The rapid development of Industry 4.0 expands industrial robots from isolated machines to collaborative agents. Recognizing this paradigm shift, design educators are increasingly aware of the need to prepare students for effectively engaging with emerging robotic technologies and shaping future human-robot collaboration (HRC) projects. However, systematic and structured resources to guide these student designers in approaching, conceptualizing, prototyping and implementing HRC remain scarce. This article introduces a novel HRC design toolkit tailored for student designers that incorporates industrial constraints, role assignment, and guided communication into a step-by-step design process. Evaluations with 13 student interaction designers showed that the proposed toolkit clarified task flows, facilitated more intuitive robot behaviors, and bridged the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical implementations. Based on participants’ feedback, we improved the toolkit with simpler visual aids and improved guidance, further lowering the threshold for creating collaborative tasks. Finally, we discussed the applications and contributions of this revised design toolkit to industrial robotics education.

Trauma-informed design is an important yet challenging area due to required expertise for careful engagement with the vulnerable and traumatized person, particularly with children. While technologies have the potential to generate value for the person with experience of trauma, the risk of exposing them to additional trauma due to research and design has ethical implications. We explore this space by engaging with therapists and social workers as dyads of proxies for parents and children with a history of trauma. We conducted a study as a participatory workshop with proxies to understand how technology could support parents in coaching social-emotional learning during episodes of high intensity emotion and difficult behavior by the child. Our findings identified design qualities to embed in SEL technology, and three roles that parents can play in implementing SEL strategies at home. We contribute a set of seven methodological guidelines for dyadic trauma-informed participatory design with proxies.

Amblyopia is a common neurodevelopmental condition affecting people's vision and quality of life. Follow up treatment plays an essential role in improving amblyopia, and experts have proposed embroidery as a potential activity many times. The low compliance of amblyopia patients is one of the impediments. However, there are currently no targeted embroidery activities designed for patients. Designing embroidery activities to meet the needs of amblyopia patients in human-computer interaction and increasing patient compliance has become a design challenge in the current research field. In this research, we present an autobiographical design process to explore the augmentation of traditional embroidery activities with computationally generated patterns based on the stitching preferences of the user. We propose two design considerations for future research: Design with technology to assist traditional handcrafting and personalized design for long-term follow-up treatment through lived experience.

Attending to the challenges of describing first-person experience, this article illustrates different uses of the Focusing method in interaction design and HCI, offering a systematic way of accessing the subtle qualities of lived experiences for design use. In this approach, the implicit bodily knowledge -or felt sense- becomes the material capture of aesthetic experiences used to inform data collection, ideation and prototyping. We offer a high-level, yet systematic coverage of Focusing applied to two case studies, informing both a set of instructions to use the method and a series of design considerations to adopt this understudied tool of introspection in interaction design research and practice.

Advancements in technology, methodologies and intelligence associated with Industry 4.0 have brought attention to the application of industrial robots in new fields. As we begin to design the new usage scenarios for industrial six-axis robots, there are gaps in design tools in the human-robot collaboration (HRC) field specially developed for interaction designers and students. We pursue generative and structured design tools that can expand the boundaries of the HRC community, attracting more people with a design background to participate in the development of HRC applications. We present the plan for a workshop for students without HRC design experience centred on creating a collaborative drawing as the theme, through the reflection activities to inform the potential form of HRC design tools in the education domain.

While existing approaches to human-robot collaboration typically focus on how to build robots that can work safely and fluently with humans on collaborative tasks, our research focuses on how people experience interaction with a robot and interpret its behaviour as cooperative or uncooperative. A microsociological theory was used to analyse the process of interaction as it unfolds, aiming to examine human perception of the cooperativeness and uncooperativeness of a robot and identify the boundary between them in the context of human-robot collaboration. Our hypothesis was that an unexpected robot movement during human-robot interaction will cause a negative perception of uncooperativeness. An experiment where the interaction was ‘disrupted’ by the robot’s movement during a collaborative task was conducted with 21 participants. Our findings, obtained through qualitative analysis based on semi-structured interviews and observations, show that the disruption leads certainly to a negative perception of the robot. The perception of robot cooperativeness or uncooperativeness, however, includes complex processes, and its boundary is not rigid, but flexible and nuanced.

