We present an exploratory design study on visualizing laughter sounds for personal reflection. We experimented with a variety of graphic design elements to visualize temporal, spatial, and social aspects of laughter sounds. In order to experience their own laughter being visualized, our participants collected audio recordings of everyday conversations with their loved ones. We extracted laughter from the participants’ audio files using a machine learning algorithm, then visualized selected laughter in five different types of visual representations, and shared the result with each participant. Through the journey of collecting, seeing, listening to, and interacting with their personal laughter visualizations, participants explored what laughter means for them in different contexts. The study reveals that interactive laughter visualizations have the potential to evoke memories, support emotional expressions, and promote relationships.

Balance Board Math (BBM) is a new balance-based interface for math instruction. BBM integrates disparate work on embodied cognition and on sensory regulation to offer learners integrated opportunities to both self-regulate through movement and to use their sense of balance as a resource for conceptual understanding. This approach imagines beyond common views that self-initiated background activity, such as fidgeting, is unproductive for education. With a sensor-equipped balance board and dynamic real time display, BBM's Balance Graphing activities offer users opportunities to playfully explore and embody different aspects of functions and graphs such as frequency and amplitude. We conducted an in-depth study with 6 school-aged children to examine how their movement and personal sense of balance were used for both self-regulation and to make sense of mathematical concepts through BBM. By inviting learners’ regulatory movements to serve as an interaction resource for exploring mathematical concepts, BBM offers a new genre of sensory-responsive design that could better serve instructional differentiation.

"Smart city" narratives promise IoT data-driven innovations leveraging biosensing technologies. We argue this overlooks a potential benefit of city living: affirmation. We designed the Heart Sounds Bench, which amplifies the heart sounds of those sitting on it, as well as recording and playing back the heart sounds of previous sitters. We outline our design intent to invite rest, reflection, and recognition of others' lives in public space. We share results from a study with 19 participants. Participants expressed feeling connected to a shared life energy including others and the environment, and described heart sounds as feeling intimate yet anonymous. Finally, we elaborate the concept of life-affirmation in terms of recognition of others' lives, feeling connection, and respecting untranslatable differences with opacity, as a way of helping "smart city" designs embrace a multiplicity of desires.

Biosensing displays, increasingly enrolled in emotional reflection, promise authoritative insight by presenting users' emotions as discrete categories. Rather than machines interpreting emotions, we sought to explore an alternative with emotional biosensing displays in which users formed their own interpretations and felt comfortable critiquing the display. So, we designed, implemented, and deployed, as a technology probe, an emotional biosensory display: Ripple is a shirt whose pattern changes color responding to the wearer's skin conductance, which is associated with excitement. 17 participants wore Ripple over 2 days of daily life. While some participants appreciated the 'physical connection' Ripple provided between body and emotion, for others Ripple fostered insecurities about 'how much' feeling they had. Despite our design intentions, we found participants rarely questioned the display's relation to their feelings. Using biopolitics to speculate on Ripple's surprising authority, we highlight ethical stakes of biosensory representations for sense of self and ways of feeling.

We investigate a speculative future in which we celebrate happiness by capturing laughter and representing it in tangible forms. We explored technologies for capturing naturally occurring laughter as well as various physical representations of it. For several weeks, our participants collected audio samples of everyday conversations with their loved ones. We processed those samples through a machine learning algorithm and shared the resulting tangible representations (e.g., physical containers and edible displays) with our participants. In collecting, listening to, interacting with, and sharing their laughter with loved ones, participants described both joy in preserving and interacting with laughter and tension in collecting it. This study revealed that the tangibility of laughter representations matters, especially its symbolism and material quality. We discuss design implications of giving permanent forms to laughter and consider the sound of laughter as a part of our personal past that we might seek to preserve and reflect upon.

