Sally Fincher & Panos Markpoulos 
People and Computers XVIII – Design for Life 
Proceedings of HCI 2004

The eighteenth annual British HCI Conference chose as its theme Design for Life. ‘Life’ has many facets, from work (of course, or should we say inevitably!) to travel, fun and other forms of leisure. We selected 23 full papers out of 63 submitted, which covered our interaction with computer systems in a variety of types of life situation — including games, tourism and certain types of work — and also covered a variety of stages in our lives, from the young to the elderly. These papers were complemented by others that described more traditional aspects of research in the field of human-computer interaction. In putting together the programme we followed a three-stage process. First each paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers. Then a member of the committee conducted a meta-review. Finally, all sets of reviews were considered by the technical chairs who assembled a programme that was submitted to, and approved by, the full committee. This process was greatly assisted by the use of the Precision Conference Solutions web-based submission system. Even more important, of course, were the volunteer reviewers themselves. In recognition, this year we have made an award for the best reviewer as well as one for the best paper.

Table of Content

Collaboration at Work and Play.- Understanding Interaction in Ubiquitous Guerrilla Performances in Playful Arenas.- Towards the Development of CSCW: An Ethnographic Approach.- An Evaluation of Workspace Awareness in Collaborative, Gesture-based Diagramming Tools.- Layers.- An Empirical Comparison of Transparency on One and Two Layer Displays.- User Interface Overloading: A Novel Approach for Handheld Device Text Input.- What is Interaction For?.- Designing for Expert Information Finding Strategies.- Supporting User Decisions in Travel and Tourism.- Constructing a Player-Centred Definition of Fun for Video Games Design.- Cradle to Grave.- The Usability of Handwriting Recognition for Writing in the Primary Classroom.- BMX Bandits: The Design of an Educational Computer Game for Disaffected Youth.- Tales, Tours, Tools, and Troupes: A Tiered Research Method to Inform Ubiquitous Designs for the Elderly.- Designs for Lives.- The Re-design of a PDA-based System for Supporting People with Parkinson’s Disease.- Designing for Social Inclusion: Computer Mediation of Trust Relations Between Citizens and Public Service Providers.- Decentralized Remote Diagnostics: A Study of Diagnostics in the Marine Industry.- Searching, Searching, Searching.- A First Empirical Study of Direct Combination in a Ubiquitous Environment.- The Geometry of Web Search.- Supplemental Navigation Tools for Website Navigation — A Comparison of User Expectations and Current Practice.- Papers in Context.- Context matters: Evaluating Interaction Techniques with the CIS Model.- Enhancing Contextual Analysis to Support the Design of Development Tools.- A Context-aware Locomotion Assistance Device for the Blind.- Interaction Behaviour (or “Roy Recommends”).- Evaluating Usability and Challenge during Initialand Extended Use of Children’s Computer Games.- Comparing Interaction in the Real World and CAVE Virtual Environments.- In Search of Salience: A Response-time and Eye-movement Analysis of Bookmark Recognition.