More-than-Human (MtH) design increasingly engages biomaterials such as fungi and algae through practices of noticing, care, and decentering beyond utilitarian framings. We extend this by examining play as a situated inquiry into MtH design. Through a two-month interspecies ethnography of attempting to play alongside fungal growth, and thematic analysis of our experiences, we formulated six play potentials (PPs) that surface playful practices such as making play moves and negotiating care with unpredictable playmates at the boundaries of growth, breaching growth and being surprised by how it’s taken them up, co-making funny, mysterious traces to revisit their change in time, and taking up the challenge of remembering what growth has hidden. Our work contributes (1) an empirical account of play as a situated way of knowing with biomaterials through joyful yet sometimes risky negotiations across temporalities, agencies, and entanglements, and (2) design directions for fostering playful, relational engagements with growing biomaterials.

Walking is an essential aspect of daily life, while walking with companions offers numerous benefits. Recently developed mobile robots, through their ability to navigate challenging terrains, open new possibilities for outdoor walking companionship. Yet, little is known about how such companions shape the human walking experience. In this study, nine participants walked outdoors with a robot and later reflected on their walking experience in semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis showed that the robot influenced how participants related to it, how they managed proximity, and how their attention, control, and social presence were affected. Building on these insights, we identify five key dimensions of human–robot walking: attunement, awareness mediation, proxemics, social perception, and playful curiosity. These dimensions capture how walking with robots transforms this ordinary activity into a co-experienced practice and additionally offer concrete design implications for designing and creating more meaningful, comfortable, and socially attuned human-robot walking interactions.

This study examines fashionability in computational fashion wearables (CFWs) through the reflective accounts of ten academic researcher–designers. While wearables are often studied for technical functions, fashionability, a key to adoption and sustained use, has received less attention. Using semi-structured interviews, we captured designers’ reflections-on-action as they revisited their own prototypes and surfaced forms of tacit, practice-based knowledge that are difficult to access through conventional user studies. Reflexive thematic analysis generated five themes: Desirable Friction, Contextual and Sub-Cultural Relevance, Symbiotic Sensory Envelopes, Narrative Social Performance, and Adaptive Longevity and Circularity. These themes reposition CFWs not as seamless devices but as expressive, situated, and evolving interfaces that mediate sensory, social, and cultural experience. Our findings contribute to fashion theory and HCI by showing how designers mobilize friction, context, sensory depth, and temporality as design resources. We conclude with actionable directions for embodied prototyping, multisensory calibration, narrative staging, and modular longevity.

The more-than-human field has contributed numerous opportunities for interacting with nature, animals, plants, and microorganisms. However, few studies have examined water ecosystems. Current water-related work primarily treats water as a medium for human-centered activities, rarely positioning water as an interactive subject. Building upon prior research, we explore how to better integrate water more playfully into digital-physical interactions as an interactive subject. We designed and developed Water’s Echo, an AI-powered public installation that enables human-water communication through a playful stone-throwing dialogue. We conducted a field study at a local pond, recruiting 15 residents to participate in Water’s Echo—a playful conversational interaction. Our findings indicate that this playful dialogue approach raises participants’ awareness and understanding of surrounding aquatic environments. This research provides insights for design researchers to establish engaging water ecology interactions across cultural communities, promoting a More-than-human perspective in re-examining human-nature relationships.

Autonomous systems such as robots are permeating our daily lives increasingly every day, which are now adorned with social elements, bringing them closer to synthetic companions. While used in fields like well-being, education, guidance, and entertainment, companion robots also hold great potential for outdoor uses, particularly accompanying people in the wild with numerous potential benefits. However, current studies lack a comprehensive understanding of the possible uses, functions, and behavior of companion robots outdoors. To explore this area, we have run a co-design study consisting of 5 design workshops with 30 participants, including interaction designers, product development experts, engineers, robotics experts, and frequent forest goers. The study resulted in nine valuable design themes, transferred into five design concepts, which were then interpreted into a comprehensive design space that can be leveraged by designers and researchers in creating companion robots for the wild.

