Sound has long been used to enhance eating experiences, and increasingly, we know sound can shape how we perceive taste. Yet intentionally composing sounds to modulate taste remains underexplored in cross-sensory HCI design. While prior research has mapped individual auditory parameter (e.g., pitch, timbre, rhythm) to basic taste perceptions, less is known about how holistic sound compositions combining multiple parameters can be systematically designed and evaluated. We present a human-in-the-loop workflow that brings together professional sound designers and generative AI to create 160 sounds with taste intentions informed by established auditory-taste parameters. In a study with 149 participants on sound-taste correspondences, we identify sounds that strongly correspond to basic taste words. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a workflow for designing taste-matching sounds; (2) a curated repository of reusable sound stimuli for cross-sensory research; and (3) a designerly framework for creating compositional taste-matching sounds alongside insights into sound-taste word correspondences and association strategies, offering implications for cross-sensory HCI.

How can we leverage taste expectations to create novel food-based experiences for children? Eating is an embodied process that engages multiple senses. Cross-sensory correspondences may offer educational and recreational opportunities to design interactive applications that encourage diversifying encounters with food. We present a study with 64 children (ages 10–11) who explored eight textured materials hidden inside mystery “food” boxes and reported both their expected tastes and willingness to eat. Our findings provide evidence of touch–taste cross-sensory correspondences in children – sweetness with weak-hard-brittle and strong-soft-brittle materials, and saltiness with a weak-soft brittle material – and how these mappings influenced children’s openness to unknown foods. These results provide empirical grounding for cross-sensory interaction design with children, demonstrating how texture could scaffold curiosity and learning. We outline design implications for cross-sensory food interfaces, non-edible public exhibits, and playful educational technologies that could broaden eating experiences and enable new forms of virtual food interaction.

The use of a wide range of sensory modalities is increasingly central to technologies for learning, communication, and affective regulation. During the preschool years, sensory integration develops rapidly, shaping how children perceive and make sense of their environments. A key component of this process is cross-sensory correspondence: the systematic ways in which perceptions in different sensory modalities influence one another. Despite its relevance, little is known about cross-sensory correspondences in preschool-aged children (2-4 years). We present a study with 26 preschoolers examining smell-touch-emotion correspondences through playful tasks. We found significant correspondences both between sensory modalities and between sensory modalities and affective judgements. Further analysis revealed association strategies underpinning these mappings. We contribute empirical insights into cross-sensory correspondences in early childhood, design guidelines that align with how preschoolers relate sensory input, and a replicable method for probing cross-sensory cognition in this age group.

Design-based learning (DBL) can contribute to students' designerly well-being when enabling them to engage with the world through their own personal values and beliefs.Reflecting on and incorporating personally meaningful human values in their designs might in turn provide an avenue to support students' collective agency to engage critically with technology.In this paper, we investigate how value-sensitive design (VSD)-based activities and tools can support middle school students in incorporating their values into design projects.We detail the development and implementation of a Design Values card set and values-focused learning activities in an exploratory case study with 24 grade 6/7 students (ages 11-13) over 18 sessions across six weeks.Findings illustrate students' value hierarchies and reasoning, the card set's role in supporting their design processes, and how their values shaped their final designs.We present implications for educational designers and educators along with future directions for research to support designerly well-being.

Sound is a preferred and dominant medium that people with blindness use to capture, share and reflect on meaningful moments in their lives. Within the timeframe of 12 months, we worked with seven people with blindness and two of their sighted loved ones to engage in a multi-stage co-creative design process involving multiple steps building toward the final co-design workshop. We report three types of sonic mementos, designed together with the participants, that Encapsulate, Augment and Re-imagine personal audio recordings into more interesting and meaningful sonic memories. Building on these sonic mementos, we critically reflect and describe insights into designing sound that supports personal and social experiences of reminiscence for people with blindness through sound. We propose design opportunities to promote collective remembering between people with blindness and their sighted loved ones and design recommendations for remembering through sound.