Companion Publication of the 2026 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and its surrounding areas, such as Human-Building Interaction (HBI), and Media Architecture have long been shaped by narratives of progress, innovation, and problem-solving, often following the “heroic arc” of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. While productive, these narratives tend to marginalize practices of maintenance, repair, and care, as well as the more-than-human relations through which sociotechnical systems persist. This full-day workshop invites participants to explore alternative narrative forms for HCI through Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, narratives centered on gathering, sustaining, and caring rather than heroic achievement. Through short provocations, peer annotation, and collaborative exercises, participants will bring existing research projects, probes, or artifacts and collectively surface and rethink the narratives embedded within them. The workshop will generate speculative narrative artifacts such as storyboards, diagrams, or care-oriented reframings. By foregrounding narrative and care, the workshop aims to expand how interactivity is understood at DIS, contributing to relational and care-centered approaches beyond interaction in HCI.

Recent HCI research increasingly incorporates edible interfaces into system design, moving beyond conventional user interface paradigms. Within this trajectory, edible interaction designers treat food materials as interactive media that can be sensed and actuated across multiple sensory modalities. This workshop convenes perspectives from HCI, fabrication, perceptual science, and materials science to build community, align knowledge, and articulate future directions for the field. Through multisensory demonstrations and hands-on activities in an one-day workshop, we aim to balance technological interventions with human factors to chart the future of edible interactions.

HCI and design research frequently engage with vulnerability in contexts of care, health, and life transitions, yet often overlooks how vulnerability is sensed and enacted through the body. This one-day workshop foregrounds vulnerability as an embodied phenomenon that unfolds in interaction, prior to and beyond language. Participants explore vulnerability through shared experiential inquiry: through carefully facilitated embodied activities, collective reflection, and methodological experimentation, participants will attend to embodied, sensory, and relational experiences of vulnerability in their own research practices. The workshop offers a safe, ethically attentive space in which participants experiment with translating non-verbal experiences into communicable forms such as sketches, body-maps or material traces that can inform design inquiry. We aim to cultivate a shared vocabulary, methodological sensibilities and practical techniques for engaging embodied vulnerability in design research, and lay the foundations for ongoing community building around care-oriented approaches in HCI and design.

In this workshop, we explore how material knowledge is taught, learned, and disseminated within HCI research. Through the activity of creating a quilt, the workshop compares how different forms of knowledge circulation—such as tutorials, oral instruction, mentorship, workshops, and community-based collaboration—relate to one another. We invite researchers, educators, designers, and practitioners to engage with themes including pedagogical forms of material knowledge; learning trajectories; tacit, sensory, and biological knowledge in making, care, and maintenance in material practices; access and participation in fabrication; and the design of pedagogical artifacts. Workshop activities revolve around creating quilt patches using different dissemination practices and assembling them into a collective quilt based on similarities and differences in how material knowledge is shared. Through these activities, the workshop aims to examine and compare how knowledge is shared and guide the creation of a simple toolkit for recording material processes.

Crisis situations increasingly involve the circulation of complex information, including real-time data, scientific modelling, risk assessments, and community-based knowledge. Around the world, communities and institutions are facing a growing range of crises, from climate-related events and public health emergencies to geopolitical instability. In these contexts, decision-making depends not only on access to information, but also on how that information is interpreted, discussed, and acted upon.

Sensemaking is central to crisis contexts, as diverse actors work to interpret uncertain and sometimes conflicting information. AI systems are now being introduced to support crisis planning and response, including data analysis, forecasting, and information management. However, their role in shaping how people make sense of situations, communicate uncertainty, and arrive at shared judgements remains underexamined from a design perspective.

This one-day workshop examines the role of AI in crisis-related sensemaking and decision-making. It considers how interactive systems influence interpretation, communication, and collective judgement in high-stakes contexts. By situating AI within practices of sensemaking, the workshop contributes to ongoing discussions about the role of design in situations characterised by uncertainty, complexity, and real-world consequences.

Social media is central to how young people maintain relationships, develop identity, and access communities, yet dominant platform designs often leave youth feeling disempowered rather than supported. My dissertation argues that youth social media design is shaped by three forms of problem-space misattunement. Conceptual misattunement occurs when the language of “social media” anchors participants to existing platforms’ interaction templates. I address this through a Fictional Inquiry design workshop that frees youth from preconceived notions of social media by having them brainstorm ways to “magically connect with remote wizard friends” rather than ideas for “social media.” Definitional misattunement occurs when researchers define what “better” means on youth’s behalf. I address this through a Discord-based asynchronous community that supports youth-led collective inquiry. Evaluative misattunement occurs when participants are asked to judge static or hypothetical designs. I address this through an ego-anchored, LLM-agent simulation sandbox. Together, these studies develop youth-grounded criteria and design directions for relationally supportive social media.

This research investigates the intersections of art, technology, and spirituality, exploring how digital technology mediates contemplative and meditative experiences. Employing a post-qualitative approach to explore techno-spirituality through artistic research, the inquiry follows a trajectory from an autoethnographic reflection on the integration of self-tracking devices into Christian prayer to an exploration of the Chinese aesthetic concept of liubai (empty space) through silence and digital fasting. This leads to ongoing experiments that prioritise material aesthetics and technological tools to create tangible artefacts for spiritual attunement. By embracing slowness and uncontrollability as design resources, this work navigates the in-between spaces of spiritual practices to foster deeper embodied attunement within technology- saturated environments.

Engaging with plants offers many wellbeing benefits. Motivated by these benefits, human–plant interaction (HPI) research is emerging. However, current systems appear to focus on unidirectional interactions between plants and humans, in which humans act on plants or receive information from them. This research argues that such approaches overlook the potential to give back to nature. Hence, I propose bidirectional interactions in which technology mediates the mutual influence between humans and plants, which appears to have been largely overlooked. As a new form of interaction between humans and nature, which involves plants not as passive objects, but as responsive living entities, in order to enrich the human-plant relationship. To explore this space, I developed a series of bidirectional systems across four progressive stages based on perceptual distance: awareness of bidirectionality, fleeting bidirectional interaction, embodied bidirectional interaction, and transcendent bidirectional interaction. This work seeks to contribute to the design of future HPI systems that enrich the relationship between humans and nature, ultimately aiming to achieve a more integrated coexistence with the natural world.

Wearable technologies (WT) offer transformative potential for older adults’ health, yet sustaining long-term engagement remains a challenge due to a lack of focus on lived, embodied experiences. This doctoral research addresses this gap by integrating Movement-Based Design (MBD) into Participatory Design (PD) to develop interactive wearables that explore the rhythmic dialogue between the body and technology, focusing on the embodied pleasure of cardiovascular synchronisation. By prioritising the felt experience, this work investigates how real-time auditory and haptic feedback can foster bodily awareness and inclusive physical activity. Through a multi-phase approach involving home studies and co-design workshops, this work aims to refine age-specific PD processes and establish design guidelines that prioritise materiality and the wearer’s relationship with their own body. This research contributes a framework for designing technologies that are meaningfully integrated into the lived experiences of an ageing population.

This research explores how human perception and experience are mediated through interactions with AI systems. Through speculative design artefacts, it inquires into the co-construction of experience with AI systems, shifts in perception that arise through these encounters, and the narratives of human experience and AI that speculative artefacts can surface. Adopting a Research through Design (RtD) approach, this work generates knowledge through the making and reflection on artefacts that foreground ambiguity, probing how it feels to be perceived by AI, how we perceive it and exploring possibilities around human-AI relational aspects.

This research investigates how extended reality (XR), combined with spatial and physical interaction systems, can enhance social connectedness and well-being among older adults in remote communication contexts. As societies age and family structures evolve, older adults increasingly rely on long-distance communication; however, conventional tools such as video calls often fail to support emotional expression, cognitive engagement, and sustained social participation. Although XR-based platforms and wearable technologies create new opportunities for remote connectedness, they frequently overlook older adults’ specific needs and interaction challenges. Using a Research Through Design approach, this study iteratively designs and evaluates multimodal XR systems. Following a systematic literature review, the current stage involves co-design workshops with older adults and domain experts, employing an experience-first approach, a multimodal XR prototype, and a card-based design toolkit. Future stages will comparatively examine peer-to-peer and intergenerational interactions, assessing social well-being and participation, with the aim of deriving inclusive design principles and practical guidelines for XR-based social communication systems.

Interactive systems are increasingly embedded in architectural environments, yet architectural space is often still treated as background context rather than as part of the interface. Drawing from architectural spatial theory and interaction research, this dissertation investigates when and how space itself can function as an interface. It introduces a conceptual framework that differentiates spatial interfaces according to spatial input, describing how systems construct operative interface state from spatial situations, and spatial output, describing how systems act back into space. The framework is advanced through Research through Design using two prototypes in learning and workshop environments. The first prototype explores relational spatial input through a mobile, location-aware LLM system. The second prototype explores relational spatial input and output through a system that senses and reconfigures shared spatial configurations via projection. Together, the project contributes a structured framework, comparative empirical insight, and design considerations for relational socio-spatial interfaces in shared environments.

Large-scale text-to-image generative models (LTGMs) have democratized media creation but introduced significant friction for sustained creative practice due to their black-boxed nature. This doctoral research investigates how generative AI can be engaged with as materials rather than commodities. Drawing on traditions of digital craft and early AI art, the project foregrounds small-data approaches and model crafting as alternatives for artistic engagement with large-scale AI, thereby contributing to a better understanding of how to design artist-centred AI art tools.

