Marius Hoggenmueller

Russian, Wu, Tim Moesgen et al.

With growing research on haptic interfaces, Mediated Social Touch (MST) technologies offer the potential to record, synthesise, and reproduce (RSR) touch experiences across space and time, enabling, for instance, a hug from afar and from the past. Although much of the existing research highlights the direct benefits of these systems, such as reducing loneliness and providing emotional support, little attention has been paid to their broader sociotechnical impacts. To address this gap, we used the Future Ripples method to speculate on possible effects of MST. We conducted three workshops with 24 participants, including potential users, domain experts, and haptics researchers. Throughout these sessions, participants collectively envisioned possible future scenarios, alongside opportunities and threats, and proposed actionable responses. Our qualitative analysis organised these insights into four themes and three distinctive challenges. These findings offer haptics researchers intervention points across the RSR pipeline to inform MST design, alongside methodological insights from applying Future Ripples to MST technology.

Xinyan Yu, Marius Hoggenmueller, Xin Lu et al.

Urban HCI investigates how digital technologies shape human behaviour within the social, spatial, temporal dynamics of public space. Meanwhile, robotic furniture research demonstrates how the purposeful animation of mundane utilitarian elements can influence human behaviour in everyday contexts. Taken together, these strands highlight an untapped opportunity to investigate how animated public furniture could mediate social interaction in urban environments. In this paper, we present the design process and in-the-wild study of mobile robotic benches that reconfigure with a semi-outdoor public space. Our findings show that the gestural performance of the benches manifested three affordances perceived by passersby, they activated engagement as robots, redistributed engagement as spatial elements, and settled engagement as infrastructure. We proposed an Affordance Transition Model (ATM) describing how robotic furniture could proactively facilitate transition between these affordances to engage passersby. Our study bridges robotic furniture and urban HCI to activate human experience with the built environment purposefully.

Xinyan Yu, Marius Hoggenmueller, Tram Thi Minh Tran et al.

Emerging technologies introduce sociotechnical tensions that call for closer collaboration between technology design and policy. In this work, we introduce Design-Policy Adversarial Futuring, a scenario-based workshop method that supports design-policy engagement by structuring contestation between design and policy perspectives. We report on a workshop conducted in the autonomous mobility domain with 12 HCI researchers, used to explore and demonstrate the method in practice. The workshop illustrates how the adversarial futuring method can surface shifting harms, translate policy abstractions into situated use, and legitimise extreme ideas while maintaining grounded policy reasoning. This work contributes a reusable, exploratory method for supporting HCI-policy collaboration through contestation, which can be adapted across emerging technological domains.