arXiv subjects

Marc Hassenzahl

Publications and source records attributed to Marc Hassenzahl.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Robot Among People:From Social Imitation to the Social Becoming of Human Groups

Robots designed to mediate human groups often fall into the solutionist trap: they are framed as sociable agents that fix problems such as conflict, disengagement, or lack of coordination. We suggest a different way of thinking. Rather than discrete agents, robots can be understood as situated elements of shared environments; catalysts and carriers of group experience whose meaning emerges through how people position, interpret, and interact with them. From this perspective, robots are not there to repair some ostensible dysfunctionality, but to enable group-level sense-making around care, norms, and identity. Our prior work on robotic street furniture suggests that this does not happen by imitating human sociality but by taking the shape of deliberately constrained, group-facing entities that happen and act for \textit{us} without being socially entangled as one of us. We thus understand robots in public spaces not in terms of autonomy or intelligence, but as a relational capacity. This implies designing robots not in our image or for our utility, but grounded in our needs in being and becoming together.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

The New Social Image: How AI Competency and AI Proactivity Influence Self- and Peer-Perceptions in the Workplace

Human-AI collaboration is considered the most promising way to incorporate AI in the workplace. What remains unexplored are the experiential consequences of this teaming. More specifically, in a team with AI, how humans perceive themselves (self-perception) and how they are perceived by their coworkers (peer perception) in terms of work ownership and job meaningfulness. In a 2x2x2 vignette study (n=50), participants rated perceptions of ownership, affect, job meaningfulness and satisfaction, and role dynamics across two levels (low/high) of AI proactivity and AI competency as within-subject factors, with point-of-view (self perception/peer perception) as between-subjects. Our results showed that AI with low competency or low proactivity generally improved feelings related to ownership, meaningfulness, satisfaction, and role dynamics, and also increased positive affect while reducing negative affect. However, these effects were often influenced by point-of-view. For instance, low AI proactivity resulted in higher job satisfaction from self-perception rather than peer perception. Based on our findings, we argue that designing AI for the future of work solely around performance metrics may not be adequate. Highly competent and proactive AI-driven systems can have undesirable impacts on perceptions of ownership, job identity, social image and team dynamics, and consequently, job meaningfulness.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

AI in the Workplace: The Impact of AI on Perceived Job Decency and Meaningfulness

The proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in workplaces is transforming how we work. While existing research on human-AI collaboration at work often prioritizes performance, less is known about their experiential outcomes. Through interviews with 24 employees across Information Technology (IT), service-based, and healthcare sectors, this paper examines AI's impact on job satisfaction via perceptions of job decency and meaningfulness, now and in the future. Our results reveal that the anticipated impact of AI on overall job satisfaction varies with the occupational domain, with differing perceptions of its underlying decency and meaningfulness. For instance, IT and healthcare anticipate increased satisfaction with decency aspects like working hours but decreased satisfaction with meaningfulness aspects like social image due to misconceptions about AI handling most of their tasks. Conversely, service workers foresee no improvement in their working hours but a higher social standing due to the perceived status boost associated with working with AI.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Beyond Hiding and Revealing: Exploring Effects of Visibility and Form of Interaction on the Witness Experience

Our interactions with technology do not just shape our individual experiences. They also affect people around us. Although previous research has addressed such "witness" experiences, the actual effect of interaction design on the witness experience remains largely unknown. In an online study (n = 407), we explored how witnesses perceive mid-air gesture-based interactions with a hearing aid, using four video vignettes. We studied witnesses' subjective visibility of manipulations and effects (following Reeves and colleagues' taxonomy), perceived form of interaction, subjective experience, and relationships between these measures. Although visibility patterns matched the intended form, they did not lead to the supposed experience (i.e., "suspenseful" gestures did not lead to suspenseful experiences). The paper illustrates gaps in current research about witness experiences, demonstrates the need to overcome basic hiding/revealing profiles, and indicates a path forward by focusing on aesthetic forms and experiences.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Obtrusive Subtleness and Why We Should Focus on Meaning, not Form, in Social Acceptability Studies

Nowadays, interactive technologies are used almost everywhere. As a result, designers need to increasingly make them "socially acceptable". Previous work recommends "subtle" forms of interaction to increase social acceptability and avoid negative experiences. Although often appropriate, such uniform recommendations neglect the variety of social situations. We demonstrate this limitation in an experiment (N=35), by comparing the observer experience of different forms of interaction in "face-to-face conversations", a social situation rarely studied. Here, the typically recommended form of interaction ("subtle") led to a more negative observer experience than the usually deprecated form ("suspenseful"), in terms of affective experience and product perception. It also made the user appear less extraverted. We conclude by positioning interactions with technology not as separate from the social situation in which they are performed, but as a constitutive part of it that meaningfully relates to other situated activities.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Experiential Benefits of Interactive Conflict Negotiation Practices in Computer-Supported Shift Planning

