Vibe Coding is conceptualised as a co-constituted form of programming through which humans and AI tools engage in the mutual shaping of a piece of code. Using design provocations in the form of three different programming assistants, we examine how intentions, control, and outcomes emerge through mutual shaping between programmers, AI-tools, code, and visual sketches. The analysis reveals a set of interrelated themes that foreground the tensions that emerge in participants’ interactions with the programming assistants. A set of design configurations is identified in relation to how these programming processes unfold. We use this to outline how vibe coding can be understood as a decentered form of programming that emphasises the mutual co-constitution and shifting boundaries among humans and AI. We argue that this suggests a reconfiguration of how AI-based programming is understood - emphasising the evolving, co-creative interactions in which intention and control are mutually shaped.

Generative machine learning models provide opportunities to support design work in various parts of the design process. This study investigates how generative machine learning and large language models may play a part in creative design processes of ideation, early prototyping and sketching. A workshop was conducted in which design practitioners and design researchers developed design concepts for a provided design case, with the help of GPT-3. The findings point to three main themes, including i) the practical usefulness and limitations of the system in design ideation processes, ii) how the form of user interaction shapes users’ expectations of the system’s capabilities and potentials, and iii), how the broader discourse around AI both limits and enables how co-creative processes involving human and AI unfolds. The discussion outlines design implications and alternative framings of this kind of co-creative design practices based on post-human perspectives on design and technology use.

This paper presents a study of a group of university students using generative machine learning to translate from natural language to computer code. The study explores how the use of the AI tool can be understood in terms of co-creation, focusing on the one hand on how the tool may serve as a resource for understanding and learning, and on the other hand how the tool affects the creative processes. Findings show how the participants search for a ’correct’ syntax in their instructions to the machine learning tool, and how the inconsistent and erroneous behavior can work as a way to generate clues and inspiration for generating creative expressions. The notion of friction is used to describe how systems like this can serve to both lower thresholds for programming, and also interfere with the creative processes, encouraging reflection and exploration of alternative solutions.

As digital fabrication machines have become more accessible and widely available, practitioners in maker communities have become increasingly responsive to the opportunities to achieve bespoke modifications, known colloquially as ‘modding’. Drawing on interviews with five experienced makers who engage in modding a laser cutter, along with ethnographic observations of maker-machine interactions, we analyse makers’ experiences and ‘war stories’ to frame modding as a prevalent but less explored maker activity. We highlight how makers care for machines, how they cope with risks when engaging in modding, and how mods are essentially creative projects. Based on our findings, we present the conceptualisation of the ‘pliable machine’ – a socio-technical system constituted by, (1) an accessible machine that can be altered, (2) maker skills that go beyond intended use, and (3) a surrounding ‘maker culture’ of caring, sharing and experimentation. Treating the machine as a material offers an alternative perspective on our interactions with technology; we show how the laser cutter becomes pliable in the hands of those who mod.

This paper draws on data from an interview study with children engaged in a leisure time design lab situated in a socioeconomically vulnerable neighborhood. The study accounts for how the children involved in the design activities make sense of their experiences of participating in the design lab. Some perspectives on the relationship between design and empowerment are discussed and three empowering functions of the activities are identified that serve to empower the children in different ways: 1) The creative laboratory – How the activities allow for exploration and experimentation of both new identities and of new possible futures. 2) Community participation – How the design lab enables participation in the local community and reflections on what it means to be a citizen. 3) Playful apprenticeship – How the lab builds a peer-culture where children are continuously addressed and presented as equal colleagues in the lab, both in internal and external settings.

Three-dimensional printing is widely celebrated as enabling open design and manufacturing practice. With easy-to-use techniques such as automated modeling, fabrication machines ostensibly help designers turn ideas into fully fledged objects. Prior HCI literature focuses on improving printing through optimization and by developing printer and material capabilities. This paper expands such considerations by asking, how do 3D printing practitioners understand and create “printability?” And how might HCI better support the work that holds together printing workflows and changing ecosystems of materials and techniques? We conducted studies in two sites of open design: a technology firm in Silicon Valley, California and a makerspace in Stockholm, Sweden. Deploying workshops and interviews, we examine how practitioners negotiate the print experience, revealing a contingent process held together by trial and error exploration and careful interventions. These insights point to the value of tools and processes to support articulation work, what Strauss and colleagues have called the acts of fitting together people, tasks, and their ordering to accomplish an overarching project. We show that despite the sought-after efficiencies of such manufacturing, 3D printing entails articulation work, particularly acts of alignment, exposing messy modes of production carried out by a varied cast of practitioners, machines, and materials.

This paper presents the SWAY prototype that encourages people to explore aspects around balance and posture in a playful way. The prototype senses small movements and shifts in posture using a Kinect sensor, and translates these movements to the tilting of a platform holding a set of marbles, and to haptic feedback in the form of vibrations. The prototype provides an interactive experience focusing on building body awareness with a particular focus on balance and posture. The design inquiry provided new insights with respect to reinforcement of bodily experiences and how different modalities affect the guiding of attention.

This paper analyses a series of events in which a discarded box found in a garbage room is examined and taken apart in the context of a makerspace. The participants' inquiry provided a rich and multifaceted experience in various settings, including puzzle-solving, exploring physical and digital materials, engaging people with different skills. The social engagements with and around the artifacts brought certain interpretative aspects to the fore. Situated acts of interpretation worked as ways of building a coherent narrative and a meaningful experience. In the paper, we highlight the relationship between on the one hand the subjects' skills and motivations to understand and make sense of the technology at hand which we call material literacy, and on the other hand the specific material qualities that encourage or trigger certain interpretations and experiences. The qualities we discuss are: opacity, risk, authenticity, uniqueness, age, and hybridity. This study allows us to reposition the contemporary understanding of makerspaces beyond that of being places for innovation and learning.

