Our project supports children's critical AI engagement with through participatory workshops envisioning public spaces. We ran a workshop with 9-12 year olds (n=7) combining AI, puppet-making, performance, and design futuring to reimagine civic spaces. Participants used ChatGPT to visualize changes to local places, created puppets representing different viewpoints, and performed debates about the proposed changes. Our findings reveal children's critical engagement with AI as a design tool, preference for iterative refinement, and desires for authentic over 'AI-like' content. This work contributes methods for engaging children in civic discussions through making and performing futures. It also demonstrates how these methods can scaffold critical AI literacy.

Capturing and communicating tacit knowledge remains a challenge for tangible interaction design. This project presents the third stage out of four of an educational interface evaluation for a tacit knowledge project in woodworking practices. It briefly covers earlier stages of the project, including sensing and interface design, before focusing on the evaluation (n= 14) of a customized block plane TUI. It argues from a sensing approach to the design and ultimately the feasibility of an educational interface for tacit knowledge. The evaluation combines SUS with soma-based approaches to capture a novel range of responses. The findings reveal how the interface fosters growing emotional engagement and shifting attention throughout the targeted woodworking practice. They demonstrate the value of soma-informed evaluation for tracking these temporal dynamics and point to future design directions for tacit knowledge interfaces.

This pictorial presents a case study of "Into the Makerverse", a community workshop that engaged about 250 children and parents in combining AI and tangible making to express desired futures for our city. We thematically analyzed 43 exit interviews and 70 (intro) and 48 (outro) questionnaires to surface themes of craft as meaning-making, prioritizing craft over AI, recognizing AI limitations, and moving beyond technocentric futures. Our discussion reflects on tangible making for AI literacy, participatory design futuring for emphasizing human agency with AI, and the importance of collaborating with local communities for AI engagements that are driven by genuine local interest. We extend and amplify calls for AI engagements that work in service of community desires for local futures and argue for a tangible craft-based approach to support this.

Entangled Histories Radio is a tangible interface that investigates the connection between local ecologies and the voices of the American Civil Rights Movement. The system senses real-time ecological data from the base of a tree and maps these inputs onto a curated archive of speeches and music from the movement. These sounds are played through a speculative object: a vintage radio. We position the urban forest as a "living archive" that interlocks with a historical human archive. In doing so, we explore how tangible, embodied experiences can bridge environmental and civil rights justice. This work-in-progress contributes a speculative approach for designing with living archives and offers a material response to critiques that more-than-human (MTH) design can overlook layered socio-political issues if not carefully attended to.

Tacit knowledge remains central in design, art, and craft practices.At the same time, it remains difficult to capture, understand, and communicate such knowledge efficiently.We explore a 3-step pilot study on capturing, understanding, and communicating tacit knowledge in woodworking.We first present a way to capture tacit knowledge through a multi-sensory system that listens to human, material, and tool encounters.Then, we analyze data from the system comparing expert and amateur performances.Based on the analysis, we propose insights and design criteria for designing an educational interface for tacit learning in woodworking.Finally, we present a tangible interface based on these criteria and implemented for communicating tacit knowledge.

In "Mold Sounds," we design a more-than-human encounter that explores how biomaterials, specifically molds, can reorient narratives of toxicity towards polyphonic, multi-species assemblages that speak to queer ecologies. We designed an environment in which molds grow and interact with conductive components, thus altering the sounds produced by the artifact. We reflect on how this helps complicate essentialist, heteronormative narratives in human and non-human relations. Through material engagements, "Mold Sounds" fosters reflections on how we might design for polyphony, or multi-species temporal rhythms, reconsider the nature of toxicity, and explore the unpredictability of queer ecological entanglements in more-than-human design.

We discuss existent approaches to trace tacit knowledge in craft practices through a turn to more-than-human centered design. This leads to a call for a multi-layered sensing system that covers not only the human body but also the tools and materials involved. Furthermore, it stresses the necessity of relational data collection and analysis. We present the design and implementation of this concept for a traditional woodworking practice: shaving wood with a block plane. In closing, we show feasibility of the suggested design through an initial pilot test. The argument contributes a theoretical turn to material-based sensing principles in the search for ways to track tacit knowledge, it outlines key design principles of this approach, provides an example implementation, and indicates a first validation through pilot data.

How can interaction design counter the trend of declining cinema visits by improving the visitor experience? This project focuses on experiences of social immersion and shared emotions among cinema audiences. The After-movie Social Accelerator is based on specific key design criteria for emotion-sharing and offers a proof-of-concept implementation. The paper closes with a preliminary evaluation (n=6) that indicates the value of emotion-sharing in cinema experiences but also calls for more communication opportunities.

Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of vision loss among persons over 50. We present a two-part interface consisting of a VR-based visualization for AMD patients and an interconnected doctor interface to optimize this VR view. It focuses on remapping imagery to provide customized image optimizations. The system allows doctors to generate a tailored, patient-specific VR visualization. We pilot tested the doctor interface (n=10) with eye care professionals. The results indicate the potential of VR-based eye care for doctors to help visually-impaired patients, but also show a necessary training phase to establish new technologies in vision rehabilitation.

