We present an exploration of e-textile/soft materials that can be used to capture fidget traces, while providing the touch sensations that fidgeters report seeking out in everyday fidget objects [3,4,5]. We created two soft-bodied "sampler" objects with a range of smart fidgeting affordances, which we describe in this paper, along with a general outline of the range of properties explored. This work extends exploration of a novel design space introduced in [4], toward the end goal of creating smart fidget objects that aid self-regulation. We include an overview of our design process, present some preliminary insights about materials that support this design space, and conclude with current and future directions for the work.

Industrial knitting machines can produce finely detailed, seamless, 3D surfaces quickly and without human intervention. However, the tools used to program them require detailed manipulation and understanding of low-level knitting operations. We present a compiler that can automatically turn assemblies of high-level shape primitives (tubes, sheets) into low-level machine instructions. These high-level shape primitives allow knit objects to be scheduled, scaled, and otherwise shaped in ways that require thousands of edits to low-level instructions. At the core of our compiler is a heuristic transfer planning algorithm for knit cycles, which we prove is both sound and complete. This algorithm enables the translation of high-level shaping and scheduling operations into needle-level operations. We show a wide range of examples produced with our compiler and demonstrate a basic visual design interface that uses our compiler as a backend.

Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have strong narratives, but in general lack interesting and meaningful choices for the player within the story. As a result, the stories are not playable. In this paper we present an existence proof for a new approach to CRPG stories that addresses this, while providing details of our implementation. We designed and created a new playable experience, Mismanor, to test our theories of playable stories. We discuss the design decisions made as well as the details of the CiF-RPG and GrailGM systems used for complex quest generation and story management based on player's traits and the social state of the game world.

One compelling aspect of computer RPGs is the promise of player agency: the ability to make significant and desired choices in a large, complex, and story-rich environment. Giving players meaningful choice has traditionally required the creation of tremendous amounts of hand-authored story content. This authoring paradigm tends to introduce both structural and workload problems for RPG designers. Our hypothesis is that reducing authorial burden and increasing agency are two sides of the same coin, both requiring advancement in three distinct areas: (1) dynamic story management architecture that allows story elements to be selected and re-ordered in response to player choices; (2) dynamic dialogue generation which takes history and relationships into account; and (3) an authoring interface that lets writers focus on quests and characters. This paper describes SpyFeet, a playable prototype of a storytelling system designed to test this hypothesis.