The cognitive complexities of emotions and individualized coping strategies make it a difficult space for design. Collecting first-person data can provide nuanced understanding of the lived experience of emotional life, to better inform the design of wearable technologies for emotional self-regulation. We present a preliminary study of our first-person phenomenological approach to autobiographical design. The methodology is unique for the intertwining of emotional activities and mindfulness exercises, as a strategy for controlling emotional repercussions. Self-observation and documentation included journaling and sketching using the Inside-Out Probe workbook, followed by material prototyping and testing in-the-wild. The Breathing Scarf prototype embodies the design considerations. In designing for one to support personalized self-regulation strategies, key considerations include designing for personal comfort, ownership, and individual-over-social meaning-making. Of equal importance in the design research process are the well-being of the designer/researcher, the ability to self-regulate emotions, and the ethics of care and emotion work.

Body maps are visual documents, where somatic experiences can be drawn onto a graphical representation of an outline of the human body. They hold the ability to capture complex and non-explicit emotions and somatic felt sensations, elaborating narratives that cannot be simply spoken. We present an illustrative example of “how-to” complete a body map, together with four case studies that provide examples of using body maps in design research. We identify five uses of body maps as generative tools for soma-based design, ranging from sampling bodily experience, heightening bodily self-awareness, understanding changing bodily experience over time, identifying patterns of bodily experience, and transferring somatic experiential qualities into physical designs. The different requirements for scaffolding the use of body maps in user-centred design versus first-person autobiographical design research are discussed. We provide this Pictorial as a resource for designers and researchers who wish to integrate body maps into their practice.

Designing technologies to support mental health in children is a growing area of research. However less is known about how to design with therapists for children with serious emotional behaviour issues. We conducted a contextual enquiry at an organisation that provides therapy treatment for children of trauma backgrounds. A co-design with therapists of a reflective storytelling activity provided insight into how to integrate design research activities with therapy approaches. Our analysis produced a framework summarising the important elements of a facilitated reflective experience. The framework is intended to guide the design of technologies to support safety, connection, and reflection in scaffolding social emotional learning towards improved emotional behaviour for children. Future directions for applying the framework include: augmenting existing therapy activities with technology, technology to support children learning how to self-regulate their emotions outside the clinic, and technology to help parents in emotion coaching their child.

Walking meditation is a form of mindfulness training, where the act of walking provides a rhythmic meter for attentional focus. Whilst digital technologies to support sitting meditation and walking practices exist, less explored is the first person in-the-moment experience of technology-mediated walking meditation. We present a study of group walking meditation, with and without an interactive rhythmic soundscape modulated by one practitioner’s brainwave data. Six workshops were conducted with novice and advanced practitioners, involving a guided walking meditation with body scan, writing and drawing exercises and a group interview. The analysis yielded themes of shifting state, attention, self-regulation strategy, and immersion and reflection, and insights into how practitioners use sound to synchronize both walking and breathing. We contribute a method for eliciting, and a novel description of, the first person experience of walking meditation, as resources for the design of interactive technologies to support mindfulness practices of walking meditation.

With the emergence in human–computer interaction (HCI) of researching contemplative practices, authentic descriptions of first-person lived experience informing design are few. Most researchers in HCI are not trained in observing the mind. We draw on learnings from neurophenomenology, inspired by well-established Buddhist techniques for mind-training. We present a self-observation ofTonglen, a Buddhist meditation technique for compassion, conducted over 12 weeks. We found that to keenly observe and document the practice, it is important to go through preparatory stages of stabilising attention and observing the mind. For the practitioner-cum-researcher, the technique should be embedded into a framework training self-observation and developing meta-awareness, supported by documentation of somatic snapshots and reflective journal writing. The first-person method of self-enquiry and account of self-evidence offer insight and directions for refining first-person approaches for future HCI research in body and mind cultivation, and design implications for interactive technologies supporting any practice with a contemplative component.

