Academic Tracks

Chairs: Markku Turunen (Tampere University), Pauliina Baltzar (Tampere University), Vasiliki Mylonopoulou (University of Gothenburg)

Are we truly designing a digital world for everyone?

While physical barriers to accessibility—like staircases without ramps—are easy to spot, digital barriers often remain invisible. In the digital space, all disabilities are, in a way, hidden. We may notice small font sizes or poor color contrast, but do we think about whether a website works with screen readers? Do we consider if digital platforms are truly perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust for all users?

The push for an inclusive digital society is growing. In 2016, the United Nations introduced the transformative pledge “No One Left Behind” as part of the Sustainable Development Goals. By 2019, EU member states enforced legislation requiring public digital services to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). By June 2025, the European Accessibility Act will extend these requirements to the private sector, reinforcing that digital accessibility is not an optional feature—it is a necessity.

True accessibility means ensuring that people with disabilities can fully participate in the digital world—just like anyone else. Accessibility has been treated as an afterthought, an add-on feature rather than an integral part of design. While participatory design has gained traction and the voices of disabled communities are increasingly heard, we are still far from achieving an accessible digital society.

As artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs), and generative AI shape our digital future, we must confront the biases embedded within them. Who gets to participate in shaping AI? Whose needs are prioritized? How do we ensure that the next wave of technological advancements is inclusive rather than exclusionary?

This track welcomes multidisciplinary researchers and practitioners exploring themes of diversity, accessibility, disability, and design justice. We invite submissions of (but are not limited to) literature reviews, empirical studies, theoretical papers, and experimental research that address the critical intersection of accessibility and digitality.

Topics of Interest Include (but are not limited to):

• AI and accessibility: from AI-driven assistive technologies to addressing biases in AI systems that impact people with disabilities
• Accessibility and the metaverse: ensuring inclusive virtual and augmented realities
• Game accessibility: designing accessible experiences for all players
• Digital education and accessibility: removing barriers in online learning
• Inclusive design methods and tools for user research
• Accessibility in everyday digital tools, interfaces, and services
• The social and ethical implications of inclusion/exclusion from the digital world

We encourage submissions from researchers, designers, technologists, policymakers, and advocates working toward a more inclusive digital future. Join us in shaping the conversation on accessibility and ensuring that no one is left behind in the digital age.

Chairs: Mattia Thibault (Tampere University), Leighton Evans (Swansea University)

The intersection of the digital and the urban is evolving rapidly, shaping new ways of living, working, and playing in our cities. As ’smart city’ technologies become more embedded in urban life, critical questions arise: What futures are we building? Who benefits from digital urbanisation? How can we ensure cities remain playful, inclusive, and sustainable spaces for diverse communities?

The Future of Smart Cities track explores these themes to investigate emerging digital technologies in urban environments. We critically assess the promises and limitations of "smart" urbanism, shifting focus toward agency, participation, play, and innovation in digital city-making. We encourage perspectives that challenge, rethink, and extend the role of technology in shaping urban experiences.

We welcome interdisciplinary contributions on topics including, but not limited to:

• Playable and Experiential Cities: urban gamification, playable media in public spaces, digital placemaking, interactive urban storytelling
• Critical Perspectives on Smart Cities: post-smart urbanism, algorithmic governance, surveillance and control
• Emerging Urban Ecologies: AI-driven urbanism, robot-human interaction, digital twins, Internet of Animals
• Community and Participation: bottom-up digital projects, co-creation and civic engagement, citizen science in urban contexts
• Sustainable and Ethical Urban Technologies: climate-adaptive infrastructures, sustainable digital cities, ethics of urban AI

We also welcome contributions focusing on this year’s special theme: “Cities and Resistance”. From civil rights movements to hackable cities, the urban space has often been at the centre of political acts of disobedience and defiance. In a moment when governments around the world seem to become increasingly authoritarian, we encourage submissions that look into the connections between resistance and the urban.

We particularly encourage submissions that push the boundaries of existing research, present speculative or experimental approaches, or engage with the intersections of urban technology, play, and community in novel ways.

