Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Making Biomaterials for Sustainable Tangible Interfaces

In this studio, we will explore sustainable tangible interfaces by making a range of biomaterials that are bio-based and readily biodegradable. Building off of previous TEI studios that were centered around one specific biomaterial (i.e., bioplastics at TEI'22 and microbial cellulose at TEI'23), this studio will provide participants the ability to experience a wide variety of biomaterials from algae-based bioplastics, to food-waste-based bioclays, to gelatin-based biofoams. We will teach participants how to identify types of biomaterials that are applicable to their own research and how to make them. Through hands-on activities, we will demonstrate how to implement biomaterials in the design of sustainable tangible interfaces and discuss topics sensitized by biological media such as more-than-human temporalities, bioethics, care, and unmaking. Ultimately, our goal is to facilitate a space in which HCI researchers and designers can collaborate, create, and discuss the opportunities and challenges of working with sustainable biomaterials.
Metaphors and `Tacit' Data: the Role of Metaphors in Data and Physical Data Representations

This paper explores (1) the role of metaphors in physical data representations and (2) the concept of tacit data: implicitly known data which are hard to uncover. In a semester course with twenty-three students, five teams explored how to represent self-chosen 'tacit data' in a visualisation, haptification, and dynamic physicalisation. Throughout these phases, our notion of tacit data evolved, resulting in a proposed working definition. Moreover, we noticed that metaphors played an increasingly important role. Based on analysis of students' work and interviews with them, we found that tacit data and physical data representations need metaphors. For haptifications and physicalisations, metaphors help to circumvent limitations, curate data, and communicate to the audience. As tacit data were seen as 'soft' and difficult to quantify, metaphors made the data workable. Furthermore, tacit data benefit from physical representations, which offer further dimensions to represent the feeling and intimate aspects of data.
Ichiyo: Fragile and Transient Interaction in Neighborhood

As the Internet develops, social networking and other communication tools have transformed people's relationships into something fast, visible, and geographically huge. However, these communication tools have not expanded opportunities for acquainting oneself with neighbors outside one's social network; rather, they have comparatively diminished occasions for interacting with unfamiliar neighbors by prioritizing communication with existing friends. Therefore, we invented the medium Ichiyo to increase the opportunities to think of neighbors walking along the same street or in the same neighborhood and to expand the imagination of those who pass by and those who used to be there. Thus, users can engage in indirect interaction. We used commercially available laser cutters to engrave QR codes on leaves that are naturally found in our living space to prevent environmental invasion. The QR codes lead to a communal space on the web where users can freely leave messages. By engraving QR codes, information can be virtually expanded to be presented. To get the feedback of Ichiyo, we let a total of several thousand people experience a new way of communication as a part of the exhibition "iii Exhibition 2022", an art exhibition at the University of Tokyo. A total of more than 1,000 leaves engraved with QR codes were prepared and scattered at the exhibition site and along the road from the nearest station to the venue.
Resonance: Collaborative Musicking Through Tactile Ecologies

This paper unveils a PhD research on "Resonance," an instrument at the crossroads of collaborative music-making, gameplay, and music-related human-computer interaction. Resonance creates a unique communal gameplay performance system, where players are interdependent, transcending the boundaries of human and non-human agency. This collective process has the potential to enhance human connections and bonding, amplifying players' sensitivity to one another and their environment. The heart of this collaboration comprises intricate networks of signals, nurturing relationships, shared expression, decision-making processes, negotiation, and a spectrum of implementations. Resonance's design showcases tactile and tangible interfaces, employing capacitive touch technology as a sound interface, thereby providing an immersive platform for player interaction. Within the broader context of constructing (an interactive music-making) ecology, networks involving people, electronics, and environments, this artwork stands as a testament to the concept's transformative power. The performance of Resonance takes the form of an acrylic panel adorned with conductive materials, composing a tangible user interface. It made its debut in the context of a Laptop Orchestra's performance, artfully spatialized over a 92-speaker immersive sound system. This performance beckons forth audio recordings that illustrate the vibrant character of Resonance's sonic palette. In summary, Resonance encapsulates an innovative fusion of music, interactivity, and collaboration. This paper sheds light on the instrument's potential to strengthen human connections and foster collaborative music creation, all the while encapsulating the richness of individual voices within a harmonious network of signals.
Fold, Stand and Drape: Unweaving Physical vs Digital Textile Design Considerations