While existing approaches to human-robot collaboration typically focus on how to build robots that can work safely and fluently with humans on collaborative tasks, our research focuses on how people experience interaction with a robot and interpret its behaviour as collaborative or non-collaborative. By applying a microsociological theory to analyse the process of interaction as it unfolds, our project aims to identify the boundary between cooperativeness and uncooperativeness of the robot in the shared task of a human and a robot carrying an object to a destination. The paper presents the experimental protocol designed based on the microsociological theory that is less known in current human-robot interaction studies. The aim of the experiment is to enable participants to experience expected and unexpected interactions with a robot and to account for how the interaction affects participant interpretation of robot cooperativeness and uncooperativeness.

Media multiplicities are media artworks that employ multiple networked digital devices to create holistic aesthetic effects. Examples include the networked light artworks of Squidsoup, the Spaxels drone-mounted light performances, DrawBots, Siftables and many others. In multiplicitous media artworks, each individual device is a programmable node connected to other nodes via a network connection, and may combine any number of sensors and actuators. A number of development technologies support artists and designers to configure and create media multiplicities, but this domain offers new challenges for creative practitioners. This workshop aims to bring together experts in creative coding and interaction design to discuss and conceptualise frameworks for the practice of media multiplicities. Open challenges include: speed of setup; ease of hardware configuration; speed of code deployment; ability to model and simulate works in VR; network connectivity and stability; and understanding network, computation and power constraints.

Sounds of Infinity is an interactive, low-resolution lighting display that portrays a magnified variation of the infinity mirror. Developed for an outdoor light and music festival, the installation provides a retro-futuristic experience for audiences and explores how playful interactions might impact the behaviour of people in public spaces. Using multiple layers of LED lights, the concept enhances the infinity mirror illusion with a variety of audio-to-visual effects to create a tunnel of interactive light visuals. Due to its intuitive design with sound input, Sounds of Infinity also allows for open exploration of the body to produce sound through voice and movements. It illustrates the timeless quality of light and sound to promote social harmony, connecting and engaging people in collaborative, fun and expressive play.

Interactive auditory feedback on physical movement activity can provide new insights into kinaesthetic awareness. Much existing work tends to emphasise corrective sonic feedback approaches to cyclic movements, either for enhancing or correcting faulty performance. Less explored is the application of aesthetic sonification for encouraging playful, creative expression of rhythmic actions such as walking. To aid the sonic interaction design process, some form of conceptual model of walking is required. We contribute a preliminary version of the Prefix/Suffix Extraction model, informed by previous work on gesture to sound-action chunks. By decomposing the footstep into a prefix-middle-suffix signal, we can control and explore various mappings of weight transfer through the articulation of the foot to sonic characteristics that may encourage the walker to play with their normal way of walking. A public installation of an interactive pressure-sensitive sound-generating surface acted as a proof-of-concept, with four different harmonic sound treatments resulting in noticeable variations in how members of the general public creatively engaged with their walking

Interactive public interfaces are opportunities for designers to affect how people relate to one another. We believe that traditional ritual can inspire a novel approach to the design of digital experience in public space. Ritual has been shown to support social cohesion and we argue that it can be used as a design strategy to encourage the cultivation of qualities like compassion in public space. We created our own interactive artwork, Wish Happiness that was inspired by methods of compassion cultivation from Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism. Through a concept-driven design research approach, we outline the set of design strategies we employed to translate key principles of Buddhist ritual and practice into the secular setting of a festival. We observed that compassion-like qualities, a positive state of mind and a sense of social harmony, were produced through interaction with the system, providing encouragement for future research into ritual interaction for compassion cultivation.

This qualitative field study conducted at a school for autistic children aimed to explain how low and medium functioning autistic children use technology at school. Additionally, it explored education professionals and parents' attitudes and concerns regarding technology use by children. Data-collection methods included focus groups with nine education professionals, naturalistic observations of fifteen children with autism in therapy sessions, and interviews with parents of four of the children. Results revealed that (1) children are regular users of digital technology and media, (2) there are different patterns of use of technologies with possible correlations to accessibility and behavioural manifestations of autism, (3) education professionals and parents have positive attitude towards the use of technology by the children, but also recognize disadvantages to its use.

