Emotional harm and discomfort in therapeutic extended realities (XR) remains underexamined, even as immersive tools are increasingly deployed in healthcare contexts. We frame therapeutic XR as EmotionTech and reflect on 12 cases from 9 researchers and designers through interviews and workshops. We locate four concerns for emotional harm and identify ways to address them: how to talk about emotion, when to talk about emotion, whose emotions are centred, and which emotions are valued. Building on these themes and therapeutic XR as one form of EmotionTech, we propose strategies to legitimise concerns for emotional safety in design and research practice, legitimise knowers by recognising diverse perspectives and situated experiences, and leveraging ambiguity in design and training tools that foster reflexivity rather than closure. These strategies together reposition design responsibility in EmotionTech innovation and make visible its potential to cause emotional discomforts and harms.

How can we cultivate deeper attunement to one another, ourselves, and the environment that can, in turn, inform and enrich design? Over the course of four workshops conducted across 1.5 years - primarily outdoors - the authors engaged in prolonged periods of shared silence. This collective silence functioned as an estrangement method, revealing the porous and interdependent boundaries between people and things, mutually constituting one another. We unpack some of the experiential qualities emerging from these experiments and mobilize them for future design processes, including: cultivating multifaceted sensibilities, dynamic modes of noticing and interacting, such as coming together and dispersing, being alone together, and acting or playing in unison; the malleability of silence to specific, orchestrated design activities, such as cooking or designing; and reframing silence, not as an absence, but as a presence - rich with sounds, interactions, and possibilities for engagement. We discuss how to set up temporal and spatial boundaries, alongside boundaries within and between ourselves.

The last decade has seen voice assistants like Apple's Siri and Google's Home become truly ubiquitous. These devices – and many more – rely on Voice-based User Interfaces (VUIs) that specify what the devices can listen for and how they express themselves through synthetic voice design. Today, primarily Western VUI designs often reproduce anthropomorphic and heteronormative vocal stereotypes and interaction scenarios. Instead, we propose an emergent framework for VUI design that opens for a multifaceted exploration of how VUIs sound, what this means for their sociocultural role and how it shapes interactions. The framework extends current VUI design concerns with concepts from sound studies that offer a richer foundation for exploring VUIs’ sonic expressions. We present the theoretical foundations of the framework and how it has developed over three collaborative workshops bringing together sound artists, sound researchers and interaction designers. We outline the framework in detail and point to future experiments and perspectives for expanding the VUI design space.

In this article, we present breathing-with as a contribution to cultivating concrete design tactics engaging with the more-than-human. We arrive at the concept based on an analysis of three distinct projects, each aimed at exploring the relationality between human and non-human bodies, and of extending the notion of the body in design processes toward the more-than-human, with a focus on breath and breathing. We analyze each project from the perspective of how breathing allowed us as designers to move from the intimate experience of our own bodies into an extended bodily awareness that included the more-than-human as material, living and social bodies. Based on this exploration, we propose breathing-with as a design tactic that can be used throughout the design process. We further reflect on how breathing-with can provide a generative design tactic for zooming in and out of the entangled relationships between human and more-than-human bodies, through surfacing notions of intimacy and vulnerability.

In this pictorial, we present the process leading to the creation of N/ERWER, an affectively engaging interactive prototype exploring personal domestic grief practices. N/ERV/ER symbolises a physical presence of the Intangible affective experiences associated with grief as an ongoing connection to the deceased in the present. N/ERV/ER was developed in a Research through Design process fueled by both personal accounts and participatory engagements using various design probes exploring experiences of loss following the death of a loved one. In this pictorial, we unfold the theoretical, methodological, and material dimensions of this process to show how designers can accommodate grief in design practice as a way of utilising and materialising the affective forces present in such sensitive contexts.

In this paper we present LYDSPOR; a site-specific sound experience, created in Elsinore, Denmark, consisting of two physical installations and an app-based soundwalk, which together allow people to feel and sense in their bodies certain narrative fragments of the history of the city. LYDSPOR is the result of a 1,5 year-long research project which had the aim of adopting soma design methods by drawing on affective interaction design and on an understanding of bodies as always multiple, relational, and never only human. Through an analysis of the design process and its outcome, the paper contributes an in-depth understanding of how to combine somatic and affective design approaches when creating site-specific sonic augmentations for historical dissemination in public space.

‘Soundscapes’ are an increasingly active topic in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and interaction design. From mapping acoustic environments through sound recordings to designing compositions as interventions, soundscapes appear as a recurring theme across a wide body of HCI research. Based on this growing interest, now is the time to explore the types of studies in which soundscapes provide a valuable lens to HCI research. In this paper, we review papers from conferences sponsored or co-sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction in which the term ’soundscape’ occurs. We analyse a total of 235 papers to understand the role of soundscapes as a research focus and identify untapped opportunities for soundscape research within HCI. We identify two common soundscape conceptualisations: (1) Acoustic environments and (2) Compositions, and describe what characterises studies into each concept and the hybrid forms that also occur. On the basis of this, we carve out a foundation for future soundscape research in HCI as a methodological anchor to form a common ground and support this growing research interest. Finally, we offer five recommendations for further research into soundscapes within HCI.

This paper presents an exploration of play design as a relational strategy to intensify affective encounters during an art museum visit. Theoretically, the paper presents a foundation emphasising the relational aspects of designing playful museum experiences. Based on a detailed and contextual analysis of a mobile web app entitled 'Never let me go', designed to be used in art museums, we show how the app and infrastructure catalysed affective encounters and put the relations between the players, the architecture and the exhibited artworks into motion. In our analysis, we highlight four ways through which the players' experiences were intensified. Finally, we discuss the potential and concerns arising from working with relational play strategies in the design of affectively engaging museum experiences, emphasising emergence, intimacy, ambiguity and trust as key elements.

Radio waves surround us but still they remain largely undetected by our senses. Unless we use specifically tuned hardware, such as FM radios, cell phones or WiFi modems, human beings cannot perceive wirelessly transmitted data. This paper presents FeltRadio, a portable and wireless technology that makes it possible to turn radio signals into visual and tactile stimuli as a form of sensorial augmentation. FeltRadio explores and makes us reflect upon what it would be like if we could sense, and feel, wireless traffic such as WiFi or Bluetooth. We present the technological design behind FeltRadio and the outcome of two exploratory studies with the technology focused on people's experience of being able to suddenly sense and make sense of wireless traffic. We discuss the possible qualities of this embodied experience of FeltRadio and point to future experiments with the technology.

In this article we explore how to enrich the experience of toys that usually spend a boring time in their boxes in the toy store by digitally bringing them out of the box. For this purpose we have developed an interactive table based on the 3D game engine Virtools, together with the reacTIVision software and have studied and evaluated the use of the table in a full-scale, realworld situation in the toy department of a major Danish retailer. Our detailed analysis highlights the wide range of interaction forms and interaction modes facilitated by the table, moving from initial exploration to playful and engaging experiences, both on individual and social levels. We sum up our findings and their relevance for future design and show how the interplay of physical design, interaction, and content has been instrumental in giving children and adults a richer and extended experience of the toy -- even though it remains in the box.