We propose a strong concept we name Somaesthetic Appreciation based on three different enquiries. First, our own autobiographical design enquiry, using Feldenkrais as a resource in our design process, bringing out the Soma Carpet and Breathing Light applications. Second, through bringing in others to experience our systems, engaging with and qualitatively analysing their experiences of our applications. In our third enquiry, we try to pin down what characterises and sets Somaesthetic Appreciation designs apart through comparing with and analysing others' design inquiries as well as grounding them in the somaesthetic theories. We propose that the Somaesthetic Appreciation designs share a subtleness in how they encourage and spur bodily inquiry in their choice of interaction modalities, they require an intimate correspondence -- feedback and interactions that follow the rhythm of the body, they entail a distinct manner of making space shutting out the outside world -- metaphorically and literally -- to allow users to turn their attention inwards, and they rely on articulation of bodily experiences to encourage learning and increased somatic awareness.

In this paper we discuss the design process and results from a design exploration on the use of thermal stimuli in body awareness exercises. A user-study was performed on an interactive prototype in the form of an interactive heat mat. The paper brings forth an alternative understanding of heat as a design material that extends the common understanding of thermal stimuli in HCI as a communication modality to instead bring the aesthetic and experiential properties to the fore. Findings account for felt body experiences of thermal stimuli and a number of design qualities related to heat as a design material are formulated, pointing to experiential qualities concerning the felt body, subjectivity and subtleness as well as material qualities concerning materiality, inertia and heat transfer.

In this paper we propose a way to motivate children to learn about science by creating a design process scenario where the children are the designers who have to learn about the material provided for their new products. The material in this case is technology embedded in the children's own toys, two of the main sensors of the video game console Nintendo Wii; the accelerometer and the IR sensor. Through embodied interactions with analogue physical models, in activities called Sciensations, we want to encourage a deeper understanding of the functioning of the technology and also of some related natural science phenomena. An elementary school class of twenty-five students in ages 10--11 was studied while engaged in a design process that ran from startup to prototype evaluation. The resulting design concepts showed several innovative usages of the sensing technologies that indicates an understanding both of the technology and the corresponding natural phenomena. The activities also encouraged discussions and reflections around these abstract concepts.

In the recent developments of human computer interaction, one central challenge has been to find and to explore alternatives to the legacy of the desktop computer paradigm for interaction design. To investigate this issue further we have conducted an analysis on a fascinating piece of machinery often referred to as one of the predecessors of the modern day computer, the Jacquard loom. In analysing the Jacquard loom we look at qualities in design and interaction from some different perspectives: how historical tools, crafts, and practices can inform interaction design, the role of physicality, materiality, and full-body interaction in order to rethink some current conceptions of interaction and design of computational devices.

In this paper findings are presented from a study on how sensor equipped computer game technologies can be used to create tools for educational settings to learn about for example concepts in physics. In a workshop focusing on the concept of gravity, a group of children interacted with an environment consisting of both physical and digital interactive components. We discuss how the mixed digital and physical setting affects the children's coordination and collaboration and their strategies to solve the given assignment. Findings suggest that the embodied nature of the technology create new opportunities for collaboration and that the alignment of the physical and digital parts of the interactive setting is important in order to create a seamless experience that takes advantage of the properties of the respective media.

In this work we present the monster eye installation, consisting of an artifact with which you can examine secrets that are hidden inside the walls.

In the design of interactive systems, developers sometimes need to engage in various ways of physical performance in order to communicate ideas and to test out properties of the system to be realised. External resources such as sketches, as well as bodily action, often play important parts in such processes, and several methods and tools that explicitly address such aspects of interaction design have recently been developed. This combined with the growing range of pervasive, ubiquitous, and tangible technologies add up to a complex web of physicality within the practice of designing interactive systems. We illustrate this dimension of systems development through three cases which in different ways address the design of systems where embodied performance is important. The first case shows how building a physical sport simulator emphasises a shift in activity between programming and debugging. The second case shows a build-once run-once scenario, where the fine-tuning and control of the run-time activity gets turned into an act of in situ performance by the programmers. The third example illustrates the explorative and experiential nature of programming and debugging systems for specialised and autonomous interaction devices. This multitude in approaches in existing programming settings reveals an expanded perspective of what practices of interaction design consist of, emphasising the interlinking between design, programming, and performance with the system that is being developed.

The practice-oriented turn in social sciences has implied a series of fundamental consequences and design challenges for HCI in general, and particularly in tangible interaction research. This could be interpreted as a move away from scientific ideals based on a modernist tradition, reflected in four contemporary themes in tangible interaction research. The first theme concerns a shift from an information centric to an action centric perspective on interaction. The second concerns a broadened focus from studying properties of the system, to instead aim at supporting qualities of the activity of using a system. The third concerns the general shift towards supporting sharable use, rather than primarily individual use settings. The last theme concerns the shift towards multiple and subjective interpretation of how to use new technological artefacts. We discuss how these themes are grounded in theoretical as well as more concrete technical developments in the area of tangible computing.

Finding generic ways of representing location in context aware systems is an interesting problem with many pitfalls. In this work we examine how a folksonomy approach with collaborative location tagging can be used to allow for end users to communicate their whereabouts to others in a way that makes sense within a specific community. The Spots system allows for users to define places based on patterns of WiFi signal strength profiles. The places are tagged with labels describing the place. Different tags can be provided within different communities. A usage study shows a great diversity in how users chose to name places.