Scott McCrickard

Computer Mediation Communication (CMC) applications are utilized to foster closer relationships between individuals. Various shared experience strategy designs were widely applied to technologies in order to enhance communications and interactions in family relationships. However, there needs to be more research on how shared experience approaches work in different family communication patterns. This paper presents insights into the effectiveness of three types of shared experience approaches for different family communication patterns and design considerations for game design from a diary study of Chatterbox Opener, the game we developed for families and couples to enhance communication orientation.

Technology use by long-distance hikers provide a fascinating glimpse of the future of HCI research, as it intersects with technology isolation and (non)use. We can understand the use of technology, explore opportunities for rural and outdoor computing, and work with underrepresented communities in these spaces to amplify their stories. In this paper, we focus on the thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail and the stories they share on Instagram. We apply narrative analysis to understand the story content, and also leverage a News Value framework to describe how they craft their stories. The findings highlight opportunities to understand the different storytelling categories that thru-hikers employ, and the platforms they choose for the telling. We discuss the usefulness of understanding technology and storytelling needs for each type of storyteller, and explore the implications for designing technology and tools to amplify …

This paper details our collaborative approach in capturing a holistic understanding of parental technology use through an assets-based framework. We steer the focus away from the design of technology as the central force of technological innovation, and instead support participants to reflect and describe intimate details that highlight specific use-contexts of technology in their lives. We leverage a group of foreign graduate student mothers' self-described unique strengths to gain an in-depth account of their lived experiences with technology. As research participants and co-authors, our collaborators elicit intimate narratives about meaningful events in their lives, bringing social and cultural aspects of their lived experience to the forefront, and thus providing broader context of their use of technology. We detail and reflect upon our approach of promoting user agency by creating an affinity group, fostering a safe and …

Pokémon GO is a popular location-based mobile game that seeks to inspire players to be more active, socialize physically and virtually, and spend more time outside. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, several game mechanics of Pokémon GO were changed to accommodate socially-distanced play. This research aims to understand the impacts of the pandemic and subsequent game adjustments on user perceptions of the game. We used an exploratory mixed-method approach, a machine learning technique (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) for topic modeling, and thematic analysis for qualitative coding of top-level Reddit comments to identify whether and how the social distancing approach changes the players' behaviors. The results demonstrate that players were less physically active, less eager to discover, and more interested in remote social practices. We discuss which players leverage social distancing …

Thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT) is an adventure of a lifetime that necessitates long-term planning and knowledge of challenges and practices in the outdoors. One important but oft-ignored step is to establish awareness about sustainable practices captured in Leave No Trace (LNT) principles for minimizing the impact on the trail. This paper seeks to understand practices of hikers with regards to trail sustainability and LNT. Since hikers often leverage virtual communities on social media for asking questions and sharing resources, we analyzed Reddit top-level comments on /r/AppalachianTrail to understand AT hiking discussions and explore their connections with sustainable practices in the outdoors. The findings will inform AT stakeholders and researchers in the field about the hikers’ practices and the role of social media platforms in supporting sustainable trail management.

Social media captures examples of people's behaviors, actions, beliefs, and sentiments. As a result, it can be a valuable source of information and inspiration for HCI research and design. Social media technologies can improve, inform, and strengthen insights to better understand and represent user populations. To understand the position of social media research and analysis in the design process, this paper seeks to highlight shortcomings of using traditional research methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups) that ignore or don't adequately reflect relevant social media, and this paper speculates about the importance and benefits of leveraging social media for establishing context in supplement with these methods. We present examples that guide our thinking and introduce discussion around concerns related to using social media data.

