More-than-Human (MtH) design increasingly engages biomaterials such as fungi and algae through practices of noticing, care, and decentering beyond utilitarian framings. We extend this by examining play as a situated inquiry into MtH design. Through a two-month interspecies ethnography of attempting to play alongside fungal growth, and thematic analysis of our experiences, we formulated six play potentials (PPs) that surface playful practices such as making play moves and negotiating care with unpredictable playmates at the boundaries of growth, breaching growth and being surprised by how it’s taken them up, co-making funny, mysterious traces to revisit their change in time, and taking up the challenge of remembering what growth has hidden. Our work contributes (1) an empirical account of play as a situated way of knowing with biomaterials through joyful yet sometimes risky negotiations across temporalities, agencies, and entanglements, and (2) design directions for fostering playful, relational engagements with growing biomaterials.

There is growing interest in making museums more participatory, creating opportunities for HCI to support audience involvement. We approach them from the perspective of play and playfulness, looking at how playful technology might promote audience participation in museums. To explore this design space, we conducted a case study at Museu del Cinema, engaging diverse stakeholders to co-design playful technologies. From a reflexive analysis of our design process and its results, we contribute: (1) a catalog featuring three design ideas showcasing different ways of active audience participation; (2) a set of design insights for creating such technologies. Examining these contributions through the lens of literature on participatory museums allows us to position their scope and potential impact, and to envision exciting avenues for future research. Overall, our work offers an exploratory case study that contributes to research on playful technology and museum participation.

This paper presents intermediate-level knowledge in the form of a taxonomy that highlights 12 different ways in which interactive tech might support forest-related experiences that are joyful for humans. It can inspire and provide direction for designs that aim to enrich the experiential texture of forests. The taxonomy stemmed from a reflexive analysis of 104 speculative ideas produced during a year-long co-design process, where we co-experienced and creatively engaged a diverse range forests and forest-related activities with 250+ forest-goers with varied backgrounds and sensitivities. Given that breadth of forests and populations involved, our work foregrounds a rich set of design directions that set an actionable early frame for creating tech that supports joyful human-forest interplays – one that we hope will be extended and consolidated in future research, ours and others'.

In this paper, we present our in-progress Research through Design around PixelGrid, an interactive display for producing pixel art and showcasing it publicly. What started as an exploration into the design of interactive tech that affords playful expression in public spaces progressively evolved into an inquiry into how to handle the unwanted uses these systems may afford, i.e. the possibility that people use their affordances in ways that might be susceptible of being offensive to others. Here we present the current state of our research: (1) describing the latest version of our prototype; (2) reporting on the iterative process that led to it, as well as on its latest deployment; and (3) sharing the early insights that derived from our in-progress research. We will present both those insights and our prototype at TEI'25, to discuss our in-progress learnings and collectively envision future avenues for our research.

We share an emergent repository of nature-entangled methods-to-be shared, experimented with, and discussed during a conference workshop. We present them in-use, as they are in formation. We do not seek to theorise or even fully articulate these methods-to-be. Rather, to make them approachable and actionable for others by showing them not fully polished. By doing this, we advocate for increased transparency in the difficulties of creating new methods, techniques, tools, and approaches. Our contribution is threefold: we provide 1) an annotated portfolio of methods-to-be; 2) illustrative examples of how cross-pollination of these methods can enrich their situated use; and 3) a discussion of ways to further articulate the methods and deepen reflection on their roles in nature-entangled design processes.

Commensality, the act of eating together, offers a rich multisensory and social experience that technology can enhance. Dining involves interactions with food, where smells, colors, sounds, and textures contribute to a multisensory experience. The table becomes a focal point for social interaction, with nonverbal cues and conversations being the indispensable ingredients of the commensal experience. The CoFI2024 workshop aims to stimulate discussion about how interactive technology can enrich dining experiences. The other aim is to build an interdisciplinary community related to commensality and human-food interaction, focusing on the role of multimodal interaction among commensal partners sharing food, being humans or artificial dining companions.

