Collaboration at Work and Play -- Understanding Interaction in Ubiquitous Guerrilla Performances in Playful Arenas -- Towards the Development of CSCW: An Ethnographic Approach -- An Evaluation of Workspace Awareness in Collaborative, Gesture-based Diagramming Tools -- Layers -- An Empirical Comparison of Transparency on One and Two Layer Displays -- User Interface Overloading: A Novel Approach for Handheld Device Text Input -- What is Interaction For? -- Designing for Expert Information Finding Strategies -- Supporting User Decisions in Travel and Tourism -- Constructing a Player-Centred Definition of Fun for Video Games Design -- Cradle to Grave -- The Usability of Handwriting Recognition for Writing in the Primary Classroom -- BMX Bandits: The Design of an Educational Computer Game for Disaffected Youth -- Tales, Tours, Tools, and Troupes: A Tiered Research Method to Inform Ubiquitous Designs for the Elderly -- Designs for Lives -- The Re-design of a PDA-based System for Supporting People with Parkinson’s Disease -- Designing for Social Inclusion: Computer Mediation of Trust Relations Between Citizens and Public Service Providers -- Decentralized Remote Diagnostics: A Study of Diagnostics in the Marine Industry -- Searching, Searching, Searching -- A First Empirical Study of Direct Combination in a Ubiquitous Environment -- The Geometry of Web Search -- Supplemental Navigation Tools for Website Navigation — A Comparison of User Expectations and Current Practice -- Papers in Context -- Context matters: Evaluating Interaction Techniques with the CIS Model -- Enhancing Contextual Analysis to Support the Design of Development Tools -- A Context-aware Locomotion Assistance Device for the Blind -- Interaction Behaviour (or “Roy Recommends”) -- Evaluating Usability and Challenge during Initial and Extended Use of Children’s Computer Games -- Comparing Interaction in the Real World and CAVE Virtual Environments -- In Search of Salience: A Response-time and Eye-movement Analysis of Bookmark Recognition.

This volume contains the full papers presented at HCI 2004, the 18th Annual Conference of the British HCI Group, a specialist group of the British Computer Society. People and Computers XVIII includes leading edge discussions outlining the latest research results and novel systems from the foremost research and development groups and laboratories throughout the UK and Europe. Themes covered include mobile devices, multimedia and hypermedia, wireless applications, collaborative working, graphics and virtual reality. The papers presented in this volume aim to have a strong industrial and commercial focus including contributions from leading figures from both the research and business sectors. This year’s theme, Design for Life, focuses on quality applications that make a difference to real people such as: Interactive technology supporting work, leisure, health, education and communities; universal design that recognizes diverse user groups, including younger and older users, and wider global markets; sustainable development.