Pedaling Together to Discover the Grand Challenges of Cycling in HCI

A CHI 2023 Workshop

Cycling plays an essential role in sustainability, health, and socializing. For many people around the world, it is becoming a comfortable, fast, and accessible transportation modality for work, leisure, and sports. With this, more cyclists tend to interact on the go, e.g., with their smartphones or smart glasses. Researchers and practitioners design and develop new technological advancements for cyclists by augmenting helmets, bicycles, and the environment around them. Moreover, more recent works aimed to measure cyclists’ physiological state, create safe and potentially realistic bicycle simulators, and even propose self-driving bikes. Given the increasing popularity of bicycle research in the HCI community, these emerging research projects highlight that there are challenges for interaction design in regard to cycling for HCI researchers. Therefore, we aim to collect and discuss these grand challenges to determine how they can be addressed. 

This workshop is a follow-up to the Cycling@CHI workshop held in 2021, which gathered over 35 online participants. For this version, we aim to collect, discuss and explore the grand challenges of cycling in HCI. The workshop will achieve this goal through discussions and presentations of workshop attendees during indoor and outdoor sessions. While many challenges of cycling in HCI are going to be contributed by the attendees with their workshop proposals, we defined some of them to create the core of the workshop:

  1. A lack of theories, tools, and perspectives for developing and designing technologies for cycling.
  2. Limited knowledge about designing for inclusive cycling, e.g., elderly, children, people with disabilities.
  3. Shortage of evaluation methods and environments regarding how to evaluate experiential/societal effects of designs, qualitatively and quantitatively.

This workshop will be held onsite as part of the CHI 2023 conference on April 23, 2023 9 am – 5 pm Central European Time (CET). We aim to bring together and build a research community around the topic of cyclingHCI around the specific goal of articulating and then publishing a paper on the “grand challenges” of cyclingHCI. 

We see cycling as a unique and healthy way of socializing and an excellent way to exchange ideas between the workshop attendees and organizers. For this workshop, we plan a cycling tour to the city park (Stadtpark) in Hamburg, around a total of 15 km, starting from the conference center and back. With this, we aim to promote outdoor discussions about grand challenges for cycling in HCI, technological advancements to improve cycling for different environments and user groups, and research direction by looking into the problem space of cycling areas. All these discussions will happen on the way to and in the city park.

POSITION PAPER SUBMISSION

For this one-day workshop, we invite submissions that illustrate and discuss challenges and new opportunities of cycling in HCI. This workshop aims to identify challenges, collect and discuss points that researchers, developers, and designers face when developing new cycling assistance systems, evaluate them, introduce new systems to different cycling groups, and discuss theories and practices that they use during this process. The submissions will require a maximum of 4 pages (including references) in the CHI Extended Abstract format or a pictorial showcasing a research challenge visually. They should include at least one challenge of cycling in HCI with a clear justification for why it is relevant to the HCI community and research and a possible solution or a vision of how to address this challenge in the future.

The submissions are due on February 23, 2023. 

We will select participants based on the requirement of presenting at least one challenge and a possible solution/vision of how to address it in the future. We will send out a notification to authors by March 24, 2023.  The workshop will be an onsite event. At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop,and all participants must register for both the workshop and at least one day of the conference. 

ORGANIZERS

ANDRII MATVIIENKO, Exertion Games Lab, Department of Human-Centred Computing, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia & Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

MARIO BOOT, University of Twente, Netherlands

PHILIPP WINTERSBERGER, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Austria and Technical University, Wien, Austria

ANDREAS LÖCKEN, Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt, Germany

BASTIAN PFLEGING, TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Germany

MARKUS LOECHTEFELD, Aalborg University, Denmark

TAMARA VON SAWITZKY, Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt, Germany and Johannes Kepler University, Austria

GIAN-LUCA SAVINO, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

JOSH ANDRES, The Australian National University, Australia

ANDREAS RIENER, Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt, Germany

STEPHEN BREWSTER, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

FLORIAN ’FLOYD’ MUELLER, Exertion Games Lab, Department of Human-Centred Computing, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia