There has been an increasing focus on teaching youth about design ethics as part of technical literacy. Biowearables are an emerging technology in which devices worn on children's bodies are used to track, monitor and provide feedback about their biological processes. In this paper we describe an online critical making workshop designed to enable students in middle school years to develop technical literacy skills that include reflection on issues related to design ethics. We investigated if and how our workshop enabled eleven youth, aged 12-14, to reflect through processes of making their own biowearable, on potential negative impacts of biowearables on their developing senses of identity, agency, autonomy and authenticity. The workshop elements included facilitated activities using custom created biowearable-tangible kit and ethics cards. Through qualitative coding and thematic analysis of moments of reflection captured with video, chat, and design journals we gathered evidence of the feasibility of promoting critical making as a means to cultivate technical literacy in youth. Our findings suggest the potential of teaching design ethics through critical making workshops and reveal a range of ways that reflection on ethical issues can be supported during making. We interpret our empirical evidence to further explore how workshop elements supported, or failed to support, learning outcomes and generalize our interpretations to propose preliminary guidance about workshop mechanisms that might be used to support ethical reflection during making.

We present a performance-led inquiry that involved a live coder programming movement-based interactive sound and two dance improvisers. During two years of collaboration, we developed a joint improvisation practice where the interactions between the dancers’ movement and the sound feedback are programmed on the fly through live coding and movement sensing. To that end, we designed a new live coding environment called CO/DA that facilitates the real-time manipulation of continuous streams of the dancers’ motion data for interactive sound synthesis. Through an autoethnographic inquiry, we describe our practice of sound and movement improvisation where live coding dynamically changes how the dancers’ movements generate sound, which in turn influences the dancers’ improvisation. We then discuss the value, potential and challenges of our dance/code improvisation practice, along with its implications as a design method.

We consider kinesthetic awareness, the perception of our own body position and movement in space, as a critical value for embodied design within third wave HCI. We designed an interactive sound installation that supports kinesthetic awareness of a participant's micro-movements. The installation's interaction design uses continuous auditory feedback and leverages an adaptive mapping strategy, refining its sensitivity to increase sonic resolution at lower levels of movement activity. The installation uses field recordings as rich source materials to generate a sound environment that attunes to a participant's micro-movements. Through a qualitative study using a second-person interview technique, we gained nuanced insights into the participants' subjective experiences of the installation. These reveal consistent temporal patterns, as participants build on a gradual process of integration to increase the complexity and capacity of their kinesthetic awareness during interaction.