There is an increasing interest in combining interactive technology with food, leading to a new research area called human-food interaction. While food experiences are increasingly benefiting from interactive technology, for example in the form of food tracking apps, 3D-printed food and projections on dining tables, a more systematic advancement of the field is hindered because, so far, there is no comprehensive articulation of the grand challenges the field is facing. To further and consolidate conversations around this topic, we invited 21 HFI experts to a 5-day seminar. The goal was to review our own and prior work to identify the grand challenges in human-food interaction. The result is an articulation of 10 grand challenges in human-food interaction across 4 categories (technology, users, design and ethics). By presenting these grand challenges, we aim to help researchers move the human-food interaction research field forward.

Here we present an exploration into the playful potential of forests and how interactive tech might respond to it. Through first-person, speculative, and situated generative design methods, we engaged with a range of forestry activities to explore their capacity to afford experiences based on joy and care. An analysis of our 16 trips to the forest (and the reflections they motivated) revealed 13 play potentials [6] of human-forest interactions: 13 aspects of forestry experiences that can be intrinsically joyful. We present them clustered as 5 overarching directions that can guide the design of technology that pays more attention to nature's inherent playful character. Our work can inspire a new wave of forest technology that transcends techno-solutionism and privileges alternative values of joy and care.

Recent research calls for new design methods and tools that respond to the idiosyncrasies of emergent design spaces. Here we address one of them: the design of nature-related technology. To facilitate increasingly situated practices in this space, we created the Wild Probes: a set of probing tools for displacing co-design into the wilderness. Our toolkit enables forestry future-making by helping forest goers to pay attention to, reflect on, ideate around, and document their forestry experiences. Here we present the design and early use of the toolkit. We hope other designers will find it useful and extend it with new Wild Probes of their own.

Location-based multiplayer games such as Pokémon GO are tied to real-world locations. Past research has demonstrated that, consequently, these games influence where players move. In order to explore what dynamics in these games incentivize travel to specific places or areas, we engaged in interviews with active players. We discovered 11 unique game dynamics, which could be positioned under three overarching themes: (1) the playing field, as determined by the placement of points of interest, the players' habitat and their surroundings; (2) the player communities and real life relationships, which motivated and directed the playing; and (3) coincidental motivational support, which highlighted how location-based games offer multi-layered motivation for players to travel to, and engage with, specific real-world locations. Our study contributes to the fields of gamified human mobility and human-nature interaction by elucidating how playful technologies can influence where and when people move.

Here we present a co-design exploration into the potential of technology to playfully re-signify urban spaces. We created a speculative catalog of urban tech and used it to facilitate multi-stakeholder discussions about the playful potential of smart cities. The learnings from our co-design engagements embody different people's ideas of how tech might and might not support rich forms of urban play, and contribute to ongoing efforts at exploring how to playfully reconfigure our cities. We present: (1) a list of inspirational play potentials of urban spaces—i.e. playful things already people do, and enjoy, in the public space; (2) a portfolio of speculative ideas that show how tech might help to realize that potential; and (3) a discussion of stakeholders’ responses to these ideas. Our work can provide designers with inspiration and actionable advice for cultivating forms of urban play that cater to people's socio-emotional needs.

In recent studies researchers have developed compelling and exciting shape-changing food (SCF) materials. Unfortunately, the adoption of SCFs in culinary practice is still complex. We present a research-through-design exploration of a novel SCF material that can be developed in restaurant kitchens using everyday kitchen appliances with the only addition of a commercial desktop 3D food printer. Our lightweight process involves the preparation of edible paper, which can be folded into origami shapes and is actuated through the addition of an acidic liquid. We facilitated participatory sessions with five chefs in their restaurants and evaluated our material. Our qualitative study contributes design guidelines on how to incorporate SCFs into chefs’ everyday culinary practices. Building on the chefs’ perspectives of our material and its culinary potential we conclude with a speculation of how SCF materials could enable novel multi-sensory and interactive food experiences.

