Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). 1073-0516/2023/1-ART1 $15.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3577015 ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. "More Than a Cliché": Experiencing Hybrid Gifting in the Wild JOCELYN SPENCE The University of Nottingham, UK BORIANA KOLEVA The University of Nottingham, UK STEVE BENFORD The University of Nottingham, UK DIMITRIOS DARZENTAS Napier University, UK MARTIN FLINTHAM The University of Nottingham, UK KEVIN GLOVER The University of Nottingham, UK HANNE WAGNER The University of Nottingham, UK REBECCA GIBSON The University of Nottingham, UK EMILY THORN The University of Nottingham, UK Gifting is socially and economically important. Studies of gifting physical objects have revealed motivations, values, and the tensions between them, while HCI research has revealed weaknesses of digital gifting and explored possibilities of hybrid gifting. We report an ېin the wild ۑstudy of a hybrid chocolate gift deployed as a commercial product. Interviews reveal the experiences of receivers and givers, as well as the producerۑs friction points and tangible benefits. We reveal how in hybrid gifts the digital elevates the physical while the physical grounds the digital. We discuss how hybrid gifts bridge the tension between receiver-preference and relationship- signalling motivations, the need to further strengthen the exchange and reveal stages of hybrid gifting, and to manage the privacy of sensitive personal messages. We propose to extend the concept of hybrid wrapping to include a finer-grained interleaving of digital into complex packaging and multi-layered wrappings to create more holistic gifting experiences. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing~Human computer interaction (HCI)~HCI design and evaluation methods~Field studies • Human-centered computing~Human computer interaction (HCI)~HCI theory, concepts and models • Human-centered computing~Interaction design~Empirical studies in interaction design Additional Keywords and Phrases: Giving, Gifting, Hybrid gifting, Consumers, Producers, Relationships, Exchange, Reveal, Safety net.