Human traces scattered across urban landscapes can signify our everyday lives and societal vibrancy in subtle and poetic forms. In this paper, we explore how designed technology can engage biodata as evocative traces. To this end, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of HeartSway, an interactive hammock that captures a user’s heart rate and micro-movements as traces and replays them as an embodied experience for the next visitor. Through a qualitative field study (N=10), we find that HeartSway evokes feelings of connection, curiosity about prior users, and appreciation for shared human vitality. Our work contributes to understanding anonymous archival biodata as a design material for experiential urban traces. We offer design considerations for intimate asynchronous encounters between strangers in public spaces and for reimagining public amenities.

Food perception is a multisensory experience shaped by environmental cues such as ambient lighting. Previous studies have demonstrated that lighting can impact how satisfied we feel while dining. However, many of these studies were conducted in controlled laboratory settings with standardized meals, overlooking how lighting interacts with personal dietary choices and diverse dining contexts. This paper introduces LumiBite, a portable lighting system integrated into a lunchbox, designed for dining environments to enable personalized lighting adjustments during meals. Through a seven-day in-the-wild study with six participants, where they freely chose when, what, and where to eat, we explored the feasibility of deploying LumiBite and investigated how user agency in customizing lighting settings impacts dining satisfaction, sensory perception and dietary behaviors. Our findings demonstrate that LumiBite not only enhances food aesthetics but also shifts users from passive consumers to active meal curators. The study highlights key challenges, including cultural dining practices and ambient light interference, and offers actionable design principles for creating context-aware, culturally sensitive dining technologies.

Aging in place refers to the enabling of individuals to age comfortably and securely within their own homes and communities. Aging in place relies on robust infrastructure, prompting the development and implementation of both human-led care services and information and communication technologies to provide support. Through a long-term ethnographic study that includes semi-structured interviews with 24 stakeholders, we consider these human- and technology-driven care infrastructures for aging in place, examining their origins, deployment, interactions with older adults, and challenges. In doing so, we reconsider the value of these different forms of older adult care, highlighting the various issues associated with using, for instance, health monitoring technology or appointment scheduling systems to care for older adults aging in place. We suggest that technology should take a supportive, not substitutive role in older adult care infrastructure. Furthermore, we note that designing for aging in place should move beyond a narrow focus on independence in one's home to instead encompass the broader community and its dynamics.