We chart the creative journeys of two groups of musicians as they explored how to engage with an AI system developed for the live performance of Irish Traditional Dance Music. A group of expert Irish musicians participated in an extended workshop to refine the system while a professional contemporary folk duo composed and rehearsed material for a public show. Drawing on the standard definition of creativity, we chart their creative journeys across a landscape we define by the two dimensions of originality and effectiveness. We reveal the importance of authenticity to a traditional practice as an opposing force to creativity and consider how the tension between these shaped their musical journeys. We generalise five strategies that move creative practitioners across this landscape in different directions: proving your chops, finding your place, perfecting the nuances, innovating, and glitching.

Co-designing with families for environmental sustainability relies on participatory imagination, yet habitual family roles and uneven participation, especially between adults and young children, often constrain it. A second challenge is continuity: workshop relationships and embodied ways of working do not easily survive into the final design, where artefacts travel more readily than roles or interactional dynamics. We report on a nationally toured mixed-reality installation developed through applied-theatre-led co-design with families. Across three workshops and user testing, applied theatre methods supported families to co-create narratives, artefacts, and interactional roles that shaped the public event. We show how theatrical co-design can rebalance child–adult participation through playful status shifts, and how selected workshop dynamics can be re-staged within a public mixed-reality installation. We contribute a theatrical account of participatory design in which designers work not only with artefacts and ideas, but with roles, rhythms, authority, and the social conditions that support collective imagination.

As robots enter the messy human world so the vital matter of safety takes on a fresh complexion with physical contact becoming inevitable and even desirable. We report on an artistic-exploration of how dancers, working as part of a multidisciplinary team, engaged in contact improvisation exer-cises to explore the opportunities and challenges of dancing with cobots. We reveal how they employed their honed bodily senses and physical skills to engage with the robots aesthetically and yet safely, interleaving improvised physical manipulations with reflections to grow their knowledge of how the robots behaved and felt. We introduce somatic safety, a holistic mind-body approach in which safety is learned, felt and enacted through bodily contact with robots in addition to being reasoned about. We conclude that robots need to be better designed for people to hold them and might recognise tacit safety cues among people. We propose that safety should be learned through iterative bodily experience interleaved with reflection.

Volunteering benefits recipients, volunteers, communities, and society, while digital technologies establish new opportunities for virtual volunteering. We describe how volunteers transitioned the UK's long-established Oxjam grassroots music festival online in response to the COVID pandemic, delivering a local pilot before scaling up nationwide. We adopt an infrastructural perspective to reveal how two teams of volunteers defined a flexible festival format, knitted together diverse technologies into a technical platform, and operated this to deliver the festival. We highlight the need for teams of volunteers to orchestrate both audience and performer trajectories through festivals. We argue for deliberately designing in volunteer labour rather than automating it out by translating traditional roles online while defining new digital ones. We propose to make these roles rewarding through a more social volunteer experience, including privileged backstage access. We highlight the challenges of using social media for such events, including complying with algorithmic policing of rights.

In this paper, we reflect on the applicability of the concept of trajectories to soma design. Soma design is a first-person design method which considers users’ subjective somatic or bodily experiences of a design. Due to bodily changes over time, soma experiences are inherently temporal. Current instruments for articulating soma experiences lack the power to express the effects of experiences on the body over time. To address this, we turn to trajectories, a well-known concept in the HCI community, as a way of mapping this aspect of soma experience. By showing trajectories through a range of dimensions, we can articulate individual experiences and differences in those experiences. Through analysis of a set of soma experience designs and a set of temporal dimensions within the experiences, this paper demonstrates how trajectories can provide a practical conceptual framing for articulating the temporal complexity of soma designs.

We report on a somaesthetic design workshop and the subsequent analytical work aiming to demystify what is entailed in a non-dualistic design stance on embodied interaction and why a first-person engagement is crucial to its unfoldings. However, as we will uncover through a detailed account of our process, these first-person engagements are deeply entangled with second- and third-person perspectives, sometimes even overlapping. The analysis furthermore reveals some strategies for bridging the body-mind divide by attending to our inner universe and dissolving or traversing dichotomies between inside and outside ; individual and social ; body and technology . By detailing the creative process, we show how soma design becomes a process of designing with and through kinesthetic experience, in turn letting us confront several dualisms that run like fault lines through HCI’s engagement with embodied interaction.

Guitars are physical instruments that require skillful two-handed use. Their use is also supported by diverse digital and physical resources, such as videos and chord charts. To understand the challenges of interacting with supporting resources at the same time as playing we conducted an ethnographic study of the preparation activities of working musicians. We observe successive stages of individual and collaborative preparation, in which working musicians engage with a diverse range of digital and physical resources to support their preparation. Interaction with this complex ecology of digital and physical resources is finely interwoven into their embodied musical practices, which are usually encumbered by having their instrument in hand, and often by playing. We identify challenges for augmenting guitars within the rehearsal process by supporting interaction that is encumbered, contextual and connected, and suggest a range of possible responses.