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.

In line with the shift toward dementia-friendly communities, HCI research is increasingly exploring holistic ways to support people living with dementia as active community members. However, less is known about how existing community networks influence technology design and effectiveness. This paper analyses Community-Based Participatory Design (CBPD) workshops conducted with individuals living with dementia, their spouses, and program coordinators through Wenger’s Communities of Practice Framework. We demonstrate how participants’ interactions created a community of practice through their: engagement in creating mutual meaning, alignment around a common purpose, and imagination in envisioning new possibilities for inclusion. Our findings highlight the agency of participants as they worked to create inclusive experiences for themselves and others. Our findings additionally demonstrated how community boundaries create systemic barriers that lead to non-participation. We argue Wenger’s framework offers a roadmap for designing technologies that foster person-to-person interdependence, helping to build more genuinely inclusive communities.

Emerging wearable robotics demand design approaches that address not only function but also social meaning. In response, we present Sumbrella, a soft robotic garment developed as a speculative fashion probe. We first detail the design and fabrication of the Sumbrella, including sequenced origami-inspired bistable units, fabric pneumatic actuation chambers, cable-driven shape morphing mechanisms, computer vision components and an integrated wearable system comprising a hat and bolero jacket housing power and control electronics. Through a focus group with 12 creative technologists, we then used Sumbrella as a technological probe to explore how people interpreted, interacted and imagined future relationships with soft robotic wearables. While Sumbrella allowed our participants to engage in rich discussion around speculative futures and expressive potential, it also surfaced concerns about exploitation, surveillance and the personal risks and societal ethics of embedding biosensing technologies in public life. We contribute to the Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) field key considerations and recommendations for designing soft robotic garments, including the potential for kinesic communication, the impact of such technologies on social dynamics and the importance of ethical guidelines. Finally, we provide a reflection on our application of speculative design, proposing that it allows HRI researchers to not only consider functionality but also how wearable robots influence definitions of what is considered acceptable or desirable in public settings.

Social play is vital for healthy child development. Autistic and neurotypical children can often struggle to play together due to differing communication, play and interactional styles, resulting in reduced social interaction quality for both groups. Play technologies can facilitate and support social play among children. However, most play technologies to date attempt to encourage more neurotypical traits in autistic children in a bid to foster social play. This approach ignores the unique experiences of autistic children. We conducted a preliminary study combining an expanded proxy design and a technology probe observation with a group of 5-year-old children and their parents. We report on initial findings highlighting the importance of creating inclusive spaces for a cohesive and supportive play environment and reflect on using expanded proxy design when designing with young, neurodiverse groups of children.

Metaphors enrich language by allowing us to express complex ideas through familiar concepts, enhancing both understanding and creativity in communication. Crossmodal metaphors are metaphors where one sensory modality is understood in terms of another (e.g, a sharp smell). Crossmodality is an integral part of how we make sense of and create meaning about the world. However, there is a lack of research on how children generate crossmodal metaphors and the interpretation of such metaphors. We present Sense-O-Nary, a game we designed to explore how children react when asked to create crossmodal metaphors in a novel environment. Children are presented with one sensory input and then asked to describe it using a different sense, for another team to guess what the original sensory input is. We engaged children (n=65, aged 8-10) to play this crossmodal metaphor generation game. We qualitatively analysed children’s exchange of crossmodal metaphors to define a set of crossmodal association strategies and then use this to categorise the metaphors they created. We discuss how engaging with crossmodal metaphors can enhance children’s linguistic development and how our findings can inform the design of interactions that involve multiple senses.

Home health monitoring systems (HHMS) are presented as a cost-effective solution that will assist with collaborative care of older adults. However, instead of care recipients feeling like collaborators, such systems often disempower them. In this paper, we examine the dissemination, onboarding, and initial use of an HHMS to see how the discourse used by developers and participants affects users’ collaborative care efforts. We found that the textual information provided often contrasted with how our participants managed their care. Instead of providing participants with ‘independence,’ ‘safety,’ and ‘peace of mind,’ care recipients were placed in a more dependent, less proactive role, and care providers were pressured to take on more responsibilities. We position HHMS, as they are currently marketed and onboarded, as normalizing pseudo-institutionalization. As an alternative we advocate that the discourse and design of such systems should reflect and re-enforce the varied roles care recipients take in managing their care.

Whilst the use of smart home systems has shown promise in recent years supporting older people's activities at home, there is more evidence needed to understand how these systems impact the type and the amount of shared care in the home. It is important to understand care recipients and caregivers' labour is changed with the introduction of a smart home system to efficiently and effectively support an increasingly aging population with technology. Five older households (8 participants) were interviewed before, immediately after and three months after receiving a Smart Home Health System (SHHS). We provide an identification and documentation of critical incidents and barriers that increased inter-household care work and prevented the SHHS from being successfully accepted within homes. Findings are framed within the growing body of work on smart homes for health and care, and we provide implications for designing future systems for shared home care needs.

While there is currently no cure for dementia, socially prescribing activities can enhance wellbeing for people living with dementia (PLWD). However, accessibility to such activities can be hindered by location, being unaware of activities, scheduling issues, or lack of interest in the specific activity. The COVID-19 pandemic further complicated accessibility and changed how coordinators of such programs thought about technology. This PhD research explores how technology can improve accessibility to community spaces and programs for PLWD and their informal carers. The first study involved understanding how technology used for social programs changed during the pandemic and developing guidelines for how program coordinators and technologists can adapt and develop technology for disseminating social programs. The current study aims to discover what elements may be necessary for spaces and programs to feel accessible for PLWD and how these elements can be translated or manifested through technology.

Many dementia-friendly social programs were adapted to online delivery due to the COVID pandemic. Hasty adaptations make it unclear how to design these programs to capture the benefits of online delivery and face-to-face interactions. To understand the complexities of program delivery, we interviewed program coordinators and held focus groups with people living with dementia (PLWD) and their informal carers. We applied an interdependence framework to examine how the relationships between individuals affect program benefits. We found that interdependencies within an organization related to finances and networking are key and that organizational and individual interdependencies converge during program delivery. Our findings suggest these two interdependencies could influence one another more effectively if technology, like video conferencing, were designed to account for it. We discuss how an expanded notion of interdependency for the design of technology helps expand inclusivity in accessible social programs.