Population ageing and the growing burden of neurodegenerative diseases call for brain-health interventions that are locally meaningful and socially engaging. Evidence highlights social engagement and cognitive stimulation as preventive practices. Advancing a multidisciplinary approach to this challenge, this pictorial documents the design and pilot deployment of an interactive installation that playfully transforms community storytelling into a tangible, multimodal artefact to (re)activate place attachment and stimulate cognitive health. Focus-group storytelling with older adults and subsequent co-creation activities translated narratives about urban sites into blend drawn reinterpretations. These visual compositions were integrated into a tangible cube puzzle, which returns the collected stories through audio retelling, creating an interactive mnemonic loop. We contribute a replicable workflow of embodied cognitive interventions for translating collective narratives into annotated visualizations and tangible interaction; design lessons on curating borrowed memories; and machine vision and audio rewarding integration for inclusive engagement and cognitive stimulation in public settings.

Interactive technology design is situated within environmental and sociocultural context. This pictorial develops an In-Situ Seeding method for engaging with site-specific sensory experiences. This method stems from a previous TEI Studio, where we utilized Sensory Portfolios, digital sensors, and other materials to make sense of interaction in place. We present an annotated collection of our Studio experiences and autobiographical retrospective reflections. These Seeds supported in-situ sensory explorations and examination of entanglements between documentation, data, location, history, and human and more-than-human agents. We contribute to literature around (1) walk-and-talk sensory explorations, (2) situated entanglements with technological artifacts, and (3) relationships between human and non-human agents in shared locations and over varied timescales. Our reflections point towards continued development for In-Situ Seeding as a method and suggest its further use and guidance to support future sensory explorers.

Emotional Machines is an interactive installation that builds affective virtual environments through spoken language. In response to the existing limitations of emotion recognition models incorporating computer vision and electrophysiological activity, whose sources are hindered by a head-mounted display, we propose the adoption of speech emotion recognition (from the audio signal) and semantic sentiment analysis. In detail, we use two machine learning models to predict three main emotional categories from high-level semantic and low-level speech features. Output emotions are mapped to audiovisual representation by an end-to-end process. We use a generative model of chord progressions to transfer speech emotion into music and a synthesized image from the text (transcribed from the user's speech). The generated image is used as the style source in the style-transfer process onto an equirectangular projection image target selected for each emotional category. The installation is an immersive virtual space encapsulating emotions in spheres disposed into a 3D environment. Thus, users can create new affective representations or interact with other previous encoded instances using joysticks.

There is an important gap in Assistive Technology related to the multiple capabilities of exploratory creativity, as with multi-aesthetic and inter-mediatic surfaces, especially in the design and development of child prosthetics. This in-progress research explores creative interactions and combinations of art and digital fabrication to design playful prosthetics for children's upper limbs. In order to do so, we are using feline animal life as inspiration and as a ludic premise to engagement through playfulness. With this artistic exploration in the scope of tangible and embodied interfaces, we seek to contribute to improve and incorporate engagement and fantasy through playful interfaces, ultimately transforming a perceived difference into empowerment of a child's self-esteem, awareness and imagination.

While HCI remains vastly abundant in human- and land- centric applications, in this work we focus on exploring further the Human Computer Biosphere Interaction (HCBI) concept in aquatic settings. Based on the existing techniques for prototyping the geodesic domes, we design them as five marine megafauna species, for the on- and off- shore locations. We describe novel interaction concepts with and within such structures: (i) Turtle AR nesting, (ii) Bird XR watching, (iii) Dolphin acoustic swimming, (iv) Seal night scuba-diving, and (v) Whale projection mapping. We report the design of such interaquatic environments, focused at depicting the ongoing concerns with such marina megafauna species, discussing their feasibility, suggesting research, implementation and validation for all interaquatic domes, planned in our future work.

[email protected] is an interactive installation that provides a bond between urban beings and the forest. Participants hug a real tree, triggering their registration in the virtual world for further interaction.

RTiVISS is an exploratory project that proposes to investigate innovative concepts and design methods regarding environmental and sustainability issues. It is concerned with natural resources, specially forests, and their preservation, through critical research and experimental artistic approaches. The project proposes multiplatform access to real-time networked video and allows users to adopt selected forests under surveillance. The interactive system feeds a whole community that establishes connections by sharing "the emotion of real-time" and the challenge of uncertainty, while remotely monitoring natural environments for forests protection. This achievement enables artistic explorations with digital media in interactive installations that engage the audience senses in unconventional ways.