Code to Cope is a STEAM curriculum for young adults designed to teach, develop, and encourage coping mechanisms while learning programming with JavaScript. COVID-19 restrictions, such as social distancing and remote learning, disrupted social development and identity formation in young adults, exacerbating mental health issues that remain unaddressed in existing STEAM curriculum. Young adults are vulnerable to psychological distress that adversely affects educational experiences and career path choices. The Code to Cope curriculum was adopted by the creative coding course at Louisiana State University from 2021 to 2022. We conducted interviews with four students in 2021 and empirical studies with 34 students in 2022 to evaluate the effects of the curriculum in terms of code, coping, and creativity. The results of the study show that the Code to Cope curriculum effectively teaches computational thinking, develops self-care practices, and engages and motivates students.

While nature can benefit people both mentally and physically, contemporary society has become increasingly disconnected from nature. To rebuild a stronger connection with nature in our everyday life, we introduce FloraWear, a do-it-yourself, wearable living interface, that enables people to easily and closely connect with plants. This pictorial introduces how knowledge is built and shared with others using hybrid craft and fabrication, illustrates the material experiments and design development for FloraWear, and discusses how it affects wearers. Then we summarize how FloraWear can help catalyze a shift in people's perspectives towards nature. By developing emotional ties to their wearable plants, FloraWear wearers begin to understand that both they and their plants are part of an ecosystem.

Robots are usually considered tools, devoid of agency and thus creativity. This robotic art performance – Contingent Dreams – explores the generative role of the human artist, algorithm, machine, medium, and environment in art making. In this performance a robot, programmed and assisted by the artist, draws an algorithmic composition in ink. The drawings – derived from recordings of everyday sounds – represent the noise of cities in Louisiana, rendering an ephemeral aspect of the city in unruly mechanical brushstrokes. The drawings come to life as the precise paths of the algorithm are translated into bold, enigmatic brush strokes and anomalous drops of ink. The drawings emerge not just from the imagination of the artist, but also from the sounds of the city, the code of the algorithm, the mechanical motion of the robot, the physics of the brush bristles and ink, and the texture and absorbency of the paper. Each aspect of the performance adds meaningful contingency to the process, resulting in drawings that evoke, as accidents accumulate into meaning, the multiplicity of urban experience.

Shifting Datum is an installation that critically examines the relationship between New Orleans – a city much of which is at or below current sea level – and changes in relative sea level. With the increasing interest among the artists and designers on how to integrate research into their practice, we present Shifting Datum as a critical inquiry speculating on environmental issues such as rising sea levels. This paper introduces the recent movement of speculative design, frames Shifting Datum as a critical lens for inquiry into the near future, and describes the process of developing and fabricating the installation.

This paper identifies a theoretical framework of interactive installations as inspirational artistic probes for human-computer interaction (HCI). It develops interstices of interactive installations by drawing from new media and digital art. Performance studies provides key terminology -- in constitutive, epistemic, and critical characteristics of performance -- to illustrate how interactive installations can reference their audiences' social and cultural contexts and foster physical and emotional engagement, and influence critical thinking. This overlaps with HCI concerns but provides an approach that originates in the art-based community, highlighting the relevance of interactive installations to HCI. This connection and the inspirational role of interactive installations are discussed and supported by examples.

Nowadays, with reductions in manufacturing costs and a transition toward lifestyles of convenience, robots are becoming pervasive in our homes, museums, and hospitals. In addition to increased demands for robots in these domains, recently more artistic robots that interact with audiences on a personal instead of a practical level are now being exhibited in art exhibition. This paper explains how people interpret artistic robots as more than mere machines in the theory of intentionality and introduces the implementation of the artistic robot, Please Smile, which consists of five robotic skeleton arms that gesture in response to a viewer's facial expressions. The paper also explores how individuals can use experimental designs to create artistic robots that can express various ideas that traditional, practical robots can often not convey.