Interactive digital technology provides an unprecedented new way to communicate through rich behaviors that sense and react to the world. Our most complex designs still pale in comparison to the richness of the behaviors of the simplest living creatures. We do not yet know the key techniques and aesthetics involved in arranging these configurations of creatures, environments, and computers to be able to truly harness this new behavioral medium. Just like living creatures, the behaviors of our technological devices are shaped by the context in which they develop. We need to expose our technology to a vast array of new situations, experiences, and contexts in order to mature programmable technology beyond its status as a simple tool into a ripe new medium. Naturalists studying animal behavior conduct their work in uncontrolled, wilderness field sites because it is only there that you can observe the full range of a creature’s behaviors that have evolved to fit the specific milieu. Likewise, contemporary Human–Computer Interaction researchers are conducting studies “in the wild” where technologies are experienced in situ. This chapter explores using different sites of scientific field work (expeditions, field courses, and field stations) as fertile areas for developing interactive media.

Digital food technologies such as diet trackers, food sharing apps, and 'smart' kitchenware offer promising yet debatable food futures. While proponents suggest its potential to prompt efficient food lifestyles, critics highlight the underlying technosolutionism of digital food innovation and limitations related to health safety and data privacy. This workshop addresses both present and near-future digital food controversies and seeks to extend the existing body of Human-Food Interaction (HFI) research. Through scenarios and food-tech prototyping navigated by bespoke Digital Food Cards, we will unpack issues and suggest possible design approaches. We invite proposals from researchers, designers, and other practitioners interested in working towards a complex framework for future HFI research.

This paper describes a methodology for conducting interaction design research workshops within wilderness locations. In biological field expeditions, scientists travel to areas with minimal infrastructure to conduct research in environments featuring unique, naturalistic interactions. Digital interaction design is growingly important to field biologists as a way to develop new forms of scientific exploration and experimentation. Ideally field biologists would create their own interactive, scientific tools based upon their developing research questions. In practice, however, time and training constraints mean design is typically outsourced to specialized practitioners in dedicated laboratories. The Hiking Hack model unites biologists and designers in collaborative, outdoor workshops. Hiking Hacks combine experiences and techniques from biological expeditions with Research Through Design methodologies. This model has been refined and analyzed throughout several Hiking Hack expeditions. The result is an adaptable workshop structure considering gear, practices, and syllabi for exploring interaction design situated within wild environments.

In this workshop, we will interactively and jointly investigate with the community how intrinsic creative and artistic values, technology and society are critical to one another, and how our present-day urban and digital societies can demonstrably be enriched and advanced by effective connections between these all. The workshop will include interactive discussions, as well as a hands-on outdoors making session.

The popularity of knitting and crochet, or yarncraft, is on the ascent. As more people discover its pleasures, enthusiasts and neuroscientists are also realizing that crafting with yarn elicits soothing and therapeutic effects. The meditative aspects of knitting and crochet are already familiar to the legions of yarncrafters, but recognition of the neuroscience of yarncraft is a relatively recent phenomenon. This work proposes to embody the relationship between yarncraft and its neurological benefits with a physical art project. This project will take the form of a large crocheted e-textile brain sculpture with embedded LEDs whose illumination is controlled live by a brain-computer interface worn by a yarncrafting practitioner. This sculpture visualizes the changes in the neurology of the yarncrafter.

This pictorial discusses the initial creation and implementation of mobile workshops for conducting digital interaction design within biological field research. These workshops, called "Hiking Hacks," directly combine scientific backpacking expeditions with Critical Making workshops. Based upon previous "Digital Naturalism" design framework, these Hiking Hacks involve multidisciplinary teams of biologists and designers working uphold the naturalistic values of wilderness exploration, while investigating the new abilities offered by digital technology. By conducting this work deep in natural field sites, Hiking Hacks directly explore the roles context and mobility play in, typically lab-based, physical computing design.