This research investigates the aural dimension of public interiors as an active and interactive component of spatial experience, rather than a purely technical issue limited to sound insulation or absorption. Sound is addressed as an intangible, relational, and temporal material that mediates interactions between space, human presence, and non-human agents, including architectural elements and environmental dynamics. Through an interdisciplinary framework bridging design, Sound Art, and acoustics the project explores how sonic phenomena can foster responsive and participatory environments. By framing sound as a system capable not only of responding to and influencing its context, but as a primary design material to be considered “a priori”, the research proposes the development of sound-informed spatial design guidelines to inform future practice, aiming to enhance comfort, awareness and engagement in public interiors.

In Mexico and across Latin America, feminicide and forced disappearance shape everyday life, producing territorial and affective ruptures that exceed statistical representation. While feminist activists construct counter-memories through art, archives, and data justice practices, interaction design often remains constrained by abstraction and neutrality. This dissertation investigates how interaction design can participate in what I have begun to conceptualize as embodied ecosystems of resistance, relational configurations in which bodies, territory, affect, data, and artifacts co-constitute one another within political struggle. Through two empirical projects, (1) embodied data physicalization workshops and activist dialog, and (2) the co-design of Galaxies of the Disappeared, a digital memory infrastructure developed with Mexican collectives, I examine how emotionally intense data can be ethically engaged and transformed into practices of care and solidarity. By tracing these processes, this research contributes a situated ethics for emotionally charged data and advances liberation-oriented approaches to feminist interaction design.

Urban digital interfaces increasingly mediate access to services, participation, and organizational practices, operating not merely as tools but as technopolitical infrastructures that structure delegation and agency. This doctoral research investigates how workshop-based design practices can critically engage with urban digital systems by temporarily reconfiguring how participants perceive and negotiate distributed agency within them. Drawing on STS and critical HCI, the project frames interfaces as sites where governance logics are embedded and often rendered invisible. Through research-creation and participatory action research, iterative workshops enable collective mapping, materialization, and reinterpretation of infrastructural arrangements. Rather than proposing new platforms, the research develops an agency-centered design stance that expands interaction design toward infrastructural literacy and technopolitical inquiry.

Older adults rely on technologies introduced as “support,” from communication apps to safety systems and, at times, embodied interactive devices. Yet their effects are not determined solely by the device. Effects depend on who installs and controls the technology, how its introduction is justified, and how it intertwines with routines and relationships. This doctoral research argues that agency, the ability to initiate, negotiate, and revise one’s use, is the mechanism through which older adults enact and protect what they value through technology. Across studies in care homes, community contexts, and family life, including older adults operating telepresence robots in relatives’ homes, I examine how values such as social connection, contribution, learning, and dignity persist while being expressed differently across contexts and transitions. Through immersion in older adults’ living contexts, I am developing a grounded account of when “support” helps realize values and when it erodes them.

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has a longstanding history of supporting civic data collection at both national and localized scales. However, a common challenge in community-based work is sustained engagement. Situated Play Design (SPD), a practice that considers playful experiences that naturally occur in people’s daily lives, could support the longevity of community-scale efforts, by creating engaging designs that motivate users to return. In my dissertation work, I aim to investigate design choices at the intersection of MCS, SPD, and civic technology that empower people to engage with community-driven goals. In this extended abstract, I propose three studies, with anticipated empirical, artifact-based, and theoretical contributions to the HCI community. Additionally, I describe NetGauge, a playful MCS (pMCS) platform, which will serve as a case-study for two of my proposed studies.

This PhD is an exploratory and critical inquiry on fashion consumption in digital contexts. Through the lenses of decolonial design and HCI it questions how technologies of online fashion consumption are imagined, designed, and used It looks at the growth of online fashion shopping to question how consumption is made, mediated, practiced and performed online, examining how networked experiences augment or even automate consumption. While these experiences are centered around the artifact of the e-commerce and its designed affordances, other media and tools are also forming the web of online consumption. From a prospective design framework, I examine the contradictions enmeshed in the making of technologies of consumption in the context of sociotechnical and sustainable transitions, connecting the ways in which fashion is made (systems of fashion/of production) to the ways consumption is made (through systems of desires).

Through qualitative and design methods, this dissertation seeks to understand how current climate technologies are designed to mitigate the effects of climate change in equitable and just ways. Through grounded case studies in the Pacific Northwest, it explores how epistemological commitments to environmental and climate justice, as well as land-based commitments, open new doors for the sociotechnical design of climate data and technologies. This research shows how commitments to frontline communities and those most impacted by climate change are necessary for the design of climate technologies.

This study investigates one-piece interlocking systems at the intersection of computational geometry, digital fabrication, and bottom-up assembly logic for spatial structures. A one-piece interlocking system is defined as a finite set of simply manufactured elements that interlock without adhesives or additional fasteners. The study emphasizes the key advantages of such systems, where geometric constraints ensure structural stability, adaptability, and enable design for disassembly (DFD). Because such systems rely on fixed geometric rules and limited combinatorial conditions, their generative behavior can be formalized and analyzed algorithmically. This study examines their mathematical and tectonic attributes to establish a generalizable framework for rule-based spatial construction.

Effective extended reality (XR) interfaces depend on contextual factors that are often uncertain at design time, such as the user’s range of motion or the presence of bystanders. AI agents have enabled a new strategy to manage this uncertainty, shifting designers from exhaustive specification to guided delegation. However, current approaches exclude designers from the loop, hindering the accumulation of design knowledge and overburdening end-users with evaluation and refinement. This dissertation proposes a method for co-designing XR applications with AI agents built around two shared mechanisms. The first is a design toolkit that allows designers to control the boundary between what they specify and what agents generate autonomously at runtime. The second is a design knowledge base that grounds agent decisions in established XR principles and evolves through successive co-design sessions. Evaluations across scenarios such as guided exercise, spatial navigation, and manual assembly will combine controlled user studies and longitudinal methods to assess the effect of the shared knowledge base on design outcomes, user effort, and the accumulation of transferable design knowledge.

Smartwatch user experience is often evaluated through adherence and continuous wear, yet this framing can miss how experiences vary across features and situations in daily life. We report a 14-day diary study in which participants recorded the smartwatch feature used, the activity/context of use, and one or more emotion labels. We operationalized affect using n_pos − n_neg and a derived valence-category (positive/neutral-mixed/negative) to summarize day-level tone. Across feature families, affective tone was predominantly positive, but negative shares concentrated in time-scheduling and health monitoring, compared with activity tracking, notifications and communication. Context further shifted these profiles: exercise cells were consistently low in negativity (activity tracking), whereas sleep and rest amplified negativity for time-scheduling and health monitoring. These patterns surface promising design directions for context-sensitive smartwatch governance — reported here as descriptive hotspots warranting further empirical testing.

Conventional rehabilitation for children with cerebral palsy is often monotonous, leading to low compliance. This paper presents the Interactive Rehab Carpet, a modular floor system that transforms lower-limb exercises into gamified experiences. We contribute a novel dual-sensing technique—combining overlaid ohmic and magnetic triggers—that robustly distinguishes left and right foot inputs without cameras or complex wearables. This bipedal discrimination is the system’s core contribution: it supports coordination-specific games for dynamic stepping and force regulation unavailable on standard pressure mats. Unlike floor systems designed for passive monitoring, our platform actively guides movement through real-time multimodal feedback. A hospital pilot with seven children (aged 6–10, GMFCS I–III) and six therapists suggests the system is intuitive and engaging, demonstrating the feasibility of low-cost, reconfigurable floor interfaces for accessible pediatric therapy.

Universal access to musical literacy is a cornerstone of inclusive arts education, yet traditional notation systems often create barriers to independent repertoire study for blind and low-vision (BLV) musicians. While Braille sheet music and aural learning are established pedagogical pillars in accessible music education, they can be limiting when navigating music scores independently. This work introduces the concept of tactile sight-reading, which is demonstrated with the development of a wearable vibrotactile glove designed to convey musical notes and fingerings for woodwind instruments. Utilizing the Ocarina as a primary testbed, we describe a technical pipeline that translates MusicXML scores into real-time haptic cues. We report on an exploratory study involving both sighted musicians for technical baseline validation and BLV musicians for qualitative accessibility insights. Our preliminary results demonstrate generally high discernment accuracy for core notes across all participant groups. BLV participants also reported a sense of freedom and independence in learning new repertoire, highlighting the prototype’s potential as a multimodal supplement to traditional aural methods. We conclude by outlining our roadmap for future development, focusing on the integration of rhythmic haptic patterns and ergonomic hardware optimization to move beyond note-level interaction and toward inclusive musical agency.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), are increasingly being proposed as automated assessors, motivated by measurable gains in efficiency and consistency. Yet these advantages do not resolve a central question: should systems with known limitations be granted evaluative authority over learners? Drawing on a critical review of recent studies, we identify persistent issues, including bias, opacity, reliability gaps, and accountability voids. We also review existing policies and standards to further understand how the gap between reported evidences and what is expected can be closed. Delegating judgment to LLMs is not a neutral technical improvement; it constitutes a significant redistribution of power within education. We argue that, when and if AI is used in assessment, it should be framed as a site of human–AI negotiation at all times rather than automated decision‑making. We outline design recommendations to close this gap, particularly by prioritising pedagogical value and human oversight. By addressing the rapid normalisation of algorithmic authority, we call on the community to confront the ethical and pedagogical stakes of machine judgment and to design systems that preserve the agency of students and teachers.

