Co-designing with families for environmental sustainability relies on participatory imagination, yet habitual family roles and uneven participation, especially between adults and young children, often constrain it. A second challenge is continuity: workshop relationships and embodied ways of working do not easily survive into the final design, where artefacts travel more readily than roles or interactional dynamics. We report on a nationally toured mixed-reality installation developed through applied-theatre-led co-design with families. Across three workshops and user testing, applied theatre methods supported families to co-create narratives, artefacts, and interactional roles that shaped the public event. We show how theatrical co-design can rebalance child–adult participation through playful status shifts, and how selected workshop dynamics can be re-staged within a public mixed-reality installation. We contribute a theatrical account of participatory design in which designers work not only with artefacts and ideas, but with roles, rhythms, authority, and the social conditions that support collective imagination.

We present a rehearsal-oriented system for creating responsive built environments during theatre devising workshops. The system connects bespoke sensing modules for gesture, position, and speech recognition to light and sound outputs through a visual no-code programming layer. It was developed, used, and refined across six workshops with eight professional performance-makers, where participants created light-and-sound scores, gesture- and position-triggered scenes, responsive architectures, participatory prototypes, and a multi-room scratch performance. Rather than presenting a production-ready show-control platform, this demo focuses on how sensing and actuation can be made available as compositional materials during early-stage creative experimentation for immersive theatrical compositions. The system is designed to support quick configuration, visible mappings, and in-room testing, allowing performers to experiment with responsive spaces with minimal technical support. We describe the system architecture, its workshop use, and the practical conditions that helped integrate interactive sensing into embodied performance-making.

We report on a six-year collaboration with a small community organisation to develop and deploy a permanent physical / digital locative media experience as part on an ongoing community regeneration project. We describe how this unfolded over four phases: approach and pilot; public deployment; supporting subsequent community-led spin-off experiences; and planning legacy and technology handovers. The project was distinctive for being a Knowledge Exchange project in which we were approached and formally contracted by the community to deliver the digital technology, rather than instigating and leading a research project. We identify seven considerations for handing over technologies that combine both digital and physical elements to communities of stakeholders that encompass businesses, councils, and volunteers, and how this illuminates the unique strengths and weaknesses of Knowledge Exchange projects within the wider design research landscape.

This workshop uses the outputs of a two-year Research through Design project as a springboard for bringing together a community of researchers interested in Hybrid Gifting. We have discovered that the many creative and socio-psychological processes involved in choosing or making a gift inform a great deal about interactions with common digital technologies, especially when they are used to make a hybrid gift with both physical and digital components. This workshop will be a temporally extended opportunity to experience the full cycle of giving and receiving gifts, whether you use our outputs or prototypes or your own ideas, artworks, or design fictions. Let’s take this opportunity to use our research to celebrate and care for each other, and perhaps envision new ways of celebrating and caring for others.

Volunteering benefits recipients, volunteers, communities, and society, while digital technologies establish new opportunities for virtual volunteering. We describe how volunteers transitioned the UK's long-established Oxjam grassroots music festival online in response to the COVID pandemic, delivering a local pilot before scaling up nationwide. We adopt an infrastructural perspective to reveal how two teams of volunteers defined a flexible festival format, knitted together diverse technologies into a technical platform, and operated this to deliver the festival. We highlight the need for teams of volunteers to orchestrate both audience and performer trajectories through festivals. We argue for deliberately designing in volunteer labour rather than automating it out by translating traditional roles online while defining new digital ones. We propose to make these roles rewarding through a more social volunteer experience, including privileged backstage access. We highlight the challenges of using social media for such events, including complying with algorithmic policing of rights.

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 “in the wild” study of a hybrid chocolate gift deployed as a commercial product. Interviews reveal the experiences of receivers and givers, as well as the producer's 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.