Fashion design has rapidly become a digital process where textiles are simulated as soft, conformable materials on a digital body. The embodied experience and physical interaction with the textile have been replaced by screen-based media, resulting in a gap in understanding between physical and digital textile material. Consequently, understanding digitized textile properties and characteristics has become challenging for practitioners. This research investigates fashion designers' implicit understanding when selecting textiles, specifically how interactions with physical textiles influence design considerations. Twenty digital fashion designers interacted with ten physical textile materials via tangible and scientific drape measurements, reflecting upon their design considerations. In digital environments, a tangible understanding of material properties is vital, and scientific drape measurements add significant understanding to digital design. The research advances our understanding of integrating digital tools in textile and soft material practices, where a postphenomenological approach is employed to help formulate the design considerations in selecting materials.
Shadowplay: An Embodied AI Art Installation

The Shadowplay installation facilitates creative and embodied interaction with a generative AI image diffusion model. The work aspires to facilitate a tangible experience of working with generative AI and produces striking, aesthetic, and provocative images exposing the edges of our creative relationships with this new class of technology. Exhibition-goers enter into a generative interplay between the probabilistic uncertainty of AI technologies, the familiarity of light, and the experimental playfulness of using one's body to cast a shadow. By enabling a tangible interaction with this rapidly-evolving technology, we probe the quality and nature of AI-mediated imaginaries, while also providing a 'lived' means to experience the limits of its expressiveness and the inseparable ties to underlying training data. Shadowplay balances a provocative and critical stance on AI and creativity, produces a captivating stream of beautiful and striking imagery, and achieves this through an engaging, playful, and tangible interaction.
Squeezable Interface for Emotion Regulation in Work Environments

Squeezing objects has been proven to be effective in helping people release negative emotions. This work-in-progress study revolves around the design and development of a proof-of-concept system to facilitate conversations on how to design squeezable interfaces for emotion regulation in the workplace. In this paper, we describe the design and development of EmoSkweezee, an interactive desktop wallpaper controlled by a squeezable ball to support emotion regulation in a peripheral way. In our pilot study, we utilized this proof-of-concept system to provoke discussions with HCI practitioners about their perspectives and the potential of squeezable interfaces for emotion regulation. In the future, the requirements for a squeezable interface for emotion regulation will be explored with desk workers and experts through interviews and co-design workshops. This proof-of-concept will serve as a catalyst for conversations in our future user studies.
Echoes of Heritage: Exploring the Convergence of Immersive XR and Live-Action Roleplay for Rural Revitalization

Due to dwindling populations, rural communities frequently encounter difficulties in economic growth and conserving their cultural heritage. These challenges are often the result of younger generations moving to urban areas in search of better opportunities, leaving behind an aging population that struggles to maintain traditional practices and stimulate local economies. Innovative entertainment forms such as Immersive XR and theater-style LARPing games are emerging as potential solutions to these challenges. These immersive experiences, particularly appealing to younger demographics, can attract and engage them back in rural revitalization efforts. By integrating modern entertainment with cultural preservation, they present an opportunity to bridge the gap between tradition and innovation, thus injecting life into these communities. This paper carefully evaluates the potential benefits and challenges of integrating these technologies into rural revitalization initiatives, drawing on successful case studies for support. It aims to improve our understanding of the possible impact of immersive XR and theater-style LARPing on rural revitalization efforts. Additionally, the paper strives to provide insightful recommendations to guide future research and development in this increasingly important field.
Queer Archival Design in Tangible Embodied Interactive Experiences

How might tangible design support embodied explorations of queer history, drawing from queer archives scholarship and Queer HCI? My work explores how queering design with attention to historicism, enacted through embodied interactions, can prompt affective and relational understandings of queer history. As preliminary research, this paper outlines a previous design case study, "Button Portraits: Embodying Queer History with Interactive Wearable Artifacts." The project uses queer methods and archival materials to design affective, embodied engagements that queer our understandings of historical linearity, imagine alternative and coalitional relationalities, and prompt emotional connections to shared queer history. This case study serves as a starting point for developing design methodology that explores embodied, tangible, interactive experiences of queer archives. Progressing my research, I outline these considerations in the context of a proposed project entitled "Queer Embodied Mapping," which draws on historicism to queer tangible interaction design by fabulating a collective archive of embodied oral histories.
Augmenting Embodied Learning in Welding Training: The Co-Design of an XR- and tinyML-Enabled Welding System for Creative Arts and Manufacturing Training

