Designing immersive systems for professionals like radiologists, surgeons, or automotive designers is rarely the idealized co-creative journey imagined in design textbooks. These users are brilliant, time-starved, and allergic to anything that smells like a "pilot study." By the time you are ready to iterate, the device vendor has gone bankrupt, the procurement office has lost your Non-Disclosure Agreement, and the only consistent feedback is that "everything’s too slow." In this keynote, I draw on two decades of building XR systems in healthcare and industrial settings to explore what really happens when design meets reality. I will share war stories of failed prototypes, successful accidents, and the occasional triumph snatched from the jaws of logistical chaos. Along the way, I will reflect on why participatory design often collapses under real-world constraints and how user-centered dogma can be counterproductive, especially when dealing with users who do not want to be "centered" at all. We’ll also look inward, at our own community: the well-meaning but neo-Luddite designers who distrust automation, avoid technical detail, and cling to post-its like life rafts. As XR matures, we must develop more resilient, adaptive design practices: ones that accept asymmetric collaboration, unreliable stakeholders, and the inconvenient truth that sometimes we must design despite the user, not just for them.

Participatory Design (PD) emphasizes mutual learning, shared authorship, and the collaborative shaping of technology with those most affected by it. However, implementing PD in highly regulated and fast-paced environments like pharmaceutical manufacturing presents significant challenges due to compliance constraints, limited stakeholder availability, and time pressure. This paper presents two case studies—one involving a Conversational AI assistant, and the other an Augmented Reality-based learning tool—conducted within a pharmaceutical company to explore how PD values can persist under such constraints. While full-fledged co-design was not feasible, expert consultation and assessment were central in shaping design decisions. We reflect on the tensions between participatory ideals and industrial realities, identifying training contexts as potential spaces for human-centered innovation. 

Recruiting medical professionals for user studies remains a persistent challenge in visualization research, largely due to time constraints and differing expectations around research participation. This paper reflects on the process of recruiting and engaging clinicians, biomedical professionals, and senior medical students for the design and evaluation of a clinical decision-support visualization system. Despite initial interest, challenges such as scheduling difficulties and varying levels of participant engagement prompted a shift toward more flexible strategies. These included collaborating with medical students as intermediaries, offering asynchronous study formats, and designing short, focused sessions to better fit within clinical routines. We highlight the importance of involving domain experts early to guide requirement gathering and task design, as well as the value of iterative, weekly meetings for refining visualizations and system usability. By sharing practical lessons, what worked, what didn’t, and what could be improved, this paper contributes actionable insights for researchers aiming to conduct user-centered design and evaluation in healthcare contexts.

Research studies involving human participants present challenges, including strict ethical considerations, participant recruitment, costs, and many human factors. While human-computer interaction researchers are familiar with these challenges and current solutions, expert-centred studies can be even more challenging in ways that researchers may not anticipate. This issue is particularly important as research grants are increasingly based on practical and real-world problems, which necessitate close collaboration with experts. In this paper, we reflect on and discuss the challenges, solutions, and specific requirements that arose during our expert-centred studies conducted over three years of a PhD study exploring immersive forensic investigation.

Recruiting medical students for user studies is a challenging task. They usually have overflowing schedules and often limited experience using advanced prototype applications, which entails complex scheduling challenges and extended introduction and training periods. Among potential solutions to this challenge is the recruitment of engineering students to model of medical students' skills and knowledge. We believe that wider, more easily accessible pools of study subjects may effectively model more valid - albeit less available - subjects, particularly in early validation and testing studies in preparation for more detailed and mature on-the-field experiments. This is because, through careful and controlled transfer of knowledge and mental models, the gap between medical and engineering students can be effectively bridged. In this paper, we delve into some of the pros and cons of recruiting among the latter students rather than the former, and propose an approach based on estimating to what degree one can leverage engineering students as suitable mental models (ESAMMs). Additionally, we advocate for the need of a more systematic analysis and comparison of these two populations, especially in the context of XR for medical education.

