"Light bodies" are mobile and portable, hand-held lights that respond to audio and vibration input. The motivation to build these devices is grounded in a historical reinterpretation of street lighting. Before fixed infrastructure illuminated cities at night, people carried lanterns with them to make their presence known. Using this as our starting point, we asked how we might engage people in more actively shaping the lightscapes which surround them. We prototyped a first iteration of sound and vibration responsive, LED-based coloured lights that we placed in three different settings including a choreographed dance performance, an outdoor public installation and an audio-visual event. We report on our experiences with these preliminary investigations.

Child-computer interaction designers are increasingly concerned with developing technologies that support and encourage physical activity in children in everyday indoor and outdoor settings. This trend mirrors commercial developments towards so-called exertion interfaces like the Nintendo®Wii™ that require full-body engagement. Physical health benefits aside, these types of interfaces present an important and underexplored design opportunity because they also engage children's spatial cognitive abilities. Can we harness this potential and design interfaces that support the development of spatial competence in children? To explore this question, the paper describes some of the cognitive and neural underpinnings of spatial competence as they relate to interaction design for children. With this background, I explore five interaction design examples: taking multiple perspectives on the environment, zooming in and out, estimating distances, experiencing motion, and encountering rich visual cues. These examples provide a starting point for new directions in designing exertion interfaces and ubiquitous computing interfaces for children that support different aspects of spatial cognitive development.

Urban environments are increasingly filled with digital display systems that are inflexible, flat, bounded, high-resolution, and unresponsive. In this paper, we explore the potential of physically instantiated pixels that enable flexible, reconfigurable, unbounded, low-resolution, and responsive urban displays. Urban Pixels are nodes in a wireless network of physical pixels for urban spaces. Each pixel unit includes a microcontroller, RF transceiver (433 MHz), LED module (ten bright, white LEDs), rechargeable Li-Ion battery pack, IR sensor and renewable energy source such as photo-voltaic cells. Two acrylic half-spheres (4-inch diameter) protect the components from the elements. No additional wiring is needed for communication and the units can be mounted individually to any surface. A small-scale prototype network of fifty Urban Pixels was displayed on a façade of Eden Court Theater in Inverness, Scotland from June 1 - June 7, 2008. The public was encouraged to change display patterns via SMS or to interact with individual units via flashlights. We observed and informally interviewed theater guests and passers-by interacting with the façade for several nights. Based on these results, we outline an exciting problem space for designing displays and lighting systems in cities.

Animated artifacts require many different electronic and mechanical components as well as appropriate drive software. This complexity has led to a kit-of-parts thinking in designing robotic assemblies. For example, Dynamixel or Lego Mindstorms provide designers, enthusiasts and children standard components from which they can assemble a multitude of creations. Despite the open-endedness of these kits, the most basic component parts such as servos present a designer with a set of constraints such as form that she cannot control. The underlying logic for these factors derives from mass-production rather than specific design requirements. The resulting black box becomes a factor around which design is created rather than an integral part of the completed artifact. In this paper, we explore the benefits of designing animated artifacts holistically. As an example, we compare the re-design of a servo in plywood and electronic components with a typical RC servo. This juxtaposition demonstrates how form-factors, materials and materiality, tactile and visual qualities and the performative aspects of a design can be reintroduced into design thinking for animated artifacts. From the example, we distill four guidelines for a design approach: (1) iterate, (2) explore material properties, (3) engage the performative aspects of the artifact, (4) cross disciplinary boundaries.

This paper describes an ecological approach to designing children's play props. By studying the world with the help of intermediary objects, children learn about the physical and "mythical" characteristics of their three-dimensional surroundings through physically active play. Starting from the universal pull-along toy as inspiration, a new category of space explorer emerges that interacts with children as they engage their outdoor play environment. Early design experiences are described and directions for future research are given.