Social Wearables Edu-Larp: Insights From a Novel Camp Combining Crafting, Coding, and Larping Aimed at Non-traditional Steam ParticipantsDeveloping STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) education curricula encouraging participation from underrepresented groups is crucial for diversity in computational fields. Many existing programs attract cis-white males, to the exclusion of other groups. This paper discusses a camp where participants, primarily female youth ages 10-14 (N=45), engage in crafting social wearable technologies within a live-action roleplay context. Our findings from four camp sessions show increased self-reported competence and interest in STEAM among participants, alongside enhanced feelings of community and social support. The camp's innovative approach integrates design thinking, iterative design, and collaboration, proving effective in fostering inclusivity and engagement in STEAM. We adopted an iterative Research-through-Design process, with researchers embedded in the camp to observe and conduct surveys and interviews with participants. Researchers and educators can benefit from reading our results, which demonstrate the value of a playful, socially-engaged curriculum in attracting and retaining diverse students in STEAM fields.2025JFJames Collin Fey et al.University of California Santa Cruz, Social Emotional Technology LabSTEM Education & Science CommunicationSpecial Education TechnologyParticipatory DesignCHI
Co-Imagining the Future of Playable Cities: A Bottom-Up, Multi-Stakeholder Speculative Inquiry into the Playful Potential of Urban TechnologyHere we present a co-design exploration into the potential of technology to playfully re-signify urban spaces. We created a speculative catalog of urban tech and used it to facilitate multi-stakeholder discussions about the playful potential of smart cities. The learnings from our co-design engagements embody different people’s ideas of how tech might and might not support rich forms of urban play, and contribute to ongoing efforts at exploring how to playfully reconfigure our cities. We present: (1) a list of inspirational play potentials of urban spaces—i.e. playful things already people do, and enjoy, in the public space; (2) a portfolio of speculative ideas that show how tech might help to realize that potential; and (3) a discussion of stakeholders’ responses to these ideas. Our work can provide designers with inspiration and actionable advice for cultivating forms of urban play that cater to people’s socio-emotional needs.2022FBFerran Altarriba Bertran et al.UC Santa CruzGame UX & Player BehaviorSustainable HCIEcological Design & Green ComputingCHI
Beyond Entertainment: Unpacking Danmaku and Comments' Role of Information Sharing and Sentiment Expression in Online Crisis VideosOnline videos are playing an increasingly important role in timely information dissemination especially during public crises. Video commentary, synchronous or asynchronous, are indispensable in viewers' engagement and participation, and may in turn contribute to video with additional information and emotions. Yet, the roles of video commentary in crisis communications are largely unexplored, which we believe that an investigation not only provides timely feedback but also offers concrete guidelines for better information dissemination. In this work, we study two distinct commentary features of online videos: traditional asynchronous comments and emerging synchronous danmaku. We investigate how users utilize these two features to express their emotions and share information during a public health crisis. Through qualitative analysis and applying machine learning techniques on a large-scale danmaku and comment dataset of Chinese COVID-19-related videos, we uncover the distinctive roles of danmaku and comments in crisis communication, and propose comprehensive taxonomies for information themes and emotion categories of commentary. We also discover the unique patterns of crisis communications presented by danmaku, such as collective emotional resonance and style-based highlighting for emphasizing critical information. Our study captures the unique values and salient features of the emerging commentary interfaces, in particular danmaku, in the context of crisis videos, and further provides several design implications to enable more effective communications through online videos to engage and empower users during crises.2021CHZhenhui Peng et al.Community ReflectionsCSCW
Drawing From Social Media to Inspire Increasingly Playful and Social Drone FuturesIn this pictorial, we explore the potential of social media to help inspire ideas for future drone design applications that support playful and social experiences. Drawing from a Situated Play Design approach, we turn to social media posts to identify recurring playful and social instances of drone use in social settings. We present the results of collecting 143 posts found on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, from which we identified a non-exhaustive list of drone-based play potentials, i.e. existing ways in which people already appropriate drones to playfully augment social situations. We present these play potentials as potentially valuable and inherently situated intermediate-level knowledge with generative power. We argue they might inspire the design of future drone technologies and experiences in Human-Drone Interaction (HDI), in directions that increasingly respond to people’s desires for play and social connection.2021APAlexandra Pometko et al.Social Platform Design & User BehaviorDrone Interaction & ControlDIS