Walking is an integral part of daily human lives which also has a great influence on happiness and wellbeing. Walking with a dog companion is one of the most popular forms of recreational walking that has similar benefits. The recent development of mobile zoomorphic robots, especially robot dogs has opened up new opportunities in the landscape of walking with companions. This led us to investigate how such robots can accompany humans in walking, and how the mobility and behavior of robots in a daily-life walking scenario affect humans’ walking experience. We interviewed nine participants who took a 15–20-minute walk with a companion robot around a university campus, to understand how diverse walking behaviors of a companion robot influence their perceived experiences. We have generated four key themes through thematic analysis. They imply that affective relationalities between humans and robots can build intimacy and empathy, whereas personal space and physical proximity need to be thought carefully to ensure interaction comfort and spontaneity. Additionally, the robot influenced people’s self-reflection and social values refraining them from enjoying an unknown experience, while ambiguity in communication led to less confidence and trust.

Throughout human history, communication has evolved and diversified t hrough v arious m eans, f rom natural languages to modern forms like video and virtual reality. Now, a paradigm shift, transhumanism, is proposing the integration of machines and computers into the human body to augment individuals physically, sensorily, cognitively, and emotionally. In this pictorial, we examine “How can we approach the design of transhuman technologies for communication?” and “How might future research examine their impact on communication?” For this, we conducted co-speculation workshops to identify design opportunities, and based on them, created fictional a bstracts envisioning future research. Our work contributes a set of design speculations and a range of thought-provoking research ideas that will foster discussions about probable pitfalls and benefits of transhuman technologies in the future of communication.

Computational wearables are redefining our presence in the world and transforming our lifestyles by engendering a seamless connection between the wearer and the worn. Despite numerous original studies on the development as well as the current advances of wearables, a systematic review from the standpoint of fashion seems to be lacking. Thus, this systematic review aimed to explore the current state of research on computational fashion in wearables’ literature in terms of the key domains, theoretical models, materials, interaction modalities, and existing gaps. To this aim, the authors built a search string based on the keywords in related topics and conducted the research using Scopus databases. As a result, a total of 4777 papers between January 1990 to August 2021 were screened and 82 research study papers finally passed the inclusion-exclusion criteria for the purpose of the review. The results display: first, computational wearables’ studies are becoming more inclined towards the aesthetic aspects of fashion wearables; second, although the functional aspects of the design processes received more attention, embodiment was the most discussed theory in the included studies; third, the extensive application of fabric implied the need for new fabrics with both smart quality and flexibility to afford aesthetic aspects; fourth, ambient data as input modalities received extensive attention in fashion wearables; fifth, kinetic output modalities as novel modes of fashion expression are becoming as prevalent as visual modalities. Finally, our findings provide a detailed overview of distinct facets of studies on computational fashion and a future research agenda for researchers and designers working on fashion and wearables.

The advancement of human-computer integration as a research field promises to introduce transhumanistic ways of communicating through the enhanced abilities of augmented humans. Our work seeks to illuminate this experiential landscape, exploring a diverse set of human augmentation technologies (HATs) for communication purposes. We investigated this topic through four co-speculation workshops focusing on physical, cognitive, sensory and emotional augmentations with 35 participants. Through a reflexive thematic analysis of the workshop data, we outlined eight HAT speculations for transhuman communication, grouped into four overarching augmentation clusters: (1) Bodily Changes in/for Communication, (2) Communication with Transferrable and Collective Beings, (3) Communication through Emotion and Memory, and (4) Communication with Augmented/Altered Perception. By serving as a foundation for discussions on transhumanism and communication in CSCW and beyond, these speculations contribute to a design space highlighting design opportunities and challenges to developing and researching near-future communication technologies.

Recent research calls for new design methods and tools that respond to the idiosyncrasies of emergent design spaces. Here we address one of them: the design of nature-related technology. To facilitate increasingly situated practices in this space, we created the Wild Probes: a set of probing tools for displacing co-design into the wilderness. Our toolkit enables forestry future-making by helping forest goers to pay attention to, reflect on, ideate around, and document their forestry experiences. Here we present the design and early use of the toolkit. We hope other designers will find it useful and extend it with new Wild Probes of their own.

