This paper presents restraints - directly imposed restrictions on players' bodily movements, as a mechanic for bodily play in HCI. While this is a familiar mechanic in non-digital movement-based games, its potential in designing bodily play experiences in HCI has been scarcely explored. Three types of restraints observed in non-digital movement-based games, are explored here: fixating body parts, excluding body parts and depriving/manipulating bodily senses. Then, we investigate the experiential dynamics of restraints as a bodily play mechanic bridging a phenomenological perspective on bodily movement with theories on play. These investigations form the theoretical framework for the subsequent analysis of five digital body game examples. Building on this analysis and theoretical framework, we formulate five design strategies for implementing restraints as a mechanic for bodily play in HCI. We propose restraints as a generative resource for researchers and designers interested in understanding and designing bodily play experiences in HCI.

We present potentials of creating excuses as a central metaphor for a design strategy - excuses to interact (a "ticket to talk") as a way to facilitate social interactions among participants. Interaction design has, in its third wave, moved towards the more abstract experiential potentials of designing for embodied playful interactions, but much is needed to understand the dynamics of social interaction and how one can design for social curiosity. With this perspective we move beyond tangible curiosity, attempting to break restraint, timidity and shyness - using touch to design for bending social norms. We build the concept of creating excuses to interact based on three large experiments with interactive art installations presented in a festival context. We attempt to convert the particular design cases into general understandings of a set of potential design strategies, with the intention to create generative design knowledge. Extremely simple technical rules can be designed with the sole purpose of breaking down normal social restraints and provoking interesting social interaction.

We consider robots that take their physical appearance from familiar domestic objects, FDOs. Such FDO robots are special kinds of non-anthropomorphic robots, whose possible expressiveness have been studied by several scholars recently. The present study concerns FDO robots specifically in staged performances. Familiar objects can be anything from a spoon, over TV sets and lamps, to a huge piece of furniture. Familiar objects mean that the audience will have some expectations what the object is and its properties as a non-animate object. When breathing life into a domestic objects (as a metaphor for making it into a robot), new performative qualities appear that play with the familiar expectations in dialogue with the expressions we have added to it. We present our initial work on a specific sort of FDO robots that obsess the bodies of an iconic brand of vacuum cleaners. Specifically, we have three main research questions: how to make FDO robots expressive, how to use FDO robots in dramaturgically interesting ways, and how to design supporting tools for using FDO robots in staged performances. This research is a collaboration between two different subjects at Roskilde University, Performance Design and Computer Science, closely integrated with this university's interdisciplinary and project oriented pedagogy for the benefit of both teaching and research.