Shifting Design Perspectives: Touch, Co-Location, and Sharing Objects during the Pandemic

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper presents the results of exploratory interview study with 18 participants to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed people’s 14 attitudes around engaging in touch, co-location, and sharing physical objects. 

Overall, the study is interesting and are targeting important topic, but there are several issues need to be addressed. First, in the background section, there are several important related work are missing and the included work is not thoroughly discussed or compared with this study. Second, for the results, the presentation is not clear enough to understand the participants' opinion.  

Author Response

We thank the reviewers for their careful and thoughtful comments. Based on the reviewers’ feedback, we have significantly revised our manuscript. We respond to each of their comments in details below.

Reviewer 1 

Overall, the study is interesting and are targeting important topic, but there are several issues need to be addressed. First, in the background section, there are several important related work are missing and the included work is not thoroughly discussed or compared with this study. 

Thank you for this feedback. We edited our background and discussion sections so that our findings and contributions are in conversation with related work.

Second, for the results, the presentation is not clear enough to understand the participants' opinion.  

We edited our text throughout to more clearly call out what is participants’ opinion vs. our analysis, as well as being clearer about how they illustrate the themes.

Reviewer 2 Report

 This manuscript presented an inductive thematic analysis, and accordingly analyzed subjects’ interviews for exploring the post-COVID changes in peoples’ behaviors towards interpersonal physical interactions. The study identified four themes of safety, co-location, appreciation and aspects of amplification in missing human touch feelings; and provides insights in context to the existing works on simulating human touch technologies.  It has been an interesting read, through a good organization of sections with appealing information and topic of study. But the coherence in the flow of manuscript should be improved, and contributions should be stated clearly. Other comments that should be resolved before consideration for its publications are as follows;

1.       The formatting needs to be revamped throughout the manuscript as per journal guidelines.

2.       Improper referencing for citations, which is also quite disruptive to the flow of manuscript.

3.       The description for the relevance of citations or any introduction for methods in those cited articles is often not provided along with reference numbers within the text.

4.       The captions for figures presented in the manuscript are not provided.

5.       The opening to the introduction section is unconventional, please check if that is intentional. Also, Q1 and P8 should be replaced to indicate the quotes from interviewer 1 and participant 8, if they are to be used before introducing the relevant abbreviations in the manuscript.

6.       It is suggested to re-check for the proper use of grammar and punctuations.

7.       The manuscript presents some inferences and deductions based on interviews with the participants. Therefore, it may also be helpful to include some background on interviewers and the research team members.

8.       The paragraphs sometimes revolve abruptly from findings the subjects interview transcript or qualitative feedback in Section 4, without any indication and only hints at the end of paragraph (Quotations marks or mention of interview transcript in the preceding paragraph), which may be confusing for readers.

9.        In my opinion, the authors should put emphasis on the inductive thematic analysis, and put more focus on their contributions as per its steps. Otherwise, the contributions seem vague.

Author Response

We thank the reviewers for their careful and thoughtful comments. Based on the reviewers’ feedback, we have significantly revised our manuscript. We respond to each of their comments in details below.

Reviewer 2 

The coherence in the flow of manuscript should be improved, and contributions should be stated clearly. Other comments that should be resolved before consideration for its publications are as follows; 

1. The formatting needs to be revamped throughout the manuscript as per journal guidelines.

We apologize for the formatting errors caused by the automatic conversion from our original non-MTI submission format to the MTI format. We have carefully corrected all the formatting errors according to the journal guidelines.

2. Improper referencing for citations, which is also quite disruptive to the flow of manuscript. 

We apologize for the reference errors also caused by the automatic formatting. We have corrected all the improper citations. 

3. The description for the relevance of citations or any introduction for methods in those cited articles is often not provided along with reference numbers within the text.

In background and discussion sections, we made sure to more explicitly describe the relevance of cited work.

4. The captions for figures presented in the manuscript are not provided.

We added captions to the figures. We apologize for the missing figure captions. 

5. The opening to the introduction section is unconventional, please check if that is intentional. Also, Q1 and P8 should be replaced to indicate the quotes from interviewer 1 and participant 8, if they are to be used before introducing the relevant abbreviations in the manuscript.

We wanted to start the introduction with a quote by one of our participants. We edited the opening to the introduction appropriately. 

6. It is suggested to re-check for the proper use of grammar and punctuations.

We went through multiple proofreading for proper use of grammar and punctuations. Thank you for your patience. 

7. The manuscript presents some inferences and deductions based on interviews with the participants. Therefore, it may also be helpful to include some background on interviewers and the research team members.

Thank you for this suggestion. We added a new section 3.4 called, "Researcher Positionality" to describe our subjectivities and how we interpreted the transcript based on subjectivities.

8. The paragraphs sometimes revolve abruptly from findings the subjects interview transcript or qualitative feedback in Section 4, without any indication and only hints at the end of paragraph (Quotations marks or mention of interview transcript in the preceding paragraph), which may be confusing for readers.

Thank you for pointing this out. We edited section 4 throughout to make clearer connection between our findings and participants’ quotes.

9. In my opinion, the authors should put emphasis on the inductive thematic analysis, and put more focus on their contributions as per its steps. Otherwise, the contributions seem vague.

Thank you for this feedback. We edited the section 3 Methods to include more explicit descriptions about how each step in the inductive analysis led to more fine tuned findings.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

No comments.