Museums are interested in designing emotional visitor experiences to complement traditional interpretations. HCI is interested in the relationship between Affective Computing and Affective Interaction. We describe Sensitive Pictures, an emotional visitor experience co-created with the Munch art museum. Visitors choose emotions, locate associated paintings in the museum, experience an emotional story while viewing them, and self-report their response. A subsequent interview with a portrayal of the artist employs computer vision to estimate emotional responses from facial expressions. Visitors are given a souvenir postcard visualizing their emotional data. A study of 132 members of the public (39 interviewed) illuminates key themes: designing emotional provocations; capturing emotional responses; engaging visitors with their data; a tendency for them to align their views with the system's interpretation; and integrating these elements into emotional trajectories. We consider how Affective Computing can hold up a mirror to our emotions during Affective Interaction

HCI has recently increased its interest in the domains of museums and gifting. The former is often oriented primarily towards the past, while the latter is often oriented towards the future, in terms of anticipating the receiver’s reactions. Our article provides a sustained and well-evidenced new theoretical framework on the role of time-orientation on the design of forward-oriented (gifting) experiences in past-oriented (museum) settings. This Temporal Experience Design Framework develops from the analysis of two such studies, one smartphone app and one VR experience using passive haptics. Both interventions prompted the user to reflect on the past while planning a gift or donation for future consumption. We apply a novel combination of analyses to both projects using the lenses of conversational storytelling, performance, and human geography. Our analyses reveal the power of orienting users towards the past and the future – simultaneously – to enhance the present moment of a performative engagement. Our aim is to provide a conceptual framework that can help design researchers to identify, name, and understand how time-orientation can be used to enhance user and visitor experience. We also extrapolate design guidelines that we expect may be fruitful outside these contexts.

The global pandemic has driven musicians online. We report an ethnographic account of how two traditional folk clubs with little previous interest in digital platforms transitioned to online experiences. They followed very different approaches: one adapted their existing singaround format to video conferencing while the other evolved a weekly community-produced, pre-recorded show that could be watched together. However, despite their successes, participants ultimately remained unable to ‘sing in chorus’ due to network constraints. We draw on theories of liveness from performance studies to explain our findings, arguing that HCI might orientate itself to online liveness as being co-produced through rich participatory structures that dissolve traditional distinctions between live and recorded and performer and audience. We discuss how participants appropriated existing platforms to achieve this, but these in turn shaped their practices in unforeseen ways. We draw out implications for the design and deployment of future live performance platforms.

We reflect on two museum visiting experiences that adopted the strategy of interpersonalization in which one visitor creates an experience for another. In the Gift app, visitors create personal mini-tours for specific others. In Never let me go, one visitor controls the experience of another by sending them remote instructions as they follow them around the museum. By reflecting on the design of these experiences and their deployment in museums we show how interpersonalization can deliver engaging social visits in which visitors make their own interpretations. We contrast the approach to previous research in customization and algorithmic personalization. We reveal how these experiences relied on intimacy between pairs of visitors but also between visitors and the museum. We propose that interpersonalization requires museums to step-back to make space for interpretation, but that this then raises the challenge of how to reintroduce the museum’s own perspective. Finally, we articulate strategies and challenges for applying this approach.

UbiComp has been envisioned to bring about a future dominated by calm computing technologies making our everyday lives ever more convenient. Yet the same vision has also attracted criticism for encouraging a solitary and passive lifestyle. The aim of this paper is to explore and elaborate these tensions further by examining the human values surrounding future domestic UbiComp solutions. Drawing on envisioning and contravisioning, we probe members of the public (N=28) through the presentation and focus group discussion of two contrasting animated video scenarios, where one is inspired by 'calm' and the other by 'engaging' visions of future UbiComp technology. By analysing the reasoning of our participants, we identify and elaborate a number of relevant values involved in balancing the two perspectives. In conclusion, we articulate practically applicable takeaways in the form of a set of key design questions and challenges.

We explore how a combination of manipulations and transitions can extend Substitutional Reality to create a highly personal Virtual Reality experience. Our design aimed to meet two challenges faced by museums: the limitations of object handling and the desire for visitors to create their own interpretations. Using a Research-through-Design methodology, we built a performance-led Mixed Reality (MR) experience that lets museum visitors physically handle 3D prints or scans of museum objects to share personal stories about them. The stories are recorded and donated to the participating museum. We reflect on the complex design and the findings gained from a two-day in-the-wild deployment to explore engagement and disruption through manipulations of physicality, visuals, and scale; the transitions between spaces; and a trajectory of storytelling performance. We chart a wide scope for Performative Substitutional Reality and draw implications for VR, MR, and performance-led research in any context.

