Designing for Behaviour, Emotion & Security
Date: Tuesday 11 Nov 2025
Room: S/2.22 - Sandpit/Katherine Johnson Suite
| Time | Presentation | Abstract | Authors | Contribution type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15:30-15:50 | Promoting Compliance: Can the Four Tendencies Framework Help Change Behaviours? | The challenge of increasing adherence, particularly medical adherence, is important for many reasons including better quality of life, increased health benefit and reduction of harm. We investigate using the Four Tendencies Framework to categorise people based on how they respond to expectations in order to create tailored interventions, and assess whether this helps increase adherence. We settled on encouraging people to meditate as an appropriate neutral intervention with parallels to medication adherence but with fewer ethical and safety issues for the participants. We developed a smartphone app based on these categorisation and behavioural principles that had two different forms of intervention. The Obliger intervention consisted of a habit tracker whilst the Questioner intervention focused on informing the user of the benefits of meditation. The app notifications were also tailored. Study participants were recruited via social contacts and, of 107 people approached, 19 participated in the 28 day study and 10 completed the post-study survey. The exploratory study suggested that the app did help improve adherence to daily meditation, though no statistically significant difference between the interventions was found. Qualitative results suggest that there were multiple potential confounding factors and hence further research is required. Particular points of interest from the study and survey include whether it is actually possible to design an app that distinctly appeals to a certain tendency, whether the meditation logging system was a good adherence measure, reasons for non-adherence, the impact of the given task and the impact of the study audience. | Russell Beale and Lucy Exley | Research |
| 15:50-16:10 | Centring Awe Experiences in Design for HCI | We explore how centring human and nonhuman flourishing affects HCI, by cultivating awe: a moral emotion that increases prosociality and fosters connectedness with life, both human and nonhuman. Following a narrative review approach we present a theoretical contribution that introduces everyday awe to HCI. Previous research on awe has focused on grandiose experiences of awe from physical vastness, like viewing a mountain, including the use of VR. However, awe experiences must be accessible in everyday life to cultivate awe as a trait. This helps encourage a deeper appreciation of the ordinary instead of the grandiose, like everyday acts of kindness or encountering a spider’s web’s complexity. By connecting established HCI research with concepts from social sciences, we derive conceptual tensions and related design strategies to design for everyday awe. We call for diverse HCI research and technology design to promote everyday uncontrollability, ambiguity, taking multiple points of view, and even creepiness. In this way, we explore how computing can move us towards more sustainable and equitable futures. | Niels van Velzen and Minha Lee | Research |
| 16:10-16:30 | Playing out cyber security issues: A theatrical dramatisation of news stories | Researchers conducting participatory design workshops have an array of tools at their disposal to stimulate participant discussions. However, engagement often depends on the presentation format of said tool and may affect the depth of the data collected. In this paper, we investigate the possibilities of using drama and theatre with professional actors, within the context of a news-story presentation, aimed at initiating discussions with professional and hobbyist coders on aspects of cybersecurity. This approach successfully stimulated deep discussions around security, highlighting certain themes that may affect security while coding (such as coder practices and morality). Even though this paper focuses on coders and lessons learned, the findings of this paper may inform HCI research more generally. The techniques we employed can apply to various stages of technology development, ranging from requirements gathering, usability testing, and the communication of the findings of technology research. | Theodoros Georgiou, Olga Chatzifoti, Sheung Chi Chan, Manuel Maarek, Clare Duffy, Rupert Goodwins and Lynne Baillie | Research |