This research aims to develop and evaluate a design framework for creating digital devices that support the exploration of animal behaviors in the wild. This paper quickly shares the main concepts and theories from the fields forming Digital Naturalism's foundation while presenting the key challenges emerging from these critical intersections between field biology and computational media. It then reviews the development of this research's hybrid methodology designed specifically for its multi-year series of "Qualitative Action Research" fieldwork carried out at a rainforest field station. This paper analyzes the resulting on-site ethnographies, workshops, design projects, and interactive performances, whose take-aways are synthesized into design guidelines for digital-natural media. This framework, itself, is then evaluated via an extra iteration of fieldwork and the results discussed. Finally, the paper identifies targets for continued research development. Further areas of interest are presented which will promote Digital Naturalism's progression into its own topic of study.

Silicone prototyping is becoming more accessible to rapid-prototypers and maker communities, but techniques combining electronics and silicone at small scale production levels are still lacking. At the workshop, our group will discuss how to utilize silicone to make more robust technology, while preparing delicate circuit parts for durable use within the rubber. We will focus on one of the trickiest and also most ubiquitous digital components used in silicone devices, vibration motors. Tips are provided for isolating and destressing sensitive electronics components as well as ensuring proper transfer of tactile stimulation through techniques such as compressive-stress molding.

Wearable and Ubiquitous computing necessarily expose digital electronics to new environments. Traditional methods of creating new technology, within climate controlled laboratories, can cultivate hidden assumptions within the design of the devices, and prolong design iteration time. Designers can instead find new ways to free the development of ubiquitous and wearable technology from the laboratory and into the site of use. This paper will describe the design and use of portable workshop equipment that has been created to enable engineers to create tools in harsh and restrictive environments. With these devices an entire workspace for digital prototyping can be quickly setup in the wild. Examples are taken from "Hiking Hack" workshops held in Panama, Madagascar, and the U.S. The mobility of our setup will enable us to bring our studio directly to the "Wear and Tear" to illustrate the key components and elicit feedback about new designs for portable studio practice.

At the overlap of maker culture, ubiquitous computing, critical making, and novel interfaces, digital craft emerges as a new research and teaching domain. It offers new opportunities in interaction design but it also poses particular challenges to academic curricula. This paper first discusses the value and challenges connected to digital craft. Then, based on our experience with exploring digital craft in a research university's teaching environment, we highlight viable approaches and teaching practices in this new field. It closes with a discussion of the prototype results achieved in those classes.

The collaborative media-art project Subway combines the mediation of a dance performance with interactive digital technology toward a new performative feedback loop. In a response to the restrictive practices regarding dancing in public in Iran, Subway applies digital technology to connect performers in the USA with those in Iran. Together, they create a new mediatised performance. The piece uses digital technology to break a dance video documentation into individual frames, which become the basis for a cell phone application that allows performers in Iran to re-enact individual poses. Finally, each pose is sent back and re-assembled in the documentation of the shared event. The text outlines the background of this work, its implementation, as well as the particular condition for the socio-technological context, and ongoing and future work. Subway is presented as a piece of experimental media performance art that integrates technology in a transformative way as it answers given cultural challenges.

Subway is a participatory multi-located activist art project. It builds on the mediation of a dance performance by breaking a video apart into its image frames; creating a photo app in Android to re-use these frames as guides for a frame-by-frame reenactment; and finally reassembling the collected images into a new video. Through the affordances of digital and mobile media, it allowed participants in New York and Teheran to create a shared dance performance as digital activist art.

Biologists seek concise, testable models of behavior for the animals they study. We suggest a robot programming paradigm in which animal behaviors are described as robot controllers to support a cycle of hypothesis generation and testing of animal models. In this work we illustrate that approach by modeling the hunting behavior of a captive colony of Aphaenogaster cockerelli , a desert harvester ant. In laboratory animal experiments we introduce live prey (fruit flies) into the foraging arena of the colony. We observe the behavior of the ants, and we measure aspects of their performance in capturing the prey. Based on these observations we create a model of their behavior using Clay, a Java library developed for coding hybrid controllers in a behavior-based manner. We then validate that model in quantitative comparisons with the live animal behavior.

