Translating physical games to digital tabletops is a promising way to engage museum visitors in open-ended museum experiences, but the process is poorly understood. How can the mechanics and social dynamics of physical games be translated into this new material form? This paper presents an empirical account of translating a physical, history-themed card game to a tangible tabletop for museum play. Through a year-long Research through Design study, we developed and deployed three comparative prototypes, each investigating a key dimension of translation: (1) the shift from turn-based to real-time event placement, (2) the introduction of time pressure, and (3) the adaptation of game difficulty. Drawing on in-situ playtests with families and workshops with expert designers, our findings reveal a central tension between fidelity to the source material’s social strengths and the transformative affordances of the digital medium. We contribute actionable design implications for translation and an open-source toolkit to support future work.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are poised to revolutionize interactive storytelling, yet they introduce a fundamental HCI challenge: balancing player agency with the coherence of a pre-authored narrative. Existing LLM-driven Game Masters (GMs) often undermine the player experience by being overly compliant, leading to disjointed stories, or by rigidly ‘railroading’ players, which diminishes their sense of freedom. This paper addresses this tension by introducing SENNA, a novel multi-agent AI system designed to maintain narrative adherence in single-player role-playing games. SENNA operationalizes a prewritten adventure by creating and using a Narrative Graph to model the structure of the story, track the player’s progress and ensure key plot points are met while maintaining interactivity. A primary contribution of this work is an empirical investigation of narrative redirection, the methods an AI GM can use to guide players back to the intended arc when they deviate. We designed six redirection strategies inspired by expert human GMs and conducted a user study to evaluate their effectiveness. The study combined live gameplay with a within-subjects comparison of different strategies at key narrative junctions. Our findings show that players strongly prefer redirection techniques grounded in the internal logic of the game, such as offering more information, experiencing consequences in the world, and influence from non-player characters. These methods successfully maintained narrative coherence without sacrificing perceived autonomy or immersion, while simplistic ‘hard denials’ were poorly received. Our work contributes an empirically validated framework and actionable design guidelines to create more robust and human-centered AI-driven narrative experiences.

In HCI, material engagement is often conceptualised as an ongoing dialogue between designer and material. However, how such dialogues are situated in time remains underexplored, which is particularly relevant in educational contexts where time is a limited resource. This paper examines e-textile crafting processes through a temporal lens in a two-phase study: Phase I involved three exploratory workshops varying in duration, participants’ skills, and materials; Phase II comprised a synthesising workshop with 17 interaction design students. Our findings show how time constraints actively shape negotiations between skills and materials, and conclude by proposing three strategies for attending to temporality in dialogues with materials: (1) Navigating Temporal Flows, (2) Allying With Time Constraints, and (3) Attending to Pacing through Material Complexity. These strategies offer insights and strategies educators can adopt to embrace time constraints and integrate time-aware approaches when planning and facilitating e-textile workshops.

Research in HCI and autism has become more focused on involving autistic adults in technological design. In this paper, we present the results of a scoping review analysis of 11 projects across 18 papers that focused on including autistic adults in the design of technology that impacts their lives. This paper contributes a deeper understanding of how autistic adults were involved in participatory design processes. Our findings reveal mixed positions on how the lived autistic perspective was harnessed to direct the application of topics and technologies chosen. Most projects employed infrastructures to enhance participation (e.g., providing multiple modes to participate or employing a tailored methodology). We pose future opportunities for autistic involvement, for example, in topics and technologies where autistic research is employed (e.g., autism diagnosis and machine learning), reviewing the importance of formal diagnosis for inclusion, and harnessing the multiple expertise of autistic adults.

Remote video communication is now part of everyday life, also for families. At the same time, children encounter digital devices at an early age, but studies indicate that physical play is still vital for their development. To support physical play at a distance, we introduce two prototypes build around projection displays, WallWizard and TableCanvas. Both allow users to play together remotely by combining physical and digital elements on shared surfaces. We evaluated our prototypes through an expert review, and, based on this study, we elaborate further on TableCanvas. We conducted a second qualitative user study with an updated prototype, focused on evaluating the remote aspect. The overall feedback was positive and suggested that the concept could facilitate and promote open-ended play, as well as support a successful remote play experience. Users also indicated additional potential use cases for board gaming, education, and work-related tasks.