Metal welding is a craft manufacturing skill that can be unusually difficult to externalize and represent to novices. Building competency requires an apprentice to iteratively practice embodied skills and sensitize themselves to a sensorially complex practice. To explore these challenges, we organized a series of co-design workshops with a youth program in welding and fabrication. Working with eight instructors and four students, we identified opportunities for mixed reality, sensing, and tinyML processes to augment welding training and practice. This resulted in an extended reality (XR) welding helmet and torch that enhances the embodied learning of welding in three key ways: biometric sensing enhances mindfulness and stress management in sensorially challenging environments; acoustic sensing focuses learner attention on non-visual cues of weld performance; and combined motion-sensing and visual XR feedback helps improve proprioceptive and embodied learning. These features are assessed and we offer design implications for augmenting novice learning of craft-practice with XR approaches.
`A Fair Game?': Using Narrative Sensification and Embodied Metaphors for Awareness

Most physical data representations rely on vision only and miss the opportunity of making people physically experience data. This work introduces 'A Fair Game': a narrative sensification that uses story-telling and embodied interaction to provide data insight. A Fair Game is a two-player horse race installation representing passport power, where people pull on a rope to move their horse. People randomly draw a high- or low-ranking passport which determines the horse's speed, so either a lot or little physical effort is needed to win the race. The installation was deployed at an exhibition for two days, where we conducted interviews with fifteen people. Findings indicate that people's embodied interaction and the visible unfairness of the game contributed to emotional engagement. Participant's felt frustration and empathy, which facilitated space for discussions regarding the topic. Our work shows the potential of kinesthetic and emotional engagement, and introduces the concept of narrative sensification.
Making Your Makerspace: A Tale of Tension

Makerspaces hold a lot of potential for participation in innovation, democratization of technology, and as a resource for community building – but not all who make, are represented in makerspaces: many makers do not feel at home in these spaces. This paper investigates the wants and needs of people who are engaged with making. It describes the result of four co-creation events, in which participants constructed their ideal version of a makerspace. By analysing the thoughts and ideas that participants shared during the building process, and the resulting physical representations of makerspaces, we uncovered two distinct tensions in what makers require from their ideal makerspace: the tension between having fun in a space and a space that is functional; and the tension between having the opportunity to collaborate with other people, versus undisturbed focus on projects. We contextualize these findings in literature related to makerspaces and offer suggestions for dealing with these tensions through design.
Embodied Hybrid Bodystorming to Design an XR Suture Training Experience

Extended Reality (XR) technology offers promising results to support skill training. In the field of surgical education, Virtual Reality (VR) has long been explored, showing the potential to foster improved skill development and learning. However, XR in this domain is still underinvestigated, and there is a lack of design knowledge, design methods, and guidelines to inform how to best design XR experiences for effective surgical training. Here, we focus on suture training and show how participatory embodied design activities with experienced surgeons can help open the design space and arrive at interesting design solutions. We report on a hybrid bodystorming combining physical props with XR headsets with passthrough capabilities, supporting rich embodied explorations, a better understanding and articulation of key steps of suturing, uncovering essential design requirements and features, and arriving at an interesting design concept proposal that can be inspiring for future works in the domain.
Chasing Tacit Knowledge: Multi-layered Sensing in Woodworking

We discuss existent approaches to trace tacit knowledge in craft practices through a turn to more-than-human centered design. This leads to a call for a multi-layered sensing system that covers not only the human body but also the tools and materials involved. Furthermore, it stresses the necessity of relational data collection and analysis. We present the design and implementation of this concept for a traditional woodworking practice: shaving wood with a block plane. In closing, we show feasibility of the suggested design through an initial pilot test. The argument contributes a theoretical turn to material-based sensing principles in the search for ways to track tacit knowledge, it outlines key design principles of this approach, provides an example implementation, and indicates a first validation through pilot data.
Zenscape: Encouraging Microbreaks from Screen-based Work through a Tangible System

Regular microbreaks from work positively contribute to one's well-being, performance, and recovery, yet integrating them into work routine can be challenging. In response, we present Zenscape, a novel tangible system that encourages regular microbreaks through a subtle stirring water action and sound. Zenscape aims to improve the quality of the microbreaks by inviting user participation in creative micro activities that are inspired from Zen Garden philosophy. We conducted field deployments of Zenscape with seven participants who interacted with the system daily for at least 2 weeks. The study revealed that the physicality of the system brought discipline to participants' work routine and interacting with the Zen Garden made microbreaks refreshing. Participants took frequent breaks with Zenscape, found themselves more productive and less tired at the end of the day. Based on study insights, we present three design considerations to guide the design of the future technologies for supporting regular microbreaks.
Envisioning Transhuman Communication Research: Speculative Human Augmentation Technologies and Fictional Abstracts

