Glossary

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Activity Theory

A conceptual framework originating in Soviet psychology (Vygotsky, Leont'ev) and widely applied in HCI, which analyses human action as goal-directed activity mediated by tools, rules, community, and division of labour. Activity Theory provides a structured lens for studying how…

Augmented Feedback(also: Extrinsic Feedback)

Feedback provided by an external system - visual, auditory, haptic, or multimodal - that supplements the intrinsic sensory feedback a learner receives from their own body during a motor task. Augmented feedback is widely used in motor learning, rehabilitation, and embodied skill…

Closed-loop Interaction(also: Closed-Loop Feedback, Perform-Assess-Adjust Cycle)

An interaction pattern in which a system continuously observes the user's action, evaluates it, and returns immediate feedback that shapes the next attempt, producing an iterative perform-assess-adjust cycle. Closed-loop interaction contrasts with open-loop designs that present…

Cognitive Artifact(also: Cognitive Artefact)

An artificial device — physical or digital — designed or appropriated to maintain, display, or operate on information in ways that support human cognitive performance. The term was codified by Don Norman to describe how objects like calendars, shopping lists, sticky notes,…

Collaboration Awareness(also: Workspace awareness, Collaborator awareness)

The ongoing, up-to-the-moment understanding of what collaborators are doing, where they are working, and what has recently changed in a shared workspace. In sighted collaboration, awareness is typically conveyed through visual cues — cursors, avatars, highlights, and selection…

Confederate(also: Research Confederate, Study Confederate)

A person who plays a scripted role in a research study while appearing to participants as a naive participant, bystander, or user. Confederates allow researchers to observe how true participants behave in realistic social situations — for example, how a blind user interacts with…

Counteractive Frictions(also: Counteractive Friction)

A concept introduced by Ly et al. for the deliberate, strategically produced disruptions that marginalised communities generate to contest hegemonic infrastructures — petitions, protests, Human Rights Tribunal filings, targeted social-media campaigns, guerrilla postering.…

Counterventions(also: Countervention)

A concept introduced by Rua Williams, Louanne Boyd, and Juan Gilbert for reflexive interventions in HCI and design that unsettle ableist norms by shifting focus from individual deficit to exclusionary sociotechnical systems. Counterventions call for disabled people to be…

Crip HCI

An orientation within human-computer interaction that brings crip theory and crip technoscience into the methods, design practices, and evaluation frameworks of computing research. Rather than asking how technology can accommodate disabled users within existing normative…

Critical Computing

An umbrella term for HCI and computer-science scholarship that interrogates the values, power relations, and social consequences of computing technologies rather than taking their benefits as given. Critical computing draws on disability studies, science and technology studies…

Critical Technical Practice(also: CTP)

A research stance, articulated by Philip Agre in 1997, in which technologists reflect critically on the assumptions built into their own systems while continuing to build. Critical technical practice argues that technologies embody theory—every design choice encodes a…

Designing with Friction(also: Friction by Design)

An HCI design stance, associated with Matthias Korn and Amy Voida, that argues for deliberately introducing friction into interactive systems to surface politics, provoke reflection, and enable democratic contention — rather than pursuing frictionless user experience as a…

Embodied Experience(also: Embodied Interaction, Embodiment (UX))

The dimension of user experience that arises from the body's sensory and kinaesthetic encounter with a system or environment — motion, vibration, balance, proprioception, ambient sound, and felt pace — rather than from explicit information channels. In autonomous transport,…

Embodied Skill Learning(also: Motor Skill Learning)

A view of learning in which acquiring a skill - such as a sign language gesture, a musical performance, a sport movement, or a rehabilitation exercise - depends on coordinated bodily action rather than on memorising symbolic information. Embodied skill learning emphasises…

Execution Gap(also: Gulf of Execution)

From Don Norman's model of human-computer interaction, the distance between a user's goals and the physical actions required to achieve them using a given system. A system with a wide execution gap forces users to translate what they want into technical commands, parameters, or…

Feminist HCI

An approach to human-computer interaction research and design articulated by Shaowen Bardzell that brings feminist theory, values, and methods into HCI practice. Feminist HCI foregrounds pluralism, embodiment, ecology, advocacy, self-disclosure, and participation; critiques…

Fitts's Law(also: Fitts Law)