Chairs: Zampeta Legaki (Tampere University), Daniel Fernández Galeote (Tampere University), Kostas Karpouzis (Panteion University)

As the pace at which humans create and consume data increases, the recent disruption caused by widely available artificial intelligence (AI) has made this growth even more exponential. This technological trend could enhance our perspective on how we look at the world, how we understand it, and how we can forecast its future. However, given the vast amounts of data generated in parallel to human technological progress, society is faced with the challenge of transforming a world full of data into a data-driven world. In this context, games and other engaging ways to interact with data (through interactive systems, either computer-based or analog) can provide motivating, insightful, and potentially transformative experiences so that this data-driven world has a purpose: to do good.

But what do we mean by good? Here, to do good means to engage (with) data for the flourishing of people and our planet. We may raise awareness, foster understanding, and support well-informed decision-making about current major societal challenges, including health and wellbeing; food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, water research, and the bioeconomy; secure, clean and efficient energy; smart, green and integrated transport; climate and pro-environmental action and resource efficiency; inclusive, innovative and reflective societies; protecting freedom, security, and at-risk populations; and ethics, both in research and in data-based practice.

This track welcomes contributions that focus on persuasive technologies, human-computer interaction, and strategies (analog or digital) that aim to support public understanding, engagement, or dissemination of societal challenges (e.g., data-driven strategies, playful methodologies), and/or are related to the Sustainable Development Goals.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Data for good, data for change
• Information systems and data visualization for social and planetary challenges
• Information design, data journalism, and data activism related to sustainability
• Prototypes, applications, and playful and gameful approaches and design for social change
• Artificial intelligence (AI) for good: Human interaction with sustainable AI

Chairs: Daria Dayter (Tampere University) and Nina Markl (University of Essex)

We invite contributions for the panel Linguistic Horizons, which explores the interactional dimensions of linguistics and their impact on both linguistic theory and human-computer interaction. This panel seeks to highlight the role of interaction in shaping meaning, structure, and technological applications, bridging human-computer interaction, computational linguistics and natural language processing, discourse analysis, pragmatics, conversation analysis, sociophonetics.

We welcome submissions addressing topics including, but not limited to:

• How interaction shapes linguistic structures and meaning in human communication
• Multimodal interaction: speech, gesture, and text in human-machine conversations
• Social and cultural aspects of interaction in computational linguistics
• Pragmatics, discourse strategies, and their computational modeling
• Sociophonetics in user interfaces: adaptation to speaker variation, accents, and social identity
• Applications of linguistic interaction research in NLP, conversational AI, and UX design
• Large language models (LLMs) and interaction: dialogue coherence, turn-taking, and pragmatic challenges

We encourage interdisciplinary approaches that integrate linguistic insights with computational, cognitive, or social perspectives. Contributions may include theoretical reflections, empirical studies, or applied research, in the format of full papers, pictorials, posters, or demos.

Full text should be submitted by May 2 via [submission portal/email] (submission starting April 8). For page length and formatting information, please see the conference page: https://www.mindtrek.org/academic-mindtrek-2025/ All accepted papers, pictorials, workshops, demonstrations, and posters will be published in the ACM Digital Library under the International Conference Proceedings Series (ICPS). Please note that ACM has moved to full Open Access model under which Full papers (including pictorials as an alternative to text-based papers) are required to pay the APC fee. For any inquiries about the track, contact daria.dayter@tuni.fi and nina.markl@essex.ac.uk

We look forward to your contributions!

Chairs: Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk (Tampere University), Ahmet Börütecene (Linköping University), Renee Noortman

With recent rapid developments in human-computer interaction, we are now facing emerging technologies which will have major impacts on humanity, potentially dramatically altering our ways of living. Technologies that once were the domain of science fiction, such as intimate technologies, brain-machine interfaces, body augmentations, circular economies and artificial companions, are now here, or on the proximate horizon. These emerging technologies promise exciting opportunities for humankind, but they come with many challenges and might lead to massive societal, cultural and individual paradigm shifts. Understanding the impacts of these
emerging technologies is remarkably challenging with conventional HCI methods such as user tests, interviews or quantitative analysis. Because these technologies are still emerging it is not possible to directly observe their impacts on society.

