What for and how will we design children's technologies in the transhumanism age, and what stance will we take as designers? This paper aims to answer this question with 13 fictional abstracts from sixteen authors of different countries, institutions and disciplines. Transhumanist thinking envisions enhancing human body and mind by blending human biology with technological augmentations. Fundamentally, it seeks to improve the human species, yet the impacts of such movement are unknown and the implications on children's lives and technologies were not explored deeply. In an age, where technologies can clearly be defined as transhumanist, such as under-skin chips or brain-machine interfaces, our aim is to reveal probable pitfalls and benefits of those technologies on children's' lives by using the power of design fiction.
The quality of social interaction has great importance for psychological and physiological health. Previous research indicates that smartphones have adverse effects on collocated social interactions. Many HCI studies addressed this issue by restricting smartphone use during social interactions. Although the results of these studies indicated a decrease in smartphone use, restrictive and limiting approaches have limitations. Users should have high levels of selfregulation to comply with them, and they may lead to unintended outcomes like withdrawal symptoms. Considering the influence of smartphones on people's social relations and interactions, either positive or negative, there is a need for new solutions to mitigate the adverse effects of excessive smartphone use alternatives to restrictive approaches. To this end, this thesis aims to explore individuals' smartphone use behavior from the standpoint of social interactions and relations by employing diverse data collection techniques, i.e., how this behavior hinders and supports social interactions. We started investigating this question through in-situ observations and focus group sessions. With the information learned from this step, we developed two research prototypes to enrich social interactions without restricting smartphone use. We then collected users' thoughts, reactions towards, and concerns about these prototypes through user studies. Finally, we examined how these prototypes influenced conversation quality in social interactions through an experimental user study.Along with the motivation and aim, this thesis makes knowledge and artifact contributions to the growing field of digital well-being. We identified 21 user insights, nine design implications, and four design approaches that will guide the design of innovations and solutions to enrich social interactions in the presence of smartphones. We developed two design concepts, which also served as the validation of these knowledge contributions.
Taking on the challenge of motivating users to drink water regularly, we designed a smart water bottle that can track water intake behavior and inform users about this behavior through ambient feedback. We then conducted two studies to explore the bottle's feedback design from the perspective of users and designers. First, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 prospective users and found that they would like to receive personalized, precise, gamified and reminding feedback. Second, we conducted a design workshop with 13 professional designers to explore the range of visualizations that can be used to give feedback. Analyzing these visualizations, we identified three reminder types (augmenting, restoring and balancing) and six visualization styles grouped according to three dimensions of ambient displays (representation fidelity, notification level, aesthetic emphasis). In this paper, we first explain our water bottle concept along with existing solutions. Then, we report the results of these studies. Finally, we discuss the potential implications of the results for our own work as well as for designing ambient displays aimed at supporting users' water intake tracking practices.
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