Recently, design research has embraced more-than-human perspectives to explore the complex entanglements of our world, decentering the human subject and eliminating dualistic thinking.Despite these advances, further progress is needed to develop a future that equally considers all beings.This paper examines the impact of body comportment on the design of embodied, interactive technologies.Drawing on Iris Marion Young's essay, we argue that the assumption of a universal body standard can lead to a disconnect between a person's intentions and their interactions with technology.We relate three modalities of body comportment-ambiguous transcendence, inhibited intentionality, and discontinuous unity-to embodied interaction.These modalities offer a perspective on how embodied being-in-the-world extends beyond physical capabilities, facilitating a pluralist view of the human body.We discuss the implications of Young's essay for research and design, reflecting on how the designer's own 'feminine existence' may influence the spatial scope of embodied interactions.

Makerspaces hold a lot of potential for participation in innovation, democratization of technology, and as a resource for community building – but not all who make, are represented in makerspaces: many makers do not feel at home in these spaces. This paper investigates the wants and needs of people who are engaged with making. It describes the result of four co-creation events, in which participants constructed their ideal version of a makerspace. By analysing the thoughts and ideas that participants shared during the building process, and the resulting physical representations of makerspaces, we uncovered two distinct tensions in what makers require from their ideal makerspace: the tension between having fun in a space and a space that is functional; and the tension between having the opportunity to collaborate with other people, versus undisturbed focus on projects. We contextualize these findings in literature related to makerspaces and offer suggestions for dealing with these tensions through design.

Abstract This paper presents the results of a 5-month diary study into the practices and routines that develop around technological making in the home, particularly focused on the experiences of women, as they continue to be an underrepresented group in the maker community. In this study, we provided participants with an entry-level electronics making kit. Over the course of twenty weeks, the participants documented their making activities via photos, videos, text messages and taking part in interviews. By means of interpretative phenomenological analysis, we identified six core themes related to women’s experiences with technological making in the home. These experiences ranged from positive—feeling challenged, proud of accomplishments, inspired; to negative—feeling frustrated, guilty due to lack of progress or confused and overwhelmed. These experiences are discussed and contextualized by aspects related to hurdles experienced by the participants, and success factors that contribute to proactive engagement with making in the home. Research Highlights Twenty-week photo diary study and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Identification of six core themes based on empirical data on experiences with technological making in the home context. Discourse around thresholds to engage women in technological making and the maker community. Design and research directions to reduce barriers in technological making.

Long-distance relationships (LDRs) have long been of interest in HCI research, and several strategies and designs for mediating intimacy have been proposed. This work-in-progress aims to explore and identify existing practices in experiencing intimacy in technology-mediated LDRs, to design artefacts that could mediate some of the related struggles, and to explore the prototypes with users. Based on the insights from seven in-depth semi-structured interviews and a creative task, we developed the concept of Qude, which entails two prototypes: a vibro-tactile wearable that enables a person to tap and send a rhythm to their partner; and a supporting app, through which users can assign meanings to the rhythms, thus creating an exclusive, tactile code. The paper concludes by reflecting on preliminary findings from four user explorations and the contextual analysis. We provide considerations for further iterations of Qude, as well as a discussion of possibilities for future designs.

In design, we often deal with complex problems that require participatory, embodied sensemaking to solve. There are abundant design tools available – both physical and digital – to support these activities. While digital tools have continued to gain presence in the design processes over the last decades, due to, e.g., widened availability, improved flexibility, and the potential to increase productivity, physical tools and analogue practices still hold a solid place in the design process for many designers. To bridge the gap between the physical and digital, and to benefit from the best of both worlds in tools for design, hybrid tools are being developed. This paper aims to identify design opportunities for future hybrid design tools, by exploring the characteristics of designing for participatory, embodied sensemaking, in the context of physical, digital, and hybrid tools.

This Pictorial discusses the outcomes of a distributed embodied ideation workshop. In this workshop, students of a Bachelor program on Management by Design explained their thesis by visualizing and externalizing the problem space using everyday objects. The use of objects to represent and understand complex design problems is well documented in the fields of Design and Human-Computer Interaction, but is often researched in collocated settings. What happens when the design tools used to externalize and represent complex design problems are everyday household objects, and the discussion happens in a distributed, asynchronous manner? How is shared meaning negotiated and established? In this Pictorial, we discuss six pictures that were taken of the visual representations that the students constructed, and reflect upon the distributed, asynchronous process that was employed to create, develop, and agree upon meaning.

