As persuasive technologies weave themselves deeper into the fabric of domestic life, the challenge of sustaining digital wellbeing grows increasingly entangled with the spaces and rhythms of everyday living. Conventional Digital Self-Control Tools (DSCTs), while offering momentary reprieve, often falter under sustained use, revealing a gap between device-centric interventions and the situated nature of technology habits. In resistance, we present Attention Nooks: a set of spatial interventions that deploy "situated frictions" within the home. Attention Nooks recast digital wellbeing as a lived negotiation of spatial boundaries in the home. Developed through an autobiographical design process, we surface design events that shaped our making and living with our prototypes. We discuss the teleological nature of interventions, implications for ubiquitous computing, and the subversion of ethically ambiguous technologies. Our contribution lies in reframing digital wellbeing as a design opportunity that calls for pluralistic situated encounters in the home.

With instant gratification constantly available at the tap of a screen, smartphone overuse has quickly become a widespread problem. Many digital applications have been built to combat this issue, either by blocking content entirely or enforcing a mindful pause before entering a distracting app. In this paper, we propose FocuShift, a shape-changing device that attaches to the phone case, as a novel tangible intervention to prevent smartphone overuse. Our device is designed to trigger a shape-change intervention periodically while a user is engaging with a distracting app, altering the ergonomics of the phone and promoting awareness while distracted. We deployed our device in-the-wild for a 48 hour study, comparing screen time between baseline phone usage and phone usage with our shape-changing intervention active. We then conducted interviews with participants to understand the qualitative merits of our proof-of-concept.

Ambient interfaces and calm technology have tried to address attention concerns by operating peripherally in the background. However, as smart home devices increasingly demand attention, we propose a different approach: primary interfaces can employ “least sensing” or “sensory reduction” as attention-preserving mechanisms. Physical privacy-preserving mechanisms have become increasingly common in smart homes, from camera covers to mechanical microphone switches, giving users direct control through physical interaction. Building on this trend, this full-day studio introduces “attention-preserving tangible interfaces”—tangible interfaces that preserve attention through sensory reduction rather than peripheral operation. Through hands-on activities, participants will explore how primary interfaces might be designed to reduce sensory engagement, speculating on what attention-preserving tangible interfaces might look like in smart home contexts. This studio is particularly relevant as smart home devices proliferate and compete for attention, offering an alternative vision of technology that respects rather than demands our focus.

The vision of programmable matter — materials that can change shape or properties in a programmable way — has inspired decades of research across robotics, materials science, and HCI. However, many line-based actuated systems struggle to achieve fine-grained geometries, due to motor size, cost, and control complexity. In this work, we introduce PopTuber, a novel approach to dynamically generate high-resolution 3D curves using passive, low-cost, multistable pop tubes. Instead of chaining actuators, our system leverages the densely arranged bellows with discrete mechanical states, collapsed, expanded, or folded, to represent and construct arbitrary curves. We present the Shaper, a device that uses only five servo motors to reconfigure tubes of any length and curved segments. Alongside the hardware, we provide design guidelines that allow our shaping principle to scale for different tube sizes, a software pipeline that can simulate the tube geometry and execute motor cmmands, and an evaluation of shaping performance and scalability. Our work challenges conventional actuator-intensive and material-oriented approaches in programmable matter, showing how passive, discretely shapable materials combined with minimal actuation can enable versatile, low-cost shape transformations along with a variety of applications.

audience voting on the robot's movement Figure 1: An overview of Dance 2 , a live interactive performance exploring how collective audience input influences a dancerrobot duet.Left -The dancer performs in real time with a wearable robot whose movements are shaped by audience decisions.Right -An audience member engages with the voting interface, making choices that interfere with and shape the unfolding choreography.

YouTube remains a site of problematic persuasive media consumption, often overriding the goals of users when on the platform. In resistance, we present Attention Receipts — artifacts that materialize the cost of being persuaded by the engagement driven design of YouTube. We design and build a browser plugin and a receipt printer that helps users critically reflect upon their time spent watching videos on YouTube. In a 3 week field-deployment with 6 participants, we evaluate how the materiality of the receipt and their agency in the reflection process affect both the quality of reflection and the time spent consuming media. We find that the materiality of the receipts positively influences time spent consuming internet media and that users were split on having agency over when and how they reflect upon their screen-time. We conclude with design recommendations for domestic artifacts that utilize materiality to reveal the effects of persuasive technology.

This paper introduces text-to-shape-display, a novel approach to generating dynamic shape changes in pin-based shape displays through natural language commands. By leveraging large language models (LLMs) and AI-chaining, our approach allows users to author shape-changing behaviors on demand through text prompts without programming. We describe the foundational aspects necessary for such a system, including the identification of key generative elements (primitive, animation, and interaction) and design requirements to enhance user interaction, based on formative exploration and iterative design processes. Based on these insights, we develop SHAPE-IT, an LLM-based authoring tool for a 24 x 24 shape display, which translates the user’s textual command into executable code and allows for quick exploration through a web-based control interface. We evaluate the effectiveness of SHAPE-IT in two ways: 1) performance evaluation and 2) user evaluation (N= 10). The study conclusions highlight the ability to facilitate rapid ideation of a wide range of shape-changing behaviors with AI. However, the findings also expose accuracy-related challenges and limitations, prompting further exploration into refining the framework for leveraging AI to better suit the unique requirements of shape-changing systems.

This paper introduces a novel approach to interactive robots by leveraging the form-factor of cards to create thin robots equipped with vibrational capabilities for locomotion and haptic feedback. The system is composed of flat-shaped robots with on-device sensing and wireless control, which offer lightweight portability and scalability. This research introduces a hardware prototype to explore the possibility of ‘vibration-based omni-directional sliding locomotion’. Applications include augmented card playing, educational tools, and assistive technology, which showcase CARDinality’s versatility in tangible interaction.

Prototyping compact devices with unique form factors often requires the PCB manufacturing process to be outsourced, which can be expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we present Fibercuit, a set of rapid prototyping techniques to fabricate high-resolution, flexible circuits on-demand using a fiber laser engraver. We showcase techniques that can laser cut copper-based composites to form fine-pitch conductive traces, laser fold copper substrates that can form kirigami structures, and laser solder surface-mount electrical components using off-the-shelf soldering pastes. Combined with our software pipeline, an end user can design and fabricate flexible circuits which are dual-layer and three-dimensional, thereby exhibiting a wide range of form factors. We demonstrate Fibercuit by showcasing a set of examples, including a custom dice, flex cables, custom end-stop switches, electromagnetic coils, LED earrings and a circuit in the form of kirigami crane.