In this one-day workshop we are going to make access. We aim to counteract the phenomenon that access to making (e.g., in makerspaces, fablabs, etc.) is not equally distributed, with certain groups of people being underrepresented (e.g., women*1). After brief introductions from participants and a set of three impulse keynotes, we will envision and make interventions together, such as speculative or provocative objects and actions. The workshop takes a constructive stance with the goal to not rest on empirical and theoretical findings or individual experiences, but to translate those into viable interventions. These serve as exemplars of findings with the clear goal of being deployed soon after.

In this chapter, the concept of Transformative Practices is introduced, i.e. shared relative steady ways of living and working with others (Wittgenstein, 1993), including specific configurations of actions, norms and knowledge (Freeman et al., 2011) and related tools and environments, focused at addressing our societal challenges, by transforming (elevating) our personal and social ethics and related behaviour through designing new ways of interaction with each other and the world. Through design research and innovation within these practices, we work together towards social-cul- turally, environmentally and economically sustainable communities.

Movement-based interaction design is increasingly popular, with application domains ranging from dance, sport, gaming to physical rehabilitation. In a workshop at CHI 2016, a set of prominent artists, game design-ers, and interaction designers embarked on a research journey to explore what we came to refer to as "aesthetics in soma-based design". In this follow-up work-shop, we would like to take the next step, shifting from discussing the philosophical underpinnings we draw upon to explain and substantiate our practice, to form our own interaction design theory and conceptualisations. We propose that soma-based design theory needs practical, pragmatic as well as analytical study -- otherwise the felt dimension will be missing. We will consider how such tacit knowledge can be articulated, documented and shared. To ground the discussion firmly in the felt experience of our own practice, the work-shop is organised as a joint practical design work session, supported by analytical study.

This paper describes the process of designing the Blue Studio: An interactive space for embodied multi-stakeholder ideation processes. Inspired by embodied sensemaking - the way people make sense of things through external expression and interaction with other people - we iteratively designed material, interactive and spatial interventions in the Blue Studio and evaluated them with multi-stakeholder participants in various studies. Thereupon, we analyzed the impact of the design interventions, based on the seven principles to design for embodied sensemaking and highlighted opportunities for refining our interactive space for embodied ideation. Based on the insights gained, a final design of the Blue Studio was realized and evaluated on functionality.

The paper presents vision, approach and outcomes of "Light through Culture", an international design school that aims at weaving, through design, innovative technologies and culture into a new canvas for making and thinking [6]. In this paper we present in particular the second edition of the school that explored the theme of human rights and designed ways of eliciting the exposure of their violation, with the realization of an experiential path through five interactive spaces, in an exhibition called "Experiencing Human Rights". The students built this interactive path to elicit a rich experience and unfold new opportunities for meaning to be elaborated by visitors. Story telling was used, as a way of creating a holistic experience that was not just based on the narration of facts but also exploited feelings and deep cultural values through embodied interaction. Based on the student's craftsmanship and their different cultural and educational backgrounds, they opened up a reflection on human rights, both in their own process, as well as for the visitors during the exhibition. The students' learning activity held Making in its core, and students were encouraged, through cycles of reflection-on-action, to develop their personal point of view, to take responsibility for it and present the designed exhibition to the visitors, inviting them to be bodily engaged and to reflection. 

The paper describes an interactive installation exploring perspectives on women’s rights, triggering visitors’ personal reflections through an immersive experience. Starting from the life histories of the women depicted in three paintings from fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth century, we explored three themes: emancipation, self-determination and violence. In the installation, representations of these three paintings were fragmented into panels, floating in the space suspended from a self-standing structure. On these elements, both the original painting and a writhing of visual material were dynamically displayed using a projector. The presence and movement of visitors in the room was tracked by means of a Kinect™ camera and influenced both the position and movements of the panels. A software crawler monitored discussions and debates on social networks. The intensity of these discussions was reflected in the movements of the panels and the content of the projections. The purpose of this interactive installation is to engage visitors in composing a harmonious picture of the complex domain of women’s rights. The experiential form confronts visitors with the opinions of other people debating the theme worldwide. The installation was the outcome of a craft-inspired learning module, grounded on constructivism and reflective practice.

Design research is regarded to be a mode of inquiry particularly suited to engage with complex topics. In our work, we are interested in unpacking the complexity at the heart of an embodied aesthetic experience. In this article, through our digital and physical artefacts and a methodological reflection, we illustrate an ongoing design research project that a multi-disciplinary team of interaction designers, professional dancers, software developers, artists and 3D modelling experts are carrying out to develop insights on how to understand this complexity and how to use such insights as inspiration for interaction design-related projects. By embracing combinations of design, new technologies and simple visualisation tools, the project investigates the complex and hidden expressivity embedded in the skills of dancers in a programmatic design research approach. This investigation leads to insights on different levels. Firstly, cycles of formulation, realisation and reflection on design programs express parts of this complexity and this lets new research interests emerge. Secondly, as a body of work, reflecting on these cycles exposes how our “drifting” within this programmatic approach has started to unveil the complexities inherent in our research program. In this article we aim at contributing to the growing understanding of what designerly ways of knowing might be and how a practice aimed at expanding and contributing such knowledge unfolds.