With one-person households being increasingly common and Covid-19 lockdown policies forcing people to stay home, remote dining has become common practice for many, who take it as an opportunity to connect with others in times of loneliness. Sharing meals online, also known as digital commensality, is a rich form of interaction, where people leverage technology to achieve a sense of connectedness and belonging while eating. In this paper, we look at digital commensality and we explore its inherent playful potential with the aim to inspire the design of engaging technologies that can support, enhance and augment this form of interaction. For this, we used a situated play design approach to document and analyze the behavior of 36 people (including pairs of friends and strangers) sharing meals online. Our analysis surfaced a set of play potentials of remote dining -- i.e., playful things people already do and enjoy spontaneously while sharing meals online. We present those play potentials as inspirational material: they can motivate and enrich the design of future digital commensality technologies by responding to people's desire for playful and social interaction with, through, and around food.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted processes interaction designers took for granted, challenging some of our most commonplace design practices. Participatory and situated approaches have been impacted the most: where we engaged stakeholders in-person and in-context, during this time we must co-design remotely and in virtual environments. Such a dramatic change calls for new co-design methods. In this article, we present a novel remote strategy for involving stakeholders to co-design interactive technology: Designerly Tele-Experiences (DTE). Our methodological proposal enables participants to experience early design concepts in-the-wild as a provocation to contribute new ideas that resonate with their experiential preferences. Here we describe the rationale for DTE, unpack how it builds on and extends existing methods, and provide actionable guidelines from our experience of using it in our work. Our contribution will empower interaction designers to embrace participatory and situated approaches even when engaging stakeholders in person is not possible or desirable.

We present a Research-through-Design case study of the design and development of an intimate-space tangible device perhaps best understood as a socially assistive robot, aimed at scaffolding children’s efforts at emotional regulation. This case study covers the initial research device development, as well as knowledge transfer to a product development company toward translating the research into a workable commercial product that could also serve as a robust “research product” for field trials. Key contributions to the literature include: (1) sharing of lessons learned from the knowledge transfer process that can be useful to others interested in developing robust products (whether commercial or research) that preserve design values, while allowing for large scale deployment and research; (2) articulation of a design space in HCI/HRI (Human Robot Interaction) of intimate space socially assistive robots , with the current artifact as a central exemplar, contextualized alongside other related HRI artifacts.

Much work has been done on the design of both interactive narratives and food-based interaction systems, however their intersection has received little attention within the design research community. We took the relative dearth of food-based interactive storytelling systems as an opportunity to explore a compelling design space for multisensory interactive narratives, given these few systems often position people only as passive observers. We report the results of a design workshop conducted among the authors who are design researchers in interactive narratives and food-based play. In the workshop, we discussed existing works, asynchronously brainstormed new food-based interactive storytelling systems, and then reconvened to discuss our ideas. We present the portfolio of designs that arose from this workshop, and the design themes that we synthesized from the portfolio. We recommend how to position people not just as observers, but as active participants in the interactive food-based storytelling system.

In this pictorial, we explore the potential of social media to help inspire ideas for future drone design applications that support playful and social experiences. Drawing from a Situated Play Design approach [3], we turn to social media posts to identify recurring playful and social instances of drone use in social settings. We present the results of collecting 143 posts found on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, from which we identified a non-exhaustive.list.of.drone-based.play.potentials, i.e. existing ways in which people already appropriate drones to playfully augment social situations. We present these play potentials as potentially.valuable and inherently situated intermediate-level knowledge with generative power. We argue they might inspire the design of future.drone.technologies.and.experiences in Human-Drone Interaction (HDI), in directions that increasingly respond to people's desires for play and social connection.

We discuss three cases of transformative creative practice that aim to address large-scale societal issues related to the climate emergency by taking a series of interconnected, small-scale actions. Drawing on our first-hand perspectives, we reflect on how the cases address such issues by proliferating across different social contexts and supporting creative engagements of diverse stakeholders. We offer this empirical reflection at a time of rapid social and ecological change that has affected all life on the planet. Eco-social challenges and structural inequalities caused by shifts in global economic, political and technological power require new approaches and transformative actions to stabilize and restore ecosystems on which life depends. Our research shows that creative practice in art and design has a critical role to play in these processes of transformation. By discussing the opportunities and challenges encountered by our three cases within their transformative efforts and analyzing how they proliferate across diverse scales, we aim to expand the emerging scholarship on the transformative potential of creative practice.