Party Mascot is an experimental design for a dynamic, interactive prop used in “actual play” streaming. Taking the form of a talking mechanical bird, the Party Mascot extends audience participation on the Twitch platform from its native chat interface to the physical playspace. Building on a critical review of frame analytical approaches to role-playing game studies and supported by an ethnographic study of actual play performers, the Party Mascot is designed to “flicker” between social, gameplay, and fictional frames of interaction. It can accommodate any number of participants and adapts to multiple roles within new mediated performance contexts. Shifting spectatorship from the screen to the physical world, the Party Mascot can reconfigure audience/performer relationships, open new avenues for game design, and engage the genre of actual play as a new site of experimentation and innovation between the producers and consumers of media.

Multi-modal technologies, including augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), have become increasingly common in education and training contexts. Despite growing adoption of these technologies, our understanding of how basic perceptual-cognitive processes are influenced or altered by AR and VR mediation remains limited. The present paper describes a pilot study in which participants performed goal-directed reaching movements toward visual illusions in three different mediation conditions: unmediated reality (UR), AR, and VR. This pilot assessed whether the speed-accuracy relationship of reaching movements in different mediation conditions was modulated by contextual information surrounding a target. Preliminary results showed that there was a trend toward an effect of the contextual information in VR, but not in UR or AR. These findings may indicate that movements in VR are generated by different sensorimotor processes than in UR and AR.

How can new materialism and non-human agency inform game design research? Through a process of game-design-as-research, the hybrid setting creation game Primal Clay offers one possible answer. In Primal Clay, human players collaborate with Hydrostone and an interactive narrative to produce a fictional game world, engaging in digital as much as material encounters. Relying on notions of material agency, this essay shows the ways in which material can exert “thing power” within the context of a collaborative, co-creative game. It concludes that materials can actively contribute to the play form, and that foregrounding such processes has the potential to broaden the field of digital game design.

Archiving Performative Objects aimed at applying and conserving puppetry as creative practice in VR. It included 3D scanning and interaction design to capture puppets and their varying control schemes from the archives of the Center for Puppetry Arts. This paper reports on their design and implementation in a VR puppetry set up. Its focuses on the evaluation study (n=18) comparing the interaction of non-experts vs expert puppeteers. The data initially show little differences but a more detailed discussion indicates differing qualitative assessments of puppetry that support its value for VR. Results suggests successful creative activation especially among experts.

Spatial abilities are grounded in the way we interact with and understand the world through our physical body. However, existing spatial ability training materials are largely paper- or screen-based; they rarely engage or encourage the use of the body. Tangible and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies provide opportunities to re-imagine designing for spatial ability. We present a game-based system that combines embodiment in VR with tangible interfaces, and is designed around a specific spatial ability known as penetrative thinking. This spatial ability is the capacity to imagine the internal structure of objects based on external cues. This ability is important in areas like design, geosciences, medicine, and engineering. We describe the iterative design, implementation, and testing of our system, including the user study of the final design. The user evaluation results showed that participants had positive experiences when they solved the penetrative thinking puzzles in the tangible VR system.

Craft practitioners rely on reflection to train and improve their skills. The lack of media to represent and communicate their tacit knowledge makes reflection difficult, especially if this reflection happens after the fact. This paper presents a set-up that tracks and visualizes muscle activities of potters when throwing on the wheel. We use this set-up to investigate the effect of the visualization of potters' muscle activities on their retrospective reflections on their own practice. We conducted a preliminary user study with three expert potters. The preliminary results suggest that externalizing the once implicit muscle activities alters potters' reflection of their own practice and can potentially serve as a medium to communicate the tacit knowledge involved in throwing.

Craft has emerged as an important reference point for HCI. To avoid a misrepresenting, all-encompassing application of craft to interaction design, this position paper first discerns craft from HCI. It develops material engagement and mediation as differentiating factors to reposition craft in relation to tangible interaction design. The aim is to clarify craft's relation to interaction design and to open up new opportunities and questions that follow from this repositioning.

A growing body of empirical evidence from the cognitive sciences shows that physical experience can enhance cognition in areas that involve spatial thinking. At the same time, virtual environments provide opportunities to engage learners with novel spatial tasks that cannot be achieved in the real world. Yet combining virtual worlds with tangible interfaces to engage spatial cognition is still not a well-explored area. This paper describes the TASC (Tangibles for Augmenting Spatial Cognition) system, which combines movement tracking and tangible objects in order to create a strong sense of embodiment in a virtual environment for spatial puzzle solving, designed to engage perspective taking ability. We describe the motivation, design process, and development of TASC. We also report the results from our user study, showing the participants' positive experiences, linking to future research opportunities.

A growing body of research combines craft and interaction design. The "Stitch Sampler" project, a sew-able musical instrument and craft platform, stands in this context. In particular, the project serves to underline the importance of two conceptual themes that have emerged in HCI over the last decade, specifically the "material turn" of research on computing and the "practice" or "action-centric" turn in HCI. We present that our prototype and its evolution process as an example of a third trend in HCI research that has developed closely along-side these shifts, with relation to research specifically on craft practice. We discuss the Stitch Sampler and related work that couple electronics and smart materials with craft practices. In that way the act of crafting has in some cases become a form of computation.

