As interaction designers are venturing to design for others based on autobiographical experiences, it becomes particularly relevant to critically distinguish the designer’s voice from others’ experiences. However, few reports go into detail about how self and others mutually shape the design process and how to incorporate external evaluation into these designs. We describe a one-year process involving the design and evaluation of a prototype combining haptics and storytelling, aiming to materialise and share somatic memories of earthquakes experienced by a designer and her partner. We contribute with three strategies for bringing others into our autobiographical processes, avoiding the dilution of first-person voices while critically addressing design flaws that might hinder the representation of our stories.

Short online videos have become the dominating media on social platforms. However, finding suitable music to accompany videos can be a challenging task to some video creators, due to copyright constraints, limitations in search engines, and required audio-editing expertise. One possible solution to these problems is to use AI music generation. In this paper we present a user interface (UI) paradigm that allows users to input a song to an AI engine and then interactively regenerate and mix AI-generated music. To arrive at this design, we conducted user studies with a total of 104 video creators at several stages of our design and development process. User studies supported the effectiveness of our approach and provided valuable insights about human-AI interaction as well as the design and evaluation of mixed-initiative interfaces in creative practice.

Existing works on interactive sonification of movements, i.e., the translation of human movement qualities from the physical to the auditory domain, usually adopt a predetermined approach: the way in which movement features modulate the characteristics of sound is fixed. In our work we want to go one step further and demonstrate that the user role can influence the tuning of the mapping between movement cues and sound parameters. Here, we aim to verify if and how the mapping changes when the user is either the performer or the observer of a series of body movements (tracing a square or an infinite shape with the hand in the air). We asked participants to tune movement sonification while they were directly performing the sonified movement vs. while watching another person performing the movement and listening to its sonification. Results show that the tuning of the sonification chosen by participants is influenced by three variables: role of the user (performer vs observer), movement quality (the amount of Smoothness and Directness in the movement), and physical parameters of the movements (velocity and acceleration). Performers focused more on the quality of their movement, while observers focused more on the sonic rendering, making it more expressive and more connected to low-level physical features.

Sound Forest is a music installation consisting of a room with light-emitting interactive strings, vibrating platforms and speakers, situated at the Swedish Museum of Performing Arts. In this paper we present an exploratory study focusing on evaluation of Sound Forest based on picture cards and interviews. Since Sound Forest should be accessible for everyone, regardless age or abilities, we invited children, teens and adults with physical and intellectual disabilities to take part in the evaluation. The main contribution of this work lies in its findings suggesting that multisensory platforms such as Sound Forest, providing whole-body vibrations, can be used to provide visitors of different ages and abilities with similar associations to musical experiences. Interviews also revealed positive responses to haptic feedback in this context. Participants of different ages used different strategies and bodily modes of interaction in Sound Forest, with activities ranging from running to synchronized music-making and collaborative play.