Post-Pandemic HCI—Living Digitally: Well-Being-Driven Digital Technologies
Effie Lai‐Chong Law, Julio Abascal · Interacting with Computers · 2021
Full Paper Chairs of the British Human-Computer Interaction Conference (BHCI) 2021 This special issue is a collection of nine papers, which are the expanded versions of the best papers presented at the 34th British Human–Computer Interaction Conference, 19–21 July 2021. The conference was held entirely online due to the pandemic. The theme of the conference ‘Post-pandemic HCI – Living Digitally’ aimed to raise hopes in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community about an eventual end to the pandemic and to invite reflective as well as visionary thinking about how post-pandemic lives could or should be with (or without) technology. Two distinct scenarios may happen as the pandemic subsides. Some people discard the technologies that they have been obliged to adopt during the pandemic because they yearn to resume pre-pandemic routines and practices (e.g. in-person learning activities at schools). In contrast, some people become so reliant on the technological solutions they have utilized during the pandemic that they continue deploying them, despite being advised otherwise (e.g. working from home). Others may opt for variants of these two contrasting scenarios. Regardless of people’s preference on how dominant technologies should play in their everyday lives, the ever-increasing digitalization of essential services (e.g. health, transport, education) renders it inevitable that people’s well-being is shaped and regulated by digital technologies (Scoglio et al., 2019). In fact, the heavy usage of social media during the pandemic is a double-edged sword for psychological well-being. On the one hand, such platforms enable people to remain connected, sustaining their social and emotional well-being (e.g. Goldschmidt, 2020). On the other hand, the same platforms can exacerbate the vulnerability of those who are prey to manipulation by online predators (e.g. Williams et al., 2020). Indeed, one of the post-pandemic grand challenges is to identify effective means to improve people’s psychological well-being, which has been undermined by the negative experiences of the pandemic. Research on understanding the intricate relations between well-being and technology has visibly grown in the past decade (e.g. Cheng et al., 2019; Scoglio et al., 2019), which is strongly linked to the work on positive psychology (e.g. Seligman, 2012) and happiness studies (e.g. Veenhoven, 2008). Presumably, the research area of positive computing posited by Calvo and Peters (2014) has promoted this line of inquiry in the field of HCI. From the design perspective, the frameworks put forward by Desmet and colleagues (Desmet & Hassenzahl, 2012; Desmet and Pohlymeyer, 2013; Klapperich et al., 2019) have stimulated related research endeavours exploring the notion of eudaimonia and meaningfulness for HCI (e.g. Mekler and Hornbaek, 2016). Identifying robust theoretical and methodological frameworks for designing, developing and deploying digital technologies to enhance people’s (and other animal’s) well-being can arguably be the fourth wave of HCI (cf. the third wave HCI; Bødker, 2015). In short, the theme of the next HCI wave may be well-being-driven HCI. There exist alternative proposed themes, such as ‘Entanglement HCI’ (Frauenberger, 2019), which has inspired the soma-focused ‘more-than-human bodies’ approaches (Homewood et al., 2020). While we do not delve into these pioneering efforts on paving the ground for the next HCI wave, it is relevant to point out that their strong ethical views on HCI work resonates with the topic of well-being-driven digital technologies, which we take a closer look subsequently. Digital technologies, when properly designed, developed and deployed, can lead to pleasurable and meaningful everyday experiences, which in turn contribute to people’s psychological well-being or happiness (Lyubomirsky, 2007; Ryan and Deci, 2001). Psychological well-being can be broadly understood as the frequent experience of positive moments and a general feeling of being satisfied with life (Diener et al., 1999). As a multifarious concept, well-being should be understood from multiple perspectives, including psychological, sociological, philosophical, economic and technological (Amichai-Hamburger, 2009; Kahneman, 2011). Furthermore, research on well-being allows insights to be gained for policymaking, organizational management, gender equality and other societal impacts. Given the robust finding that happy people are healthier (e.g. Veenhoven, 2008) and more productive (e.g. Oswald et al., 2015), well-being can be considered as a highly desirable individual and collective goal, a yardstick for policy interventions, a central productivity factor for organizations and a key value