In my dissertation, I investigate how physical design can preserve and invite curiosity through embodied interaction in everyday spaces across situated cultural contexts for children. I introduce the concept of Curiosity Portals – invitational, material configurations that function as entryways into playful, real-world exploration. Through three studies situated across diverse global informal contexts (a comics exhibition in the US, a psychology lab in Germany, and a community makerspace in France), I examine how children and intergenerational participants’ first encounters with tangible artifacts shape exploratory engagement. This work contributes a cross-cultural, design-centered framework for understanding how curiosity emerges through children’s playful physical interaction in everyday life, with implications for learning design, HCI, and informal education.

Curiosity is the inherent human drive to learn and understand the unknown. This poster presents the design and implementation of nine Curiosity Portals: intentionally designed invitations in everyday spaces that spark curiosity through hands-on, sensory-rich experiences. We provide empirical evidence of how designers operationalize attributes from the existing Curiosity Portal framework into practice. Eleven graduate students studying design participated in a course where they created curiosity portals, and temporarily deployed them in diverse public settings. We illustrate how designers embodied their curiosities through the artifacts they created from early ideation to implementation to deployment. Our findings reveal four cross-cutting implementation strategies designers employed to operationalize curiosity portals. We also identified critical tensions designers must navigate in real-world situations. These findings expand the curiosity portal framework from a designer-centered perspective, providing practical insights on how to invite curiosity through physical design in everyday spaces.

Character animation remains challenging for novices and children despite advances in digital tools. While recent tangible interfaces have lowered barriers by enabling creators to animate their drawings on paper, they are limited to preset animation sequences and support for only human-like characters. We present Rig-a-Doodle, a tangible kit and web application for open-ended character rigging animation, where creators can draw any character and construct a custom physical rig using everyday materials to animate it. This work-in-progress contributes a system of tangible interaction to animate hand-drawn characters by direct physical manipulation of custom rigs in real-time. We share findings from a preliminary workshop with adults to explore the kinds of expressive animation the kit enables, discover issues with interaction, and source ideas for future directions.

This interactive art installation presents Twist-Yay!, an isokinetic sculpture that draws fascinating connections with mathematics as a part of its making process. The design of Twist-Yay! is a large-scale, hands-on manifestation of the geometric properties of hexagons and hexagonal tessellation formations using mechanical movements. This installation invites children (and everyone!) to drive the sculpture by physically standing on the central hexagonal piece and twisting clockwise and anti-clockwise to make the sculpture move. The art installation intends to tap into the curiosities of young learners by drawing their attention to pattern-formation and by providing an analog experience with mathematics and art. Twist-Yay! aims to highlight the mathematics at play while the sculpture was being designed; enabling an affinity towards mathematics coupled with a playful full-body experience and mechanistic movements.