Neurofeedback training (NFT) has increasingly been adopted as a non-pharmacological intervention for children with ADHD. However, most existing NFT systems are grounded in a neurotypical perspective and often overlook the well-being of neurodivergent users. This work-in-progress introduces AttentionGo, a tangible neurofeedback system designed from a holistic well-being perspective. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), we articulate design strategies based on SDT. AttentionGo enables children to engage in embodied, self-directed play through interaction with tangible objects, while also supporting meaningful stakeholder engagement, such as caregivers. We reflect on how this approach positions NFT as a long-term, multi-context training practice that supports well-being, and discuss its implications for neurodiverse HCI research.

Programming with large language models increasingly feels less like using a tool and more like playing a game: a loop of quests (bugs, edge cases, refactors), rapid feedback, surprising drops (a perfect function!), and punishing randomness (hallucinated APIs, brittle glue). This provocation argues that LLM-assisted coding is not merely like a game in metaphorical terms, but that it already exhibits recognizable gameful dynamics, including incremental progression, variable rewards, and difficulty scaling. The result is a compelling “one more prompt” rhythm that can boost momentum and learning, but also risks shallow exploration, technical-debt speedrunning, and attention capture. Treating LLM programming as a gameful interactive system invites us to ask different design questions: What are the ethics of embedding compulsion into IDEs? How might we redesign LLM tooling for reflective pacing rather than grind? What would responsible difficulty look like for AI coding partners?

Intergenerational linguistic differences pose challenges to effective and intimate family communication. This paper presents GenSync, a chat-based interface that supports intergenerational understanding through different forms of translation visibility. We conducted a controlled within-subjects study with 16 family dyads (32 participants), comparing three conditions: no translation, black-box translation, and transparent translation that displays both original and interpreted messages. The results show that translation visibility plays a critical role in shaping conversational experiences. Transparent translation supported conversational quality, intimacy, and usability, while black-box translation often disrupted conversational flow. These findings position intergenerational language support as a form of interpretive mediation and contribute design implications for AI-mediated communication in socially sensitive contexts.

AI “afterlives” (deathbots, generative ghosts) are typically imagined as platform services: hosted, moderated, and ultimately shut down by someone. This paper provokes a different future: a blockchained deathbot whose identity model, licensing, and revenue flows are enforced by smart contracts and decentralized storage. In this design, the bot can outlive companies, families, and jurisdictions, continuing to speak, earn, and possibly learn from conversations with no (minimal) human administration. We argue that “autonomy after death” is not only a technical affordance but a new socio-legal actor: part memorial, part micro-enterprise, part unkillable interface. Rather than proposing such systems, we use this scenario as a warning: a future in which an AI version of a person may continue to interact, transact, and resist removal even when families, platforms, or regulators would prefer it to stop. We outline emergent features, failure modes, and regulatory collisions (post-mortem privacy, consumer protection, AI governance, financial compliance), and we propose research questions and design provocations for DIS’s “Beyond Interaction” theme.

Personal AI agents are now proposed as proxies for human judgment in participatory design, but do they replicate what people choose, or represent how people reason? We paired 30 participants with personalized AI agents and asked both to navigate the same urban routes using identical street-level imagery, selecting paths based on street-level scores such as safety and walkability. At each intersection, both human and agent chose a route and tagged the visual reasons behind their decision.

Our results reveal a “competency-without-comprehension” paradox: while agents achieve a Cohen’s kappa value of 0.377 in final route selection, acting as effective functional proxies, their visual reasoning is difficult to explain given the low Jaccard index of 0.24 between agent and human reasoning tags. By forcing agents to externalize visual tags, we found 49% of decisions share no common criteria with humans, proving AI reaches “right” choices for “wrong” reasons. Specifically, agents systematically underweight safety compared to humans. Matching outcomes is not matching reasoning. Without transparency into how agents decide, participatory planning inherits biases it cannot see.

Agency in interaction design is often defined by the ability to change system outcomes. But what happens when outcomes cannot be changed? In institutional heritage education, historical events cannot be rewritten and epistemic authority must be preserved. This work-in-progress investigates how agency might be reconfigured under such constraints. Through iterative prototyping of an AI-mediated, role-based narrative system for secondary history classrooms in Singapore, we propose perspective-based agency: a design orientation that locates agency in interpretation rather than outcome alteration. An initial text-based prototype was deployed across four schools, surfacing design tensions around immersion, constraint, artefact mediation, and AI authority. Insights from these deployments inform an artefact-centred visual iteration that repositions archival materials as primary interaction anchors. We situate this work within historical empathy research and HCI scholarship on material mediation as a contribution to the design of constrained interactive systems.

Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly used for divination, with people turning to it for fortune-telling, tarot, astrology, prayer, bazi, and confession. These practices invite unusually intimate forms of disclosure, not only because the questions are deeply personal, but also because of the power imbalances between users and the system. In these contexts, GenAI may be positioned as an authority (e.g., the voice of fate or a divine figure), which can pressure users to disclose more than they otherwise would. We argue that such divination GenAI exposes an important gap in privacy-by-design (PbD). While classic PbD principles remain valuable, they are underspecified for culturally situated experiences of authority, where consent is shaped by ritual, awe, and shared norms around divination and disclosure. We therefore propose a PbD research agenda and design directions for divination GenAI systems.

This study investigates how the feeling of being understood can emerge in AI-responsive spaces without relying on accurate emotion recognition. Drawing on the concept of the empathy illusion, we developed an immersive VR prototype that modulates light, sound, and shadow based on users’ observable behavioral energy. Using a Wizard-of-Oz methodology, participants experienced three interaction strategies: mirroring, regulating, and random spatial responses. Results from self-report measures and interviews suggest that perceived understanding is strongly influenced by behavioral contingency rather than semantic emotion detection. Both direct alignment and complementary modulation of spatial dynamics increased perceived agency compared to random responses. However, the empathy illusion proved fragile, moderated by perceptual salience and interpretive framing. These findings reconceptualize empathy in spatial HCI as a perceptual construct emerging from temporal coherence and relational dynamics, offering a design-oriented perspective on how responsive environments can cultivate the experience of being understood.

AI‑mediated learning systems increasingly shape how students act, choose, and engage within digital classrooms, yet designers lack concrete ways to evaluate how these systems support or constrain student agency. This work‑in‑progress paper proposes an initial, design‑oriented framing of student agency for interactive learning environments and introduces a prototype methods suite for analysing it in practice. Synthesising insights from HCI, the learning sciences, and child‑rights guidance, we conceptualise agency as an interactional and multidimensional phenomenon produced through system affordances, decision policies, feedback structures, and orchestration behaviours. We outline early methods (i.e., log‑data probes, scenario‑based interface walkthroughs, and mixed‑methods classroom studies) that reveal how students interpret system cues, negotiate control, and enact agency socially and developmentally. Our aim is to offer designers an emerging evaluative lens that identifies when AI systems narrow or expand students’ room to act, and to support the creation of more intentional, agency‑sensitive learning technologies.

Young adults often struggle with everyday financial decision-making due to emotional stress, cognitive load, and impulsive spending rather than deliberate budgeting. As financial well-being becomes an increasing concern, we designed Nutworth, a context-aware spending companion that supports young adults to make more intentional financial decisions by translating abstract financial trade-offs into concrete metaphors and personalized interactions that encourage reflection. Through three iterative prototyping rounds, we gathered think-aloud and reflective feedback with 15 participants. We found that emotional safety, clear reflection-derived distinctions between spending goals, and autonomy-supportive framing are essential for reducing reactance and fostering engagement with long-term values through everyday choices. We discuss implications for persuasive financial technologies and propose open research questions for future study of long-term impacts on financial self-efficacy.

Research in Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) has shifted beyond anthropomorphic representation and speech toward non-verbal modes of expression. A key strand of this work demonstrates that movement quality influences interpretations of robotic agency. However, far less is known about how such meaning emerges through lived bodily engagement. In this paper, we report on a design workshop with eight participants, which investigated how soma-informed engagement with robotic appendages–artificial structures that extend the body–can facilitate bodily sympathy in human–robot encounters. Through embodied scenario-building and soma-informed bodystorming methods, participants co-designed robotic appendages, explored guided movement, and collaboratively enacted non-verbal interaction scenarios. Qualitative analysis of annotated prototype outcomes, video data, and group reflections reveals that appendages operate as relational amplifiers, enabling expressive behaviours to emerge through situated human–robot entanglement rather than through predefined social cues. We outline how soma-informed co-design can support the emergence of other-than-human robotic identities, advancing HRI toward embodied and relational interaction paradigms.

When working remotely, employees often miss out on workplace awareness, leading to feelings of isolation and reduced opportunities for communication. This paper presents a pressure-sensing chair and posture silhouettes visualization as a design case that interpret postural cues through everyday objects. We translate sitting patterns, such as leaning forward, leaning back, or leaning sideways, into abstract group visualizations shared among distributed teams. Rather than interpreting posture data as objective measures, our design embraces ambiguity and interpretation, allowing groups to negotiate meaning and presence. Drawing on an early exploratory study, we reflect on how abstract posture representations can evoke presence and group belonging without presenting behavioral details. We contribute a playful and open-ended exploration of how postural cues, mediated through everyday objects, can serve as social signals and shape experiences of togetherness in hybrid work.

Emotions are inherently contagious within social interaction. To prevent the excessive circulation of negative emotions, this work proposes a speculative service system for recycling “mental trash.” Through a squeezing gesture that releases emotional tension, pressure values are measured and translated into generative forms. The system produces a unique physical representation for each episode of negative emotion that is otherwise invisible. These materialized forms serve as therapeutic objects to support a self-digestive cycle in which negative emotional experiences are externalized, confronted, and reabsorbed. Presented through two experimental narrative artifacts, this designed interactive system structures a conscious engagement with one’s own affective experiences.