Emotional biosensing is rising in daily life: Data and categories claim to know how people feel and suggest what they should do about it, while CSCW explores new biosensing possibilities. Prevalent approaches to emotional biosensing are too limited, focusing on the individual, optimization, and normative categorization. Conceptual shifts can help explore alternatives: toward materiality, from representation toward performativity, inter-action to intra-action, shifting biopolitics, and shifting affect/desire. We contribute (1) synthesizing wide-ranging conceptual lenses, providing analysis connecting them to emotional biosensing design, (2) analyzing selected design exemplars to apply these lenses to design research, and (3) offering our own recommendations for designers and design researchers. In particular we suggest humility in knowledge claims with emotional biosensing, prioritizing care and affirmation over self-improvement, and exploring alternative desires. We call for critically questioning and generatively re-imagining the role of data in configuring sensing, feeling, 'the good life,' and everyday experience.

The growth of small scale manufacturing technologies associated with the "maker movement" has captured the attention of artists, innovators, educators, and policy makers. This paper critically examines how one core technology of the maker movement, a 3D printer, materializes assumptions about makers and their preferred ways of working with machines and materials. We describe how existing designs can be seen as anthropocentric, framing the human maker as visionary and commander of passive machines and materials. We then present an alternative system for 3D printing, called Redeform, which explores how a post-anthropocentric framing of makers as collaborators with machines and materials changes the design of 3D printers. We place our system within a lineage of performances that have explored relationships between humans and nonhumans since the 1950s. In doing so, we explore and speculate on the opportunities for operationalizing post-anthropocentric theories within the specific context of the maker movement.

This paper explores the social meaning of clothing-based displays of biosignals. How do friends make sense of their own and each other's skin conductance display in the context of a conversation? We developed Hint, a dynamic thermochromic t-shirt whose ambiguous pattern changes color when its wearer's skin conductance increases, an indication of sudden arousal. We investigated how pairs of friends each wearing the shirt conversed and interpreted the display. Participants shared a broad range of interpretations; e.g., joy and embarrassment were associated with an increase in skin conductance. Additionally, participants expressed desires for their skin conductance display to help validate their feelings and show emotional engagement with others. We explore ambiguity in the context of clothing-based information displays and discuss how skin conductance display became part of social performance in our study. From there, we suggest framing biosignals as social cues along with facial expression, gestures, etc., and begin to question what design territories this might uncover.

This paper explores the role dynamic textile displays play in relation to personal style: What does it mean to wear computationally responsive clothing and why would one be motivated to do so? We developed a novel textile display technology, called Ebb, and created several woven and crochet fabric swatches that explored clothing-specific design possibilities. We engaged fashion designers and non-designers in imagining how Ebb would integrate into their design practice or personal style of dressing. Participants evaluated the appeal and utility of clothing-based displays according to a very different set of criteria than traditional screen-based computational displays. Specifically, the slowness, low-resolution, and volatility of Ebb tended to be seen as assets as opposed to technical limitations in the context of personal style. Additionally, participants envisioned various ways that ambiguous, ambient, and abstract displays of information could prompt new experiences in their everyday lives. Our paper details the complex relationships between display and personal style and offers a new design metaphor and extension of Gaver et al.'s original descriptions of ambiguity in order to guide the design of clothing-based displays for everyday life.

This paper details the design and evaluation of Being the Machine, a portable digital fabrication system that places digital fabrication activity outside of the traditional fab lab environment. Being the Machine invites people to (re)consider materials found in their everyday and personal environment as part of the fabrication activity. We expand the design space involving hybrid (physical-digital) fabrication by describing how our system draws from art to support critical and reflective modes of making. In interaction with our system, participants distributed control between human and machine actors to support their preferred mode of making. These patterns reveal new opportunities and challenges for future hybrid fabrication systems, and suggest that designing for qualities of experience, like meditation and reflection, could support meaningful making experiences for many different kinds of makers.

Redeform presents an alternative vision of 3D printing that complicates common divisions between human/machine, abstract/concrete, and high/low tech. It invites people to perform the functions of a 3D printer in order to collaboratively construct digital models from everyday materials in everyday spaces. At TEI, Redeform will serve as a site for discussion about values in digital fabrication design.