Walking is an everyday act that we, as humans, often take for granted. To walk requires the synergy of somatosensory, neurological and physiological processes for us to move at a regular pace by lifting and setting down each foot in turn. It can be argued that walking is also a source of creativity and exploration when conducted as an intentional act of somatic or self-awareness. This design case study aims to explore the kinds of somatic awareness and aesthetic engagement of walking apparent through the introduction of a pressure mediated sound generating surface with a group of Feldenkrais movement practitioners. These explorations reveal that there is an awareness of tempo and rhythm during the step cycle. This awareness takes on an internal focus as shifts in attention and bodily organization. Another key finding is that exploration and play are enabled due to the rich timbral qualities of the pressure mediated auditory feedback. The significance and contribution in this work is in the implications it has for the design of technologies that support kinaesthetic awareness through aesthetic and exploratory strategies.

Although not always consciously collected, bodily information shapes the way we construct meaning. By paying attention towards the subtle changes of the soma, it is possible to access part of the ongoing source of meaning and self-knowledge contained in the inner self. In this paper, we describe how the use of wearable devices to amplify direct perception in conjunction with the somatic technique Focusing can facilitate the articulation of the tacit dimension of people's experiences. The perceptible feedback generated by wearable props opens up a dialogue space between the soma and intellect, acting as a facilitator to connect people with unknown aesthetic aspects of their personal stories. Beyond mere amplification of sensation, wearable technology can potentially assist in the ongoing human process of meaning-generation.

Our bodily dimension plays a fundamental role in the ongoing construction of meaning. Exploring the potential of this perspective, this paper describes the structure of a one-day workshop entitled: The body as a source of aesthetic qualities for design: Explorations and techniques. In this workshop, participants will engage with a series of somatic exercises to get in contact with their senses, aiming to reach their tacit, less explicit dimension. Aesthetic qualities emerging from the act of filtering out ideas through the body will be used as generative tools for creativity, as well as for interrogation of subjective experience. By using a series of wearable devices and artefacts from everyday life participants will explore the nuanced differences between sensing and felt-sensing, and how the use of somatic tools and stimuli from wearables can shape the way personal narratives are expressed.

Wearable technology brings computation in intimate proximity to the body, raising questions about the role of the body in interacting with tools. The disappearance of self and technology in achieving transparent and skilful action -- the ideal aspiration of ubiquitous and context-aware computing -- overlooks the potential of self-awareness as a critical resource for interactive experiences grounded in the body. We propose a body-centred perspective on wearable technology informed by phenomenological theories on the body-tool relationship and pragmatist Somaesthetics prioritising the cultivation of the self through somatic awareness for improved life quality. We extend Heidegger's concept of present-at-hand with a new concept of present-at-body, defined as the reflective use of tools for developing bodily self-awareness. In our body-centred approach to wearable technology, we emphasise the dynamic interplay between visibility and transparency of body and tool as a fundamental resource for learning and self-development.

Walking is a physical activity that most people do on a daily basis. It is often characterized as a utilitarian means of locomotion; our basic, habitual mode of getting around from place to place. Walking can also be considered a creative and expressive act, with the potential for inspiring the design of interactive surfaces to support and mediate these aesthetic aspects. We draw on understandings of walking from a range of perspectives including biomechanics, ecological perception, anthropology and dance to inform the design and evaluation of an interactive surface. This surface, the Slow Floor, is intended to encourage a reflective engagement with the act of walking. We present the design and initial user evaluation of the Slow Floor, a pressure sensitive sound-generating surface, with a group of Butoh dancers performing a slow walk. The evaluation reveals a unique creative agency when walking on the Slow Floor compared to the internal focus on awareness when slow walking without the interactive surface. This creative agency provides new knowledge on the role interactive surfaces can play in developing awareness of movement and internal felt experience contributing to the discussion around somatics and HCI.

An emerging area of new materiality in interactive architecture is the blending of physical computing with architectonic surfaces. As the sense of touch gains increasing significance across many design disciplines, new design knowledge is required for working with technology-mediated tactile interaction and haptic experience. With the introduction of novel forms of tangible, interactive materials, designers are faced with the challenge of acquiring design skills grounded in unfamiliar, tactile properties. We present a new design method comprised of a touch toolkit and accompanying workshop. The toolkit consists of two parts: a graphical user interface and four interactive sample surfaces. The surfaces contain actuators, which change their tactile qualities dynamically (e.g., temperature, texture) according to the GUI settings. A worksheet has been designed to collect data and user feedback, facilitating both the acquisition of touch-based design skills and reflection on the tactile perceptual qualities. A preliminary user study has provided initial confirmation of the usability of the toolkit and the usefulness of the workshop format for introducing novices to this emerging area of touch-based design.