The potential of skills in design is intriguing; as skills open up new perceptions of the world they allow meaning to arise as we engage with the world. Several skills-based techniques that leverage this potential have been developed, and integrated into the Designing in Skills framework. The framework builds on personal engagement of designers in their practice, and promotes them to take a first-person perspective, enabling designs to be enriched with meaning. In this paper, we present the most recent workshop based on this approach, which specifically focuses on employing the Designing in Skills framework as a starting point and catalyst for design practice. We briefly introduce the Designing in Skills framework and present the DiffractMe! project in which we built on this approach to explore its potential for design practice. We conclude with reflections on the process and result by the involved designers. These reflections offer insights into the value of this approach for enriching interactive design with experiential qualities.

 In this paper, we describe the research-through-design process that led to the realization of the interactive exhibition Charged Utopia that took place in August 2016 at the Norrbyskärs Museum. The design leveraged embodiment and active perception: visitors could activate the content by physically engaging with the space. These interactions were intended to trigger personal reflections on social coexistence, its paradoxes and challenges. The paper guides through the researchthrough-design process, from initial design direction and their theoretical grounding, to the design process and final event. The paper contributes with a reflection on the “wicked impact” of the event, suggesting that it is of relevance for design researchers that deal with societal issues, to discuss and expose the effects of their practice beyond immediate results.

The pictorial track exemplifies how the field of interaction design research explores more designerly ways of communicating knowledge in an academic context. In this pictorial, we present the Interactive Dissertation project that explores how the design of a Ph.D. dissertation may embody the experiential qualities of interactive systems that are presented in its (textual) content by leveraging active perception. We report on the research-through-design process and present results from the project's first iteration. We conclude with a visual reflection on the potential of active perception in communicating interactive experiences in print as well as wider implications for the field.

Tango is a form of partner dancing in which two bodies sense one another, and move accordingly, in a dynamic, physical dialogue that is known for its subtle complexities, beauty and intimate experience. In MoCap Tango, we explore how we can build on our skills as designers to highlight and unravel these embedded qualities and use them as inspiration in designing interactions. In this pictorial, we invite the reader to actively participate in the designerly engagement that turns objective data into subjective expressions; highlighting the qualities embedded in the movements of professional dancers.

Recently, there has been a clear shift in the Interaction Design community towards the design for engagement as opposed to more traditional ideals of efficiency and functionality. Our work explores how to design for aesthetic engagement in interaction; building on an approach founded on phenomenology, embodiment, pragmatist aesthetics and embodied cognition. In this paper, we present four different research through design projects we have undertaken, in which we leveraged this approach. These designs cover a wide range of contexts, scales and use. Together, they describe and open up a design space: each of the projects provides rich, aesthetic experiences that respect complexity and ambiguity. They entice people to engage with body and mind, where meaning arises in dialogue with the artifact. We present and critically reflect on these projects in the form of an annotated portfolio. Comparing and contrasting the project results reveals insights into our overall approach and research interest regarding how to design for engagement. We conclude with opportunities that these reflections offer for the design of engaging interactions. Furthermore, we expand on the implications that these reflections suggest towards further trajectories of practice-based research into such experiences.

This paper illustrates present a constructive design research process centred around 3D printing with a wood-based material. This process was highly explorative: it involves the development of a new material and the use and hacking of a machine to materialize a design intention. Along the way, elements of craft emerge, as the designers develop skills in navigating the tensions that exist between material, machine and design intention.We present the process of navigating this design space by unpacking the act of making, using a digital fabrication technique, through a lens of craftsmanship. We employ the notions of ambiguity and resistance, to understand the factors and forces at play that may not typically be considered to be part of a highly automated digital fabrication method, such as 3D printing.As a result of this detailed reflection, new parts of the design space were articulated. All resistances appear as a result of the tension between and designer’s skills and intention, capabilities of the machine and possibilities of the material, all materialised in the Printed Future Vase.This publication contributes to the development of a new additive manufacturing method, and increases our awareness of what factors and forces are at play in this new additive manufacturing method, in which the development of the designer’s tacit skills have been articulated more explicitly.

Through the course Dense Spaces 2012—i.e. designing small, intelligent spaces such as elevators—carried out together with a group of architecture students at Umeå School of Architecture, Umeå University, Sweden, we report on, exemplify, and discuss how architectural theories, skills, and attitudes can come to complement and provide new food for thought for other design fields, including interaction design. We present the course, discuss some resulting spaces, and reflect on feedback from the participants. Then, we discuss some outcomes of the course that have broader implications. Unlike a more traditional technology-centered perspective, an architectural approach seems more prone to focus on designing what we term dynamic absence, i.e. design also concerned with what is not there. In a similar vein, an architectural approach also seems to address complexity by not fragmenting design challenges into smaller problems. The more holistic architectural attitude provides the opportunity to treat technology as a design material, along with the other architectural design materials the design situation offers, including structures, light, space, and absence. In this way, the architectural approach seems to shift the attention away from the design of representations and metaphors to instead focus on designing meaningful engagements in these spaces. 

