Surfing, like many water sports, offers a unique opportunity to experience natural environments, yet the design of interactive technologies for water activities– “WaterHCI” – so far prioritised athletic performance over experience. To explore this opportunity, we designed SurfSync, a novel wearable system in the form of an actuating vest and a hat that provides oceanic information through sound, vibration, and heat actuation, aimed at enriching the surfing experience as a playful encounter with the ocean. We studied SurfSync in an ocean-based field study with eight surfers. Through thematic analysis of interviews, we articulated the surfers’ experiences, indicating how they made sense of playful cues while in the ocean. By reflecting on our soma design process and the surfers’ experiences, we provide six design strategies to enrich the surfing experience. Our work contributes to the emerging field of WaterHCI by providing insights into how wearables can enrich human-water experiences outdoors.

Traditional games like "Tag" rely on shared control via inter-body interactions (IBIs) – touching, pushing, and pulling – that foster emotional and social connection. Digital games largely limit IBIs, with players using their bodies as input to control virtual avatars instead. Our “Shared Bodily Fusion” approach addresses this by fusing players’ bodies through a mediating computer, creating a shared input and output system. We demonstrate this approach with "Hidden Touch", a game where a novel social electrical muscle stimulation system transforms touch (input) into muscle actuations (output), facilitating IBIs. Through a study (n=27), we identified three player experience themes. Informed by these findings and our design process, we mapped their trajectories across our three experiential spaces – threshold, tolerance, and precision – which collectively form our design framework. This framework facilitates the creation of future digital games where IBIs are intrinsic, ultimately promoting the many benefits of social play.

The emerging concept of “computational food” focusing on the material affordances when designing food interactions is gaining traction in Human-Food Interaction (HFI). However, prior HFI research has not yet substantively investigated the dynamic nature of computational food from its creation to consumption, limiting our understanding of the complex interactions among creators, computational food, and consumers. In response, our paper shifts the perspective towards the dynamics of computational food interactions through a study in cooperation with chefs and gastronomists. Utilizing “Dancing Delicacies” as a research artifact – a system that facilitates dynamic dining trajectories – we adopted the concept of “choreography” to unravel the experiential dynamics of computational food. Our study resulted in six themes concerning computational food experiences and detailed four design implications central to culinary choreography. Our work aspires to leverage the choreographic potential of computational food design, paving the way for future HFI innovations.

Prior research around the design of interactive systems has highlighted the benefits of supporting embodiment in everyday life. This resulted in the creation of body-centric systems that leverage movement. However, these advances supporting movement in everyday life, aligning with the embodiment theory, so far focused on sensing movement as opposed to facilitating movement. We present PneuMa, a novel wearable system that can facilitate movement in everyday life through pneumatic-based bodily extensions. We showcase the system through three examples: "Pardon?", moving the ear forward; "Greetings", moving a hand towards the "Bye-bye" gesture; "Take a break", moving the hands away from the keyboard, enabling the bodily extensions that support movement in everyday life. From the thematic analysis of a field study with 12 participants, we identified three themes: bodily awareness, Perception of the scenarios, and anticipating movement. We discuss our findings in relation to prior research around bodily extensions and embodied interaction to provide strategies to design bodily extensions that support movement in everyday life. Ultimately, we hope that our work helps more people profit from the benefits of everyday movement support.

Our bodies play an important part in our remembering practices, for example when we can remember passwords by typing, even if we cannot verbalise them. An increasing number of technologies are being developed to support remembering. However, so far, they seem to have not taken the opportunity yet to support remembering through bodily movements. To better understand how to design for such embodied remembering, we conducted a diary study with 12 participants who recorded their embodied remembering experiences in everyday life over a three-week period. Our thematic analysis of the diaries and interviews led to the creation of a framework that helps understand embodied remembering experiences (ERXs) based on the level of skilled and conscious movements used. We describe how this ERX framework could help with the design of technologies to support embodied remembering.

Water's pleasant nature and associated health benefits have captivated the interest of HCI researchers. Prior WaterHCI work mainly focused on advancing instrumental applications, such as improving swimming performance, and less on designing systems that support interacting with technology in water in more playful contexts. In this regard, we propose floatation tanks as research vehicles to investigate the design of playful interactive water experiences. Employing somaesthetic design, we developed a playful extended reality floatation tank experience: "Fluito". We conducted a 13-participant study to understand how specific design features amplified participants' water experiences. We used a postphenomenological lens to articulate eight strategies useful for designers aiming to develop digital playful experiences in water, such as designing to call attention to the water and designing to encourage breathing and body awareness in water experiences. Ultimately, we hope that our work supports people to be playful and benefit from the many advantages of being in water.

Spectating digital games can be exciting. However, due to its vicarious nature, spectators often wish to engage in the gameplay beyond just watching and cheering. To blur the boundaries between spectators and players, we propose a novel approach called "Fused Spectatorship", where spectators watch their hands play games by loaning bodily control to a computational Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) system. To showcase this concept, we designed three games where spectators loan control over both their hands to the EMS system and watch them play these competitive and collaborative games. A study with 12 participants suggested that participants could not distinguish if they were watching their hands play, or if they were playing the games themselves. We used our results to articulate four spectator experience themes and four fused spectator types, the behaviours they elicited and offer one design consideration to support each of these behaviours. We also discuss the ethical design considerations of our approach to help game designers create future fused spectatorship experiences.