EnergyBugs are energy harvesting wearables with features that invite children to move their bodies to generate tiny, yet usable amounts of electricity. EnergyBugs not only convert children's kinetic energy into usable electrical energy, but also let children power a specially designed LED lamp with the energy the children have personally harvested. EnergyBugs therefore turn the electrical energy into a tangible object that children can manipulate and think with. Two studies of EnergyBugs with 34 elementary school children have revealed that children carefully observed and negotiated the use of personally harvested energy with their classmates, as well as developed emotional connections to energy. In particular, moving their own bodies to generate energy led the children to more actively ask questions about energy from new perspectives. We report our iterative design process and discuss the implications of our results for HCI.

We present Programming by Manipulation, a new programming methodology for specifying the layout of data visualizations, targeted at non-programmers. We address the two central sources of bugs that arise when programming with constraints: ambiguities and conflicts (inconsistencies). We rule out conflicts by design and exploit ambiguity to explore possible layout designs. Our users design layouts by highlighting undesirable aspects of a current design, effectively breaking spurious constraints and introducing ambiguity by giving some elements freedom to move or resize. Subsequently, the tool indicates how the ambiguity can be removed, by computing how the free elements can be fixed with available constraints. To support this workflow, our tool computes the ambiguity and summarizes it visually. We evaluate our work with two user-studies demonstrating that both non-programmers and programmers can effectively use our prototype. Our results suggest that our tool is 5-times more productive than direct programming with constraints.

AnyType is a mobile application that generates unique typefaces from photographs of shapes that people find in their environment. In keeping with the principles of aesthetic interaction, the design of AnyType supports opportunities for surprise, storytelling, and expression. This paper presents data collected from two observational studies of AnyType. In both studies, we found that people appropriated the application to create highly personalized messages. They found inspiration in unexpected locations, created memories from nuanced details in their lives, and creatively explored the design space provided by the system. Drawing from our observations, we discuss possible roles mobile devices could play in people's personal meaning making, creative process, and discovery, in interaction with elements of their physical environment.

A key affordance of computational learning environments is that they can be designed to instantiate specific rules and causal relationships between user inputs and perceptual output. In this sense, designers can attempt to engineer specific trajectories of learners' conceptual development by devising situations they believe will help learners construct a particular concept/scheme. We revisit and elaborate upon Papert's notion of 'body syntonicity' and present a three-parameter model of interaction to describe how the interplay between a learner's prior knowledge, immediate perceptions, and goals embedded into the instructional situation contributes to the emergence of new conceptual schemes. We retrospectively apply this model to prior works and to a current instructional design that combines mathematics learning with physical exercise.

We introduce StoryFaces, a new composition and storytelling tool for children to explore the role of emotional expressions in children's narrative. StoryFaces invites children to record emotional expressions that become part of storybook illustrations. As children watch the story being told, they see their faces bring the story to life; then they can "go backstage" to play with the story by rearranging the videos and altering the story text. More experienced children can build an interactive ebook from the ground up, creating scenes, characters and expressive faces to craft personalized narratives. Our design rationale focuses on supporting children's exploration of emotional expression through their narrative play. Results with eighteen children ages 4-10 indicate that emotional expressions are inviting and motivating for children across this broad age range to engage in both reading and creating narrative. StoryFaces gave children's ephemeral facial expressions concrete forms with which they could manipulate, discuss, and think about the role of emotion in narratives. Our goal is to provoke new ideas about how pretend play with digital tools can empower young children in social-emotional narrative activities.

AnyType is a creative application that lets people transform elements and objects in the physical world into novel digital typefaces. The portability, computational power and network capabilities of AnyType allow the user to take design into the wild so that they can create and share in the same moment in which they are inspired. With AnyType, we invite people to reinterpret their everyday environment and transform it into a set of possible creative inputs.

Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR)---techniques to dynamically overlay digital information in the user's view through mobile devices---has the potential to uniquely contribute to people learning about objects or environments in situ. Using interactive expert videos and side-by-side MAR views on a location sensitive tablet, our prototype system, GreenHat MAR, simulates how experts go about making observations in the field, and encourages students to actively observe their environment to learn about biodiversity and sustainability issues in their natural environment. We present our design process, the GreenHat MAR prototype, and results from our preliminary evaluation study.

We present GreenHat, an interactive mobile learning application that helps students learn about biodiversity and sustainability issues in their surroundings from experts' points of view, before participating in unfamiliar debates about their familiar surroundings. Using the interactive location-sensitive map and video on a smart phone, GreenHat simulates how experts go about making observations in the field and encourages students to actively observe their environment. We present our design process, our initial prototype, report the results from our preliminary evaluation, and discuss ongoing work.