Technology has provided an environment for connecting indigenous community members and provide a means for them to seek and engage with their indigenous knowledge (IK). Emerging research has examined the effects of social media on specific IK, including the possibility of undermining community agency. In this work, we contrast how indigenous community members engage with IK offline, and in their own self-organized communities online. Through interviews with community members and a study of Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups, we seek to better understand these practices and elicit design recommendations. Our findings describe how community roles have shifted in the presence of technology, notably with absence of elders and the inclusion of “born towns”–community members who live in non-traditional settings. We also find that fluency in the indigenous language served both as a …

Privacy policy and term agreement documents are considered the gateway for software adoption and use. The documents provide a means for the provider to outline expectations of the software use, and also provide an often-separate document outlining how user data is collected, stored, and used--including if it is shared with other parties. A user agreeing with the terms, assumes that they have a full understanding the terms of the agreement and have provided consent. Often however, users do not read the documents because they are long and full of legalistic and inconsistent language, are regularly amended, and may not disclose all the details on what is done to the user data. Enforcing compliance and ensuring user consent have been persistent challenges to policy makers and privacy researchers. This design fiction puts forward an alternate reality and presents a policy-based approach to fording the …

YouTube is not only a platform for content creators to share videos but also a virtual venue for hosting community activities, such as social media campaigns (SMCs). SMCs for public awareness is a growing and reoccurring phenomenon on YouTube, during which content creators make videos to engage their audience and raise awareness of global challenges. However, how the unique celebrity culture on YouTube affects collective actions is an underexplored area. This work examines an SMC on YouTube, #TeamTrees, initiated by a YouTube celebrity and sought to raise people's awareness of tree-planting and climate change. The authors annotated and analyzed 992 #TeamTrees videos to explore how YouTube celebrities, professionals, and amateurs in different channel topics diagnose problems, present solutions, and motivate actions. This study also looks into whether platform identities and framing …

The struggle to thrive as a productive student researcher, an attentive parent, and a caring partner can be difficult, particularly for international student parents who are far from home and also possibly burdened with complex cultural expectations, interpersonal dynamics, and institutional biases. Using uses and gratifications theory as a framing mechanism, we describe interviews with twelve international student mothers in the United States who are primary caregivers of children between six months to five years old, focusing on the context of their use of screen media content and devices, the gratifications they seek from their children's use of screen media devices, and the differences in their perceptions about the use of screen media as an educated, non-US parent. Our findings give an initial account of the role of screen based technology in their domestic life with young children, and the limitations of their …

Exergaming incorporates exercising into video games, with the purpose of physically engaging users in the gameplay. Location-based games have gained the attention of exergame designers as they have been able to motivate people to exercise and spend time in outdoors. Studies have shown the impact of current exergames to intervene with sedentariness by containing some elements of nature and outdoor activities. However, it is unclear how location-based mobile exergames can engage users with nature throughout playing and exercising. This paper presents insights from an exploratory self-study of experiences provided by the most popular location-based mobile game, Pokémon GO, concerning its potential to engage players in outdoors. We also provide design considerations for location-based mobile exergames to engage players in nature while becoming physically active.

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected face-to-face social interaction with and among relational partners - relatives, friends, and others. Prior to the pandemic, many people relied on face-to-face social play experiences to help them maintain relationships and satisfy relatedness needs. However, growing coronavirus-related concerns have made such activities unwelcome or inaccessible, leading many to turn to technology-mediated experiences, as a safer alternative means of supporting recreational play with non-proximal relational partners. But how does one design technology-mediated recreational play experiences to satisfy a diverse range of user needs, interests, and preferences? To explore this area of interest we study the social experience afforded by the multiplayer game, Among Us. We conduct a diary study with students enrolled in an undergraduate HCI course and report on the findings of a …

The popularity of mobile devices for learning outside conventional classrooms necessitates the exploration of the many challenges which can impede the learning process for children using them. Key among these is the possibility of disorientation, occurring when children are faced with stimuli external to their learning task which can redirect their attention elsewhere. This paper explores the several factors which can contribute towards disorienting children from their learning task in an informal learning environment (ILE) using science festivals as a context. We detail the design and deployment of a mobile leaf identification application used by attendees at a child-focused science festival in a setting filled with distractions. Participating children used the app to watch an educational video about leaves, and were asked to identify the leaves around the exhibit correctly by taking a picture using the app. From our …

Children in international and cross-cultural families in and outside of the US often learn and speak more than one language. Challenges can arise for these children in terms of communicating with other children and being able to fully participate in school and society using the primary country language, in developing relationships with distant relatives in other languages, and with the lack of opportunities for practising additional languages within a small community of speakers. Recent research shows that some parents use screen media content to acquaint their children with their parent’s native language, and to also help them become proficient in the language of communication in the country that they reside in. We leverage the qualities of screen media in aiding children with language learning, and try to translate those qualities into the design of a CUI for children to explore the potential of designing …