proposition and market differentiator for products and services. Digital technologies, including those currently as widespread as smartphones, provide an infrastructure capable of enhancing well-being in many ways. Nonetheless, technology does not intrinsically have values (Amichai-Hamburger, 2009), but values are integrated into digital products and services through design (Verbeek, 2011; cf. value-sensitive design; Friedman et al., 2013). Moreover, depending on how users appropriate the original design goal, a digital product or service can have detrimental effects on well-being. Salient examples are the addictiveness of social media (e.g. Brailovskaia and Teichert, 2020) and excessive tracking of one’s health parameters with self-monitoring technologies (e.g. Storni, 2010), leading to debilitating anxiety and poor self-esteem. A key research challenge for the HCI community to tackle is how digital technologies can be designed to facilitate well-being. How do we fit the technical opportunities provided by digital technologies into people’s everyday lives? How can we make everyday life meaningful and enjoyable through interactive technologies? How can the burgeoning range of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-infused autonomous products and services be utilized to promote well-being? HCI researchers and practitioners often attempt to answer these questions with the established user-centred design (or human-centred design) (UCD/HCD) (ISO 9241-210:2019, n.d.). While UCD/HCD is a relevant starting point, it needs augmented as well as concretized to address the challenges for being not only human-centred but also well-being-driven design. These challenges have recently become more acute, thanks to high complexities and uncertainties of AI-infused systems (Yang et al., 2020). In the following, we discuss three main challenges. Developing models to understand the interplay between well-being and technology in context. To design for well-being requires foremost a deep understanding of what well-being is. While models of well-being in psychology and other social sciences (e.g. Kahneman, 2011) are inspiring, they are not concrete enough for designing interactive technologies for specific applications, especially AI-infused ones. It is imperative to develop models to summarize and systemize well-being-related knowledge, making it applicable to the design of well-being-driven technologies in diverse contexts. Identifying ethical, political and societal implications of well-being-driven HCI. Designing for well-being has deep ethical, political and societal implications. Current HCI and AI ethics work (e.g. Canca, 2020; Kisselburgh et al., 2020) need to be refined, given that well-being-driven design tends to realize certain values. The key ethical concern is whose values (Vallor, 2016). As different cultures, worldviews and people value different forms of well-being, it becomes a critical ethical choice what kinds of well-being to prioritize and drive with digital technologies. Furthermore, it is also important to ensure that the design is democratically legitimate and mindful of minorities, becoming a key political concern of well-being-driven HCI. While western societies tend to frame the pursuit of well-being as a private endeavour, it is strongly affected by collective systems and actions. Well-being-driven HCI should reconcile the pursuit of individual well-being with social responsibility towards collectives (Klapperich et al., 2019). Developing methods and tools for evaluating well-being-driven digital technologies. Understanding and positioning what well-being is and accepting it as a legitimate goal are important preconditions for well-being-driven digital technologies. On top of that, it is necessary to develop innovative and valid methods and tools to evaluate the user experience, user engagement and other specific well-being-oriented criteria of these technologies. For instance, how to measure validly and viably memory-based and moment-based experience (i.e. ‘experienced utility’; Kahneman, 2011), which is strongly linked to well-being (Soleimani and Law, 2017), is one of the challenges to tackle. The topics of the nine accepted papers for this special issue are related to the above discussions on well-being-driven technologies, albeit to different extents. Two of the papers have the word well-being in the title, with one addressing physical health (Goffe et al., 2022) and the other, mental health (Noronha and Campos, 2022). Indeed, health is a dominant domain for this batch of papers: two related topics are digital telecare (Taylor et al., 2022) and digital twins in healthcare (De Maeyer and Markopoulos, 2022). Apart from health, utilizing interactive technologies to improve education (Schaper et al., 2022) and transport (Goodman-Deane et al., 2022) contributes to well-being-oriented goals. Putting