Internet users are increasingly inclined to contribute comments to online news articles, videos, product reviews, and blogs. The most common interface for comments is a list, sorted by time of entry or by binary ratings. It is widely recognized that such lists do not scale well and can lead to "cyberpolarization," which serves to reinforce extreme opinions. We present Opinion Space: a new online interface incorporating ideas from deliberative polling, dimensionality reduction, and collaborative filtering that allows participants to visualize and navigate through a diversity of comments. This self-organizing system automatically highlights the comments found most insightful by users from a range of perspectives. We report results of a controlled user study. When Opinion Space was compared with a chronological List interface, participants read a similar diversity of comments. However, they were significantly more engaged with the system, and they had significantly higher agreement with and respect for the comments they read.

We present data collected from a field study of 12 needle-crafters introduced to Spyn-mobile phone software that associates digital records (audio/visual media, text, and geographic data) with locations on fabric. We observed leisure needle-crafters use Spyn to create one or more handmade garments over two to four weeks and then give those garments to friends, partners, and family members. Using Spyn, creators left behind digital and physical traces that heightened recipients' appreciation for the gift and enabled a diverse set of meanings to emerge. Digital engagements with Spyn became a means for unraveling the value of the gift: recipients used digital information associated with the physical objects to interpret the story behind the objects and their creators. We discuss the nature of this relationship between digital and physical material and its implications for craft.

Crafters today blend age-old techniques such as weaving and pottery with new information and communication technologies such as podcasts, online instructions, and blogs. This intersection of tradition and modernity provides an interesting site for understanding the adoption of new technology. We present a qualitative study of seven knitters introduced to Spyn - a system that enables the association of digitally recorded messages with physical locations on knit fabric. We gave knitters Spyn in order to elicit their reflections on their craft practices and learn from their interactions with material, people, and technology. While creating artifacts for friends and loved ones, knitters expanded the creative and communicative potential of their craftwork: knitters envisioned travel journals in knitted potholders and sung lullabies in knitted hats. We describe how these unusual craft activities provide a useful lens onto contemporary technological appropriation.

We introduce mixed physical and digital authoring environments for children, which invite them to create stories with enriched drawings that are programmed to control robotic characters. These characters respond to the children's drawings as well as to their touch. Children create their stories by drawing props and programming how the robotic character should respond to those props and to physical touch. By drawing, programming the robotic character's behaviors, and organizing and negotiating the order and meanings of the props, children's story events unfold in creative ways. We present our iterative design process of developing and evaluating our prototypes with children. We discuss the role technology can play in supporting children's everyday creative storytelling.

Ubicomp research has spurred the exploration of more "natural" or "invisible" interfaces that can be seamlessly embedded into their environment. In this paper, we discuss the role such technology can play in augmenting existing creative practice to enhance the sharing of the handcraft process. We present the design and implementation of Spyn, a system for knitters to record, playback, and share information involved in the creation of their hand-knit artifacts. Guided by a formative study of knitting practices, we designed Spyn to capture information while a person knits and allow for the subsequent retrieval of the information using the knit artifact. Spyn uses computer vision techniques in combination with patterns of infrared ink printed on yarn to correlate locations in knit fabric with messages recorded during the knitting process. Rather than seeking to improve the speed or accuracy of the knitter, we designed Spyn to enrich the knitter's craft while preserving the look and feel of the knit artifact.

We introduce I/O Brush, a new drawing tool aimed at young children, ages four and up, to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by "picking up" and drawing with them. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color, texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, children can draw with the special "ink" they just picked up from their immediate environment. In our preliminary study with kindergarteners, we found that children not only produced complex works of art using I/O Brush, but they also engaged in explicit talk about patterns and features available in their environment. I/O Brush invites children to explore the transformation from concrete and familiar raw material into abstract concepts about patterns of colors, textures and movements.

In this paper, we present the design and the prototype of a work-in-progress, StoryMat: a soft intelligent play mat that records and recalls children's storytelling activities.