Shift planning plays a key role for the health and well-being of healthcare workers. It determines when they work and when they can take time off to recover or engage in social activities. Current computer-support in shift planning is typically designed from a managerial perspective and focuses on process efficiency, with the long-term goal of full automation. This implies automatic resolutions of emotionally charged scheduling conflicts. In the present study, we measured the effects of such a fully automated process on workers' well-being, fairness, and team spirit, and compared them with a more interactive process that directly involves workers in the decision-making. In our experimental online study (n = 94), we found positive effects of the more interactive process on all measures. Our findings indicate that full automation may not be desirable from the worker perspective. We close with concrete suggestions to design more worker-centered, hybrid shift planning systems by optimizing worker control, considering the worker experience, and embedding shift planning in the broader work context.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Social Practice Cards: Research material to study social contexts as interwoven practice constellations

Studying how social contexts shape technology interactions and how we experience them is hard. One challenge is that social contexts are very dynamic and shaped by the situated practices of everyone involved. As a result, the same human-technology interaction can be experienced quite differently depending on what other people around us do. As a first step to study interpersonal and interpractice dynamics, we collected a broad range of visual representations of practices, such as "riding a bike" or "skipping the rope". This material can be used to further explore how different, co-located practices relate to each other.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

Experiencing Utopia. A Positive Approach to Design Fiction

Design Fiction is known for its provocative and often dystopian speculations about the future. In this paper, we present an alternative approach that focuses primarily on the positive. We propose to imagine, enact, and evaluate utopia with participants. By doing so, we react to four main critiques concerning Design Fiction: (1) its negativity, (2) its contextlessness, (3) its elitist authorship, and (4) its missing evaluation methods.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

Simulating Social Acceptability With Agent-based Modeling

Social acceptability is an important consideration for HCI designers who develop technologies for social contexts. However, the current theoretical foundations of social acceptability research do not account for the complex interactions among the actors in social situations and the specific role of technology. In order to improve the understanding of how context shapes and is shaped by situated technology interactions, we suggest to reframe the social space as a dynamic bundle of social practices and explore it with simulation studies using agent-based modeling. We outline possible research directions that focus on specific interactions among practices as well as regularities in emerging patterns.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

Towards a Better Understanding of Social Acceptability

Social contexts play an important role in understanding acceptance and use of technology. However, current approaches used in HCI to describe contextual influence do not capture it appropriately. On the one hand, the often used Technology Acceptance Model and related frameworks are too rigid to account for the nuanced variations of social situations. On the other hand, Goffman's dramaturgical model of social interactions emphasizes interpersonal relations but mostly overlooks the material (e.g., technology) that is central to HCI. As an alternative, we suggest an approach based on Social Practice Theory. We conceptualize social context as interactions between co-located social practices and acceptability as a matter of their (in)compatibilities. Finally, we outline how this approach provides designers with a better understanding of different types of social acceptability problems and helps finding appropriate solutions.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

Design and Appropriation of Computer-supported Self-scheduling Practices in Healthcare Shift Work

Shift scheduling impacts healthcare workers' well-being because it sets the frame for their social life and recreational activities. Since it is complex and time-consuming, it has become a target for automation. However, existing systems mostly focus on improving efficiency. The workers' needs and their active participation do not play a pronounced role. Contrasting this trend, we designed a social practice-based, worker-centered, and well-being-oriented self-scheduling system which gives healthcare workers more control during shift planning. In a following nine month appropriation study, we found that workers who were cautious about their social standing in the group or who had a more spontaneous personal lifestyle used our system less often than others. Moreover, we revealed several conflict prevention practices and suggest to shift the focus away from a competitive shift distribution paradigm towards supporting these pro-social practices. We conclude with guidelines to support individual planning practices, self-leadership, and for dealing with conflicts.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Designing everyday automation with well-being in mind

