Characterised by the increased spread of technology out of workplaces and into public spaces and homes, the so-called third-wave of human-computer interaction has placed greater focus on scenarios that are socially situated, context dependent and not necessarily task oriented. This movement has led to studies investigating how people interact with digital applications in public spaces, but the discussion of intuitive interaction thus far has not been extended to this new realm of user interfaces. Designing for intuitive interaction in public spaces differs from traditional digital applications due to the inherently fluid social nature and often large-scale character of urban interventions. This article discusses the design of interaction for public spaces, based on applications we developed along the years, contrasted to similar endeavours elsewhere. We analyse them through the lens of frameworks for intuitive interactions and derive a series of strategies towards designing for immediate use and high crowd turnaround in urban interventions.

Today’s social and political movements against dominant Western narratives call for a re-contextualization of cultural heritage (CH) toward inclusivity, multiperspectivity, and sensemaking. Our work approaches this challenge from a Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) perspective, questioning how HCI approaches, tools and methods can contribute to CH re-contextualization. Through collaborative reflection on our research practice, we identified four diverging case studies highlighting the different roles of HCI and its increasing entanglement with CH. Case studies 1–3 focus on HCI as a medium for CH, case 4 on digital CH, and thereby on the HCI–CH entanglement. Our reflections contribute to CH re-contextualization by highlighting the need for co-design and slow design approaches, the role of HCI technologies in preserving, communicating, and shaping CH, and open questions and challenges related to the increasing HCI–CH convergence.

Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to fundamentally change how people engage with increasingly interactive urban environments. However, many challenges exist in designing and evaluating these new urban AR experiences, such as technical constraints and safety concerns associated with outdoor AR. We contribute to this domain by assessing the use of virtual reality (VR) for simulating wearable urban AR experiences, allowing participants to interact with future AR interfaces in a realistic, safe and controlled setting. This paper describes two wearable urban AR applications (pedestrian navigation and autonomous mobility) simulated in VR. Based on a thematic analysis of interview data collected across the two studies, we find that the VR simulation successfully elicited feedback on the functional benefits of AR concepts and the potential impact of urban contextual factors, such as safety concerns, attentional capacity, and social considerations. At the same time, we highlight the limitations of this approach in terms of assessing the AR interface’s visual quality and providing exhaustive contextual information. The paper concludes with recommendations for simulating wearable urban AR experiences in VR.

In recent years, researchers and manufacturers have started to investigate ways to enable autonomous vehicles (AVs) to interact with nearby pedestrians in compensation for the absence of human drivers. The majority of these efforts focuses on external human–machine interfaces (eHMIs), using different modalities, such as light patterns or on-road projections, to communicate the AV’s intent and awareness. In this paper, we investigate the potential role of affective interfaces to convey emotions via eHMIs. To date, little is known about the role that affective interfaces can play in supporting AV–pedestrian interaction. However, emotions have been employed in many smaller social robots, from domestic companions to outdoor aerial robots in the form of drones. To develop a foundation for affective AV–pedestrian interfaces, we reviewed the emotional expressions of non-humanoid robots in 25 articles published between 2011 and 2021. Based on findings from the review, we present a set of considerations for designing affective AV–pedestrian interfaces and highlight avenues for investigating these opportunities in future studies.