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In 1966, anthropologist Edward Hall coined the term "proxemics." Proxemics is an area of study that identifies the culturally dependent ways in which people use interpersonal distance to understand and mediate their interactions with others. Recent research has demonstrated the use of proxemics in human-computer interaction (HCI) for supporting users' explicit and implicit interactions in a range of uses, including remote office collaboration, home entertainment, and games. One promise of proxemics is the realization of context-aware environments, which have been extensively pursued since Marc Weiser's seminal paper, "The computer for the 21st century," written in 1991. However, the potential of proxemics in HCI is still underexplored and many research questions remain unanswered. With the growing interest in using proxemics, we organized the Dagstuhl Seminar 13452 on the topic. "Proxemics in Human-Computer Interaction," was held from November 3-8, 2013, and it brought together established experts and young researchers from fields particularly relevant to Proxemic Interactions, including computer science, social science, cognitive science, and design. Through an open keynote, mini talks, brainstorming, and discussion in breakout sessions, seminar attendees identified and discussed challenges and developed directions for future research of proxemics in HCI.

The Graphical User Interface (GUI) – although developed in research laboratories in the late 1970s – is still the dominant interaction paradigm in Information Visualization. We propose a new interaction paradigm called Blended Interaction. It combines ideas of Embodied Cognition, Multimodal Interaction, Reality-Based Interaction & Ubiquitous Computing. This is intended to stress that a single increase in the reality aspect of the interaction cannot go far enough. The particular challenge – and from the user's standpoint, the key advantage – lies in a meaningful marriage between the tested real-world options and the digital world. As a minimum this marriage must exist on the levels of the interaction, communication, of the way we solve problems with conventional tools (workflows), and of the design of the space or the architecture of buildings and places. The digital world often offers entirely new possibilities and takes the form of interactive devices of various shapes but also of intelligent everyday objects (e.g. the 'Internet of things'). In our view, interaction concepts can indeed offer a new quality of interaction, but only when the design of the interaction includes all these domains at the same time and with equal weighting. We test the suitability of our ideas of Blended Interaction concepts by using specific application examples that are being worked on as part of current research projects. Our experiences show that this new interaction paradigm has also great potential for interacting with visualization. For example, we have developed multi-touch scatter plots & facet maps for tangible user interfaces supporting the searching & browsing in Digital Libraries. We have embedded different visualizations into a Zoomable Object-oriented Information Landscape (ZOIL), which supports our vision of using visualizations on different displays of different size at the same time. We have developed specific kind of search tokens that supports collaborative search activities. For example, we try to address the following research questions: * How can future interactive InfoVis tools look like, especially in the light of the idea Blended Interaction? * How can future interactive InfoVis tools benefit from Multi-Displays & Multimodal environments used by Multiple Users? * What are the specific design requirements for multi-touch visualizations? * How can we support the collaborative use visualization tools?