While digital filmmaking has broadened the accessibility of documentary film and television creation, legacy production practices persist of first gathering information (shooting) and later structuring the audio-video narrative (editing). The open-source app Documatic combines shooting and editing processes via synchronized smartphone-camera annotation systems that automatically generate non-destructive video "rough-cuts" for Adobe Premiere. Harnessing the correct digital affordances can enable small documentary productions to enjoy some of the production efficiency traditionally belonging only to large scale filmmakers, while maintaining the artisanal quality control of a small team. The paper outlines the design, implementation, and example usage of this production and editing assistant, which is aimed at supporting small independent documentary filmmaking teams.

We are interested in the way players identify with their virtual characters, and how this identification could be exploited to augment players' cognitive abilities. Our approach is based on the cognitive neuroscience theory of common coding and related experiments, that suggest that perception, imagination and execution of movement are linked by a common representation in the brain. We report three experiments that examine players' identification with the avatar and one effect of this identification on the player's cognitive abilities. The first experiment laid the foundation for the design and development of a full-body puppet interface for transferring a player's own movements to a virtual avatar. Subsequent experiments used the puppet to investigate: (1) whether players recognised their own movements in a virtual avatar and (2) whether this self-recognition improved the player's ability to perform mental rotations. Our results show that the puppet interface is effective in personalising an avatar, and it can augment players' cognitive abilities.

While digital filmmaking has broadened the accessibility of documentary film and television creation, legacy production practices persist of first gathering information (shooting) and later structuring the audio-video narrative (editing). The open-source app Documatic combines shooting and editing processes via synchronized smartphone-camera annotation systems that automatically generate non-destructive video "rough-cuts" for Adobe Premiere. Harnessing the correct digital affordances can enable small documentary productions to enjoy some of the production efficiency traditionally belonging only to large scale filmmakers, while maintaining the artisanal quality control of a small team. The paper outlines the design, implementation, and example usage of this production and editing assistant, which is aimed at supporting small independent documentary filmmaking teams.

We have developed an embodied puppet interface that translates a player's body movements to a virtual character, thus enabling the player to have a fine grained and personalized control of the avatar. To test the efficacy and short-term effects of this control interface, we developed a two-part experiment, where the performance of users controlling an avatar using the puppet interface was compared with users controlling the avatar using two other interfaces (Xbox controller, keyboard). Part 1 examined aiming movement accuracy in a virtual contact game. Part 2 examined changes of mental rotation abilities in users after playing the virtual contact game. Results from Part 1 revealed that the puppet interface group performed significantly better in aiming accuracy and response time, compared to the Xbox and keyboard groups. Data from Part 2 revealed that the puppet group tended to have greater improvement in mental rotation accuracy as well. Overall, these results suggest that the embodied mapping between a player and avatar, provided by the puppet interface, leads to important performance advantages.

Recent work in neuroscience suggests that there is a common coding in the brain between perception, imagination and execution of movement. Further, this common coding is considered to allow people to recognize their own movements when presented as abstract representations, and coordinate with these movements better. We are investigating how this 'own movement effect' could be extended to improve the interaction between players and game avatars, and how it might be leveraged to augment players' cognition. To examine this question, we have designed and developed a tangible puppet interface and 3D virtual environment that are tailored to investigate the mapping between player and avatar movements. In a set of two experiments, we show that when the puppet interface is used to transfer players' movements to the avatar, the players are able to recognize their own movements, when presented alongside others' movements. In both experiments, players did not observe their movements being transferred to the avatar, and the recognition occurred after a week of the transfer. Since the recognition effect persisted even with these two handicaps, we conclude that this is a robust effect, and the puppet interface is effective in personalizing an avatar, by transferring a player's own movements to the virtual character.