Combining practices of craft and tangible interaction design opens up new opportunities for both domains. But structuring cross-domain collaboration between the two poses challenges. How can we set up a crafter-designer collaboration to utilize the different fields of expertise and include separate practices? We address this question through a co-design research approach that stands in context with existing work discussed. We propose a design perspective that builds on an initial distinction between the collaborators, repositions the construction of the brief, and culminates into a collaboration through the shared object. This perspective is described in a collaboration between an interaction designer and a ceramic artist. The resulting collaboration model is presented through this co-design driven collaborative case study in pottery and interaction design that exemplifies collaborative practices to improve tangible designs.

In this paper, we describe our approach to designing electronic puppetbuilding workshops for middle to early high school students. Power Puppet uses traditional puppet building materials paper and cloth as the main resources, together with simple circuits elements such as LED's, batteries and magnets. We document our process of designing puppetbuilding workshops that include STEM education criteria. We collaborated with the Center for Puppetry Arts to design these workshops in such a way that part of the making will include basic electronic input and output components. We aim to open this tradition up for larger audiences to enhance hardware CS education in STEM fields.

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.

Machinima is a new form of creative digital filmmaking that leverages the real time graphics rendering of computer game engines. Because of the low barrier to entry, machinima has become a popular creative medium for hobbyists and novices while still retaining borrowed conventions from professional filmmaking. Can novice machinima creators benefit from creativity support tools? A preliminary study shows novices generally have difficulty adhering to cinematographic conventions. We identify and document four cinematic conventions novices typically violate. We report on a Wizard-of-Oz study showing a rule-based intelligent system that can reduce the frequency of errors that novices make by providing information about rule violations without prescribing solutions. We discuss the role of error reduction in creativity support tools.

Our research explores the connection between physical and virtual tools. This work is based on research from the cognitive sciences showing that physical and virtual tool use extends our brain's representation of peripersonal space to include the tool. These findings led us to investigate if tool appropriation transfers from virtual to physical tools. The present paper reports the results of a study that revealed that manipulating a tool in the virtual space is sufficient to induce appropriation of a similar physical tool. These results have implications for interaction design in training and simulation applications.

TUIs have become part of a larger digital ecology. Thus, hybrid interface design that combines tangible with other interaction options is ever more important. This paper argues for the importance of such hybrid approaches for creative practices that use divergent collaborative processes. It presents the design, evolution, and implementation of such a hybrid interface for machinima film production. Finally, it provides initial reflection on the use and preliminary evaluation of the current system.

This paper reports on an empirical study that uses a Grounded Theory approach to investigate the creative practices of Machinima filmmakers. Machinima is a new digital film production technique that uses the 3D graphics and real time rendering capability of video game engines to create films. In contrast to practices used in traditional film production, we've found that Machinima filmmakers explore and evaluate ideas in real time. These filmmakers generate vague and underspecified mental images, which are then explored and refined using the real time rendering capabilities of game engines. The game engine assists the filmmaker to fill in indeterminate details, which allows creative exploration of scenes through playfully experimenting with parameters such as camera angle and position, lighting, and character position. Creative exploration distributes the cognitive task of evaluation between the human user and the Machinima tool to enable evaluation through exploring possible scene configurations.

Pictures at an Exhibition is a physical/digital puppetry piece that uses tangible interface puppets to modify a virtual scene projected at the back of the stage in real-time. Telling the story of a heist in an art gallery, the actions of the puppets are digitally reflected in abstract changes to an artwork in the scene. The piece merges traditional puppeteering practices with tangible interaction technologies and virtual environments to create a novel performance for the live stage.

We have developed an embodied puppet interface that translates a player's body movements to a virtual character, thus enabling the player to have a fine grained and personalized control of the avatar. To test the efficacy and short-term effects of this control interface, we developed a two-part experiment, where the performance of users controlling an avatar using the puppet interface was compared with users controlling the avatar using two other interfaces (Xbox controller, keyboard). Part 1 examined aiming movement accuracy in a virtual contact game. Part 2 examined changes of mental rotation abilities in users after playing the virtual contact game. Results from Part 1 revealed that the puppet interface group performed significantly better in aiming accuracy and response time, compared to the Xbox and keyboard groups. Data from Part 2 revealed that the puppet group tended to have greater improvement in mental rotation accuracy as well. Overall, these results suggest that the embodied mapping between a player and avatar, provided by the puppet interface, leads to important performance advantages.

This paper sets out to investigate how COBOL programs can be interpreted using Prolog. For this purpose, we examine how an executable logic specification can be obtained, which is semantically equivalent to the original source. We define a specification language COPRA as a restricted subset of Prolog and show how various imperative constructs, such as GOTOs and subroutine calls, can be handled in this language. The specification is generated automatically and may serve as a starting point for reengineering in form of a higher-level modification of the source program.