Journaling supports mental wellness by translating unstructured emotions into language. While generative AI successfully lowers the barrier to this practice by reducing the cognitive load through dynamic dialogue, we see an opportunity to explore how altering the representation of these records can foster a slower, more self-directed reflective process. Contributing to this space, we introduce DiaryContainer, a tangible prototype that leverages slowness and minimal presence to shift from explicit logging to abstract visualization. The system translates verbal reflections into visual mental landscapes on thermal paper, where a resolution filter links the depth of emotional articulation to visual clarity. By deliberately withholding permanent text logs, this approach alleviates the privacy concerns and self-judgment often associated with explicit archives. A preliminary deployment (N=1) suggests that minimal system presence creates a safe space for unburdening, and visual ambiguity empowers users to reshape their narratives, and the desire for visual clarity motivates deeper articulation. Importantly, we also identify a design tension: while the desire for visual clarity motivated deeper articulation, it inadvertently introduced a goal-oriented optimization logic. Ultimately, this work demonstrates how designing for slowness can offer an alternative to immediate, explicit logging, emphasizing anticipation, ambiguity, and personal meaning-making, while outlining future directions to expand the user base and extend the deployment duration, alongside adjustments for ethical data handling and systemic opacity.

Therapeutic art activities, such as expressive drawing and painting, require the synergy between creative visual production and interactive dialogue. Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have expanded the capacity of computing systems to interpret both textual and visual data, offering a new frontier for AI-mediated therapeutic support. This work-in-progress paper introduces an MLLM-powered chatbot that analyzes visual creation in real-time while engaging the creator in reflective conversations. We conducted an evaluation with five experts in art therapy and related fields, which demonstrated the chatbot’s potential to facilitate therapeutic engagement, and highlighted several areas for future development, including entryways and risk management, bespoke alignment of user profile and therapeutic style, balancing conversational depth and width, and enriching visual interactivity. These themes provide a design roadmap for designing the future AI-mediated creative expression tools.

Privacy in intimate relationships is grounded in openness and trust, yet personal technologies introduce tensions around boundaries, surveillance, and access. Prior work describes partners’ avoidance of privacy conversations as privacy silence, yet its role across relationship stages remains underexplored. We report findings from interviews with partners (n=8), including paired and individual interviews, using the card game OpenWhen for scenario-based discussion. We found that privacy silence is stage-dependent. In established relationships, participants often preferred non-verbal strategies to preserve harmony, whereas in early-stage relationships, they were more willing to negotiate privacy expectations. We argue for a temporal understanding of privacy that accounts for shifting communication practices: supporting privacy silence in established relationships, while encouraging proactive privacy dialogue early in intimacy. We illustrate this through a design implication for dating applications that foregrounds privacy reflection before trust is assumed, helping mitigate risks of intimate partner surveillance.

Capturing lived experience in HCI is often approached through measurement, sampling, or sensing, privileging externally triggered or data-driven accounts of what people feel, notice, or experience. In this provocation, we question this orientation and explore an alternative stance: designing for noticing rather than measuring. We introduce Micro-Experience Bingo, a playful, paper-based interaction artifact that invites participants to log experiential micro-moments when they occur. It is designed to scaffold attention, reflection, and metacognitive awareness of subtle sensory, affective, and cognitive shifts. Drawing on its use in a situated interdisciplinary workshop, we reflect on how event-based, participant-initiated logging reshapes what becomes visible as “experience” in HCI. We do not propose this approach as a replacement for existing methods, but as a provocation that invites a rethinking of how experience is captured, valued, and made discussable through interaction design.

Generative AI systems in education are commonly designed as flawless, omniscient assistants optimized for correctness, speed, and convenience. While effective for information retrieval, this paradigm risks encouraging cognitive offloading and passive learning, particularly in abstract domains such as computer science education. This work-in-progress challenges that assumption by presenting AlgoGPT, a model of AI-mediated pair programming in which the AI is intentionally constrained. Rather than acting as an oracle, the AI functions as a pedagogical partner that withholds direct solutions and, in one mode, introduces deliberate imperfections. Through two role-reversing interaction modes alongside a chat-based baseline, the system provokes learners to articulate reasoning, critique AI-generated code, and engage in metacognitive reflection. Findings from a large-scale deployment with 907 students and an SRL survey of 155 participants suggest the design is associated with sustained engagement and elevated metacognitive activity, while also surfacing affective risks that call for adaptive scaffolding.

AI systems are increasingly embedded in workplace platforms, where they infer performance, attention, and affect from everyday traces. The EU AI Act regulates such systems through risk categories and governance concepts, yet it remains unclear how these concepts operationalize when AI becomes an agentic infrastructure. We present a near-future performance review fiction accompanied by short legal annotations. Rather than assessing compliance, the annotations function as legal exegesis: they mark where oversight, contestability, and sensitive inference shift meaning when enacted through interfaces, procedures, and cross-referencing agents. The provocation foregrounds three dynamics: the chameleonic aspects of risk categories, oversight collapsing into recursive system input, and sensitive domains becoming inferable through proxy data traces. We argue that “fiction and exegesis” offers a situated method for interrogating legal governance before such systems stabilize in practice.

Persistent loneliness significantly impacts adolescents and young adults, yet stigma often prevents professional help-seeking. Their high technology acceptance offers opportunities for non-human support agents. We introduce BabyDuck & HongDuck, a low-barrier, continuously available in-home robotic support system. Operating via a dual-device architecture, BabyDuck uses edge AI to classify user speech into seven emotions; HongDuck then externalizes these states through multimodal outputs (motion, lights, sound, haptics). A reciprocal interaction loop encourages users to comfort the robot via touch. A preliminary user study (N=10) explored this role-reversal paradigm compared to non-responsive and mirror-only conditions. While limited by sample size, the findings suggest that emotion-mirroring may support self-reflection, while touch-based caregiving presents unique potential for self-esteem restoration. This paper highlights practical design implications for using role-reversal paradigms as stigma-free entry points for everyday emotional support.

The clinical field is characterized by high stakes and high uncertainty. Clinical AI systems are developed to reduce inherent clinical uncertainties, yet they also introduce new uncertainties spanning technical, interactional, and organizational dimensions. These uncertainties often remain implicit during deployment, highlighting the need to understand and address them during design activities critical to clinical AI implementation. We present UnCert-AIn, a design card set that externalizes sources of AI uncertainty across clinical implementation contexts. Through a five-stage iterative Research through Design process involving expert workshops, iterative discussions, and an expert review session, we developed 24 cards organized into four categories: data-related, model-related, tool-related, and system-in-use-related uncertainty sources. Our work extends existing clinical AI uncertainty taxonomies by incorporating socio-technical dimensions and demonstrates how design tools can make abstract uncertainty concept visible and discussable.

Early-stage design ideation often relies on rough sketches created under time pressure, leaving much of the designer’s intent implicit. In practice, designers frequently speak while sketching, verbally articulating functional goals and ideas that are difficult to express visually. We introduce TalkSketchD, a sketch-while-speaking dataset that captures spontaneous speech temporally aligned with freehand sketches during early-stage toaster ideation. To examine the dataset’s value, we conduct a sketch-to-image generation study comparing sketch-only inputs with sketches augmented by concurrent speech transcripts using multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Generated images are evaluated against designers’ self-reported intent using a reasoning MLLM as a judge. Quantitative results show that incorporating spontaneous speech significantly improves judged intent alignment of generated design images across form, function, experience, and overall intent. These findings demonstrate that temporally aligned sketch-and-speech data can enhance MLLMs’ ability to interpret user intent in early-stage design ideation.

Living heritage sites (e.g., active craft workshops) often depend on operators who must interpret heritage for visitors, monetize it through goods/experiences, and steward its ongoing practice. When guided tours become economically unsustainable, these sites struggle to maintain consistent interpretation without adding staff burden. We report a design case at Rixing Type Foundry: a BYOD open-web self-guided tour developed through Diagnose, Reposition, Architect, and Mediate. Across three years of field deployment, web analytics and operator accounts revealed recurring patterns of use, including both sequential progression across POIs and non-sequential access to participatory DIY pages. These patterns suggest that the guide may have supported more than one mode of engagement, while direct entry to internal pages also points to the possibility of temporal extension beyond the on-site visit. We therefore argue that platform choices such as open web vs. native app, and shareable vs. gated access, should be understood not only as technical decisions but as infrastructural conditions that shape how self-guided heritage services evolve over time.

Personalized privacy assistants (PPAs) are emerging AI assistants that hold the promise to manage privacy on users’ behalf. Prior to the design decisions and deployments of a PPA in different regions, it is important to understand prospective user acceptance and factors contributing to users’ behavioral intention to adopt the assistant. In this paper, we report a cross-regional survey study with participants from China, Germany and California analyzing a UTAUT2-informed acceptance model for PPA acceptance. The results suggest that cross-regional comparability of PPA acceptance cannot be assumed. While partial measurement invariance supports meaningful structural comparisons between California and Germany, compositional invariance was not established for several constructs when comparing the Chinese sample with Californian and German samples. Together, we raise three provocations based on these findings: 1) Cross-regional acceptance comparisons might often be invalid by design; 2) it is time to reconsider acceptance models for AI assistants for privacy management, and 3) some thoughts on the future of PPAs.

