Minority groups are the fastest growing demographic in the U.S. In addition, the poverty level in the U.S. is the highest it has been in the last 50 years. We argue that the community needs more research addressing this user segment, and we present a novel study about how underserved youths react when presented with different UI designs aimed at promoting creative writing. The act of creative writing per se can become the driver of change among underserved teenagers, and researchers should strive to discover novel UI designs that can effectively increase this target group's productivity, creativity and mental well-being. Using MS Word as baseline, our contribution analyzes the influence of a Zen-like tool (designed by the authors and called Haven), a nostalgic but realistic typewriting tool (Hanx Writer), and a stress-based tool that eliminates writer's block by providing consequences for procrastination (Write or Die). Our results suggest that the Zen characteristics of our tool Haven were capable of conveying a sense of calm and concentration to the users, making them feel better and also write more. The nostalgic Hanx typewriter also fared very well with regard to mental well-being and productivity, as measured by average number of words written. Contrary to our initial expectations, the stress-based UI (Write or Die) had the lowest productivity levels.

Humans perceive different objects, scenes or places using all their senses. Our sensory richness also plays an important role for creative activities. Humans also recall those sensory experiences in order to spark creativity, e.g. while writing a text. This paper presents a study with 100 students, divided in groups, that explores the effect of auditory and olfactory cues and their combination during a creative writing exercise. Our results provide useful insights suggesting that olfactory cues have an important role in the creative process of users and even when this type of cues are combined with auditory cues. We believe, that this type of modalities should gain more relevance on the development of creativity support tools and environments for supporting the creative writing process.

In this paper, we review research in the emerging practice and research field of Human Work Interaction Design (HWID). We present a HWID framework, and a sample of 54 HWID related papers from workshops, conferences and journals from the period 2009–2014. We group the papers into six topical groups, and then attempt to map these groups to the framework to find research gaps for future research. We find that the groups of papers cover all areas of the framework well for a variety of work and leisure domains. The area in strongest need for more research papers is the development of the holistic framework itself. Furthermore, much focus has been on studying design sketching or implemented systems-in-use, while little attention has been paid to mature design (prototypes) or early implementation (content templates). In conclusion, we recommend an update to the framework so that it can be also useful for research in prototyping and early organizational implementation.

City parking is increasingly complex and available parking spaces are scarce. Being able to identify a space to park their cars can lead many drivers to drive around the intended parking area several times, increasing traffic density and pollution. In this research we propose a collaborative blockchain solution with gamification for parking. Users collaborate to report free spaces and receive free parking minutes for their service to the community. In parallel, this approach can be used to collect beacon information from the parked vehicles and create a low-cost collaborative approach for managing a parking control process platform Blockchain that can handle this distributed process and the gamification platform increases users’ participation. Keywords Blockchain Collaborative Gamification Parking