Smart-jewelry design has many layers such as comfort, ergonomics, fashionability, interactivity and functionality that create a complex design process, making the form exploration challenging. Various wearable prototyping tools were developed to overcome this challenge; however, they are usually textile-based and do not target smart jewelry design. To bridge this gap, we developed Snowflakes that differentiates from existing tools by 1) allowing designers to explore different jewelry forms, 2) incorporating external materials such as leather, 3) creating form factors that fit body parts with flexible connectors. In this paper, we explain the design process of Snowflakes which is inspired by 7 design parameters (limbs, materials, grip, fastener, decoration, placement, form) extracted through the examination of non-smart jewelry. We also demonstrate three reimplementations and design concepts implemented with Snowflakes. Our exploration with Snowflakes contributes to the wearable community in terms of smart-jewelry visual expressions, interaction modalities, and merger of traditional and computational materials.

This paper explores a novel concept of textile-based shadow displays that incorporates shape memory alloys (SMA) on fabrics to cast dynamic shadows as an ambient information display. To explore this, we implemented a lamp prototype, capable of presenting a set of dynamic shadows. These shadows exemplified iconic vs. abstract shadow figures, as well as demonstrating changes in shadow sharpness, size and/or position on the lamp’s shade. We conducted a user study (n =8) to investigate the perception toward our concept. Our findings report that the concept does not only provide the potential for a variety of use cases, dynamic alterations of the shadows feel like a decorative addition to the living spaces, as well as creating relaxing channels of information display.

This course is a hands-on introduction to the fabrication of flexible, transparent free-form displays based on electrochromism for an audience with a variety of backgrounds, including artists and designers with no prior knowledge of physical prototyping. Besides prototyping using screen printing or ink-jet printing of electrochromic ink and an easy assembly process, participants will learn essentials for designing and controlling electrochromic displays.

We present the design and prototype of the DecoLive Jacket, a dynamic clothing that allows its wearer to switch between opened and closed states of flower patterns as subtle indication of availability for social interactions. The Jacket embodies two electrochromic (EC) displays and NFC-based wireless energy harvesting components, enabling battery-free operation. The wearer controls the garment’s patterning by placing a smartphone in one of the two pockets of the jacket, activating either the open or closed flower visualization, and expressing a subtle message about their willingness to interact with others. Our implementation demonstrates the potential for battery-free EC displays on aesthetic wearables to enable dynamic control of the non-verbal messages communicated by clothing.

We present the design and prototype of ShadowSparrow, an ambient display utilizing lights & shadows. The concept uses illustrative bird images and other relevant visuals (e.g., dishwasher and e-mail icons) cast on the surroundings for ambient information visualizations and notifications. Our work creates an alternative channel to convey non-critical information in an unobtrusive and aesthetic way.

During collocated meetings, the spontaneous need for information, called opportunistic search, might arise while conversing. However, using smartphones to look up information might be disruptive, disrespectful or even embarrassing in social contexts. We propose an alternative instrument for this practice: Glance Mug, a touch-sensitive mug prototype that listens to the conversation and displays browsable content-driven results on its inner screen. We organized 15 pairs of one-to-one meetings between students to gather user reflections. The user study revealed that the mug has the potential for supporting instant search and affords sufficient subtlety to conceal user actions. Yet, it provoked some anxiety for the users in maintaining eye contact with their partners. Our main contributions are the context-aware mug concept tested in a real-life setting and the analysis through Hornecker and Buur's Tangible Interaction Framework that discusses its design space, and its impact on the users and social interaction.

The Head Mounted Projection Display (HMPD) is a growing interest area in HCI. Although various aspects of HMPDs have been investigated, there is not enough information regarding the effect of HMPDs (i.e., head referenced static and dynamic displays while a user is in motion and standing) on visual attentional performance. For this purpose, we conducted a user study (N=18) with three experimental conditions (control, standing, walking) and two visual perceptual tasks (with dynamic and static displays). Significant differences between conditions were only found for the task with dynamic display; accuracy was lower in walking condition compared to the other two conditions. Our work contributes an empirical investigation of the effect of HMPDs on visual attentional performance by providing data-driven benchmarks for developing graphical user interface design guidelines for HMPDs.