Peer support is increasingly positioned as a scalable response to gaps in mental health care, particularly in digitally mediated settings, yet what counts as peer support and how responsibility is distributed remain unevenly defined in practice. Drawing on interviews with peer supporters, we show how lived experience, moral commitment, and self-identification shape participation while blurring expectations around scope, authority, and accountability. Institutional ambiguity concentrates emotional labour, boundary-setting, and escalation of responsibility at the individual level, often without consistent organisational scaffolding. Participants evaluated AI not primarily through empathy or technical capability, but through how technologies redistribute risk, labour, and accountability within already fragile support roles. Building on these findings, we outline design futures for an AI-supported peer support ecosystem that foregrounds responsibility as a central design concern rather than treating AI as a mechanism of scale.

We introduce Embodied Consent Interfaces (ECIs) as a design probe for rethinking privacy consent beyond dialog-window-based notice-and-choice consent mechanisms. ECIs reframe privacy consent as an embodied, performative process in which users engage with permissions through spatial interaction, ongoing revision, and a deliberate act of commitment. We present a functional ECI prototype in Virtual Reality (VR), where data types are represented as interactive 3D objects, enabling users to explore permission information and select, revoke, or revise their consent decisions through embodied interaction. In an exploratory within-subject study (N = 12), we compare this approach to a dialog-based permission interface. Qualitative findings suggest increased engagement and more cautious consent behavior, while also introducing additional interaction overhead. Finally, we discuss ECIs as a design probe to introduce intentional friction at privacy-critical moments and to explore trade-offs between deliberation and efficiency in consent interaction design.

In an era of instantaneous digital communication, personal exchange has been eroded by speed and efficiency. Messages are sent, received, and forgotten in rapid succession, often stored on unstable platforms vulnerable to failure. This project explores the consequences of these shifts and proposes alternative modes of communication that restore emotional depth and physical presence. Using a Research through Design (RtD) approach, a speculative handheld device was created and deployed that allows users to create, send, and experience messages as personalized scrolls, recontextualizing historical mediums. Users customize these scrolls using a marking method of choice. A motorized spool system enables recipients to engage with messages in a physical, deliberate manner. This project imagines a world where personal data and emotional exchange are tactile. By integrating speculative design, historical formats, and concerns around digital decay, it challenges frictionless communication and proposes a simple new code of intentionality in messaging and memory preservation.

Designing interactive outdoor technologies for older adults often emphasises tracking and exercise, which can conflict with enjoyment, autonomy, and the realities of public space. Previous work on tangible systems for older adults have largely focused on indoor, supervised, or therapeutic contexts, leaving limited guidance for outdoor community settings. We present Melomove, a 3D printed handheld dumbbell shaped device that maps movement to real-time musical feedback for self-paced exploration. We report an exploratory outdoor workshop with 16 older adults (63–93) in a campus bandstand, using structured observations and interviews to examine how a tangible movement music interface can scaffold agency, affective engagement, and social interaction. Participants engaged in rhythmic play and shared choreographies, with the familiar form acting as a social anchor that supported turn taking and informal leadership, while highlighting technological and structural constraints that inform design considerations for joyful socially shared outdoor movement for older adults.

Computer input for productivity and play depends on bimanual coordination (e.g., holding modifiers while typing, switching windows). For people with hemiplegic cerebral palsy (CP), limited dexterity in the affected hand can force one-handed workflows. We present an assistive prototype for asymmetric bimanual role assignment: (1) a tabletop pad with fist-pressable mode selection/navigation keys; (2) a squeeze gripper that triggers modifiers (Ctrl/Cmd, Alt, Shift, Space). Because accessibility needs vary across hemiplegic CP, assistive input should be user-specific; we present the design and evaluation in a qualitative case study with a hemiplegic CP user using a left-handed half-QWERTY keyboard and trackpad. Findings indicate trade-offs in learnability, coordination, fatigue, and workflow compatibility: shortcut sequences improved over time, but holding modifiers while typing was fragile during transitions, and mappings conflicted with half-QWERTY remapping. Design implications include clear feedback, safeguards against unintended squeezes, stable gross-motor layouts, and testing alongside existing remapping systems.

We present SpatialPrompt, an Extended Reality(XR) system that turns spatial sketches into executable constraints for controllable 3D generation. Users draw rough structures with a 3D pen and add voice prompts for semantic and stylistic intent. The system supports iterative refinement and synchronous co-creation in shared space with color-coded contributions. Implemented on Apple Vision Pro with Logitech Muse and Meshy, a heuristic evaluation suggests that the workflow is intuitive and supports shared understanding in collaborative creation, while revealing needs for faster generation and clearer feedback.

User interfaces rely on rules that govern how users create, organize, and transform content. We call these rules structure. While structure enables functionality, its rigid enforcement often conflicts with user intentions, particularly in productivity and creative workflows. As generative systems increasingly produce and adapt structure on behalf of users, there is a clear need for a vocabulary to reason about structural behavior. We introduce Structural Interaction, a framework that makes structure a primary object of design. We model the user interface as a directed graph of elements and rules, and characterize rule behavior along two orthogonal dimensions: rigidity (how much a rule can be shaped) and enforcement (how much it can yield during interaction). Four values per dimension generate a 16-cell design space. Through two use cases, we show how the framework diagnoses structural limitations in existing interfaces and guides the design of solutions operating independently on each dimension.

Generative AI is increasingly used in K-12 educational product design, yet many AI-assisted critique tools prioritize usability and efficiency over reflection on child specific risks. Designing for minors involves responsibilities related to developmental appropriateness, privacy governance, emotional safety, and the framing of AI authority. We introduce EduReview, a system that explores how automated feedback can be structured around child centered risk considerations rather than surface optimization. EduReview is informed by a tiered risk framework that highlights structural concerns such as data transparency and authority boundaries alongside interaction refinements. Rather than focusing solely on accelerating production, the system aims to support reflective consideration of normative tensions during early design stages. Preliminary expert assessments and a small novice study suggest that structured AI critiques can help surface overlooked structural risks and prompt revisions beyond interface level adjustments. These findings contribute a design perspective on AI-assisted critique in risk sensitive domains.

Design researchers create user journey maps—visual timelines that depict a user’s actions, mindsets, and emotions associated with a particular task—to ultimately communicate user research insights which align with the expectations of their stakeholders. As this process demands skillful ideation and communication, we seek to alleviate this challenge by supporting speculative design thinking. In this work, we first employ a interviews and co-design to unpack the process of user journey mapping. Through our co-design activities (n=13), we found that when creating user journey maps, design researchers confront unknowns in user data, navigate variations of user actions, and decipher implicit user emotions. To address these unique challenges, we designed and evaluated an initial design probe called Tabi, an interactive user-journey mapping system that offers AI pipelines to support speculation. Finally, we conclude with reflections on designing human-AI speculative tools for design research.

Community placemaking can strengthen residents’ sense of place, yet in accountability-oriented governance, residents’ choices may be rewritten before deployment. This paper reports on a GenAI-supported co-design case in Beijing where residents, community workers, and designers co-designed fence-mounted visuals. Tracing proposals from prompting to deployment, we show that participation is enacted across governance handoffs: GenAI lowers drawing barriers but shifts participation toward prompt literacy; voting functions as a participation peak where model errors catalyze collective critique; yet procedural legitimacy is later reworked through accountability-driven gatekeeping, creating disconnects between resident choices and final displays. We derive design implications for civic GenAI systems to make mediation, review, and revision more visible, negotiable, and accountable. These findings contribute to understanding how GenAI reconfigures power dynamics in top-down governance contexts.

More-than-human design challenges anthropocentric assumptions by foregrounding non-human entities as stakeholders, yet designers face an epistemic boundary: they cannot directly access non-human experience. We present an exploratory study examining how generative AI—specifically a text-to-3D world generation platform producing navigable environments—may function as a speculative mediator in more-than-human design. Through a qualitative study with five participants from engineering and sustainability backgrounds engaging with AI-generated worlds derived from non-human traces, we investigate how instant exploration—navigating generated environments within seconds—shapes reflection, iteration, and provisional treatment of outputs. Our findings suggest that navigating AI-generated environments supports reflection-in-action distinct from evaluating static representations, while designers’ epistemic stances oscillate between treating outputs as generative provocations and as authoritative representations. We propose technologically-amplified backtalk and productive provisionality as preliminary lenses for understanding how navigable AI-generated 3D environments can surface anthropocentric assumptions in more-than-human design.

This demonstration presents an interactive installation which aims to facilitate social interactions amongst conference attendees though real-time shape transformation as visceral conversation. Morph-UX is a web-based application for emotive form design which uses physiological features correlated with emotional experience (e.g., HR from raw electrocardiography and phasic EDA from raw EDA) as input to control objects attributes (i.e., size, torsion, sphericity, and tessellation) in real-time. Centered on the body, our approach aims to provide visual feedback as to how bodily sensations associated with the expression of emotions can alter, transform and modulate shapes. Participants experiencing Morph-UX will be able to take home a digital memento encapsulating the emotional experience they shared with a stranger at DIS. We hope that interacting with each other through Morph-UX will help attendees reflect on how we can foster compassion, connection, creativity and empathy in our daily lives, one conversation at a time.

The fundamental challenge in digital olfactory transmission lies in the “olfactory verbalization gap,” the human inability to accurately describe smells. While recent HCI research maps discrete words to scents, these systems struggle with the complexity of daily olfactory experiences. We propose narrative resonance as an alternative to optimizing chemical precision by treating olfaction as a chronological sequence rather than a static chemical representation. Our process leverages an LLM’s one-shot domain knowledge to compose everyday olfactory descriptions into a sequence of 12 scents feasible for hardware release. We present the Sentence to Scent sequencer transforming a natural language sentence into a 60-second scent sequence. Through two pilot scenarios (N = 12), we demonstrate how this sequential approach fosters resonance between the user’s imagination and their perceived experience.

