Understanding "cool" in human-computer interaction research and design

Recently a discussion has been initiated on what is cool and how HCI can use the concept in practice and design for it. This paper aims to provide a better understanding on cool as a concept from a theoretical and a practical perspective. From the theoretical perspective, we selected the HCI papers that focus on cool and we present their core findings. Then we performed a literature review on the concept of cool and we have identified its fundamental characteristics, through cool personalities and cool styles. From a practical perspective, we have studied how other domains have managed to successfully produce cool objects and we provide four suggestions on how to design cool digital artifacts. Finally, in this paper we also identify possible research directions in relation to cool, which if we manage to address we can increase our understanding on what is user experience and this can lead to the creation of better digital artifacts. Overall, this paper is a contribution towards researching and designing for cool, a research topic, which we believe it will initiate fruitful discussions in the HCI field.