Chasing Play on TikTok from Populations with Disabilities to Inspire Playful and Inclusive Technology DesignThere is an open call for technology to be more playful and for tech design to be more inclusive of people with disabilities. In the era of COVID19, it is often unsafe for the public in general and people with disabilities, in particular, to engage in in-person design exercises using traditional methods. This presents a missed opportunity as these populations are already sharing playful content rich with tacit design knowledge that can be used to inspire the design of playful everyday technology. We present our process of scraping play potentials from TikTok from content creators with disabilities to generate design concepts that may inspire future technology design. We share 7 emerging themes from the scraped content, a catalog of design concepts that may inspire designers, and discuss the relevance of the emerging themes and possible implications for the design concepts.2021JDJared Duval et al.University of California Santa CruzUniversal & Inclusive DesignGame AccessibilityEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsCHI
Chasing Play Potentials in Food Culture: Learning from Traditions to Inspire Future Human-Food Interaction DesignIn this pictorial, we turn to culture and traditions to present an annotated portfolio of play-food potentials, i.e. interesting design qualities and/or interaction mechanisms that could help promote playful and social engagement in food practices. Our portfolio emerged from a one-day workshop where we played with and analyzed a collection of 27 food traditions from diverse cultural backgrounds and historical periods. We highlight play forms and experiential textures that are underexplored in Human-Food Interaction (HFI) research. Our contribution is intended to inspire designers to broaden the palette of play experiences and emotions embraced in HFI.2020FBFerran Altarriba Bertran et al.Gamification DesignFood Culture & Food InteractionDIS
Designing and Evaluating 'In the Same Boat', A Game of Embodied Synchronization for Enhancing Social PlaySocial closeness is important for health and well-being, but is difficult to maintain over a distance. Games can help connect people by strengthening existing relationships or creating new ones through shared playful experiences. We present the design and evaluation of 'In the Same Boat' (ITSB), a two-player infinite runner designed to foster social closeness in distributed dyads. ITSB leverages the synchronization of both players' input to steer a canoe down a river and avoid obstacles. We created two versions: embodied controls, which use players' physiological signals (breath rate, facial expressions), and standard keyboard controls. Results from a study with 35 dyads indicate that ITSB fostered affiliation, and while embodied controls were less intuitive, people enjoyed them more. Further, photos of the dyads were rated as happier and closer in the embodied condition, indicating the potential of embodied controls to foster social closeness in synchronized play over a distance.2020RRRaquel Breejon Robinson et al.University of SaskatchewanFull-Body Interaction & Embodied InputMultiplayer & Social GamesRole-Playing & Narrative GamesCHI
Technology for Situated and Emergent Play: A Bridging Concept and Design AgendaDespite the capacity of play to spontaneously emerge in our daily life, the scope of application of play design in HCI is generally narrower, specifically targeting areas of pure leisure, or wholly utilitarian and productive play. Here we focus on the value of play design to respond to and support our natural gravitation towards emergent play that helps to meet our social and emotional needs. We present a bridging concept: Technology for Situated and Emergent Play, i.e. technology design that supports playful engagement that emerges interwoven with our everyday activities outside leisure, and that enriches these activities with socio-emotional value. Our intermediate-level contribution has value as a synthesis piece: it weaves together theories of play and play design and bridges them with concrete design examples. As a bridging concept, it contributes: i) theoretical grounding; ii) inspiring design exemplars that illustrate the theory and foreground its value; and iii) design articulations in the form of valuable experiential qualities and design features. Our work can help to focus design agendas for playful technology and inspire future designs in this space.2020FBFerran Altarriba Bertran et al.University of California, Santa CruzGamification DesignCHI