in a broader context, all these essential everyday services are only sustainable in a peace time when safety is assured, but sadly, this very basic existential condition cannot be taken for granted even in the 21st century (NB: the Ukraine war is still raging at the time of writing this editorial). The paper by Paracha et al. (2022) on peacekeeping is particularly timely and relevant. The remaining two papers (de Quincey and Mitchell, 2022; Wright and Kefalidou, 2022), while not directly addressing well-being, can have methodological implications for well-being research through their user experience-focused studies. In ‘Web augmentation for wellbeing’, Goffe et al. (2022) grounded their work in the concepts of digital civics and public health. Based on the empirical data gathered over a sustained period of 12 months on users’ food-ordering behaviours and experiences with a dedicated platform, the authors proposed modifications to the platform. The authors combined the participatory UCD approaches with the web augmentation method to address the goal of enabling users to make healthy food choices. While the impact on well-being is yet to demonstrate, the case study provides methodological insights. In ‘Harnessing virtual reality nature to promote well-being’, as the title indicates, Noronha and Campos (2022) aimed to demonstrate the utility of immersive experience enabled by virtual reality (VR) for improving people’s mental health through relaxation exercises. The nature scenes in VR proved effective in increasing people’s calmness while decreasing their arousal and energy level. This work strengthened the assumption that VR can be a well-being-enhancement tool. In ‘Supporting safe and independent living’, Taylor et al. (2022) identified the innovative digital telecare concepts for older adults by applying the UCD approaches and synthesizing user engagement findings. Apart from the identified themes for future work in the field-community-based support, the authors illustrated comprehensively the process of gathering users’ needs and translating them into actionable design concepts. In ‘Digital Twins in healthcare’, De Maeyer and Markopoulos (2022) reported how experts in digital transformation of healthcare envisaged the application of the emerging digital twins technology. In addition to practical insights on exploring the potential of this technology for personalized well-being, methodological insights on the use of Delphi study for eliciting expert views were obtained. Paracha et al. (2022) stated a lucid message: for the digital transformation of peacekeeping, it is recommendable to put humans before technological solutions. Using the value-sensitive design approach (Friedman et al., 2013), the authors argued for integrating human values into technological designs. Several core values were identified across three use contexts, including peacekeepers’ well-being. This work lent further evidence to the importance of human-centred technological interventions. In the same vein, Schaper et al. (2022) demonstrated how they successfully applied the UCD approaches to digitizing iteratively an analogue syllable-based reading intervention. Specifically, they conducted expert reviews and interviews with end-users (primary school pupils) to gather concepts for digital prototypes, which were usability evaluated. Goodman-Deane et al. (2022) aimed to address the ethical concern of inclusiveness for digital mobility services by paying particular attention to people with diverse backgrounds. As an integral part of the UCD process, the authors captured user requirements by conducting a relatively large-scale interview study with 1010 participants. De Quincey and Mitchell (2022) also applied the UCD approach with a different method and in a different context. Specifically, they applied a special type of card sorting—repeated-single-criterion sorting—to understand and analyse user-based music categorization. On a different domain, Wright and Kefalidou (2022) studied the phenomenon of synaesthesia in the context of mixed reality. They posited that multimodal design characteristics could inform a more synaesthetic design approach in MR, which may have implications for supporting people’s mental health (cf. Noronha and Campos’ work on VR-based relaxation). Overall, majority of the papers in this volume have contributed to the understanding of well-being-oriented research, especially in the domain of healthcare. Nevertheless, there exists a substantial challenge in bridging the gap between the provision of technological solutions and real-life adoption (Blandford, 2019), despite the systematic application of the UCD approaches. Furthermore, AI-infused systems may contest the prevailing concepts, methods and tools of UCD. This may instigate a paradigm shift that launches the next wave of HCI, which can be well-being-driven HCI!