The design of programmed spatio-material environments can be conceptualized as providing new stimuli with which to rewire the human brain in the context of architectural design. The plasticity of the brain is now recognised by neuroscience -- the brain can be teased to inform, continually learn and restructure itself. As a driver for stimuli that rewire behavioural and cognitive patterns, a cognitive architecture 4EA approach is employed ('embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, affected') to inform the design of digitally manufactured and interactive prototype environments that become sensate machines. We introduce a 4EA design framework, combining approaches from computational architectural design, human-computer interaction and choreography, for the design of environments in which novel cognitive experiences arise from interaction between network components. A series of creative works from the Black Project is presented as case studies exemplifying our 4EA design framework, furthering investigations into how to collaboratively design, manufacture and choreograph sensate machines for rewiring cognition through creative engagement by performers and audience alike.

This Creativity & Cognition 2013 workshop explores emerging methods for mapping movement, technology and computation. We invite participants that are interested in bodily experience within computational knowledge representation. The title Beautiful Dance Moves, references the challenge of representing embodied movement knowledge within computational models. While human movement itself focuses on bodily experience, developing computational models for movement requires abstraction and representation of lived embodied cognition. Mappings between movement and its rich personal and cultural meanings provide an underexplored research domain that can provide insight within computational modeling. Many fields, including Interaction Design, have been inspired by recent developments within Neuroscience validating the primacy of movement in cognitive development and human intelligence. This has spawned a growing interest in experiential principles of movement awareness and mindfulness, while simultaneously fueling the need for developing computational models that can describe movement intelligence with greater rigour. This workshop seeks to explore an equal and richly nuanced epistemological partnership between movement experience and movement cognitive and computational representation.

There is growing interest in designing for movement-based interactions with technology, now that various sensing technologies are available enabling a range of movement possibilities from gestural to whole-body interactions. We present a design methodology of Moving and Making Strange, an approach to movement-based interaction design that recognizes the central role of the body and movement in lived cognition. The methodology was developed through a series of empirical projects, each focusing on different conceptions of movement available within motion-sensing interactive, immersive spaces. The methodology offers designers a set of principles, perspectives, methods, and tools for exploring and testing movement-related design concepts. It is innovative for the inclusion of the perspective of the mover, together with the traditional perspectives of the observer and the machine. Making strange is put forward as an important tactic for rethinking how to approach the design of movement-based interaction.

We are exploring new possibilities for bodily-focused aesthetic experiences within participatory live-art contexts. As artist-researchers, we are interested in how we can understand and shape bodily experience and imagination as primary components of an interactive aesthetic experience, sonically mediated by digital biofeedback technologies. Through the making of a participatory live-art installation, we illustrate how we used the Bodyweather performance methodology to inform the design of ritual interactions intended to reframe the audience experience of self, body and the world through imaginative processes of scaling and metaphor. We report on the insights into the varieties of audience experience gathered from audience testing of the prototype artwork, with a particular focus on the relationship between the embodied imagination and felt sensation; the influence of objects and costume; and the sonically mediated experience of physiological processes of breathing and heartbeat. We offer some reflections on the use of ritual and scripted interactions as a strategy for facilitating coherent forms of bodily experience.

In our approach to body-focused interactive art, the tangible material with which we craft interactional aesthetic experiences is body experience. Touch and proprioception become primary materials for exploration and embedding in technology-mediated interactional situations. We applied the Feldenkrais Method of somatic bodywork in the development of a prototype interactive artwork, Surging Verticality, to pursue our understanding of how to craft audience experience, where the artwork offers a framework for critical reflection and self-enquiry. The Feldenkrais Method is based on an appreciation of musculo-skeletal organization as a fundamental component of our self-image and subjectivity. Our preliminary reflections on our experience of making, testing and evaluating body-focused interactions reveal the importance of the contract between artist and audience, the care, skill and sensitivity required by the artist and the receptivity of the audience.