What does it mean for culturally embedded architectural patterns to function as a medium of interaction? Inspired by Peranakan tiles, PeraNETS reconceptualizes patterned heritage surfaces as modular architectural interfaces. The system activates tiles through distributed sensing, actuation, and computation, transforming decorative surfaces into responsive interaction layers. As participants engage with the tiled surface, interaction unfolds across spatial and material dimensions, mediating relationships between bodies, built environments, and embedded visual traditions. Building on advances in distributed sensor networks, PeraNETS investigates how responsive architectural surfaces can operate as sites of cultural mediation within sociotechnical systems. By reframing architectural tiles as interfaces, this work positions culturally embedded form as an operative component of technological and environmental infrastructure, expanding interaction beyond device-centered paradigms toward distributed, spatial, and materially embedded systems. We present the design process, system architecture, and installation that stage encounters with embedded modular interfaces.

Being Stone explores how nonhuman-centered embodiment can be experienced in virtual reality (VR). The VR experience invites participants to inhabit the viewpoint of a stone, an entity that undergoes change over time, though does not act with intention. The VR experience can be entered in two different ways. In one configuration, participants first physically manipulate a real stone by touching or rotating it before entering VR to experience the scene from the stone’s perspective. In the other configuration, participants experience the VR environment while simultaneously touching the physical stone. We conducted an exploratory study using the Virtual (Stone) Embodiment Questionnaire (VSEQ) and post-experience interviews. The study examines how participants across different modes described their sense of agency, influence, and change. The findings suggest that participants did not fully “become” the stone; instead, they negotiated an ambiguous position between human action and nonhuman endurance, describing agency as indirect, distributed, or understood only in retrospect.

Taking care of a plant can also foster care for oneself, offering mental and physical benefits, such as improved indoor humidity. While existing human-plant interaction designs aim to increase attention toward plants, automated care models may reduce sustained engagement in process-oriented plant care. We see an opportunity for interaction design to raise awareness of this symbiotic relationship. To explore this, we designed SymbioSip, a novel bidirectional hydration system. SymbioSip monitors human dehydration with a wearable sensor, triggering a water pump to irrigate an indoor plant when the human is dehydrated. It also monitors plant dehydration via soil moisture to activate a fine mist spray worn on the human’s head. The demonstration of this wearable benefits the DIS community by engaging them in a novel human-plant experience that raises awareness of human-plant symbiosis by amplifying both human and plant hydration needs. Ultimately, we aim to showcase the potential of interaction design to raise awareness of human-plant symbiosis, encouraging people to take better care of plants.

Generative AI threatens artists through unauthorized use of datasets, yet offers unexplored creative potential when artist-controlled. We present Artist Logico Live, an interactive demonstration validating boutique-scale LoRA as a practical model for sustainable human-AI collaboration. The system enables three engagement pathways through a browser-based interface: autonomous text-to-image generation for rapid conceptual exploration (Pathway 1), live artist-mediated sketch performances where AI compresses rendering time but not creative conception time (Pathway 2), and physical artifact distribution, postcards of the original 27 training works and clear photocards for participatory engagement, with social media guide assessing organic circulation (Pathway 3). Our demonstration shows that small datasets with strong rights protections can outperform large-scale pipelines prioritizing scale over artistic sovereignty.

We present Multimodal Social Extended Reality Cards, a card-based toolkit that translates abstract XR concepts into accessible design representations across six dimensions: social partners, interaction modes, physical interaction modes, avatar, scenario, and potential challenges. The toolkit enables older adults and non-expert stakeholders to co-design remote multimodal social experiences through structured, combinable card categories and a Cards-to-Scene Board supporting collaborative ideation and generative AI-assisted scene visualization. Formative evaluation with 21 experts in HCI, XR, haptics, and aged care confirmed that the toolkit lowers participation barriers, structures design thinking, and reveals context-dependent design logics for XR sociality. At DIS 2026, attendees will engage hands-on with the physical card set and board, experience the co-design workflow, and explore how tangible design tools can scaffold participation in complex technological design spaces.

An expanding variety of interactive technologies has been shown effective to support movement-based experiences in domains such as physical rehabilitation and training. While they can range in complexity, here we argue for a minimal technological approach that can be both effective while also considering pressing sustainability needs. We present the Movement and Training Technologies (MoTTs), minimalist wearables providing multisensory movement feedback while leveraging the hardware of already-existing smartwatches. They resulted from embodied co-design activities in a Research through Design project focused on a specific rehabilitation context in neurorehabilitation after peripheral nerve transfer surgery. However, their minimalism, open-endedness and generalisability made them apt for reappropriation to support other rehabilitation and training goals. We demonstrate the range of physical activities the MoTTs can support and prompt collective reflection on sustainable design drives and how they can coexist with commonplace expectations of technological development.

As children with cerebral palsy grow, they tend to become more socially isolated while their motor and gait skills decrease or plateau. Thus, exploration of an interaction that assists the children to be social and mobile is a critical area for development. This study brings an established approach to assistive technologies for children with Cerebral Palsy–robotics–to a new context, providing social comfort. We adapt evidence-based methods of providing social comfort, dance therapy and cooperative game design, to create Chory Cloth Bot, a robotic social dance game. Then, we present results of user tests of the Chory Cloth Bot prototype with 9 children with cerebral palsy ages [6 – 17], including preliminary findings that suggest increased motivation and social awareness among participants.

Remembering faces and the contexts in which people were previously encountered is cognitively demanding. In this interactivity paper, we present Yuno, an AI-powered system that augments human social memory by combining real-time face recognition with contextual recall of relationship information. Yuno integrates smart glasses that provide in-situ conversational assistance with a gamified companion that supports the practices of active recall. The smart glasses capture facial features and conversational cues during initial encounters and deliver personalized voice-based reminders during subsequent encounters. The companion 64 × 64 RGB LED matrix display gamifies social memory practices through AI-generated interactive quizzes, fostering engagement and relationship maintenance. Our work contributes to the HCI community by exploring the design and development of AI systems to support reconnecting with people in socially dense environments through social memory assistance, while also pointing toward accessibility-oriented applications for individuals with face blindness (prosopagnosia) or other memory difficulties.

SlimeUI explores slime, a non-Newtonian fluid, as a novel substrate for deformable digital musical instruments (DMIs). Prior materials for deformable DMIs often support only limited behaviors. For example, stretchable fabric interfaces can deform elastically but usually preserve fixed topology and cannot be sculpted or divided during performance. Clay can be shaped, separated, and manually rejoined, but it tends to retain imposed forms and does not naturally recombine into a continuous medium. Slime bridges these categories by flowing under slow manipulation, stiffening under rapid impact, and allowing topological changes such as separation and recombination within one material. Through a formative study of slime interaction, we observed associations between material behavior and musical control, including stretch for pitch and amplitude, sculpting for timbre, and separation or recombination for sound instantiation and chord formation. We implemented a computer vision system and prototypes that translate these mappings into real-time musical control.

NomadicPerch presents the co-design of a wearable perch as an exploration of more-than-human design grounded in Haraway’s notion of becoming-with companion species. The project emerges from everyday interactions between the first author (A1) and her companion parrot, Shiso, who frequently uses the human body as a perch. NomadicPerch is a felted, sensor-augmented wearable that extends the human hand into a temporary, mobile perch. Through a series of prototypes, moments of avoidance, destruction, hesitation, and attraction reshape the artifact’s form, material choices, and structure. Rather than treating co-design as a discrete participatory event, this work foregrounds long-term, embodied cohabitation as constitutive of the design process itself. The interactivity lies not only in the exhibited artifact, but in the ongoing relational adjustments between human and bird that shaped its development. By documenting and exhibiting this process, NomadicPerch contributes to more-than-human design discourse by extending multispecies co-design as a situated, relational, and evolving practice.

Grounded in catharsis theory, expressive vocalization plays a critical role in emotional release, yet is often constrained by social norms or physical limitations. We present a VR demo, Wolfborn, that enables stress relief through embodied pseudo-vocalization without requiring audible speech. Prior VR animal-avatar systems primarily rely on visual and gestural embodiment, overlooking the cathartic role of vocal expression. Users embody a wolf and experience the release of howling through a multimodal pseudo-vocalization mechanism integrating visual, auditory, and tactile feedback, while preserving silence in the physical world. This design fosters a strong Sense of Agency (SoA) over vocal production and supports high-arousal emotional release through the wolf’s symbolic association with freedom. User studies show significant gains in embodiment and perceived emotional release compared to visual-only avatars. This demo highlights silent, socially acceptable pseudo-vocalization as a novel design space for inclusive VR-based emotional regulation.

We present Picnic, an interactive musical installation exploring Machine Learning (ML) as design material for embodied music-making. The system transforms everyday objects in a picnic basket into a loop-based sampler, allowing users to create rhythms by striking cups, plates, and cutlery. A microphone captures sounds that are classified in real-time by an ML model, triggering percussion samples, melodic layers, and bird calls that loop sequentially. Embracing ML’s inherent uncertainty, we intentionally used an underfitted classification model to create a playful and ambiguous music-making experience.

Recent developments in 3D generative AI enable users to create bespoke 3D models from text or image prompts. However, language is often insufficient to express spatial design intent, and customization of generative output remains limited to surface appearance, making it difficult to personalize designs to the geometry and constraints of a user’s environment. Bridging this gap typically requires returning to conventional CAD tools to measure, edit, and adapt geometry, tasks that remain time-consuming and error-prone.