Potentialities of skills in design are intriguing. Skills open up new perceptions of the world, transform human understanding and engagement with the world itself. Our explorations suggest that leveraging existing designer's skills and training for new skills might remarkably contribute in designing for richness of meaning. We developed several skills-based techniques and validated them through a number of workshops. These techniques encourage participants to make before thinking, to reflect on the outcomes of making, and proceed by iterations of reflection-on-action. Also developed are techniques to increase the frequency of such iterations to minimize loss of meaning by abstraction, and techniques to foster depth of reflection. We organised these techniques into a framework, Designing in Skills (DiS). DiS nurtures personal engagement of designers, compelling a sense of responsibility; it supports designers toward what we call the "first-person perspective", enabling application of individual sensitivities. This paper presents firstly the motivation of our work and the surrounding theory. Subsequently, it introduces the framework and its development, using design cases that have led to its consolidation. It illustrates how DiS prepares for design practice and reflects on the theme of experiential richness.

This paper reflects on the possibilities of embodiment and skilful coping to connect people and to catalyse a constructive (design) “conversation” among people with different backgrounds, during transformative collaboration. We do this by illustrating the process and results of a two- weeks design class with Master students at the Department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology. The resulting Engagement Catalyser is a creative tool to engaging people in a (design) discussion more concrete and effective than a discussion or brainstorm session held around a table. The six developed Engagement Catalysers have been used and evaluated in two workshops, in which participants from very different cultural and professional background have used them as a means to engage quickly and ignite the design process. The results show that the Catalysers stimulate engagement, help people to get familiar and connected in a short period of time, and seem to inspire and boost the design process.

This video shows the ongoing design research project MoCap Tango. The project highlights the subtle qualities embedded in the physical dialogue between two tango dancers from a design perspective. Using custom-made wearables fitted with passive markers, in an optical Motion Capture System, the movements of two world-class tango dancers are captured. This data is used to experiment with real-time visualisations and 3D printed materialisations of the movements. The video presents the current state of the project, showing public performances in which the system was used as well as current work to use the data to create animations and 3D printed sculptures. Interviews with part of the design team highlight motivations for the project and discuss its relevance for embodied interaction design.

The +++ Wearable Player is a result of the application of the Rights through Making approach in designing wearables. This approach aims at designing systems, whose use empowers people towards the materialization of values (e.g. human rights). The +++ Wearable Player system elaborates on the previous project Sound Experience, and introduces the concept of viral music exchange as a motivating factor in the context of social health. This paper describes the morphological genesis, the functional aspects and how they have been implemented in a fully working experienceable prototype. The design process and its outcomes are illustrated, in the framework of the “changing behaviour” design trend.

The interaction design community increasingly addresses how digital technologies may contribute to societal transformations. This paper aims at understanding transformation ignited by a particular constructive design research project. This transformation will be discussed and analysed using resilience thinking, an established approach within sustainability science. By creating a common language between these two disciplines, we start to identify what kind of transformation took place, what factors played a role in the transformation, and which transformative qualities played a role in creating these factors. Our intention is to set out how the notion of resilience might provide a new perspective to understand how constructive design research may produce results that have a sustainable social impact. The findings point towards ways in which these two different perspectives on transformation the analytical perspective of resilience thinking and the generative perspective of constructive design research - may become complementary in both igniting and understanding transformations.

In this work in progress, we start to unpack the act of making in a digital fabrication process. In particular, one kind of digital fabrication - 3D printing - that is typically considered to be highly automated but in this case is not. In this process, a tension exists between our skills, the properties of a novel material and the capabilities of a novel machine. As design researchers, we navigated through the design space that emerged in this tension and explored how to 3D print in wood. In unpacking this tension between machine, material and designer, we pay attention to how the embodied nature of this process was essential for its development. We start to explore how we might explain the embodied act of making in the context of digital fabrication through the lense of ambiguity and resistance, notions previously used to unravel craftsmanship. © 2019 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).

This paper reports on preliminary results of a design research project that explores how spaces in virtual reality may be designed to build on qualities of embodied sensemaking. The project forms a basis for the exploration of an ethical dimension to interactions in virtual reality. This publication focuses on identifying qualities of embodied sense-making in an existing physical space, the interactive exhibition Charged Utopia. These qualities are transposed into a virtual interactive space. The translation of the qualities is done through the three main themes: Physical Movement, Resistance and Ambiguity. We present the design research process to describe how these themes were identified and transposed. We conclude with reflections that sketch ways in which we might capitalise on the opportunities offered by a virtual space, while respecting human skills in embodied sensemaking.