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Linda Hirsch
The Traces in Use Design Concept
Doctoral Dissertation, August 08, 2023. LMU Munich, Munich, Germany 26 pages. doi:tbd (bib)

Todayâs environments increasingly comprise a network of smart and interactive devices that change our perception and relationship with our surroundings. This enables us to access massive information and functionality at our fingertips but may also induce overload and stress and reduce our mental well-being. Additionally, it triggers changes in spatial usage and onsite behaviors, challenging cities to preserve their placesâ authenticity and social and cultural identity. These environmental changes push human-computer interaction (HCI) to research the design space of human-environment interaction and develop new design approaches and concepts that support designing for shared multi-user contexts. This also requires designing interactions in relation to the target environmentâs social, cultural, and spatial conditions to preserve their identity. Experiencing interaction under consideration of these relations fosters senseand meaning-making, which strengthens usersâ feelings of belonging, understanding, and social connectedness. However, HCI research lacks design concepts and approaches to contextualizing interfaces so that they can promote this effect. The thesis approaches the gap with the goal of developing a design concept to contextualize interfaces for meaningful human-environment interaction. For this, I present a three-step process including identifying design approaches and requirements for shared environments, the theoretical development of the design concept Traces in Use, and the conceptâs empirical evaluation in physical, augmented, and virtual reality human-environment interactions. My work shows that the Traces in Use concept can implicitly increase interfacesâ social and cultural meaning and, thus, supports their contextualization. The Traces in Use concept developed in this thesis is a strong design concept for creating meaningful human-environment interactions, which supports place-making and social connectedness in three different realities. Additionally, the concept responds to the need for preserving placesâ authenticity and identity by reusing natural and recognizable features of physical reality environments, aka traces, that embody temporal courses and socio-cultural behaviors. My work also reveals outstanding research questions and opportunities relevant to humancomputer and human-environment interactions. This includes evaluating the concept further in different cultural contexts and with user groups or exploring their potential for meaningful mixed-reality contextualization. The thesis approaches a subject of the HCI Grand Challenges by providing a concept to create meaningful human-environment interactions and revealing various additional challenges for future research.