Design Fiction, Speculative Design or Critical Design have emerged as methods to explore possible futures and grapple with social, cultural, political and environmental challenges of emerging technologies. These methods create fictional and speculative worlds oriented around proximate futures of technology allowing researchers to contemplate the consequences and possibilities of new technologies. Speculative methods allow us to better understand the opportunities, pitfalls, and dangers of new technologies, and shape new futures. Speculative and critical methods help us to think rigorously, systematically and playfully about possible futures, and propose alternatives to the status quo. Therefore, our aim with this track is to create a venue for research projects which adopt less conventional methods including design fiction, pastiche scenarios, speculative research or critical design and in the long term become a frontier publication avenue for such research projects.

All papers that will be submitted to this track should have relevance to methods such as design fiction, speculative or critical design. Thus, although submissions may include a variety of methods, they MUST include a section that critically engages with the related research by methods, approaches and tools such as fictional abstracts, fictional prototypes, speculative design proposals, diegetic prototypes, experiential futures, or pastiche scenarios. Accordingly, we do not have a clear boundary on the topics we accept, however, to give an example, some of the topics that are of relevance to this track include:

• Body-integrated or Intimate Technologies
• Brain-Computer Interfaces
• Techno-Spiritual Studies
• Alternative forms/conceptions of intelligence
• Afrofuturism and Black Futuring
• Critical Feminist Perspectives and Feminist Futuring
• Indigenous Futurism
• Posthuman Subjectivities
• Dystopia and Utopia Studies
• Politics of race, class, gender, and ability in imagined futures
• Altered States of Consciousness
• Transhuman and Posthuman Technologies
• Robotic Agents & Artificial Intelligence
• Habitation of Space
• Solarpunk, Steampunk, Cyberpunk

If you are unfamiliar with the methods mentioned in this track but still would like to submit your research, we recommend a few readings that can lead to a successful submission to this track. Moreover, these methods can help researchers to form novel perspectives to engage with their topics. Therefore, we expect submissions from all fields and encourage authors to engage with the fictitious, speculative and critical design methods.

If you have questions, please contact oguz.buruk@tuni.fi

READINGS:

Erete, S., Rankin, Y., & Thomas, J. (2023). A method to the madness: Applying an intersectional analysis of structural oppression and power in HCI and design. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 30(2), 1-45.

Blythe, M. (2014, April). Research through design fiction: narrative in real and imaginary abstracts. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 703-712).

Lazem, S., Adamu, M. S., Abdrabou, Y., Muashekele, C., Erete, S., Thomas, J., … & Peters, A. (2023, November). What if?.. Fabulating African HCI Futures within the Veil of HCI. In Proceedings of the 4th African Human Computer Interaction Conference (pp. 295-299).

Baumer, E. P., Blythe, M., & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2020, July). Evaluating Design Fiction: The Right Tool for the Job. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 1901-1913).

Tanenbaum, T. J., Tanenbaum, K., & Wakkary, R. (2012, May). Steampunk as design fiction. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1583-1592).

Bardzell, J., & Bardzell, S. (2013, April). What is" critical" about critical design?. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 3297-3306).

Muller, M., Bardzell, J., Cheon, E., Su, N. M., Baumer, E. P., Fiesler, C., … & Blythe, M. (2020, April). Understanding the past, present, and future of design fictions. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-8).

Lindtner, S., Bardzell, S., & Bardzell, J. (2016, May). Reconstituting the utopian vision of making: HCI after technosolutionism. In Proceedings of the 2016 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1390-1402).

Chairs: Juho Hamari (Tampere University) and Benedikt Morschheuser (University of Bamberg)

Games and Gamification represent one of the most prominent areas of contemporary development socially, economically, culturally and reach far beyond their original leisure permeating various aspects of everyday life, reshaping language, fashion, music, education, work, mobility, creativity, and even political and economic structures. Consequently, the continuously evolving research field on games is multifaceted and increasingly transdisciplinary, often serving as a pioneering and inspiring source of innovation for other domains and fields.

The central aim of this track at the Academic Mindtrek conference is to provide a platform for emerging and visionary research contributions that advance the field and extend its impact beyond traditional boundaries.