Throughout human history, communication has evolved and diversified t hrough v arious m eans, f rom natural languages to modern forms like video and virtual reality. Now, a paradigm shift, transhumanism, is proposing the integration of machines and computers into the human body to augment individuals physically, sensorily, cognitively, and emotionally. In this pictorial, we examine "How can we approach the design of transhuman technologies for communication?" and "How might future research examine their impact on communication?" For this, we conducted co-speculation workshops to identify design opportunities, and based on them, created fictional a bstracts envisioning future research. Our work contributes a set of design speculations and a range of thought-provoking research ideas that will foster discussions about probable pitfalls and benefits of transhuman technologies in the future of communication.
Sensing Bodies: Engaging Postcolonial Histories through More-than-Human Interactions

Sensing Bodies is an interactive installation that integrates plants, biosensors, and data displays in a series of tangible embodied encounters to facilitate reflection on the complex sociopolitical entanglements of plants. The triptych installation incorporates different forms of biodata and three plantation plants of the U.S. South to highlight reciprocal people-plant relationships while fostering a deeper sensibility toward colonial histories of local landscapes. In this paper, we put forth three design provocations for engaging with postcolonial perspectives in more-than-human interactions: materializing tensions to trouble multi-species relationships, embracing ambiguities and multiple relationalities, and highlighting geographic and cultural situatedness. In doing so, we contribute to how TEI might facilitate postcolonial understandings and sensibilities.
SensorBricks: a Collaborative Tangible Sensor Toolkit to Support the Development of Data Literacy

Data is often inaccessible for non-expert users, leading to a lack of data transparency and speculation in the understanding and interpretation of data, not providing personal value to individuals. The SensorBricks toolkit was evaluated during 5 workshops (N = 20) to learn how an IoT toolkit can support the development of data literacy. The SensorBricks toolkit introduced data to individuals in a fun, accessible and easy way, creating a low boundary for users to interact with data, sensors and output modalities. The toolkit helped individuals to reflect on the role of data in their environment. The collaborative aspect gave individuals the option to discuss the data and learn from each other's experiences helping users to create a meaningful interpretation and shared understanding of sensor data. The combined digital and data physicalization data representation gives individuals both awareness and in-detail information, creating an understandable and informative way of presenting data.
TipTrack: Precise, Low-Latency, Robust Optical Pen Tracking on Arbitrary Surfaces Using an IR-Emitting Pen Tip

Tables are focus points for social interactions and support everyday activities, such as learning, crafting, or dining. These physical interactions on and around the table may be augmented with digital information and tools projected onto the tabletop. For interaction with such projected information, touch input suffers from technical and interactional limitations. Pen input is a more robust alternative that does not suffer from Midas-touch problems. We developed a system for tracking the position of an IR-emitting pen tip on a planar surface with sub-millimeter resolution and an end-to-end latency of less than 30 ms. Distinguishing between drawing and hovering states is done by combining a stereoscopic camera setup and a machine-learning classifier. We demonstrate practical performance, uses and limitations through multiple studies and examples.
Thermo-Play: Exploring the Playful Qualities of Thermochromic Materials

As interest in materiality has increased in human-computer interaction (HCI), a growing body of research has emerged on the use of smart materials to enhance interactivity. In particular, thermochromic materials, which change color in response to environmental temperature, have drawn attention. However, despite their dynamicity and interactivity, limited studies have dug into their playful potential. This paper presents Thermo-Play, a series of four projects—Picky Tamagotchi, Alphabet Blocks, Shake My Hand, and Gradual Display—that examine the potential of thermochromism in the sense of play and its implications for design and HCI. Evaluating the four projects, we identify the elements that make thermochromic materials playful, such as physicality, color-dynamicity, and gradualness, and the limitations of these materials. Through the findings of Thermo-Play, we expect to discover new opportunities for thermochromic materials in designing playful interactions.
Tangible Diffusion: Exploring Artwork Generation via Tangible Elements and AI Generative Models in Arts and Design Education

Generative models have revolutionized the field of art and design, providing an emerging and accessible approach to creating diverse artwork. However, effectively utilizing these models still requires significant expertise, making the system inaccessible to novice users, such as young children. This paper introduces a novel approach to artwork generation, combining tangible elements with AI generative models, resulting in a more engaging and immersive learning experience. With materials prepared by teachers, students can easily create digital artwork by manipulating tangible building blocks. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed pipeline can be applied to various scenarios, using either off-the-shelf or carefully designed tangible elements. This approach provides an interdisciplinary learning platform for arts and design education, fostering creativity and exploration of various art styles and design topics.