million and is part of the Editorial Boards of the ACM Transactions in Human-Computer Interaction, and Taylor & Francis Human-Computer Interaction journals.
Praktiker-Track Keynote
Fast Forward Towards a Hybrid World: A Look into our Phygital Future
Never before have the analog and digital worlds merged so intensively as they do today. You don’t have to look at cyborgs to realize this: Humans and computers can no longer be considered separately – the systems of the analog and digital worlds profoundly influence each other. Wherever we look, we see a world created with digital technologies, optimized with algorithms, and kept alive by computers. Speaker Katharina Aguilar takes us into her version of this world. She has made it her mission to bring our living spaces into the digital age. From her practice, she reports on how hybrid, life-changing places, and experiences are created – and where the analog and digital worlds meet in the future. Whether in the data-supported design process, in the creation of constantly new user interfaces and touchpoints in highly emotional customer journeys or in the creation of algorithms that decode our environment: she catapults us into her world where aesthetics, added value, and technology form a highly exciting, phygital future.
Entrepreneur
Katharina Aguilar is an entrepreneur, speaker, and trained moderator. After almost 10 years in the innovation and start-up sector in the automotive industry, she followed her inner call to start her own company.
With great vision and a deep sense of future trends, she immerses herself in the digitalization of our living spaces. With her companies, she brings practical knowledge from Smart City, New Work, and digitalization to companies and public institutions – in the process she never loses sight of sustainability. She is a future shaper who doesn’t talk but does.
Closing Keynote
eXtended Reality and Passengers of the Future
I will present our work into improving passenger journeys using immersive Virtual and Augmented Reality (together XR) to support entertainment, work and collaboration on the move. In Europe, people travel an average of 12,000km per year on private and public transport, in cars, buses, planes and trains. These journeys are often repetitive and wasted time. This total will rise with the arrival of fully autonomous cars, which free drivers to become passengers. The potential to recover this lost time is impeded by 3 significant challenges:
Confined spaces – These limit interactivity, and force us to rely on small displays such as phones or seatback screens
Social acceptability – We may share the space with others, inducing a pressure to conform, inhibiting technology use
Motion sickness – Many people get sick when they read or play games in vehicles. Once experienced, it can take hours for symptoms to resolve
XR headsets could allow passengers to use their travel time in new, productive ways, but only if these fundamental challenges can be overcome. Passengers would be able to use large virtual displays for productivity; escape the physical confines of the vehicle and become immersed in virtual experiences; and communicate with distant others through new embodied forms of communication.
I will discuss our solutions to these challenges, focusing on the visual aspects. We are: developing new interaction techniques for VR and AR that can work in confined, seated spaces; supporting safe, socially acceptable use of XR providing awareness of others and the travel environment; and overcoming motion sickness using multimodal countermeasures to support these novel immersive experiences.
University of Glasgow
Stephen Brewster is a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. He got his PhD in auditory interface design at the University of York. At Glasgow, he leads the Multimodal Interaction Group, which is very active and has a strong international reputation in HCI (http://mig.dcs.gla.ac.uk). His research focuses on multimodal HCI, or using multiple sensory modalities and control mechanisms (particularly audio, haptics and gesture) to create a rich, natural interaction between human and computer. His work has a strong experimental focus, applying perceptual research to practical situations. A long-term focus has been on mobile interaction and how we can design better user interfaces for users who are on the move. Other areas of interest include haptics, wearable devices and in-car interaction. He pioneered the study of non-speech audio and haptic interaction for mobile devices with work starting in the 1990’s. He currently holds an ERC Advanced Grant in the area of AR/VR for passengers. He was a General Chair of CHI 2019 in Glasgow, CHI papers chair in 2013 and 2014, and has previously chaired MobileHCI, EuroHaptics and TEI. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy, an ACM Distinguished Speaker and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is also a member of the ACM CHI Steering Committee, setting the direction for the CHI conference series.