Secondary school systems often reward predictable, mark-bearing performance, making experimentation feel risky, especially in under-resourced contexts, where time, attention, and materials are tightly managed. We report on an exploratory case study of a charity-led digital arts programme delivered in two low-socioeconomic secondary schools in which immersive (i.e., Virtual Reality) and non-immersive (i.e., tablet-based) digital tools were introduced into Year 7 (400+ pupils, typically aged 11–12) curriculum. Through thematic analysis of the lesson observation notes and student surveys, we show that pupils take more creative risks, value exploration, iterate more, and increasingly learn through and with peers. We characterise shifts in classroom ecology, including shared talk, turn-taking, micro-tutorials, and practices of care and repair that help sustain learning-in-process. Finally, we analyse the breakdowns and trade-offs of deploying off-the-shelf creative technologies in low-resource school routines, and derive deployment lessons for resilient, bottom-up creative technology curricula that fit everyday classrooms.

In underserved coastal communities, the adoption of digital technology is deeply stratified. While schools with high socio-economic status (SES) leverage technology for creative agency, under-resourced schools often face a second-level digital divide, where hardware is treated as a disruption rather than a tool for inquiry. We investigate this dynamic through an exploratory study of a digital arts programme in low-SES UK secondary schools, in which Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers served as advisors and observers of a co-created partnership between schools and a local digital arts charity. Our findings reveal a pedagogical chasm. Systemic constraints and assessment pressures force teachers into the role of risk-averse behavioural gatekeepers, while external facilitators manage the creative play. However, we identify how students bridge this gap by establishing peer infrastructures, shared talk and repair work that transform technical breakdowns into possibility spaces for learning. We argue that sustainable integration requires designing for school settings to empower the human relationships central to creative technology use.

Figure 1: First page previews of our Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and LINE platforms, aligned from left to right

One factor leading to compromised Quality of Life (QoL) for people with dementia in long-term care settings is the significant barriers they face in accessing experiences beyond their physical premises. Although, in recent years, research within HCI has investigated the use of Virtual Reality (VR) in providing enriched experiences for people with dementia, few studies have looked into the practical issues relating to integrating and deploying VR into care settings and how in-depth understanding of such issues can inspire VR design for dementia care. Considering the perspective of key stakeholders, we demonstrate VR’s potential to create a rich conversation space with family members, preserve the identity and personhood of people with dementia through VR, and consider organisational issues of VR deployment in care settings. As such, this paper contributes to the HCI research community with future design directions to enhance the deployment and adoption of VR in dementia care settings.

Human behaviour and habits co-evolve with technology, and the metaverse is poised to become a key player in reshaping how we live our everyday life. Given the importance of food in our daily lives, we ask: how will our relationships with food be transformed by the metaverse, and what are the promises and pitfalls of this technology? To answer this, we propose a co-design study that reveals the important elements people value in their daily interactions with food. We then present a speculative catalogue of novel metaverse food experiences, and insights from discussing these ideas with food designers, anthropologists and metaverse experts. Our work aims to provide designers with inspirations for building a metaverse that: provides inclusive opportunities for the future of food; helps re-discover the forgotten or lost knowledge about food; facilitates the exploration, excitement and joy of eating; and reinvigorates the ways that food can soothe and heal.

Despite the substantial research interest in using Virtual Reality (VR) in healthcare in general and in Psychological, Cognitive, and Behavioral (PC&B) interventions in specific, as well as emerging research supporting the efficacy of VR in healthcare, the design process of translating therapies into VR to meet the needs of critical stakeholders such as users and clinicians is rarely addressed. In this paper, we aim to shed light onto the design needs, opportunities and challenges in designing efficient and effective PC&B-VR interventions. Through analyzing the co-design processes of four user-centered PC&B-VR interventions, we examined how therapies were adapted into VR to meet stakeholders’ requirements, explored design elements for meaningful experiences, and investigated how the understanding of healthcare contexts contribute to the VR intervention design. This paper presents the HCI research community with design opportunities and challenges as well as future directions for PC&B-VR intervention design.

Many people with dementia (PWD) residing in long-term care may face barriers in accessing experiences beyond their physical premises; this may be due to location, mobility constraints, legal mental health act restrictions, or offence-related restrictions. In recent years, there have been research interests towards designing non-pharmacological interventions aiming to improve the Quality of Life (QoL) for PWD within long-term care. We explored the use of Virtual Reality (VR) as a tool to provide 360°-video based experiences for individuals with moderate to severe dementia residing in a locked psychiatric hospital. We discuss at depth the appeal of using VR for PWD, and the observed impact of such interaction. We also present the design opportunities, pitfalls, and recommendations for future deployment in healthcare services. This paper demonstrates the potential of VR as a virtual alternative to experiences that may be difficult to reach for PWD residing within locked setting.