Thus, in this track, we welcome the latest research related to games, gaming, and game culture. We invite papers on, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Design (interaction, mechanics, interfaces, aesthetics…)
• Evaluation (game experience, playability, usability…)
• Development (tools, engines, AI, audiovisual…)
• Business (digital distribution, crowdfunding, revenue models, virtual goods, online gambling, game analytics…)
• Platforms (online, social, mobile, desktop, VR/AR/XR…)
• eSports (culture, streaming, fandom…)
• Hybrid games (digital-physical, board games, toys…)
• Players (demographics, inclusivity, accessibility…)
• Indie (innovation, modding, transgressive…)
• Content (content generations, user-generated content, graphics, sound…)
• Challenges (Toxicity, cheating, radicalization, dark pattern…)

Beyond Games and cultures around them, applied games and gamification is increasingly shaping human practice outside the sphere of games themselves via motivational and engaging design that aims to promote changes in human motivations, attitudes, and behaviors. Gamification has become an umbrella concept that, to varying degrees, includes and encompasses other related technological developments such as serious games, game-based learning, gameful design, exergames & quantified-self, games with a purpose/human-based computation games, alternate reality games, and persuasive technology.

Topics in this field may involve:

• Users (engagement, experience, user types…)
• Education (gamification in education, serious games, game-based learning…)
• Media (streaming, social media and gamification, gamification in journalism & media…)
• Commerce (marketing, business models, consumer behavior…)
• Work (organizational gamification, gameful work, gamification in leadership, playbour…)
• Technology (gamification in engineering, software development, playful and gameful robotics, IoT…)
• Health (quantified self, games & gamification for sports and health, mental health…)
• Culture (ludification, history of games and gamification, gamification in society, social structures, storification…)
• Environment/Climate (bioeconomy, climate-change engagement, circularity, human/forest interactions…)
• Governance (democracy, participation, law enforcement, e-justice, cyber forensics, urban planning, smart and playable cities, surveillance…)
• Design (design principles, design methods, designing gamification, gamification artifacts, playful and speculative design…)
• Theories/concepts/methods (contributions to science around gamification)

Chairs: Nannan Xi (Tampere University), Katya Krylova (Tampere University) and Marc Riar (IÉSEG School of Management)

With the rapid development and maturity of innovative information and computing technologies, the vision of an alternate and decentrally organized digital world has arisen – often referred to as the “metaverse”. The ongoing debates and research initiatives have not yet fully concluded what exactly constitutes a – or the – metaverse but we know from research that virtual and hybrid reality formats, often summarized under the umbrella term “XR” (X can be replaced by any form of new reality), will play a dominant role. More specifically, concepts such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) will provide access to Metaverse- environments. Within these environments, cryptocurrencies, digital twins, avatars, digital identities, and new social/legal systems will likely play important roles in distinguishing the metaverse concept from digital environments we know today.

On a broader level, little is known about the general “nature” of the metaverse concept (e.g., how different players define and evaluate it or how it can impact societies at large). In contrast to the idea of the metaverse, XR technologies have been on the market for several years and they provide multiple opportunities for research that include, but are not limited to, access, usability, comfort, functionality, interactivity, vividness, privacy, ethical and legal issues, and unexpected adverse outcomes. Such hurdles and concerns warrant researchers’ attention in view of prevailing private control over technologies and the lag in legislative regulation of AI and XR development and use. At the same time, as these technologies hold new opportunities for businesses, communities and creatives, we invite contributors to reflect on how a metaverse can redefine, among other things, economic, business, political, artistic and educational practices, and what new forms of sociality and agency can emerge from it.

We encourage submissions from any disciplinary background that uses any research approach. Authors of accepted papers in this track are also invited to submit an expanded version of their papers to the AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction (THCI) after the conference.

Topics of interest to this track include but are not limited to:

• Usability: e.g. design, interface, affordances and evaluation
• Adoption: e.g. acceptance, usage, and satisfaction
• Dark side: e.g. challenges, risks, and ethical concerns
• Experience: e.g. affect, enjoyment, playfulness, presence, immersion, embodiment, flow, interactivity, and vividness
• Information and knowledge: e.g. cognitive skill, learning performance, training, information processing, exchange of ideas, and knowledge management
• Social interaction: e.g. crowdsourcing, grassroots activism, team and community building, co-creation, collaboration, competition, and social capital
• Organizational system: e.g. decision making, strategic management, leadership, innovation, and communication
• Value and outcomes: e.g. individual wellbeing, self-efficacy, empowerment, trust, pro-environmental outcomes, sustainability, human rights, and cultural aspects
• Power structures, governance and regulation: e.g. centralized control by governments, technology corporations and financial structures vs decentralized community run platforms and application