Air traffic control is an example of safety-critical domain where operators' decision making is crucial for enhancing safety. Visualization tools can help air traffic controllers not just to maintain safety of flights but to manage traffic complexity. Our recent research in visual analytics have demonstrated clear benefits for identifying controllers mapping patterns and also for supporting them in critical decision-making tasks i.e. conflict detection and resolution and complexity management. Yet the ultimate effectiveness of our research hinges on the collaborative engagement of the critical workforce—air traffic controllers—in their co-design and evaluation. In this position paper, we share insights gathered from design and evaluation studies conducted with more than 30 fully-licensed and operational air traffic controllers to propose a principled approach for meaningful application domain expert participation in work pattern analysis and visualization design for ATC. We present the unique challenges these operators face, and outline methods and outcomes of successful co-design processes resulting a forward-looking research agenda.

Collaborating with highly skilled professionals in participatory design of machine learning and visualization tools presents unique challenges. This paper reflects on interdisciplinary projects involving medicine, biology, and the social sciences, where machine learning was introduced to support complex data analysis and segmentation tasks. Despite initial enthusiasm, many efforts were hindered by unrealistic expectations, unclear roles, limited stakeholder availability, and evolving project scopes. Through these experiences, we identify recurring barriers to successful end-user development. This includes overestimation of ML capabilities and fragile team structures. We propose practical strategies such as lightweight review rituals and structured documentation to improve resilience and alignment in co-design workflows. These insights contribute to ongoing conversations about effective collaboration and sustainable design practices with critical workforce participants.

This position paper reflects on experiences from TellUs – The Talking Planet, a participatory design and outreach project developed by five leading Swedish science centers. The project centers around a portable, interactive spherical installation that uses storytelling, conversation, and data visualization to make STEM topics engaging and accessible for children aged 7–12, particularly in communities with low socio-economic status. Through visits to schools and learning spaces, the sphere invites hands-on exploration and dialogue. As national coordinators of the project, the authors work across institutional and disciplinary boundaries, aligning content development and design processes among diverse professional groups, including educators, engineers, researchers, and content creators. While the context differs from traditional high-skilled technical professions, many of the same challenges appear: time constraints, conflicting epistemologies, and the negotiation of authority in co-creative processes. The paper argues that effective participatory design relies on competence-based trust, a forgiving environment, and an explorative mindset where insights emerge through iteration and reflection. In this context, storytelling is presented not as an opposition to scientific fact, but the form through which facts come alive. Crafting narratives that resonate with audiences requires deep understanding, editorial judgment, and communicative skill. The authors address the common tension between storytelling and science, noting that in many science center contexts, storytelling is perceived with ambivalence. Drawing on the work of Mieke Bal, Jerome Bruner, and John H. Falk, they argue that narrative is essential to meaning-making and long-term memory in informal learning, but also powerful triggers for curiosity and learning. The paper concludes that trust, flexibility, and narrative sensibility are not only central to working in interdisciplinary educational settings, but are also transferable to participatory design involving high-skilled professionals in more regulated domains.

Despite the cultural ubiquity of digital games, many people remain excluded from participation for various reasons, such as lack of interest, and cost and unfamiliarity barriers. This paper argues that to broaden the inclusivity and relevance of digital games, we must design with and for non-gamers and gamers with less experience. It describes recent work from HCI, accessibility, and game studies to show how non-participation is socially constructed, and propose a method of engaging non-players and low-experience players in design using visual prompts to elicit their assumptions, preferences, and expectations. This approach offers a low-barrier path for co-design that surfaces values often invisible in conventional game development. The goal is to reframe the boundaries of game design and propose a more inclusive path forward for play, participation, and interaction.

Proficient braille-typing adults are rare and usually engaged in professional work. Engaging them in text-entry studies presents unique logistical and ethical challenges. In our study, eleven legally blind adults participated in multi-session typing tasks across three braille-compatible devices. Recruitment and participation were influenced by factors including employment, transportation, duration, and participants’ desire for hands-on experience with new technology. Careful design of informed consent procedures, attention to accessibility, and performance-based incentives facilitated trust and motivation. Participant feedback highlighted the importance of balancing experimental control with community engagement, and suggested that participants can act as collaborators rather than passive subjects. These findings provide practical guidance for future research and underscore the need to integrate accessibility considerations into study design and protocol development.