Internet of things (IoT) devices and sensor kits have the po-tential to democratize the access, use, and appropriation of data. Despite the increased availability of low cost sensors, most of the produced data is 'black box' in nature: users of-ten do not know how to access or interpret data. We propose a 'human-data design' approach in which end-users are given tools to create, share, and use data through tangible and phys-ical visualizations. This paper introduces Physikit, a system designed to allow users to explore and engage with environ-mental data through physical ambient visualizations. We re-port on the design and implementation of Physikit, and pre-sent a two-week field study which showed that participants got an increased sense of the meaning of data, embellished and appropriated the basic visualizations to make them blend into their homes, and used the visualizations as a probe for community engagement and social behavior

People increasingly use smartwatches in tandem with other devices such as smartphones, laptops or tablets. This allows for novel cross-device applications that use the watch as both input device and output display. However, despite the increasing availability of smartwatches, prototyping cross-device watch-centric applications remains a challenging task. Developers are limited in the applications they can explore as available toolkits provide only limited access to different types of input sensors for cross-device interactions. To address this problem, we introduce WatchConnect, a toolkit for rapidly prototyping cross-device applications and interaction techniques with smartwatches. The toolkit provides developers with (i) an extendable hardware platform that emulates a smartwatch, (ii) a UI framework that integrates with an existing UI builder, and (iii) a rich set of input and output events using a range of built-in sensor mappings. We demonstrate the versatility and design space of the toolkit with five interaction techniques and applications.

This article proposes the concept of Collaborative Affordances to describe physical and digital properties (i.e., affordances) of an artifact, which affords coordination and collaboration in work. Collaborative Affordances build directly on Gibson (1977)’s affordance concept and extends the work by Sellen and Harper ( 2003 ) on the affordances of physical paper. Sellen and Harper describe how the physical properties of paper affords easy reading, navigation, mark-up, and writing, but focuses, we argue, mainly on individual use of paper and digital technology. As an extension to this, Collaborative Affordances focusses on the properties of physical and digital artifacts that affords collaborative activities. We apply the concept of Collaborative Affordances to the study of paper-based and electronic patient records in hospitals and detail how they afford collaboration through four types of Collaborative Affordances; being portable across patient wards and the entire hospital, by providing collocated access, by providing a shared overview of medical data, and by giving clinicians ways to maintain mutual awareness. We then discuss how the concept of Collaborative Affordances can be used in the design of new technology by providing a design study of a ‘Hybrid Patient Record’ (HyPR), which is designed to seamlessly blend and integrate paper-based with electronic patient records.

Mobile devices have become an intrinsic part of people's everyday life. They are multifunctional devices providing ubiquitous access to many different sources of information. Together with traditional personal computers, these devices form a device ecology that provides access to an overlapping information space. Previous studies have shown that users encounter a number of fundamental problems when interacting with these device ecologies, such as lack of transparency, control, intelligibility and context. To mitigate these problems, we introduce ActivitySpace: an activity-centric configuration space that enables the user to integrate and work across several devices by utilizing the space between the devices. This paper presents the conceptual background and design of ActivitySpace and reports on a study with nine participants. Our study shows that ActivitySpace helps users to easily manage devices and their allocated resources while also exposing a number of usage patterns. \