Concepts and theories that emerge within the social sciences tend to be nuanced, dealing with complex social phenomena. While their relevance to design could be high, it is difficult to make sense of them in design projects, especially when participants have a variety of backgrounds. We report on our experiences using role-play scenarios as a way to sensitize heterogeneous designer teams to complex theoretical concepts related to museology as social and cultural phenomena. We discuss design requirements on such scenarios, and the importance of connecting their execution closely to the context of the design and the current stage of the design process.

Hybrid gifting combines physical artefacts and experiences with digital interactivity to generate new kinds of gifts. Our review details how gifting is a complex social phenomenon and how digital gifting is less engaging than physical gifting for both givers and receivers. Employing a Research Through Design approach, we developed a portfolio of four hybrid gifting experiences: an augmented advent calendar; edible music tracks; personalized museum tours; and a narrated city walk. Our reflection addresses three concepts: hybrid wrapping where physical gifts become wrapped in digital media and vice versa; the importance of effortful interactions that are visible and pleasurable; and the need to consider social obligation, including opportunities for acknowledgement and reciprocation, dealing with embarrassment, and recognizing the distinction between giving and sharing. Our concepts provide guidance to practitioners who wish to design future gifting experiences while helping HCI researchers engage with the concept of gifting in a nuanced way.

This paper takes on one of the rarely articulated yet important questions pertaining to digital media objects: how do HCI and design researchers understand 'gifting' when the object can just as easily be 'shared'? This question has often been implied and occasionally answered, though only partially. We propose the concept of 'inalienability', taken from the gifting literature, as a useful theory for clarifying what design researchers mean by gifting in a digital context. We apply 'inalienability' to three papers from the ACM Digital Library and one ongoing project, spanning nearly two decades of HCI and design research, that combine 'gifting and 'sharing' in their frameworks. In this way we show how applying the concept of 'inalienability' can clarify behaviours that mark gifting as a unique activity, frame research questions around gifting and sharing, outline specific next steps for gifting research, and suggest design strategies in this area.

This paper presents the GIFT smartphone app, an artist-led Research through Design project benefitting from a three-day in-the-wild deployment. The app takes as its premise the generative potential of combining the contexts of gifting and museum visits. Visitors explore the museum, searching for objects that would most appeal to the gift-receiver they have in mind, then photographing those objects and adding audio messages for their receivers describing the motivation for their choices. This paper charts the designers' key aim of creating a new frame of mind using voice, and the most striking findings discovered during in-the-wild deployment in a museum -- 'seeing with new eyes' and fostering personal connections. We discuss empathy, motivation, and bottom-up personalisation in the productive space revealed by this combination of contexts. We suggest that this work reveals opportunities for designers of gifting services as well as those working in cultural heritage.

We present our case study on gifting digital music, The Rough Mile, as an example of a Framework of Immersive Practice, intended for researchers and practitioners in HCI and interaction design. Although immersion is a frequently used term in the HCI and related literatures, we find no definitions or frameworks that are robust enough to capture the full range of multi-sensory, emotional, and cognitive engagement that the richest of these experiences can entail. We therefore turn to the theatrical performance literature to distil a theory-based framework of practices that can apply to interdisciplinary projects as well as works with an entirely aesthetic aim. The design choices and findings of The Rough Mile are presented in terms of this framework, leading to a discussion of the design guidelines that can shape its use in any HCI or interaction design project aiming for a deep, personal engagement through technology.

This paper identifies a body of HCI research wherein the researchers take part in digitally mediated creative experiences alongside participants. We present our definition and rationale for "self-situated performance research" based on theories in both the HCI and performance literatures. We then analyse four case studies of this type of work, ranging from overtly "performative" staged events to locative audio and public making.

This workshop explores a novel design practice and the methodology behind it in an entirely hands-on way. Participants will create a performance centring on their own personal digital media using Collect Yourselves! -- a two-phase online system that guides the selection, sharing, and live performance of digital photos. Through using the system and briefly analysing the results, participants will gain first-hand understanding of the potential for using performance to extend interactions with technology into an emotionally and aesthetically charged space. The workshop will then cover the basics of the methodology used to create this system, leading to a brainstorming session for how to use Performative Experience Design to interrogate and enhance each participant's own research interests. Participants in this workshop will create and experience a compelling and potentially transformative engagement with digital technology, then use this experience and the methodology behind it to pursue the unique aesthetics of performance in their own work.