Tangible and embodied explorations have delivered many designs to rejuvenate many traditional leisure activities such as parlor games, and dancing, and offered ideas on how to bridge inter-generational divides through play, and allow players of different skill levels to compete relatively equally. However there seem to be few examples of designs for non-competitive play which allow participants to take very different roles. Bringing together elements of playing with dance, communication, and drawing, we present the Move It Like Picasso platform. This facilitates a collaboration between a player trying to physically trace flickering lines from an animation which are unpredictably triggered by the second player’s bodily movements. We offer this as an example of how combining simple digital technologies and everyday physical materials may offer a route to rich social play experiences that might simultaneously appeal to a wide range of tastes.

We introduce the term 'Art Digital Jewellery' as a label for craft-oriented, bespoke approaches to embedding electronics in jewellery. These unconventional digital-physical jewellery practices struggle for attention compared with higher profile, often more mass-production oriented wearables. This is partly because discourses articulating and critiquing these experimental practices are scarce and obscure to HCI researchers. To address this, we describe how these artistic practices arose from earlier fashion movements and we engaged six leading creative practitioners in a structured and iterative dialogue. Analysis of our adapted Delphi survey suggests that core to Art Digital Jewellery is very individualised design processes and creating artefacts which are highly personal in terms of their form, their materials, their narratives and their interactivity. An appreciation of these unique practices may enrich perspectives on designing wearables, marrying craft with technology, and personalisation of experiences.

The intersection of philosophy and HCI is a longstanding site of interest for the field that has been attracting special attention in recent years. In this paper, we present metaphysical probes (Metaprobes) as a tool for design-led philosophical inquiry. A Metaprobe is a design artifact used to study a metaphysical idea without concealing the philosophical tools mobilized by the designers or the designerly knowledge attained after deployment. We introduce the concept of a Metaphysical Workshop. This is the set of sketchy philosophical notions that a designer mobilizes in order to research a philosophical idea through design. We then present a case study that comprises: the philosophical issue under examination, the Metaprobes designed to study it, the metaphysical workshop used and the designerly insight produced. We conclude with a discussion of the potentials and weaknesses of Metaprobes in relation to other critical and speculative research-through-design practices. We aim to provide one way to make philosophies already present in design more explicit and make other philosophical concepts relevant to HCI more accessible and workable for designers.

It is common to speak of video conferencing as opening “windows” between locations. But this neglects how various kinds of “walls” also impact on these connections. This poster offers an initial exploration of these twin qualities of video calls via reflecting on unusual interaction designs. Inspecting digital-bodily play, facilitation stunts, museum events, and social icebreaking installations can spark new ideas to improve video calls.

Developing systems to spark face-to-face interactions between strangers is a recurring challenge that may benefit from drawing together inspiration from many different creative fields. This paper presents a design fiction that makes accessible over 50 diverse examples of objects and environments that might help foster new social encounters. Unlike most design fiction, this narrative is not about the future, but about an alternative present. The designs discussed are all real objects - either functional prototypes or interactive exhibits. The fiction is that these already existing artefacts are a commonplace, and not particularly remarkable part of the everyday. Thus the strange is made familiar by unusual designs being presented as a universal normality. Each individual element is "real" in that it has not been invented for the purpose of this review, however the overarching story uses a fictional frame to place all this work in the same world. We hope immersion in this narrative can enrich perspectives and debates around designing to support social interaction.

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.

Physical games involving blindfolded players have a timeless appeal and the restricting of perceptual channels can be insightful for players and observers regarding embodied experience. Wireless, mobile and wearable technologies open up further opportunities for designing bodily play experiences through exploiting sensory deprivation. To better understand the potential for movement-based games in which vision and/or audio is restricted, we iteratively developed and play-tested a series of three to four player chasing games. Based on our tests, we suggest the importance of ambiguity, proximity, and freedom of movement to support designing sensory deprivation games.

This workshop will discuss how different multimedia applications and interaction techniques have been employed to support public sociality---from collocated interactions to social awareness and feeling of community. Participants will discuss recent work and join hands-on design activities to envision new ways for potential users to discover and learn how to use ubiquitous technologies for opportunistic social interactions.

We introduce Object Theatre for Design as a hands-on approach to enable healthcare tracking to move beyond numbers and empower patients to monitor and convey their subjective well-being. A transformed perspective on relating to artifacts will drive tangible and bodily explorations in order to collaboratively create mockups for logging and expressing emotions and perceptions in novel tangible forms.

Positive social and collaborative effects are hailed as a major advantage of embodied and tangible approaches to interaction. This studio offers a hands-on exploration of potentially extreme versions of such benefits Systems and techniques that somehow share or transfer embodiment between two or more people. Through participatory demos, studio attendees will explore and compare a variety of approaches to experiencing the perspectives of another body, and controlling bodies other than their own. These comparisons will be a launch pad for collaboratively combining existing "body sharing" systems and mocking up new design concepts. By bringing together ideas and approaches in an actionable manner, this studio will share and develop imagination, theory, and skills relevant to the design and study of interactive systems in which the body plays a central role.

Players sharing control of each other's bodies offers a promising direction for delivering engaging collaborative experiences in digital physical games. We present HandyFeet -- a movement based game platform in which two players compete to most effectively direct the body of a third player. This third person becomes like a puppet that has two masters. The two directing players take turns making hand signals to guide one of the puppet player's legs. The puppet-person is prevented from seeing both their own legs and the floor, and so is dependent upon the directors' instructions for navigating the physical environment. To further the development of movement based games involving players surrendering or sharing control of their own bodies, we offer five themes that arose from analysing our initial play-tests.

Come and get creatively hands on with the next generation of stretch sensors! This studio will see participants familiarize themselves with, and devise exciting new uses for dielectric elastomer (DE) stretch sensors. Unlike normal stretch sensors, these skin-like sensors are highly durable and reliable. DE sensors can also be customised into nearly any shape or size, whilst being only 0.5mm thin makes them near undetectable to the wearer. After introducing the technology by walking through some easy to adapt examples, participants will be supported to express and test their ideas around stretchable interfaces through a collaborative maker session. Through attaching the sensors to our bodies or by modifying second hand garments, participants will explore the design opportunities of DE sensors. The session will culminate in a design crit of participants' application mock-ups and a discussion of opportunities for future interactive materials, garments, artefacts and environments.

Technology provoking disparate individuals to collaborate or share experiences in the public space faces a difficult barrier, namely the ordinary social order of urban places. We employed the notion of the breaching experiment to explore how this barrier might be overcome. We analyse responses to a set of city center social interventions to reveal four themes: "offering collaboration", "requesting collaboration", "allowing for collaboration" and "making collaboration contextually relevant". Each of these breaching experiments in different ways helps reveal the ordinary social organization of life in public spaces. Arising from this, we argue for the importance of qualities such as availability, facilitation, perspicuous settings, and perspicuous participants to encourage and support co-located strangers to collaborate and share experiences.

A major challenge for developers of tangible, embedded and embodied interfaces is the understanding of dynamic social contexts. To address this challenge, the concept of "social contraptions" is proposed. Social contraptions are interactive installations and performative interventions employed as designerly explorations of social relations.