Trust in a recommendation system (RS) is often algorithmically incorporated using implicit or explicit feedback of user-perceived trustworthy social neighbors, and evaluated using user-reported trustworthiness of recommended items. However, real-life recommendation settings can feature group disparities in trust, power, and prerogatives. Our study examines a complementary view of trust which relies on the editorial power relationships and attitudes of all stakeholders in the RS application domain. We devise a simple, first-principles metric of editorial authority, i.e., user preferences for recommendation sourcing, veto power, and incorporating user feedback, such that one RS user group confers trust upon another by ceding or assigning editorial authority. In a mixed-methods study at Virginia Tech, we surveyed faculty, teaching assistants, and students about their preferences of editorial authority, and hypothesis …

The importance of Indigenous Knowledge (IK) in understanding the environment and informing scientific studies has gained prominence with the increased attention on environmental sustainability. Researchers have partnered with indigenous communities towards leveraging technology to preserve these important IK. However, there still remains a gap in the understanding of how indigenous community members use technology to engage with, and safeguard their IK. We conducted an interview-based study with museum experts and members of an indigenous community in Kenya to understand how community members seek, preserve, and disseminate location-dependent IK. We augmented our findings through a year-long observation of organic interactions on six Facebook Pages that are specifically geared towards discussing aspects of IK. The findings illustrate the importance of location in providing context …

Technology can be used to augment visitors’ experience with a museum exhibit and provide museum visitors with means of interacting with otherwise hands-off exhibits. However, introducing technology to support interactivity has the likelihood of usurping users’ attention from the exhibit or diminishing interactions with other visitors. Our approach to this problem involves supporting hands-on interactions for groups visiting a pollinator garden—a science museum exhibit containing fragile species where touching is discouraged. Through interviews with museum experts and docents, we elicited design goals that we then enfolded into an Android application that leverages visual recognition to support interactions with the exhibit. We tested our application in-situ with 65 children in three groups and subsequently propose and describe design approaches that uses the ethos of scaling to support different number of users …

Introducing interactive computing in nature changes the human experience of being in nature. These changes are both significant and not well understood. Fortunately, the computer-human interaction (CHI) research community has developed a set of research methods for understanding interactive computing in specific settings. In this paper, we divide CHI research methods into inductive and deductive methods and describe how each have been applied to the study of interactive computing in nature. We give examples from recent published work. Careful application of both inductive and deductive methods will lead to new and important insights into how interactive computing can enhance, enable and detract from the experience of being in nature.

Exergaming provides the opportunity to have fun while exercising, with accompanying technology guiding and enhancing the experience. Exergames often contain some elements of nature and outdoor activities, though it is not well understood how engaging and effective these elements are to users. This paper presents an exploratory self-study of experiences with three exergames that include or encourage outdoor activity: Walkr, Zombies Run!, and Pokémon GO. The paper outlines the experiences of the participants, summarizing common and different elements of their interactions with the exergames. It provides in-depth examination of select elements of the game play as they relate to engagement with nature. Finally, it provides insights on ways that exergames’ elements have promise to engage users with nature.

Shared participation in arousing recreational experiences, such as those involving the outdoors, contributes positively to well-being, relationship health, and human needfulfillment. However, people often face barriers which hinder contact with nature and participation in outdoor recreation with relational partners. Loss of outdoor recreation opportunities could negatively affect a person’s well-being and their ability to satisfy basic human needs. This research aims to explore design considerations for technology-based interventions intended to overcome select barriers to outdoor recreation. Critical to this goal is understanding these barriers, the reasons why people choose to engage in recreation activities involving the outdoors, and the needs they hope to fulfill through using the outdoors as a medium for such activities. We report on a survey study exploring such concerns, and thoughts on the Planet Runner concept, a technology-mediated indoor/outdoor experience designed to enable loved ones to play together while apart. We observed that differing user motivations for choosing to spend time outdoors could create conflicts and tensions within the user and between relational partners, and affect interest in technologymediated outdoor recreation solutions.