Nowadays, automation not only permeates industry but also becomes a substantial part of our private, everyday lives. Driven by the idea of increased convenience and more time for the "important things in life," automation relieves us from many daily chores - robots vacuum floors and automated coffee makers produce supposedly barista-quality coffee on the press of a button. In many cases, these offers are embraced by people without further questioning. However, while we save time by delegating more and more everyday activities to automation, we also may lose chances for enjoyable and meaningful experiences. In two field studies, we demonstrate that a manual process has experiential benefits over more automated processes by using the example of coffee-making. We present a way to account for potential experiential costs of everyday automation and strategies of how to design interaction with automation to reconcile experience with the advantages of a more and more powerful automation.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Using Experimental Vignettes to Study Early-Stage Automation Adoption

When discussing the future of work and in detail the concerns of workers within and beyond established workplace settings, technology-wise we act on rather new ground. Especially preserving a meaningful work environment gains new importance when introducing disruptive technologies. We sometimes do not even have the technology which effects we are willing to discuss. To measure implications for employees and thus create meaningful design variants we need to test systems and their effects before developing them. Confronted with the same problem we used the experimental vignette method to study the effects of AI use in work contexts. During the workshop, we will report our experiences.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Finding the Inner Clock: A Chronobiology-based Calendar

Time and its lack of play a central role in our everyday lives. Despite increasing productivity, many people experience time stress, exhaustion and a longing for time affluence, and at the same time, a fear of not being busy enough. All this leads to a neglect of natural time, especially the patterns and rhythms created by physiological processes, subsumed under the heading of chronobiology. The present paper presents and evaluates a calendar application, which uses chronobiological knowledge to support people s planning activities. Participants found our calendar to be interesting and engaging. It especially made them think more about their bodies and appropriate times for particular activities. All in all, it supported participants in negotiating. external demands and personal health and wellbeing. This shows that technology does not necessarily has to be neutral or even further current (mal-)practices. Our calendar cares about changing perspectives and thus about enhancing users wellbeing.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Understanding and Designing Automation with Peoples' Wellbeing in Mind

Nowadays, automation not only dominates industry but becomes more and more a part of our private, everyday lives. Following the notion of increased convenience and more time for the "important things in life", automation relieves us from many daily household chores - robots vacuum floors and automated coffeemakers produce supposedly barista-quality coffee on the press of a button. In many cases these offers are embraced by people without further questioning. Of course, automation frees us from many unloved activities, but we may also lose something by delegating more and more everyday activities to automation. In a series of four studies, we explored the experiential costs of everyday automation and strategies of how to design technology to reconcile experience with the advantages of ever more powerful automation.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

Positive Work Practices. Opportunities and Challenges in Designing Meaningful Work-related Technology

Work is a rich source of meaning. However, beyond organizational changes, most approaches in the research field of Meaningful Work neglected the power of work-related technology to increase meaning. Using two cases as examples, this paper proposes a wellbeing-driven approach to the design of work-related technology. Despite the positive results of our cases, we argue that the use of technology as a means of increasing meaning in the workplace is still in its infancy.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

Fairness and Decision-making in Collaborative Shift Scheduling Systems

The strains associated with shift work decrease healthcare workers' well-being. However, shift schedules adapted to their individual needs can partially mitigate these problems. From a computing perspective, shift scheduling was so far mainly treated as an optimization problem with little attention given to the preferences, thoughts, and feelings of the healthcare workers involved. In the present study, we explore fairness as a central, human-oriented attribute of shift schedules as well as the scheduling process. Three in-depth qualitative interviews and a validating vignette study revealed that while on an abstract level healthcare workers agree on equality as the guiding norm for a fair schedule, specific scheduling conflicts should foremost be resolved by negotiating the importance of individual needs. We discuss elements of organizational fairness, including transparency and team spirit. Finally, we present a sketch for fair scheduling systems, summarizing key findings for designers in a readily usable way.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2010

Reconstructing Experiences through Sketching

We present iScale, a survey tool for the retrospective elicitation of longitudinal user experience data. iScale employs sketching in imposing a process in the reconstruction of one's experiences with the aim to minimize retrospection bias. Two versions, the Constructive and the Value-Account iScale, were motivated by two distinct theories on how people reconstruct emotional experiences from memory. These two versions were tested in two separate studies. Study 1 aimed at providing qualitative insight into the use of iScale and compared its performance to that of free-hand sketching. Study 2 compared the two versions of iScale to free recall, a control condition that does not influence the reconstruction process. Significant differences between iScale and free recall were found. Overall, iScale resulted in an increase in the amount, the richness, and the test-retest reliability of recalled information. These results provide support for the viability of retrospective techniques as a cost-effective alternative to longitudinal studies.

cs.HC↗