We present MiXR, an augmented reality system that enables users to create new 3D designs by remixing parts harvested from real-world objects. Users paint to segment real-world geometry into reusable parts, recompose the parts directly in AR through spatial manipulation, and refine the assembly into a unified, fabrication-ready 3D model via a generative AI pipeline. By treating spatial assembly itself as the input modality, MiXR replaces text prompting with rough physical arrangement as a more reliable and expressive way to specify design intent. In this demonstration, attendees will construct novel 3D models by harvesting parts from objects in their environment, recomposing them in AR, and refining them with generative AI into coherent unified designs.

Introspective dialogue with self-agents is gaining attention for its ability to externalize the self and foster emotional acceptance and cognitive reframing. However, the surreal experience of conversing with a past self via generative AI often triggers cognitive dissonance, undermining the deep immersion essential for reflection. This research proposes ritualistic framing—leveraging cultural contexts and intentional constraints—to mitigate this technical dissonance and design dedicated introspective experiences. We introduce RecallMe, a ritualistic artifact integrating voice cloning with a rotary phone. By utilizing the device’s materiality, detached from everyday functional efficiency, the artifact reframes the dialogue as a ritual encounter with the past self, supporting the reconstruction of personal narratives. This demonstration illustrates how physical framing alleviates dissonance and sustains immersion in surreal scenarios, proposing a design approach for technology-mediated self-reflection.

Prolonged sedentary behaviour in desk-based work can negatively impact both mental and physical wellbeing. While prior HCI research has explored integrating physical activity into office routines through movement-based interfaces and spatially distributed systems, many approaches either disrupt workflow or struggle to sustain engagement. Playful exergame snacks have demonstrated promise in promoting enjoyable engagement, yet they typically rely on screens, potentially increasing cognitive load and screen exposure for already screen-saturated workers. To address this gap, we present Punch at Your Desk, a desk-based interactive system in which a robotic arm acts as a playful boxing companion. By combining physical embodiment with adaptive robot behaviour, the system delivers engaging, desk-compatible micro-break activity. A preliminary evaluation (n = 12) suggests the potential of playful, embodied human–robot interaction to foster enjoyable and sustained engagement in desk-based physical activity. This work contributes an initial exploration of playful, embodied and adaptive human–robot interaction as a desk-compatible approach to supporting short, engaging, enjoyable bursts of physical activity during everyday work routines.

Sleep onset difficulties arise from intertwined physiological, cognitive, and emotional hyperarousal, requiring interventions that reduce overall activation. Drawing on the view of the soma design, we explore somatic design as a non-intrusive sleep intervention that reduces rather than amplifies stimulation, aligning interaction with the body’s transition to rest. We present Splash into Bubbles, an installation rooted in physiological computing that structures around progressive sensory fading. Informed by sensory gating dynamics, the experience unfolds as a staged sensory transition: vision first anchors attention to the breathing, while soft synchronized sound surrounds the body. As respiratory control strengthens, visual feedback fades, sound persists, and localized tactile cues emerge. With further physiological stabilization, auditory feedback withdraws, leaving immersive whole-body pneumatic modulation as the dominant modality. By aligning external fading with sensory gating processes, the installation lets interaction recede with the body, allowing internal rhythms to become perceptually dominant.

Dark phobia is a pervasive issue in early childhood, affecting both child development and family life. While the HCI field has explored exposure therapies via technologies such as Virtual Reality, there remains a lack of lightweight in-situ interventions tailored for domestic dark environments. To address this, we present Margin, a set of lightweight robots informed by principles of Ambient Intelligence and Embodied Interaction to support therapeutic play in domestic dark environments. The system comprises a guide robot, Heechu, integrating a large language model (LLM) for adaptive dialogue, and four ambient intervention robots operating in a coordinated multi-robot architecture. Through multisensory storytelling and interaction, Margin mediates children’s engagement with dark spaces by reframing fear-related stimuli as approachable elements. This interaction paradigm enables children to actively participate in shaping their surroundings, supporting cognitive reframing of fear within a structured interactive context.

Exergaming effectively motivates physical activity through scores and physiological metrics, yet it often overlooks the subtle bodily sensations and cultural dimensions of movement. In this interactivity, we address this gap by grounding exergaming in bodily experience and cultural context. Through mapping practitioners’ movements, posture, and breathing onto interactive visual forms derived from traditional Chinese motifs, MotiFit provides real-time feedback that links physical practice with its cultural meaning. This interactivity demonstrates how traditionally static motifs can be transformed into dynamic, interactive mediators of embodied experience, offering design insights for culturally grounded exergaming.

While visual cuteness effectively enhances robot acceptability, relying solely on appearance may limit design diversity and normalize particular aesthetics. This demonstration explores calculated cuteness, intentional behaviors designed to appear attractive, as an alternative approach. Drawing on East Asian concepts such as Japanese Azatoi, Korean Aegyo, and Chinese Sajiao, we conducted interviews with nine participants from Japan, China, and Korea to identify behavioral cues for calculated cuteness. We implemented these cues in a tabletop social robot and designed a participatory exhibition using Brunswik’s Lens Model. Visitors interact with the robot, vote on which cues contributed to their perception of calculated cuteness, and see results visualized in real time via projection mapping. This cross-cultural participatory approach enables us to examine cue utilization across diverse cultural backgrounds and provides a forum for discussing ethical questions surrounding manipulative design and intention attribution to robots.

It is difficult for non-experts to build an intuitive understanding of how AI usage creates environmental and productivity impacts, partly owing to disagreements over how to quantify such impacts. We propose that interactive visualisation can help build intuition, for navigating these disagreements. butterfl.ai is an interactive installation comprising two stations. Each of the stations is powered by a computer connected to a primary monitor and a larger screen (or projector screen). The primary monitor shows a chatbot interface as well as a prototype AI-powered geospatial visualisation tool. These two pieces of software are connected to each other through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, demonstrating a realistic use case for tool-enabled AI. The larger screen shows an interactive visualisation demonstrating the energy, environmental, and productive impact of the user’s activity. butterfl.ai aims to help people more tacitly understand trade-offs between inference speed, output quality/usefulness, resource cost, and human effort.

While sound plays a central role in memory, digital remembering practices remain overwhelmingly visual. This interactive installation explores how we might create sonic archives that are approachable, adaptable, embodied, and social. We present EchoField, an application that invites people to revisit and reimagine sonic memories by blending many audio clips into a colorful, continuous, spatial palette. Unlike standard audio libraries, which support searching and sorting, EchoField encourages meandering through audio archives as a way to enable slow discovery. EchoField can be experienced both as a web app and an immersive installation. In its immersive form at the DIS conference, the spatial sonic palette is projected onto the floor; participants encounter sounds by walking through the space, triggering playback of different audio recordings based on their position. As participants contribute their own sounds and build their own sonic palettes, EchoField becomes a living, collective sonic map of the conference experience.

Interest in leveraging emotions in Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) has been growing, and Virtual Reality (VR) offers rich access to real-time biometric data such as facial expressions; yet this capability remains underexplored in novel IDN design. Existing approaches typically treat emotion input superficially, such as adjusting system difficulty or aesthetics, but rarely influence how players experience the narrative itself. Prior work also lacks a focus on a specific authored narrative. We propose an experimental affective interaction model that uses a VR headset’s built-in face-tracking capability to recognize player emotional states, fostering “emotional perspective-taking” between the player and their embodied story character, thereby deepening the player’s emotional connection to the character and their narrative engagement with the VR experience.

Dream Brush is an interactivity demo that explores how embodied writing can guide generative image-making. As generative tools move creative practice toward detached prompting, we ask how a brush, a body, and a Chinese character can keep meaning and gesture in one mark. We built a physical installation where participants write Chinese characters with water on a canvas and watch the system transform each mark into Chinese painting motifs with sound. Informal use suggests the approach makes spatial intent and composition legible while inviting shared improvisational making. The system still has limitations in targeting irregular regions and in rendering the ink metaphor with smooth transitions. In the near term, Dream Brush can support public demos that surface how generative systems mediate cultural practices of writing and painting. In the long term, it offers a model for interactivity that frames creative systems as encounters with layered cultural and technical relations.

Food streets play an essential role in contemporary urban nightlife, where street vendors often rely on e-tricycles adapted to diverse selling needs. With added lighting, cooking tools, refrigeration, and other components, these e-tricycles become customized mobile stalls. Such modifications represent a form of everyday, make-do design shaped by practical survival needs, yet they often occur within a gray zone where guidance and safety checks are limited. This project investigates how vendors use and modify electric tricycles for everyday vending and how these changes relate to both community life and safety risks. We present these findings through an interactive installation with a Two Sides visual scene: Side A depicts the everyday street atmosphere, while Side B highlights safety risks linked to retrofits. Visitors use a flashlight-shaped device to scan the screen, and the spotlight reveals Side B only within the lit area. Rather than judging these practices as right or wrong, the installation invites reflection on how livelihood needs and safety concerns coexist in shared street spaces.

