Landscapes, Long Tails and Digital Materialities: Implications for Mobile HCI Research

Mobile HCI is changing. From being about, for example, UI design for small devices, interaction via limited input modalities, and design for small screens, these important aspects of mobile HCI are now heavily interwoven in complex arrangements of computational devices, platforms and services. With a point of departure taken in these processes of current development, this paper sets out to describe and envision a research agenda for mobile HCI carefully crafted out in relation to three specific and recent developments in this field. More specifically, these strands of developments include the formation of new interaction landscapes, the long tail of interaction, and digital materialities. This paper presents the background of each followed by examples illustrating how these three manifest themselves in practice. With a point of departure taken in these three cornerstones a research agenda is presented followed by a discussion on the implications of this agenda for mobile HCI research.