Evaluating a Personalizable, Inconspicuous Vibrotactile(PIV) Breathing Pacer for In-the-Moment Affect RegulationGiven the prevalence and adverse impact of anxiety, there is considerable interest in using technology to regulate anxiety. Evaluating the efficacy of such technology in terms of both the average effect (the intervention efficacy) and the heterogeneous effect (for whom and in what context the intervention was effective) is of paramount importance. In this paper, we demonstrate the efficacy of PIV, a personalized breathing pacer, in reducing anxiety in the presence of a cognitive stressor. We also quantify the relation between our specific stressor and PIV-user engagement. To our knowledge, this is the first mixed-design study of a vibrotactile affect regulation technology which accounts for a specific stressor and for individual differences in relation to the technology's efficacy. Guidelines in this paper can be applied for designing and evaluating other affect regulation technologies.2020PMPardis Miri et al.Stanford UniversityVibrotactile Feedback & Skin StimulationSleep & Stress MonitoringCHI
Designing 'True Colors': A Social Wearable that Affords VulnerabilityVulnerability is a common experience in everyday life and is frequently perceived as a flaw to be excised in technology design. Yet, research indicates it is an essential aspect of wholehearted living among others. In this paper, we present the design and deployment of 'True Colors', a novel wearable device intended to support social interaction in a live action roleplay game (LARP) setting. We describe the Research-through-Design process that helped us to discover and articulate the possibility space of vulnerability in the design of social wearables, as support for producing a sense of social empowerment and connection among wearers within the LARP. We draw conclusions that may be of value to others designing wearables and related technologies aimed at supporting co-located social interaction in games/play.2019EDElla Dagan et al.University of California, Santa CruzHaptic WearablesSerious & Functional GamesRole-Playing & Narrative GamesCHI
Shaping Pro-Social Interaction in VR: An Emerging Design FrameworkCommercial social VR applications represent a diverse and evolving ecology with competing models of what it means to be social in VR. Drawing from expert interviews, this paper examines how the creators of different social VR applications think about how their platforms frame, support, shape, or constrain social interaction. The study covers a range of applications including: Rec Room, High Fidelity, VRChat, Mozilla Hubs, Altspace VR, AnyLand, and Facebook Spaces. We contextualize design choices underlying these applications, with particular attention paid to the ways that industry experts perceive, and seek to shape, the relationship between user experiences and design choices. We underscore considerations related to: (1) aesthetics of place (2) embodied affordances, (3) social mechanics, (4) and tactics for shaping social norms and mitigating harassment. Drawing on this analysis, we discuss the stakes of these choices, suggest future research directions, and propose an emerging design framework for shaping pro-social behavior in VR.2019JMJoshua McVeigh-Schultz et al.University of California, Santa CuzSocial & Collaborative VRIdentity & Avatars in XRSocial Platform Design & User BehaviorCHI
Making Sense of Human-Food InteractionActivity in Human-Food Interaction (HFI) research is skyrocketing across a broad range of disciplinary interests and concerns. The dynamic and heterogeneous nature of this emerging field presents a challenge to scholars wishing to critically engage with prior work, identify gaps and ensure impact. It also challenges the formation of community. We present a Systematic Mapping Study of HFI research and an online data visualisation tool developed to respond to these issues. The tool allows researchers to engage in new ways with the HFI literature, propose modifications and additions to the review, and thereby actively engage in community-making. Our contribution is threefold: (1) we characterize the state of HFI, reporting trends, challenges and opportunities; (2) we provide a taxonomy and tool for diffractive reading of the literature; and (3) we offer our approach for adaptation by research fields facing similar challenges, positing value of the tool and approach beyond HFI.2019FBFerran Altarriba Bertran et al.University of California, Santa CruzFood Culture & Food InteractionCHI
Designing Future Social Wearables with Live Action Role Play (Larp) DesignersDesigning wearable technology that supports physical and social engagement in a collocated setting is challenging. In this research, we reached out to an expert community of crafters of social experiences: larpers (live action role players). Larpers and larp designers have a longstanding tradition of designing and making use of a variety of elements, such as costumes, physical objects, environments, and recently also digital artifacts. These are crafted in support of co-experience values that we argue can inform the design of social wearables. We engaged in a co-design process with a game designer and co-founder of a larp production company, and embedded the resulting social wearables in a larp. Here, we present the results of this design and implementation process, and articulate design affordances that resonate with our larp designer’ values. This work may inspire and inform researchers and designers creating wearable technology that is aimed at supporting collocated engagement.2018ESElena Márquez Segura et al.University of California, Santa CruzHaptic WearablesDigital Art Installations & Interactive PerformanceInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingCHI
Social Affordances at Play: Game Design Toward Socio-Technical InnovationIn this paper we propose that game design strategies and theories can be useful tools for supporting the design of innovative socio-technical systems aimed at supporting social co-presence. We support this proposal with an annotated portfolio of a series of research prototype games that investigate sensor affordances and configurations to sustain and enhance social co-presence. We introduce relevant theory from game studies (the magic circle; the MDA (mechanics/dynamics/aesthetics framework)) to help ground and guide the use of game design in HCI practice. We conclude with recommendations for adopting game design as a supplementary research technique, with caveats about the limits of the approach.2018KIKatherine Isbister et al.University of California, Santa CruzSerious & Functional GamesInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingCHI
Games and Play SIG: Engaging Small Developer CommunitiesThe Games-and-Play community has thrived at ACM SIGCHI with a consistent increase in games- and play-related submissions across research papers, workshops, posters, demos, and competitions. The community has attracted a significant number of academic researchers, students, and practitioners to CHI conferences in recent years. CHI 2018 is being held in Montréal, a major game development hub. Montréal is not only a home for major game studios but also more than 100 smaller game studios. In line with the “Engage With CHI” spirit of CHI 2018, this SIG aims to engage the Games and Play community in a discussion about the directions that we can take to advance towards demographics that will benefit from HCI games research but are currently underrepresented: small, independent developers, non-profit organizations, and academics that create mobile games, games for health, games for change, and/or educational games.2018LNLennart E. Nacke et al.University of WaterlooGame UX & Player BehaviorSerious & Functional GamesCollaborative Learning & Peer TeachingCHI
Bots & (Main)Frames: Exploring the Impact of Tangible Blocks and Collaborative Play in an Educational Programming GameWhile recent work has begun to evaluate the efficacy of educational programming games, many common design decisions in these games (e.g., single player gameplay using touchpad or mouse) have not been explored for learning outcomes. For instance, alternative design approaches such as collaborative play and embodied interaction with tangibles may also provide important benefits to learners. To better understand how these design decisions impact learning and related factors, we created an educational programming game that allows for systematically varying input method and mode of play. In this paper, we describe design rationale for mouse and tangible versions of our game, and report a 2x2 factorial experiment comparing efficacy of mouse and tangible input methods with individual and collaborative modes of play. Results indicate tangibles have a greater positive impact on learning, situational interest, enjoyment, and programming self-beliefs. We also found collaborative play helps further reduce programming anxiety over individual play.2018EMEdward F Melcer et al.New York UniversityProgramming Education & Computational ThinkingCollaborative Learning & Peer TeachingCHI
"I just let him cry...": Designing Socio-technical Interventions in Families to Prevent Mental Health DisordersInterventions that help children develop protective factors against mental health disorders are an inherently social endeavour, relying on a number of actors from within the family as well as the school context. Little work thus far in CSCW and HCI has examined the potential of technology to support or enhance such interventions. This paper provides the first steps to unpacking this socio-technical design space, focusing on emotional regulation (ER) as a specific instance of a protective factor. We combine a user-centred approach to understanding lived experiences of families (interviews, design workshops) with an expert-led understanding of what makes interventions psychologically effective. Our findings suggest the potential of technology to enable a shift in how prevention interventions are designed and delivered: empowering children and parents through a new model of `child-led, situated interventions', where participants learn through actionable support directly within family life, as opposed to didactic in-person workshops and a subsequent `skills application'. This conceptual model was then instantiated in a technology probe, which was deployed with 14 families. The promising field study findings provide an initial proof-of-concept validation of the proposed approach.2018PSPetr Slovak et al.Health and RelationshipsCSCW