The menopausal transition is often accompanied by emotional fluctuations that can disrupt pre-sleep settling. Many women adopt non-pharmacological strategies to unwind, including mindfulness practices such as the body scan, yet audio-guided body scans can feel demanding in low-energy evening moments because they rely on verbal instruction and sustained internal attention. We present an exploratory VR body scan design probe centred on a nature-based, non-human self-avatar: becoming a tree. Through a persistent body-to-tree mapping, scripted environmental events, and object-based spatial audio within a natural soundscape, the system externalises the attentional sequence of a body scan into followable environmental cues. Drawing on interviews (n = 6) and a formative prototype demo with the same participants, we describe how immersive multisensory guidance can support a gentle shift of attention toward bodily sensations and resonate with preferences for nature-related cues. We contribute design considerations for using non-human embodiment and multisensory environmental rhythm to scaffold low-effort pre-sleep settling practices.

This paper presents a sonic–haptic interactive system that fosters in-situ engagement and embodied resonance with subtle more-than-human life in forest environments. The system is centered on a portable and extensible transducer that integrates multiple sensing modalities, including environmental sonic vibrations, surface electrical conductivity of natural substrates, and plant bioelectrical activity, and transforms these imperceptible ecological signals into bodily-perceptible sonic and haptic feedback delivered through wearable devices. Through these system configurations, we articulate a set of interaction modes that enable users to freely move across the forest environments and dynamically engage with various ecological affordances. We further report on a pilot field study conducted at a forest therapy base in Japan with certified forest therapists. Their immersive experiences and practical understandings suggest that sonic–haptic interactions can support sensory awareness, practices of noticing, and embodied attunement toward subtle more-than-human life in forest environments.

Secondhand smoke exposure in London’s outdoor spaces poses persistent health and comfort challenges for both smokers and non-smokers. Existing policy and design interventions often rely on spatial segregation, which can be temporary, stigmatizing, or minimally effective. This research adopts a harm-reduction and inclusive-design lens to examine how interactive and spatial design can support more equitable coexistence. Using mixed methods—an online survey (N=26) and semi-structured interviews (N=7)—we identified three key themes: smoking as a social ritual, sensory discomfort, and a shared desire for harmonious coexistence. Grounded in these insights, we developed “BreezeBond,” a dual-mode public smoking intervention comprising a pillar-based station and portable tabletop air purifiers. Our work introduces the lens of coexistence design to HCI, illustrating how technological interventions can complement public-health goals without relying on segregation.

Despite the ubiquity of ‘Bags for Life,’ urban grocery shopping remains plagued by a usability paradox: reusable bags are rarely accessible during spontaneous trips, leading to household accumulation and systemic waste. This pictorial presents CarryOn, a circular rental ecosystem designed to decouple carrier access from individual ownership. We explore the ‘Rethink, Remake, Redesign’ of carrier bag infrastructure through a Research-through-Design (RtD) approach. By documenting our process, from identifying ‘deceptive eco-consciousness’ in household bag stashes to the development of entrance-based dispensing systems, we demonstrate how shifting responsibility from shopper memory to store infrastructure can foster genuine circularity. We contribute insights into the physical and digital ‘frictions’ of rental-based shopping and offer a vision for sustainable urban retail that aligns with UN SDG 12 [14]. Through annotated visual documentation of our prototyping and ‘Wizard of Oz’ testing, we argue for design solutions that prioritise systemic accessibility over individual behaviour change.

One of the challenges of Generative AI is that, by design, it categorizes identities, reintroducing and amplifying existing societal biases and reducing diversity. With children increasingly interacting with such systems, helping them develop a critical stance toward their misleading outputs becomes even more important. At the moment, this kind of criticality can be hindered by the sleek nature of the interactions with GenAI, inducing in users a false sense of objectivity and expertise. In this pictorial, we leverage frictional design to counter easy and mindless engagement. We present the conceptualization and realization of an installation that uses friction to guide families through a reflective journey on GenAI oversimplification. We contribute the idea that introducing friction into child–AI interactions can help surface the reductive processes GenAI carries out, creating opportunities for shared reflection that smooth interfaces typically hide.

The persistent gap between higher education curricula and industry expectations engenders an “Experience Paradox”: emerging talents struggle to secure employment without prior experience, yet remain unable to acquire experience without employment. This pictorial presents Fovy, an interactive platform designed to challenge the “100% readiness myth.” It shifts the recruitment paradigm from static, retrospective verification, traditionally mediated by resumes, to dynamic, prospective navigation via interactive skill maps. Through an annotated visual narrative, we illustrate our design inquiry, detailing the transition from dismantling the linear “list” metaphor to constructing a non-linear “skill topology.” We demonstrate how Fovy visualizes “micro-tasks” as pedagogical bridging mechanisms, empowering users to adopt a “work-to-learn” approach. Finally, we reflect on how map-based interfaces reshape the affordances of talent discovery, transitioning from algorithmic keyword filtering to dynamic trajectory mapping.

Drug checking services in Switzerland struggle to reach individuals when information and support matter most despite big outreach efforts. We therefore aim to offer a low-threshold intervention to provide timely and accessible support in this stigmatized domain. In this project, we report on designing, developing, and evaluating an educational mobile application for informed recreational substance use. Alongside presenting the artefact, we critically reflect on our design approach. Our findings highlight how a designer’s stance becomes materially embedded in the artefact and shapes engagement and perceived usefulness, particularly through users’ feelings of being heard and understood. Overall, our work contributes (1) a mobile intervention for informed recreational use and drug checking outreach and (2) design implications at system, social, and individual levels. Beyond this, it offers an example of designing a low-barrier, anonymous safe space for reliable information and reflection in a stigmatized context through a humanistic approach.

While typing is the most common modality to instruct an LLM, there are applications where text can limit our interaction with AI. Especially during design, individuals might rely on visual thinking, imagination, and intuition, all of which do not follow a sequential chain of thought and can be challenging to express through sentences. Can tangible interfaces use embodiment to structure and craft prompts that challenge the linear thinking encoded into conversational LLM interfaces? We designed 3 object prompts that leverage tangibility to enable LLM interaction while mitigating information overload. The first group of objects, AI Expert Personas embodied as figurines, can fine-tune models depending on spatial position and distance. Second is a rotary lighthouse tower that searches for relevant work. Third, we map customisable criteria onto Goal Tokens to automate summarization and evaluation. We present “tangible prompting” as a framework for rethinking to our increasingly monotonous interactions with LLMs.

Despite the importance of healthy eating, many students rely on convenience foods due to time scarcity, stress, and decision fatigue. Prior health technologies focus on tracking and monitoring, offering limited contextual support for cooking. Through surveys and interviews, we identified opportunities for more supportive, motivating, and context-aware interventions. In response, we present MuseMeal, a smartwatch–app system featuring a conversational avatar that generates personalised recipes based on users’ mood, ingredients, and physiological data. The smartwatch extends interaction beyond the screen through avatar projection and hands-free guidance during cooking. Developed through an iterative, user-centred design process, MuseMeal explores how affect-aware conversational agents, wearable projection, and reward mechanisms can support behaviour change in situ. This pictorial contributes design knowledge on embodied conversational interaction, wearable projection interfaces, and motivational health technologies, illustrating how emotionally responsive systems can foster more engaging and sustainable everyday food practices.

Breathing is a foundational yet often ignored determinant of endurance performance. It is frequently overshadowed by the quantification of external metrics in modern sports wearables. We challenge the assumption that athletic training should rely solely on symbolic data, and instead rethink respiration as a perceptible, interactive dimension of embodied practice. We present Breatho, a remade soft wearable system that translates locomotor rhythms into real-time pneumatic tactile cues delivered to the abdomen.

By redesigning the interaction through a recursive prototyping process, we moved beyond traditional vibrotactile feedback to an adaptive pneumatic modality, that aligns with the biomechanical expansion of the diaphragm. Evaluations in treadmill and outdoor scenarios demonstrate that Breatho stabilizes respiratory waveforms and significantly reduces the Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) from 13.46 to 11.39. This work contributes to an embodied interaction framework for athletic skill acquisition, offering a transformative alternative to viewing shortness of breath while running as a common sub-health challenge, rather than just a matter of competitive performance, and elevates the issue of breathing difficulties among amateur runners to the level of a lack of bodily awareness in general health.

Across Indian cities, grievance apps are optimised for administrative completion, not civic participation. Through a survey of 157 urban residents and in-depth interviews with citizens, government actors, and urban planning stakeholders, we identify the core failure as participatory erosion: institutional silence and siloed teams, erode civic hope far more than technological friction. Nearly half of respondents believe filing changes nothing; three-quarters of those who file do not feel heard.

Grounded in Till’s (2005) negotiation of hope and Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of participation, we propose a hybrid participatory governance layer that replaces problem-solving logic with negotiated sensemaking, moving the role of citizens from informing to negotiation. The goal is not only to process grievances more efficiently, but to make participation structurally possible for the first time. It does this by converting lived experience into accountable, shared outcomes.

“Body Through Time” is a design research project that explores how irreversible bodily marks can be translated into textile artifacts through a co-design workshop, somaesthetic design, visual abstraction, and digital fabrication.

Through a tapestry incorporating abstract designs made by participants, based on their scars, the workshop offers those struggling with their body image a positive outlook on their scars. The final design consists of ten abstract designs, in which each participant reflects on how they can convey a story behind their self-image and gain a positive view of themselves.

Men experiencing infertility often struggle to express their emotions, articulate their experiences, and seek support from partners and peers. This gap presents a clear opportunity to strengthen communication within established support networks and initiate dialogue related to infertility. This project introduces a conversation-based card game to facilitate open dialogue, emotional reflection, and mutual understanding between partners or peers. Through responding to guided prompts, participants are encouraged to articulate their experiences and engage in discussion about their personal journeys, vulnerabilities, and challenges. This game creates a low-pressure environment that enables men to connect deeply with their partners or peers and strengthen interpersonal connection and support.