Since the launch of the first Oculus Developer Kit in 2013, consumer and commercial adoption of VR and AR technology has arrived beyond the early-adopter stage. This widespread availability of VR and AR headsets raises challenging and exciting questions for researchers in the field of embodied interaction: how do we design embodied interactions in VR? Can we improve (social) sensemaking beyond the natural body? What new opportunities for embodied interaction have presented themselves, thanks to this new technology, and how can we best use them? To address these questions, my research focuses on designing new interactions with VR systems that go beyond the (digital) gaming context, especially including tangible interactions from new and unusual perspectives, made possible by the new developments in the field of VR technologies. In my thesis, I aspire to present a framework of embodied sensemaking informed by new and unusual perspectives, enabled by virtual reality technology, developed in a Research through Design process.

Games are a great objective for research on tangible and embodied interaction as they not only have a long tradition in both the analogue and the digital game domain; they also perfectly represent the tangible and the embodiment through the nature of game play. In this Studio, we will go beyond the analogue characteristics of board games, not just by adding a visual digital layer, but by examining new game play mechanics for board games through digital technology. We will do this by introducing a new role in board games as an immersed 'character' in the game. For this, we use a very specific technology (virtual reality live streaming from a miniature perspective) as a new lens on (existing) board games. Through experimentation with and exploration of existing board games through this new lens, we will conceptualize and prototype game play mechanics for this new notion of game participation.

Traditionally, architects and designers have used scale models to explore, communicate, and evaluate concepts and ideas in large-scale, spatial projects. These scale models offer the user a bird's eye perspective and often tangible ways of interacting with the model. Nevertheless, they lack a realistic, first-person view on the effects that the design solutions have in the space. In this paper, we explore MacroScope, a tool that aims to support collaborative spatial design by providing a real time, 360o first-person perspective in a physical scale model, by means of a virtual reality head-mounted display. We reflect on the usage potentials in collaborative creative processes, before describing next steps for the development of MacroScope.

The use of generative design tools for collaborative design tasks has been common practice in the fields of HCI and Design. In this pictorial, we present the evolution of an open-ended design tool: a scale model of a car showroom, used to investigate collaborative interactions in spatial environments. The features of the scale model evolved through several impromptu usage scenarios. With this contribution, we share our observations about the use of the prototype as a means of communication, as well as a means of inspiration, and argue for the use of non-prescriptive design tools in collaborative design projects.

This paper describes the process of designing the Blue Studio: an interactive space for embodied multi-stakeholder ideation processes. Inspired by embodied sensemaking -- the way people make sense of things through external expression and interaction with other people -- we iteratively designed material, interactive and spatial interventions in the Blue Studio and evaluated them with multi-stakeholder participants in various studies. Thereupon, we analyzed the impact of the design interventions, based on the seven principles to design for embodied sensemaking and highlighted opportunities for refining our interactive space for embodied ideation. Based on the insights gained, a final design of the Blue Studio was realized and evaluated on functionality.

Gaze is an important aspect in social communication. In this paper we present a first exploration of visualizing gaze in the co-located physical world. LaserViz augments gaze in the physical world by means of an eye-tracking enabled wearable device that laser beams the gaze position to real world objects. Based on an initial prototype, we explored the effects of shared gaze through a collaborative as well as a competitive scenario in a co-located setting. This paper discusses the insights and implications following these explorations for the concept of shared gaze in the co-located physical world.

In this paper, we show the development of the Ideating in Skills (IiS) toolset: an embodied design tool aimed at supporting co-design processes. The iterative process of developing the toolset was carried out by students. They worked individually at first, exploring their own skills and moods through movement, visualisations and poetry. These explorations were translated into objects that were able to communicate and connect with each other. In each iteration, the design of the qualities of these connections was based on the findings of the previous explorations. After several individual and team-based iterations, a final toolset was collaboratively created and evaluated in various short design sessions. Based on the potential of the first version of the toolset, a second version was created that is currently used and tested in one-on-one settings all over the world and in multi-stakeholder settings in a creative hub in Sweden.