Hybrid crafts blend traditional materials with embedded interactivity, yet everyday use of such artefacts remains underexplored. This paper contributes the study of lived experience with high-fidelity hybrid craft artefacts (made with interactive stained glass), following an initial study with 11 practitioners. We conducted three co-design sessions with nine end-users to create bespoke crafted artefacts deployed across three households for three weeks each, supported by user diaries and interviews. Our findings reveal how participants developed habitual patterns (placement, timing, relocation), emotional attachments, and disengagement needs, perceiving the artefacts as warm, expressive, and socially meaningful, distinguishing hybrid crafts from screen-based or smart devices. We offer design recommendations for leveraging artistic and pictorial qualities, supporting routine-based interaction and emotional connection, and designing for placement flexibility and spatial legibility. This work marks a shift from practitioner-only explorations of hybrid crafts toward user-centred in-the-wild understanding of how these artefacts function as lived-with technologies.

Partial automation makes digital games simpler by performing game actions for players. It may simplify gameplay for non-gamers who have difficulty controlling and understanding games. However, the automation may make players confused about what they control and what the automation controls. To describe and explain non-gamers’ experiences of automation confusion, we analyzed gameplay, think-aloud, and interview data from ten non-gamer participants who played two partially automated games. Our results demonstrate how incorrect mental models, behaviours resulting from those models, and players’ attitudes towards the games led to different levels and types of confusion.

Pandemic lockdowns created new barriers for HCI researchers, but also provided new opportunities for deeper engagement and reflection in our home environments. Five participants were introduced with a design brief on self-isolation and engaged 12 of their friends and family in the design process of in-the-isolated-wild deployments. By analysing the design process, we found that –while ‘making from home’– our participants noticed the subtlety of the interactions and materials, the processes of remembrance embedded in craft, the use of imperfection and metaphor in homeware, and how ambient presence can provide emotional support. We then conducted a follow-up study on the benefits and limitations of using a crafting approach while ‘making from home’ and discuss the tensions that novices experience while designing TUIs in such an environment. Our results expand the literature by highlighting the benefits, limitations, and trade-offs of user-led design, DIY user empowerment, and harnessing the power of craft.