Fitts's law is a predictive model of human movement that describes the time required to rapidly move to a target area as a function of the distance to the target and the target's size. Widely used in human-computer interaction (HCI) since the 1970s, it quantifies pointing…

Help-Seeking(also: Help seeking behavior)

The deliberate process of asking for, searching for, or otherwise obtaining assistance to complete a task, learn a feature, or resolve a breakdown. In accessibility contexts, help-seeking is often shaped by inaccessible documentation, visually oriented tutorials, and the cost of…

Human-Nature Interaction(also: HNI)

A research area within human-computer interaction concerned with how people perceive, access, and engage with natural environments, and how technology can mediate that relationship. HNI draws on environmental psychology, biophilia, and posthumanist design to study experiences…

Implicit Interaction(also: Implicit Input, Implicit Human-Computer Interaction)

Implicit interaction refers to user input that the system infers from natural behaviors not explicitly performed for the purpose of issuing commands, such as gaze, gait, posture, physiological signals, or ambient context. It contrasts with explicit interaction, where users…

In-Situ Deployment(also: In-Situ Study, Field Deployment Study)

A research methodology in which a functional prototype or product is installed on participants' own devices and used in their everyday environment over days, weeks, or months, rather than in a controlled laboratory session. In-situ deployments are especially valuable for…

Information Foraging Theory(also: IFT)

A theory proposed by Pirolli and Card describing how people seek information by adaptively optimising for maximum information gain with minimum effort, analogous to animal foraging. Key constructs include information scent (cues signalling potential usefulness), information…

Infrastructural Inversion

A methodological move, articulated by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, that foregrounds the usually invisible infrastructure underpinning everyday action — categories, standards, procedures, silent stabilising work — treating it as the primary object of analysis rather than…

Infrastructuring

A theoretical lens from HCI, CSCW, and participatory design (developed from the work of Susan Leigh Star, Karen Ruhleder, Volkmar Pipek, and Volker Wulf) that treats infrastructure not as a finished artifact but as an ongoing, situated accomplishment. Infrastructuring highlights…

Interaction Analysis

A qualitative research method for studying knowledge and action in interaction with people, objects, and environments — typically through close observation of video or screen recordings, annotating visible affect, body language, utterances, and moment-by-moment behavior.…

Interactional Synchrony

The coordinated, often unconscious alignment of conversational partners' body postures, gestures, gaze, vocal rhythm, and facial expressions during social interaction. Research in social psychology and affective neuroscience has linked interactional synchrony to rapport,…

Multimodal Sensing(also: Multi-Modal Sensing)

The simultaneous capture of data through multiple sensor channels - for example, combining physiological signals (heart rate, galvanic skin response, skin temperature) with behavioural signals (motion, audio, button input, pressure) - to produce a richer picture of a user's…

Multisensory Interaction(also: Multisensory HCI)

Multisensory interaction is an HCI research area concerned with designing and studying systems that engage two or more human senses - sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, proprioception - simultaneously or in combination. It differs from multimodal interaction (which typically…

Narrative-Flip Method(also: Narrative flip)

A qualitative HCI research method in which participants first encounter a technology or artifact without knowing its origins or intent, reflect on it, and only afterwards are told its disability-led, activist, or political context. The deliberate before/after framing surfaces…

Non-Use(also: Technology Non-Use, Technology Refusal)

A research tradition in HCI that takes seriously the choice not to use a technology — treating refusal, abandonment, and selective engagement as meaningful, reasoned behaviour rather than as failure. Non-use scholarship (Wyatt, Baumer, Satchell & Dourish, Waycott and colleagues)…

Nudge(also: Nudging)

A small change in the presentation, default, or framing of a choice that systematically influences decisions without removing options or significantly altering incentives. Introduced to behavioural economics by Thaler and Sunstein (2008) and grounded in Tversky and Kahneman's…

Perpetual Contact

Perpetual contact is a sociological term coined by James Katz and Mark Aakhus to describe the state, enabled by mobile phones and later by ubiquitous internet messaging, in which people maintain constant availability to their social network regardless of physical location. For…

Persona Design(also: Design Personas, User Personas)

A user-centered design technique in which designers create fictional but grounded profiles of representative users — demographics, goals, context, pain points — to guide design decisions when direct user involvement is limited. In accessibility and HCI co-design workshops,…

Point of Infrastructuring(also: PoI)

