NSF Workshop on Seamless/Seamful Human-Technology Interaction

This project will hold a workshop and publish a report addressing seams, that is, significant junctures among people and technologies. Seams involve the ways that different modalities, mechanisms, and situations of interaction are connected. Researchers across fields will gather and collaborate to address and formulate emerging research questions.

Where do seams arise? How can they be stitched together? How can consideration of seams enable developing new relationships among people and technologies?

When do we want our interactions with technology to be seamless, that is, for the seams to be invisible to human participants? When might we want seamful design, which makes seams visible, reminding the humans of gaps? The workshop report will be published on the workshop website, and in prominent archival venues, such as through the ACM and IEEE.

This workshop and report authoring will involve researchers across fields, including human-computer interaction, machine learning and data science, haptics, internet of things, wearables, computer graphics and computer vision, cognitive science, design, and computational creativity to consider seamless and seamful design addressing and combining: high-dimensional data analysis, computational creativity, interactive art, interaction design, exploration of machine learning model spaces, communication awareness, buildings and urban spaces, computational companions, and user modeling. Research contributions are expected to take forms such as ideas for new research initiatives, implications for design, frameworks, and theories.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.