There is an open call for technology to be more playful [5, 79] and for tech design to be more inclusive of people with disabilities [80]. In the era of COVID19, it is often unsafe for the public in general and people with disabilities, in particular, to engage in in-person design exercises using traditional methods. This presents a missed opportunity as these populations are already sharing playful content rich with tacit design knowledge that can be used to inspire the design of playful everyday technology. We present our process of scraping play potentials [4] from TikTok from content creators with disabilities to generate design concepts that may inspire future technology design. We share 7 emerging themes from the scraped content, a catalog of design concepts that may inspire designers, and discuss the relevance of the emerging themes and possible implications for the design concepts.

Warm-up games are widespread practices in multiple activities across domains, yet little scholarly work can be found about their role in physical training. Here, we study potential goals and benefits of warm-up games, and explore opportunities for technology inclusion through investigating a collection of warm-up games gathered: online, from a survey of online warm-up games curated, described, and used by Physical Education teachers; and in person, from an ongoing design research work as part of a technology-supported circus training course. Further, in the context of the latter, we conducted explorative design interventions, augmenting a range of the warm-up games with wearable technology. Our work surfaces major goals and benefits of warm-up games, which can be broadly classified as preparing participants physically, socially, and mentally. We also show how the inclusion of open-ended technology can support these goals and discuss broader opportunities for technology inclusion in warm-up games.

In this paper, we present an annotated portfolio of speculative ideas that emerged from a co-design process where we investigated the playful potential of day-to-day mealtime. Our portfolio illustrates the learnings from our participatory engagements: it embodies ours and our participants' ideas of how technology might support increasingly playful and socio-emotionally rich experiences around food. We contribute: (1) a list of play potentials of mealtime-i.e. people's existing playful practices with food-that will point designers towards socio-emotionally desirable play-food experiences; (2) a portfolio of speculative design ideas that illustrate how mealtime technology could help to realize that playful potential; and (3) a discussion of our participants' experiences with and responses to lo-fi prototypes of our ideas. Our work will provoke designers to carefully consider the impact of food-tech innovation on the quality of people's social eating experiences and inspire them to cultivate forms of food-play that are socio-emotionally rich.?

In this pictorial, we turn to culture and traditions to present an annotated portfolio of play-food potentials, i.e. interesting design qualities and/or interaction mechanisms that could help promote playful and social engagement in food practices. Our portfolio emerged from a one-day workshop where we played with and analyzed a collection of 27 food traditions from diverse cultural backgrounds and historical periods. We highlight play forms and experiential textures that are underexplored in Human-Food Interaction (HFI) research. Our contribution is intended to inspire designers to broaden the palette of play experiences and emotions embraced in HFI.

Digital technology has become a frequent companion of daily food practices, shaping the ways we produce, consume, and interact with food. Smart kitchenware, diet tracking apps, and other techno-solutions carry promise for healthy and sustainable food futures but are often problematic in their impact on food cultures. We conducted four Human-Food Interaction (HFI) workshops to reflect on and anticipate food-tech issues, using experimental food design co-creation as our primary method. At the workshops, food and food practices served as the central research theme and accessible starting point to engage stakeholders and explore values, desires, and imaginaries associated with food-tech. Drawing on these explorations, we discuss diverse roles that experimental design co-creation, performed with and around food, can play in supporting critical, interdisciplinary HFI inquiries. Our findings will appeal to design researchers interested in food as a research theme or as a tangible (and compostable!) design material affording diverse co-creative engagements.