Chairs: Ferran Altarriba Bertran (Escola Universitària ERAM), Sebastian Prost (City St George’s, University of London), Samuel Chovanec (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design)

This track aims to bring together research exploring how to design interactive technologies that support, encourage, and inform human-nature interaction. We welcome a broad range of research topics, projects, and methodologies as long as they inquire into the potential of technology to enhance people’s experiences of and relationships with(in) nature. We are particularly interested in works that transcend the bounds of techno-solutionism; that is, works that explore how technology could contribute to enriching human-nature interactions beyond productivist or otherwise utilitarian frames, thus embracing the importance of alternative values such as joy, fun, care, or multi-species kinship. Overall, we intend to stimulate a conversation around the potential of computation to support future human-nature interactions that are experientially rich, socio-culturally meaningful, ecologically caring, fun and/or a source of awe or joy.

We welcome papers and pictorials, as well as workshops, posters, and demonstrations representing various research approaches and methodologies. Due to the track’s theme and focus, we expect the conversation to have a slight orientation toward HCI, interaction design, and design research. However, we also welcome submissions from other disciplines such as social sciences or the arts, e.g. in the form of research or artistic work centered on the impact of tech on people’s relationship with nature. We invite a range of different submission types, including theoretical works, argumentation essays, empirical studies, design cases, annotated portfolios and pictorials, experiences, artworks, and methods papers.

In summary, this track’s topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Technology designs and artefacts aimed at enriching human-nature connections in playful, pedagogical, caring, and/or more-than-humanely sensitive ways
• Novel design and research methods for human-nature interaction, including more-than-human and participatory approaches
• Critical, speculative, and/or theoretical explorations into the impact of technology on human-nature interactions, including sustainability, ecological justice, and nature-related future-making
• Works that explore the intersection between human-nature interactions and other domains, e.g. food practices, mental and physical health, education, etc.

Chairs: Sumita Sharma (University of Oulu), Yixiao Wang (Georgia Institute of Technology), Grace Eden (University of Tartu, Estonia), and Biju Thankachan (Tampere Universities, Tampere)

Our lives are more technology rich than ever. From Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies that impact our lives in various ways, such as, LLMs disrupting how we work, think, write, and imagine. To robots, rapidly spreading to all spheres of life and taking on more roles in society, such as massive industrial automation to applications in education, medicine, and households. However, Robots and AI in our everyday lives are not without concerns and consequences.

For this track, we welcome papers focusing on all things related to Robots and AI!

This includes how various demographics of people interact with robots and AI in their everyday lives, the impact of such interactions on people, community, and society at large, the ethical and societal issues that arise, and also explorations of newer ways of interactions.

We especially encourage papers that present explorations, experiments, and/or field studies focusing on AI-embedded robotics that are socially interactive/intelligent.

This track is a great opportunity to initiate a multidisciplinary discussion on the key challenges and opportunities of human-robot-interactions and human-machine(AI) interactions on theoretical and practical levels.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Sciences
• Human-robot communication and interactions
• Ethical perspectives to Robots and/or AI (data privacy, security, trustworthiness, transparency, fairness, accountability)
• User-centred and machine-centred design: theories, methods, frameworks
• UX in Robots and/or AI

Chairs: Muhterem Dindar (Tampere University) and Mohammad Khalil (University of Bergen)

Rapid technological advancements have fastened uptaking of digital tools and environments in the educational landscape. Games, simulations, extended reality mediums, Artificial Intelligence, and internet-enabled platforms have been increasingly used for teaching and learning within and outside the schools. The challenges in designing effective, efficient and enjoyable learning experiences with digital technologies have drawn the attention of scholars from a broad range of fields including psychology, learning sciences, and computer science. This track provides an opportunity for the researchers to partake in transdisciplinary discussions and collaborations on designing and implementing context-aware, social, adaptive, personalized, and playful technologies for education.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Gamified/Game-based Learning
• Virtual, Mixed and Augmented Reality Applications in Education
• Teaching and Learning with Artificial Intelligence
• Learning Analytics • Human-Computer Interaction in Educational Technology
• Online Learning Platforms (e.g. MOOCS, and video conferencing systems)
• Mobile Learning Systems
• Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning
• Data and Methodological Issues in Digital Education