Indian Classical Dance has long treated performance as a participatory act in which emotion arises in a trained spectator (rasika) through an understanding and attention on the codified vocabulary of hand gestures (mudras) and facial expressions (rasa). This participation is not behavioural but constitutive. The contemporary audience lacks the cultural cognitive vocabulary needed to interpret the performance and attend without the capacity to do so. We present an early-stage multimodal system that extracts hand gestures, facial expressions, and audio content from a recorded Mohiniyattam performance and delivers a synthesised narration through text and audio modalities. A study (n=10) combining semi-structured interviews and eye tracking reveals that scaffolding requirements vary according to the viewer’s literacy in the tradition.Spectators largely prefer audio narration because it frees the visual channel to focus on the dancer; performers largely prefer text because audio narration competes with the musical structure central to the form. We argue that designing for audience-side participatory sense-making in codified performance requires attention to viewer literacy, not only modality preferences and offer preliminary design directions.

XR technologies often presume hand-based interaction as universal, marginalizing people with limited mobility. In close collaboration with two disabled artists, we developed a mouth interface that reimagines XR interaction, foregrounding disabled practices. Rather than positioning as an accessibility “fix,” we stage the interface as an activist provocation against hand-centric design. Using a narrative-flip method, we asked early-stage HCI researchers to use the interface without context, later revealing its disability-led, activist origins. This before/after framing exposed how the participants imagined accessibility, shifting from awkwardness and discomfort to empathy and political reflection − yet sliding back into solutionist product thinking. Through analysis of participants’ reflections, enriched by our disabled collaborator’s feedback, we reveal how accessibility was framed as a fix, as political, and as agency. We argue that accessibility research in HCI can move beyond solutionist fixes: assistive technologies as provocations that disrupt able-bodied assumptions and expand how access is imagined.

Data physicalisation is a technique that encodes data through the geometric and material properties of an artefact, allowing users to engage with data in a more immersive and multi-sensory way. However, current methods of data physicalisation are limited in terms of their reconfigurability and the types of materials that can be used. Acoustophoresis—a method of suspending and manipulating materials using sound waves—offers a promising solution to these challenges. In this paper, we present DataLev, a design space and platform for creating reconfigurable, multimodal data physicalisations with enriched materiality using acoustophoresis. We demonstrate the capabilities of DataLev through eight examples and evaluate its performance in terms of reconfigurability and materiality. Our work offers a new approach to data physicalisation, enabling designers to create more dynamic, engaging, and expressive artefacts.