Urban voids: identifying and optimizing urban voids potential as a revitalization source in enhancing developing countries’ city income

This study attempts to remedy the issue of urban voids, which are one of the possible choices for extra interactive spaces. As a city with a great civilization history, Egypt is also home to many urban voids, mainly buffer zones. This generates the research problem that urban voids result from managing isolated planning sites irrespective of the context and away from the community. Few studies tackled the impact of public spaces on city life; they were mainly theoretically oriented and focused on piazzas without highlighting other spaces or conducting empirical investigations. The study determines that voids could be a testing ground to establish a framework of how these spaces can be reused. Revitalizing urban voids goal is to reconnect these useless spaces with context, achieve users’ needs, integrate technologies with the space to revitalize the city, and increase its income through combining theoretical findings, empirical study, and questionnaires, which generate a framework that helps the planners and designers in developing urban voids and maximizing its efficiency. Currently, adaptive redesign is a hot topic to discuss, and this may be the moment to realize that following the updated design components, meeting community needs, and using technology will always reinvigorate the void.

Youth First: A Canadian Youth-led Initiative in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic

This reflection writing was co-written by seven young people and three Master of Arts Child and Youth Care (MA CYC) students from Ryerson University. Our writing centres around a Canadian youth-led initiative called Youth First, developed as a MA CYC placement due to the lack of placement opportunities available during the pandemic. Youth First focused on creating safe and interactive spaces in cyberspace for young people during the pandemic. Through this reflection, we hope to share our experiences, accomplishments, lessons learned and overall reflection of being part of this initiative during a global pandemic.

PACMHCI V5, ISS, November 2021 Editorial

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to this issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, the second to focus on the contributions from the research community Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS). Interactive Surfaces and Spaces increasingly pervade our everyday life, appearing in various sizes, shapes, and application contexts, offering a rich variety of ways to interact. This diverse research community explores the design, development, and use of new and emerging interactive surface technologies and interactive spaces. The call for articles for this issue on ISS attracted 77 submissions, from all over the world. This issue has 23 papers, 4 submitted in February 2021 and 19 submitted in July 2021. After the winter round, 4 (total of 19 articles, 21.1%) articles were accepted and 5 (26.3%) articles required major revisions. After the summer round, 19 (total of 58 articles, 32.8%) articles were accepted, and 18 (31,0%) articles required major revisions. The editorial committee worked hard over the two iterations of the review process, winter and summer rounds, to arrive at final decisions. In total, counting both the winter and the summer rounds, 23 articles (total of 77 articles, 29.9%) were accepted. All authors of the accepted articles are invited to present at the ISS conference from November 14--17, 2021. This issue exists because of the dedicated volunteer effort of 31 senior editors who served as Associate Chairs (ACs), 105 expert reviewers in the winter round, and 206 expert reviewers in the summer round to ensure high quality and insightful reviews for all articles. Reviewers and committee members were kept constant for papers that submitted to both rounds. The Editorial Board is presented here: https://iss.acm.org/2021/organization/editorial_board

Facilitating Tacit Knowledge Construction

Design knowledge, for its most part, is tacit. The embedded and inherent nature of tacit knowledge implies that it is a cognitive and internal construct acquired through the design act of doing. However, it is also socially constructed through shared experiences, collaborations and interactions. The design studio is a dynamic, pedagogical site that facilitates the construction of tacit knowledge through its myriad of interactive spaces. Online and virtual platforms offer opportunities to extend the learning boundaries of its social realm. Studies in the influence of these spaces on tacit knowledge construction are currently insufficient. An interpretive study was conducted in different studio environments within the Environment and Interior Design discipline of the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University to further the understanding of tacit knowledge construction in blended learning environments.

Revisiting Computer-Assisted Language Teaching: What Else Do Tertiary-Level EFL Teachers Need to Know?

Computer-assisted language teaching (CALT) is widely used in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in college. As illustrated by the existing research, CALT is valuable in that it can leverage technological affordances (e.g., multimodal resources or interactive spaces) in motivating students’ learning interest. However, beyond the technological level, CALT treats language (i.e., vocabulary and grammar) separately from content de/construction (e.g., questions-based content comprehension). This means that to further improve CALT in the EFL context, the students’ understanding of the relationship between language and content, which contributes to the success of literacy activities, must be fostered pedagogically. As such, this paper introduces systemic functional linguistics and argues for its use as a complementary tool for students’ improved engagement in CALT. It also offers recommended practices for teachers in this regard.

Extended Reality (XR) Teaching in the Era of Deepfakes

The use of existing and emerging technologies in teaching and learning provides the opportunity to present subject-area content using devices, programs, and venues in ways that promote higher-order thinking and long-term retention. In the last decade, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have resulted in the development of virtual reality programs that enable end-users to interact with content in third and fourth-dimensional interactive spaces (i.e., extended reality or XR). The transformation beyond traditional face-to-face or two-dimensional teaching and learning has resulted in an unforeseen digital side effect. The digital side effect presents in the form of deepfakes or the deliberate alteration of audio and visual content to advance a specific point of view. The premise of this chapter is to present a primer using the technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) and levels of use construct to mitigate the presence of deepfake and malinformation in subject-area content when working in XR environments.

Interactive Spaces in Times of Racial Segregation

This chapter assesses how German occupiers and Polish men and women interacted during times of racial segregation. Curiosity, a thirst for adventure, and specific offers gave rise to observable intimate relationships, especially in the first weeks and months of the German occupation. One measure intended to curb contact between German and locals was physical separation by the German racial thinking. However, in everyday life and in some places, the segregation between groups was enforced less strictly than the regulations demanded. Instead, the German men's need for female company was an open secret, and was, to some extent, tolerated by both military and civilian authorities. Most couples who had intimate relationships lasting for longer periods got to know each other at work, however. This was the most logical and least dangerous space for interaction because men and women met here daily anyway, meaning that neither side would attract suspicion. Contact with local women could also arise from military or professional duties: police and customs officers got to know women during questioning and arrests. Sexual barter transactions, and also sexual blackmail, could develop from such encounters.

Trust and Technologies of Sense. VR and Proprioception in Hamlet Encounters

This paper investigates the changing role of media devices in constructing fictive worlds through senses, and the changing relation we have to our senses. The demand for immersion in a virtual visual reality has its precedents, shown for example by the popularity of the kaleidoscope, the peeping box, the Guckkasten, or the panoramas. But while the immersive effect of these illusion spaces was based on visual perception, now we have multisensory interactive spaces that trigger our proprioception (body awareness and feeling of presence). The VR experience Hamlet Encounters offers a unique experience and exemplary use of distance, dislocation, and perception of one’s own senses.