This paper describes the underlying motivation, creation process, and evaluation outcomes of Shiva's Rangoli, a tangible storytelling installation that allows readers to impact the emotional tone of a narrative by sculpting the ambience of their space. Readers interact with a tangible interface that acts as a boundary object between the reader and the fictional world. We discuss how these kinds of interfaces can engage readers to feel like they are a part of the story, endow them with responsibility, and blur the line between real and fictional worlds.

There has been a significant increase in commercial interest in wearable technologies, spearheaded by Google's Glass project, and also by the success of a new generation of fitness oriented biosensors such as the Fitbit, the Bodymedia Fit, and the Misfit Shine. Concurrently, there has been a proliferation of embodied interfaces for digital games such as Nintendo's Wii, Sony's Move controller, and Microsoft's Kinect. These technologies often only scratch the surface of the design possibility space, overlooking nuances of social and emotional experience for wearers/players that are important in other areas of design, such as theatrical costuming and fashion. We propose a studio that offers participants the chance to create wearable game controllers that afford a playful exploration of this design terrain, encouraging transformation, collaboration, and enjoyment of rich spectacle.

DIY, hacking, and craft have recently drawn attention in HCI and CSCW, largely as a collaborative and creative hobbyist practice. We shift the focus from the recreational elements of this practice to the ways in which it democratizes design and manufacturing. This democratized technological practice, we argue, unifies playfulness, utility, and expressiveness, relying on some industrial infrastructures while creating demand for new types of tools and literacies. Thriving on top of collaborative digital systems, the Maker movement both implicates and impacts professional designers. As users move more towards personalization and reappropriation, new design opportunities are created for HCI.

In this paper we look at the Steampunk movement and consider is relevance as a design strategy for HCI and interaction design. Based on a study of online practices of Steampunk, we consider how, as a design fiction, Steampunk provides an explicit model for how to physically realize an ideological and imagined world through design practice. We contend that the practices of DIY and appropriation that are evident in Steampunk design provide a useful set of design strategies and implications for HCI.

This studio provides participants with an opportunity to engage in a hands-on exploration of the use of "design fictions" as a strategy for producing physical artifacts. The idea of design fictions blurs the boundaries between traditional design practices and narrative explorations of potential futures. If the goal of design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones, then the goal of design fiction is to use speculations, metaphors, and explorations of desired futurities to explicate and inform material design practices. Participants will have a chance to discuss these ideas, as well as to design and build their own "diegetic prototypes" out of materials sourced from local antique shops, thrift stores, and other nearby sources of inspiration. Through this hands-on exploration of the constraints and affordances of fictional scenarios and scavenged materials, we hope to collectively explore a compelling new design space for tangibles.

In this paper we describe the Reading Glove, a wearable RFID reader for interacting with a tangible narrative. Based on interviews with study participants, we present a set of observed themes for understanding how the wearable and tangible aspects of the Reading Glove influence the user experience. We connect our observational themes to theoretical notions from interactive narrative and tangible interaction to create a set of design considerations such as enacting a role, ownership and permission, multiplicity of interpretations and boundary objects.

In this paper we explore sustainability in interaction design by reframing concepts of user identity and use in a domestic setting. Building on our own work on everyday design and Blevis's Sustainable Interaction Design principles, we present examples from an ethnographic study of families in their homes which illustrate design-in-use: the creative and sustainable ways people appropriate and adapt designed artifacts. We claim that adopting a conception of the user as a creative everyday designer generates a new set of design principles that promote sustainable interaction design.

The EventTable technique is a tangible object tracking technique implemented on a camera vision based tabletop platform. The technique supports an event-driven -- rather than object centric -- tracking technique. Fiducial markers are distributed between objects. When objects are brought into a proximal or connected relationship, a whole marker is formed and recognized by the tracking system. Thus, rather than tracking each individual object, the system tracks user-driven events that occur when two or more objects are proximal. The technique can be used in addition to individual object tracking and touch tracking. This approach provides a reliable and flexible approach to tabletop object tracking for a wide variety of tabletop activities. We describe three prototype applications to illustrate how the distributed marker technique can be applied. We describe the advantages and limitations of this approach. We conclude with a brief discussion of how the EventTable technique enables a shift in human computer interaction research from an information-centric to an action-centric epistemological view on how users' create meaning.

We discuss three design strategies for improving the quality of social interaction and learning with interactive museum guides: 1) embodied interaction; 2) game-learning; 3) a hybrid system. We used these strategies in our prototype Kurio, which is aimed at supporting families visiting museums. The results of our evaluation show positive implications of implementing the design strategies: closing the social gap, naturalizing technology, and supporting exploration and discovery in learning.