This paper presents two design-oriented educational units within a broader programme aimed at supporting emotional awareness, regulation, and preparedness in hydrogeological disaster scenarios in children and adolescents. The units introduce purposefully designed phygital artefacts—physical objects augmented with digital technologies—as tangible supports to externalise emotional processes and prompt reflection on coping in risk-related contexts. Through guided interaction and reflection, participants explore how emotions can be sensed, represented, and transformed through interaction, and articulate design ideas for their own emotionally expressive phygital artefacts grounded in disaster preparedness situations. The units were implemented as a pilot with university students to assess the clarity, feasibility, and coherence of the artefacts and activities prior to deployment in school contexts. The paper describes the phygital artefacts’ structure and interaction logic, and how they support reflection on emotion regulation and the articulation of design concepts for disaster preparedness.

Adults with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) are often excluded from decision-making processes that shape their lives, reducing opportunities for self-expression and agency. This paper presents a co-design proposal for a public park with adults with ID, focusing on how structured activities support meaningful choices.

Storytelling is a widely explored educational practice. Within Human–Robot Interaction (HRI), robots are extensively employed for storytelling. In parallel, non-robot phygital artefacts — physical objects augmented with digital technologies — have been considered for supporting interaction and collaboration. However, systematic comparisons between these approaches remain limited. This paper presents a systematic review of 135 out of 1,040 studies (2014–2025) involving participants under 18. The review compares robots and non-robot phygital artefacts used in storytelling. Studies were coded across analytic lenses on media, participation, collaboration, learning goals, and Artificial Intelligent support, enabling age-stratified comparison. Findings reveal that non-robot phygital artefacts more consistently foster peer collaboration and creative ownership, while robots primarily contribute social presence and novelty, often structuring participation sequentially. The review highlights implications for future HRI design, suggesting that robots should complement alternative phygital artefacts by promoting openness, adaptability, and collaboration in storytelling

A B S T R A C T Micro-electronics tools, coupled with card-based tools, are employed for prototyping smart devices with nonexperts.Lately, researchers have started investigating what tools can actively engage people with intellectual disabilities (ID) in their prototyping.This paper posits itself in this line of work.It presents a toolkit for ID people to rapidly prototype together their own ideas of smart things, for their own shared environment.It analyses and discusses engaging or disengaging features of the toolkit in light of the results of two workshops with eight ID participants.Lessons of broad interest for the design of similar toolkits are drawn from the literature and study findings.

Digital well-being traditionally means limiting the effects on individuals of technology abuses.However, in a broader perspective, it can be crucial to consider the pervasiveness of technology, and the effect it can have not only on individuals but also on their peers in the context of diverse everyday-life situations.Within this view, which emphasises the social side of digital well-being, the paper argues the need of educating young generations to participate in the making of technology for a social goal and have a reflective attitude towards technology and its impact on society.It, therefore, presents a design toolkit as a means to (i) engage young generations to become active in design for social digital well-being and, thanks to the exposure to how technology works, (ii) reflect deeply on the pros and cons of technology in use in their everyday life.By presenting the results of a study with 24 high-school pupils and their teachers, the paper discusses how a phygital toolkit, which structures the design process, engages them in the rapid prototyping of their own smart things, and how it acts as a proxy for soliciting their own reflections around technology and social digital well-being.

Smart things are everywhere: smart watches, smart jewellery, smart art installations. All have in common the capability of sensing with input devices (e.g., buttons), computing, reacting with output devices (e.g., light matrices), and connecting with other smart things. Engaging their end users in their design can be challenging and yet give end users unique empowering opportunities. Toolkits are fundamental for engaging end users and enabling them to design. This paper presents the IoTgo phygital toolkit for smart-thing design with end users who are not experts, e.g., artists and school learners, which results from co-design actions and interventions in the field.

A smart bracelet that reacts to a person's heartbeat. A smart bench that invites passers-by to sit close. These and others are smart things, part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and people's lives. However, people are mainly IoT consumers and rarely given the possibility of becoming IoT creators. This paper presents a case study concerning the design of smart things for outdoor environments, with end users as the main creators. Ideas of smart things were collaboratively conceptualised by child end-users with a card-based board game. Their ideas were taken up in the form of inspiration cards within a bachelor's first-year course, by students coming from different high schools. Students started from children's ideas as inspiration triggers and collaboratively evolved some of them into interactive smart-thing prototypes. The paper concludes by reflecting on its results and drawing lessons for future editions of cross-generational workshops related to IoT design with end users.

Children's role in the design of new technology has been widely investigated. Recently, the research focus has shifted, from the technology they help create, towards what children gain by participating in design workshops. This paper intercepts this line of research. It reports on a design workshop with 27 children, aged from 11 to 14 years old, ideating, programming and prototyping smart objects for their town park. Data were gathered in relation to children's beliefs, before and after the workshop, and in relation to their understanding of design, after the workshop. The analysis of the gathered data suggests that the workshop positively affected children's beliefs and understanding of design, giving indications for future work concerning design as means of empowerment.

Primary school curricula teach children conversation norms for promoting positive social interactions, such as turn-taking and turn reserving, while curricula discourage other aspects of conversations, such as overlapping in turns. However such norms are abstract and difficult to master. Recently, interactive tangible solutions (briefly, tangibles) have been used to sustain the scaffolding of conversation norms. This paper continues this line of investigation. It discusses how meta-design and action research complement each other and tackle trade-offs in designing tangibles for conversations in primary schools. It reports on the emergence and genesis of tangibles for class conversation, named ClassTalk. Then it focusses on usages and actions with ClassTalk in 2018 in primary school classes, and it discusses them in relation to children's and teachers' engagement and usages of tangibles. It concludes by reflecting on the entire experience, and considers trade-offs and lessons learnt for meta-design and action research, as well as for the design of such tangibles per se.

Interactive tangible objects can help orchestrate conversations in school classes. If such tangibles are created with a meta-design approach, for the specific context of their users, they evolve according to their usage. Specifically, tangible object prototypes are created; prototypes are adopted by their users in ecological studies; their usage is reflected over by users and designers to investigate design possibilities, which are rapidly prototyped and again adopted by users. This paper reports on the meta-design and latest evolution of ClassTalk, a tangible for conversations in primary school classes. It shows how new design ideas emerged by making users adopt ClassTalk prototypes, and by moving designers into users' context.

Social learning curricula teach children social norms for managing conversations, such as the norm of not overlapping in talking turns. Interactive tangible objects (briefly, tangibles) can help teachers in the scaffolding of such norms. Such tangibles should be created for the specific social learning contexts of their users, and evolve according to their requirements. An ideal design process for tangibles for children's conversations is meta-design, based on action-research: evolving tangible prototypes are developed, with natural material and easy-to-use micro-electronics components; tangibles are adopted by their users in ecological studies, and their usage is reflected over with designers to stir design directions or uncover design possibilities, which are developed and again used by users. This paper reports on such an evolutionary design process, concerning tangibles for children's conversations. It shows how new design ideas emerged by making users adopt design solutions and moving designers into ecological settings.

Nowadays, circa 10% of 7-11 olds turn out to be poor comprehenders: they demonstrate text comprehension difficulties, related to inference making, despite proficiency in low-level cognitive skills like word reading. To improve the reading comprehension of these children, TERENCE, a technology enhanced learning project, aims at stimulating inference-making about stories. In order to design and develop the TERENCE system, we use a user centred design approach that requires an in depth study of the system's main end-users, namely, its learners and educators. This paper reports on the specification of the user classes for the TERENCE learners by means of user-centred design field studies, the resulting global system architecture, and an example use case of the system, with few related GUI's snapshots.