A concept from Pipek and Wulf's infrastructuring theory naming the moment at which users become aware of the technology they depend on - typically when it breaks, behaves unexpectedly, or no longer supports their task - and begin to adapt, configure, or work around it. Points of…

Positive Computing(also: Positive Technology)

A design approach articulated by Rafael Calvo and Dorian Peters (2014) and extended by Riva, Gaggioli and colleagues that intentionally orients information and communication technology toward supporting psychological wellbeing, human flourishing, and positive emotion — rather…

Posthumanism(also: Posthumanist Design, More-than-Human Design)

A theoretical orientation in design and HCI that decenters the human as the sole agent of value and instead considers nonhuman animals, plants, ecosystems, and even technological artifacts as participants in design contexts. Posthumanist and more-than-human framings push…

Practice-based Learning(also: Iterative Practice)

An approach to learning that organises instruction around short, repeatable cycles of attempting a task, receiving feedback, and refining performance, rather than around passive content consumption. Practice-based learning is well suited to embodied skills - sign language, motor…

Provocation (HCI)(also: Design provocation, Provotype)

In human-computer interaction, a designed artifact whose purpose is to unsettle assumptions, provoke debate, or surface hidden values rather than to solve a defined problem. Provocations draw on traditions of critical design (Dunne and Raby), adversarial design (DiSalvo),…

Queer Theory in HCI(also: Queering HCI, Queer Design)

The application of queer theory to human-computer interaction research and design, challenging heteronormative and binary assumptions embedded in technology. Queer theory in HCI questions how technologies enforce normative identities around gender, sexuality, and embodiment, and…

Relational Accessibility(also: Relational Access)

An approach to accessibility that treats access as something co-constructed between people in everyday life, rather than a property of an individual user, tool, or environment. Relational accessibility recognises that communication, care, and adaptation are ongoing practices…

Research Probe(also: Design Research Probe, Technology Probe)

A purpose-built, partially functional artefact — often a software prototype, sensor, or interactive installation — deployed in a study not primarily to deliver a finished product but to provoke reflection, surface user needs, and generate design insight. Distinct from cultural…

Research-through-Design(also: RtD)

A research methodology, articulated by Zimmerman, Forlizzi, and Evenson (2007), in which the act of designing artefacts is itself the mode of inquiry. Knowledge is produced through iterative cycles of prototyping, deployment, evaluation, and reflection, and is typically…

Residual Category(also: Residual Categories)

A concept from Susan Leigh Star describing the "other" or "not applicable" categories in classification systems — the bucket where anything that does not fit predefined types gets placed. Individuals sorted into residual categories become illegible to the systems that grant…

Routine Infrastructuring

A concept developed by Bryan Semaan describing community practices through which marginalised and oppressed groups continually reconfigure sociotechnical arrangements to sustain everyday life under persistent disruption. Unlike classical infrastructuring, which treats disruption…

Semi-Automatic Wizard-of-Oz(also: Semi-Automatic WoZ)

A hybrid Wizard-of-Oz study methodology in which part of a prototype system is implemented with real automation while a human researcher (the 'wizard') intervenes only for components that are not yet reliable enough to run autonomously. For example, an AI agent may generate…

Sensemaking(also: Sense-making)

The cognitive and social process of giving structure to ambiguous, incomplete, or unfamiliar information so that one can act on it. In HCI and information science, sensemaking is studied as iterative cycles of foraging for information, building mental representations, testing…

Stage-Based Model(also: Stage-Based Model of Personal Informatics)

A model of personal-informatics use, introduced by Ian Li, Anind Dey, and Jodi Forlizzi (2010), describing how people move through five stages of self-tracking: preparation (deciding to track), collection, integration, reflection, and action. The model made early contributions…

Story Completer

A design role for generative AI in storytelling, proposed by Niu, Clements, and Kim (2026), in which AI systems complete and enrich stories authored by human creators rather than generating full storylines or automating creative decisions. The concept is framed in contrast to AI…

Supportive Empathy

A therapeutic conversational stance in which a listener responds to another person's feelings with affirmation, validation, and gentle encouragement rather than problem-solving or interpretation. In music-therapy practice supportive empathy is often paired with a 'holding'…

Symbolic Interactionism(also: SI)

A sociological tradition, associated with Herbert Blumer and the Chicago School following George Herbert Mead, that understands social reality as constructed through ongoing interaction: people act toward things — including other people, technologies, and disability itself — on…