Despite the capacity of play to spontaneously emerge in our daily life, the scope of application of play design in HCI is generally narrower, specifically targeting areas of pure leisure, or wholly utilitarian and productive play. Here we focus on the value of play design to respond to and support our natural gravitation towards emergent play that helps to meet our social and emotional needs. We present a bridging concept: Technology for Situated and Emergent Play, i.e. technology design that supports playful engagement that emerges interwoven with our everyday activities outside leisure, and that enriches these activities with socio-emotional value. Our intermediate-level contribution has value as a synthesis piece: it weaves together theories of play and play design and bridges them with concrete design examples. As a bridging concept, it contributes: i) theoretical grounding; ii) inspiring design exemplars that illustrate the theory and foreground its value; and iii) design articulations in the form of valuable experiential qualities and design features. Our work can help to focus design agendas for playful technology and inspire future designs in this space.

User involvement is well established in game and play design. But in a time when play design is becoming relevant in domains beyond pure entertainment, and play blends into everyday activity in diverse ways, we need to revisit old, and develop new, user involvement methods. Using a situated perspective and Research through Design, we present Situated Play Design (SPD), a novel approach for the design of playful interventions aimed at open-ended, everyday activities that are non-entertainment based. Like user-centered game and play design methods, our contribution leverages user engagement; like Participatory Design methods, our method acknowledges the co-creating role of end users. SPD extends those approaches by focusing on uncovering existing manifestations of contextual playful engagement and using them as design material. Through two case studies, we illustrate our approach and the design value of using existing and emergent playful interactions of users in context as inspirations for future designs. This allows us to provide actionable strategies to design for in-context playful engagement.

Wearables are integrated into many aspects of our lives, yet, we still need further guidance to develop devices that truly enhance in-person interactions, rather than detract from them by taking people's attention away from the moment and one another. The value of this paper is twofold: first, we present an annotated portfolio of 'social wearables', namely technology designs worn on the body that augment co-located interaction. The design work described can serve as inspiration for others. Then we propose a design framework for social wearables grounded in prior work, as well as our own design research, that can help designers to ideate by raising valuable questions to begin their inquiry with and use to evaluate their designs. We illustrate the evaluative value of this framework through two social wearable designs, each tested in the appropriate social setting.

Activity in Human-Food Interaction (HFI) research is skyrocketing across a broad range of disciplinary interests and concerns. The dynamic and heterogeneous nature of this emerging field presents a challenge to scholars wishing to critically engage with prior work, identify gaps and ensure impact. It also challenges the formation of community. We present a Systematic Mapping Study of HFI research and an online data visualisation tool developed to respond to these issues. The tool allows researchers to engage in new ways with the HFI literature, propose modifications and additions to the review, and thereby actively engage in community-making. Our contribution is threefold: (1) we characterize the state of HFI, reporting trends, challenges and opportunities; (2) we provide a taxonomy and tool for diffractive reading of the literature; and (3) we offer our approach for adaptation by research fields facing similar challenges, positing value of the tool and approach beyond HFI.

Vulnerability is a common experience in everyday life and is frequently perceived as a flaw to be excised in technology design. Yet, research indicates it is an essential aspect of wholehearted living among others. In this paper, we present the design and deployment of 'True Colors', a novel wearable device intended to support social interaction in a live action roleplay game (LARP) setting. We describe the Research-through-Design process that helped us to discover and articulate the possibility space of vulnerability in the design of social wearables, as support for producing a sense of social empowerment and connection among wearers within the LARP. We draw conclusions that may be of value to others designing wearables and related technologies aimed at supporting co-located social interaction in games/play.

Interventions that help children develop protective factors against mental health disorders are an inherently social endeavour, relying on a number of actors from within the family as well as the school context. Little work thus far in CSCW and HCI has examined the potential of technology to support or enhance such interventions. This paper provides the first steps to unpacking this socio-technical design space, focusing on emotional regulation (ER) as a specific instance of a protective factor. We combine a user-centred approach to understanding lived experiences of families (interviews, design workshops) with an expert-led understanding of what makes interventions psychologically effective. Our findings suggest the potential of technology to enable a shift in how prevention interventions are designed and delivered: empowering children and parents through a new model of 'child-led, situated interventions', where participants learn through actionable support directly within family life, as opposed to didactic in-person workshops and a subsequent 'skills application'. This conceptual model was then instantiated in a technology probe, which was deployed with 14 families. The promising field study findings provide an initial proof-of-concept validation of the proposed approach.