Learning clothes repair is challenging for novices, who face interconnected procedural and embodied challenges, especially when learning alone. Existing tools fail to provide holistic support as interactive tutors and lack awareness of the embodied interactions of working with textiles. This paper presents a multi-phase study that investigates these challenges and explores the design space for a Human-Touch-Aware conversational agent (RepairBot). We began with an in-depth autoethnography to understand the novice experience, which informed the development of the RepairBot Conversation Framework (RBCF) together with a design implementation of a technology probe. Using the RepairBot prototype together with a Wizard-of-Oz approach to simulate Human-Touch-Awareness, we investigated how a conversational agent could support repair learning in novices as well as engage them with their own clothes-repairing projects. Subsequent lab and in-home studies with novice participants suggested specific conversational and embodied mechanisms that would facilitate novices’ holistic understanding of repair, increase their confidence, and elicit attentive touch and emotional reflection. We bring these mechanisms together in the framework presented in this paper.

Advances in emerging technologies, such as on-body mechanical actuators and electrical muscle stimulation, have allowed computers to take control over our bodies. This presents opportunities as well as challenges, raising fundamental questions about agency and the role of our bodies when interacting with technology. To advance this research field as a whole, we brought together expert perspectives in a week-long seminar to articulate the grand challenges that should be tackled when it comes to the design of computers’ control over our bodies. These grand challenges span technical, design, user, and ethical aspects. By articulating these grand challenges, we aim to begin initiating a research agenda that positions bodily control not only as a technical feature but as a central, experiential, and ethical concern for future human–computer interaction endeavors.

FFAME (Filtering Familiar Audio for Movement Exploration) is a novel sonification framework aiming to facilitate movement in individuals with chronic back pain. Our personalised, music-based approach contrasts and extends prior work with predetermined tonal sonification. FFAME progressively filters selected music based on angles of the trunk. Through a qualitative analysis of reported experience of 15 participants with chronic pain and 5 physiotherapists, we identify how sonification parameters and musical characteristics affect movement and meaning-making. Music-based movement sonification proved impactful across multiple dimensions: (1) encouraging movement, (2) escaping pain-related rumination, (3) externalizing pain experiences, and (4) scaffolding physical activities. Drawing on enactivism and related philosophies, the study highlights how the semantic indeterminacy of music, combined with real-time movement sonification, created a rich, open-ended environment that supported user agency and exploration. Sonification for pain management can be creative and expressive, enabling people with pain to extend challenging movements and build movement confidence.

Drawing from a present need as well as a growing interest towards developing methods to engage participants in research remotely [1,2], this workshop focuses on identifying opportunities and challenges around designing with children from an embodiment perspective [3,4,5,6,10,11,12,13,15]. Themed around whole body interaction and digital technologies [3,7,8,9,10,11,14,15,16,17,18,20,21] the aim of this workshop is to gain methodological insights for the remote participation of children in design, and arrive at design insights addressing the question how we can design remote, inclusive whole body interactions for and with children while attending to child participants’ multimodal communication and bodily engagement [19,21] in a physically dislocated setting [1,2]. The workshop will involve discussions around data gathering from different angles, including relational, ethical, safety and practical perspectives, to create a comprehensive picture of what it entails to orchestrate embodied co-design workshops with children virtually. Outputs from the workshop will contribute to the IDC community by offering methodological insights from attendees’ own experience and presented case studies from researchers and practitioners from both non-academic and academic settings to support children's embodied engagement in remote workshop situations and beyond.