Real-time online interaction is the norm today. Tabletops and other dedicated interactive surface devices with direct input and tangible interaction can enhance remote collaboration, and open up new interaction scenarios based on mixed physical/virtual components. However, they are only available to a small subset of users, as they usually require identical bespoke hardware for every participant, are complex to setup, and need custom scenario-specific applications. We present SurfaceCast, a software toolkit designed to merge multiple distributed, heterogeneous end-user devices into a single, shared mixed-reality surface. Supported devices include regular desktop and laptop computers, tablets, and mixed-reality headsets, as well as projector-camera setups and dedicated interactive tabletop systems. This device-agnostic approach provides a fundamental building block for exploration of a far wider range of usage scenarios than previously feasible, including future clients using our provided API. In this paper, we discuss the software architecture of SurfaceCast, present a formative user study and a quantitative performance analysis of our framework, and introduce five example application scenarios which we enhance through the multi-user and multi-device features of the framework. Our results show that the hardware- and content-agnostic architecture of SurfaceCast can run on a wide variety of devices with sufficient performance and fidelity for real-time interaction.

Digital data shape work practices as they travel through space, time, and social situations. In turn, workers shape the materiality of data through different data-oriented activities. In this paper, we draw on theory of data journeys to develop and present a conceptual framework of four data-intensive activities: Producing, mobilising, processing, and re-purposing. Together, those activities capture entanglements of data transformations and data-intensive practices. We develop the framework through a qualitative study of digitisation in Environmental Assessment (EA) practice. EA practitioners reflect on their experiences working with digital environmental data through ten semi-structured and two interactive interviews. The paper offers two main contributions. First, we develop a data journey theoretical framework and show that it is useful as a unit of analysis for uncovering tensions in data-oriented activities. Second, we use these insights to outline a set of tensions for future design activities in the area of data work practices.

Hackathons are increasingly embraced across diverse sectors as a way of democratizing the design of technology. Several attempts have been made to redefine the format and desired end goal of hackathons in recent years thereby warranting closer methodological scrutiny. In this paper, we apply program theory to analyze the processes and effects of 16 hackathon case studies through published research literature. Building upon existing research on hackathons, our work offers a critical perspective examining the methodological validity of hackathons and exemplifies how specific processes for organizing hackathons are modified for different purposes. Our main contribution is a program theory analysis of hackathon formats that provides an exploration and juxtaposition of 16 case studies in terms of causal relations between the input, process and the effects of hackathons. Our cataloguing of examples can serve as an inspirational planning resource for future organizers of hackathons.

This Studio offers researchers and designers an opportunity to investigate and discuss prototypes and in-process projects from a perspective that expands beyond material aspects, to also cover social and cultural ones. Participants will bring a project, device, or platform, which will be discussed as sociomaterials that actively participate across multiple social and cultural contexts. This perspective, as well as the prototypes and projects brought by the participants, forms the core of the Studio, where conversation will emerge over several phases: from the demonstration of the individual projects as things, to the generation of speculative fictions as to the role and use of these artifacts in the world. Finally, we end with a discussion of infrastructuring and appropriation of the artefacts and their social roles. The themes that will be examined in this Studio are agency, emerging behaviors, embeddedness and design strategies from a sociomaterial perspective of artifacts.

The aim of the workshop is to examine and discuss how computers can support, enrich, and transform collaborative creative processes. By exploring and combining methodological, theoretical, and design-oriented perspectives, we wish to examine the implications, potentials, and limitations of different approaches to providing digital support for collaborative creativity. Participation in the workshop requires participants to actively document and identify salient themes in one or more examples of computer-supported collaborative creativity, and the resulting material will serve as the empirical grounding for workshop discussions.

We investigate the diversity of participatory design research practice, based on a review of ten years of participatory design research published as full research papers at the Participatory Design Conferences (PDC) 2002–2012, and relate this body of research to five fundamental aspects of PD from classic participatory design literature. We identify five main categories of research contributions: Participatory Design in new domains, Participatory Design methods, Participatory Design and new technology, Theoretical contributions to Participatory Design, and Basic concepts in Participatory Design. Moreover, we identify how participation is defined, and how participation is conducted in experimental design cases, with a particular focus on interpretation, planning, and decision-making in the design process.

This paper introduces the idea of craftsmanship as a way of understanding the shaping and re-shaping of code as a material crafting practice. We build our analysis on a qualitative study of a coder engaged in creative and expressive programming on an old hardware platform. The contribution of the paper is a set of conceptual categories: craft engagement, craftsmanship rhythm and craftsmanship expressivity, that conceptualizes coding as crafting.