Child-centred AI advocates and protects children’s rights in the development and design of AI systems. Most approaches are narrowed to children’s interactions with AI. However, children develop relationships with and through AI, beyond just interacting with it. We aim to shed light on the manifold relations that children have with/through AI-enabled systems on the back of entanglement theories and philosophy of technology, for evolving our conception of child-centred AI: How do children relate to/through AI? How do these entanglements change their being, knowing, acting and growing in the world? How can our understanding of child-AI entanglements inform child-centric approaches?

Treesense is a modular play kit for children to engage with a tree’s experience of being in the world. It is modular and contains different elements: A round textile carpet with detachable felt leaves that can also be attached to the user’s body, interaction cards for guidance, and electronic elements to unlock interactivity. It invites children to collaboratively create an individual tree and enact its story throughout the four seasons. Recent research has defined a need for deepening the understanding of how to design meaningful interactions with/for children to engage with non-humans and nature. Treesense responds to this and invites more-than-human speculations on how trees experience their world.

sssnake is a soft toy that allows multi-user play over distance as well as single users playing alone. It has a haptic interface and can connect children (especially during the COVID-19 pandemic) while avoiding the usage of screen-based media. It combines social interaction inspired from online gaming with a playful way to learn about music and instruments. We present a handcrafted prototype manufactured from e-textiles, wool and grape seeds. The sssnake prototype was evaluated in a user study with ten children aged between one and eight years. The study showed that online-connected soft toys can be an extension to traditional possibilities of socializing and play.

Designing for interactive play brings new dimensions for play experience blended with digital and physical characteristics. Starting from the insights of two interactive soft toy projects, the authors explore interactive soft materials in designing for playfulness through a material-driven design approach. This can bring a new dimension in designing interaction for ludic experiences and reveal specific characteristics of soft materials. By combining somaesthetic and embodied design methods, the studio aims at exploring what makes soft materials playful. Moreover, it addresses how technology can enhance the playfulness of these materials and what kind of playful interaction scenarios can be imagined with interactive soft materials by involving the whole-body in the design process. The learnings from the studio will help the authors build a framework which shows the potential and describes the characteristics of interactive soft materials to create new tangible, embedded and embodied interactions for play.

Deploying wearable technologies in the performing arts not only concerns costume wearers but affects further stakeholders whose work is impacted by the interactive effects or who help maintain the technology. Beyond the wearer, literature neglects how these other stakeholders engage with interactive costumes, though a performance production is based on the contribution of many parties. We conducted a longitudinal study to examine how stakeholders of a youth ballet production experience and appropriate interactive costuming. Our findings suggest that user experiences vary according to stakeholders' closeness to the costume, background and taste, the costume interaction mode and social environment. We expand existing models of technology appropriation with two novel technology relations: professional reserve and polite indifference. Based on these, we suggest integration into existing practices, to design for the show, and create positive experiences to incorporate interactive costumes in the performing arts and discuss relevance for other professional fields.

In the 1920s, Oskar Schlemmer, artist in the Bauhaus movement, created the Triadic Ballet costumes. These re-strict movement of dancers, creating new expressions. In-spired by this, we designed an interactive wire costume. It restricts lower body movements, and emphasizes arm movements spurring LED-light 'sparks' and 'waves' wired in a tutu-like costume. The Wire Costume was introduced to a dancer who found that an unusual bond emerged be-tween her and the costume. We discuss how sensory altera-tion (sight, kinesthetic awareness and proprioception) and bodily training to adjust to the new soma, can result in nov-el, evocative forms of expression. The interactive costume can foster a certain mood, introduce feelings, and even embody a whole character -- only revealed once worn and danced. We describe a design exploration combining cul-tural and historical research, interviews with experts and material explorations that culminated in a novel prototype.

A growing part of HCI is research on wearables, e-textiles and performances with technology. However, conventional theatre productions underlie traditionally grown structures and have predefined production process that do not allow for in-house creations of interactive costumes. This research project addresses this issue and tries to figure out how this cultural sector and traditional costume design could engage with contemporary e-textile and wearable technologies.

In this paper, we discuss the requirements and critical challenges for creating and staging interactive costumes in the theatre. Different to other types of performance, theatre costumes are secondary to acting. Our investigations are based on two practice-based case studies: a self-directed design research within a student project, and a collaboration with a local theatre house, where interactive costume elements were developed in a real-life setting. These reveal requirements and challenges for the design process as well as the effective staging of interactive costumes, the biggest challenge being how to integrate these into existing structures of traditional theatre houses, and requirements for the costumes themselves. Because interactive costumes integrate technological features and traditional analogue crafts, they require interdisciplinary collaboration and transcend established boundaries between departments in theatre houses, challenging established work processes and structures.