The Arts in HCI Tapestry: Networking, Making, and Reflecting Together

Throughout history, the arts and creative practices have played a pivotal role in HCI. They serve as inspirations, challenges, and innovative avenues for learning and extending HCI methods. While HCI often prioritises empirical evidence and outcomes, the art world emphasises diversity, process, and personal experiences. As generative AI and interdisciplinary collaboration grow, the relationship between art and HCI is undergoing a transformative shift, affecting how wemakeand think. Tapestries have long recorded changing narratives, practices, memories, and identities, capturing transformation. By tradition, they are collaborative productions of skilled craftspeople. Inspired by this, the meetup invites artists, designers, makers, technologists, researchers, educators, and others to create a shared tapestry ‘beyond warp and weft’. Attendees may contribute sensory elements to a paper surface (warp), including visual, tactile, auditory, kinaesthetic, gustatory, olfactory, cross-sensory, and social aspects (weft). The completed tapestry serves as a collective narrative that encapsulates the shared experiences of participants

SewSimple in Practice: Designing an E-Textile Tutorial for Primary Computing Education

We present a tutorial for teaching e-textiles with BBC micro:bit and the "SewSimple" maker kit aimed at developing computational making skills. We approach instructional design by drawing on the authors' lived experiences as schoolteachers, computing education and HCI scholars, and learning technologists, while engaging with the English national curriculum through an interdisciplinary lens that integrates computing with art and design. This approach facilitates the development of creative and constructing skills essential to e-textile design, while enabling students to apply computing knowledge to create functional artifacts. Our work shows how art and design can be effectively integrated with technical skill development. Furthermore, we demonstrate that "SewSimple" offers both usability and educational affordances necessary to support teaching objectives and achieve English computing curriculum goals

Climate Places: Floating University Berlin

A chapter in a book of case studies honouring the life and work of the late Peter Blundell-Jones. The chapter draws on the work of the research collective MOULD (of which Jeremy Till is a founding member), and in particular their identification of eight 'sites' that architecture needs to address in the face of climate breakdown

While the Gods Were Busy with Another Child

While the Gods Were Busy with Another Child by Andrea Luka Zimmerman (2026, 25mins) This deeply exploratory work is drawn exclusively from the eclectic personal and public archive, in multiple formats, of Andrea’s life until their lasting estrangement from both parents, aged 30. Alternating between the playful, poetic and unsettling, While the Gods… collages together photographs, 16mm, VHS, interviews and diary entries in a process of profound and necessary self – and social interrogation. Unflinching in its presentation and analysis of a precarious and challenging working-class childhood and adolescence in 1970s Munich, nevertheless While the Gods… manifests an enduring and wayward spirit of resistance, seeding the possibility of living a life on one’s own terms. distributed by LU

Closing the Capability Gap: Embedding Service Design in Frontline Professional Development

This report examines how service design capability can be systematically embedded within Continuing Professional Development (CPD) frameworks for frontline public sector workers in the UK. While service design has become increasingly influential in government, digital, and strategic transformation roles, frontline professionals such as care workers, housing officers, librarians, and benefits advisers—remain largely excluded from access to design-led learning. These workers represent nearly a third of the UK workforce and are often best positioned to identify service challenges, yet existing CPD structures prioritise compliance and regulation over reflective, experiential problem-solving. Using an exploratory, qualitative research approach, the study combines a literature and policy review, analysis of international case studies from Norway, Sweden, and Portugal, and semi-structured interviews with UK practitioners across local government, design consultancy, academia, and professional training. The findings demonstrate that embedding service design into frontline CPD requires more than introducing new training courses. Instead, it demands coordinated system-level change across policy, funding, organisational culture, procurement, and workforce structures. Evidence from adult learning theory and workplace learning research shows strong alignment between service design and effective professional development when learning is experiential, collaborative, and embedded in real work. International models such as StimuLab, Experio Lab, and LabX illustrate how design capability can be scaled through sustained investment, embedded learning, and communities of practice. However, UK-specific barriers—particularly lack of time, negative perceptions of design, and limited organisational support—must be addressed. The report concludes that extending design capability to the frontline represents a significant opportunity for strengthening public services. Achieving this requires system-level commitment to workforce development that recognises service design as a core professional capability rather than a specialist or optional skil

Make it SewSimple: Navigating UK Curriculum and Classroom Practice in Secondary Computing Education with E-textiles

This paper explores the potential of integrating e-textiles as part of the approach to delivering computing in UK secondary schools. As one of the few UK-based exploratory studies of teachers’ experiences, it investigates how e-textile platforms such as the "SewSimple" maker kit and the BBC micro:bit can be incorporated into Key Stage 3 computing education (ages 11-14), taking into account both English national curriculum requirements and the realities of classroom practice. Our research question is: How do teachers perceive the potential of including e-textiles as part of computing education in English secondary schools? In summary, our research contributes to secondary computing education in three ways. First, we examine teachers’ direct, cross-disciplinarity experiences in two participatory design workshops using a newly designed e-textile platform and extend the limited discussion on supporting the BBC micro:bit in e-textile education. Second, we specifically identify opportunities, barriers, and challenges across three dimensions: school planning, national curriculum guidance, and practical e-textile implementation. Third, we offer insights into best practices for supporting maker technology adoption and pedagogical practices within existing institutional structures to maximize students' benefits for secondary school computing education

Expanding the scope: Presence, Visibility and Interpretation

This chapter investigates how selected contemporary artists are making work using sound technologies in ways that challenge the insistently prevalent idea of what constitutes humanness. These works question the accompanying historic colonial, binary, and anthropocentric underpinnings that have fed into the idea of the human. They each focus, in different ways, on the concerns and subjectivities of beings that might be considered ‘outsiders’ or ‘other’ to this common conception of ‘human’ and extend to the more-than-human

Slippage of Leisure: Walking as a Form of Socio-Political Way of Transforming Civic Experience

The study sees walking as a critical subject, looking at how walking serves as a revolutionary way to reinverting networking and transform the experience of social life. With the blurred boundary between the discourse of leisure and political functionality, the study posits walking as a participatory radicalisation of a determined and ongoing interest, involved in urban sociological struggles. The chapter employs Bangkok and Hong Kong as two case studies, addressing the discourse of which walking becomes a legitimate cultural force and negotiates with the authorities. Walking is undeniably different in cities of the Global South with notable cases of Hong Kong and Bangkok demonstrating how the sociological landscape of walking participates in responding to the political injustice and eagerness to express oneself or the collective desire. The practice of walking in Bangkok and Hong Kong marks the discursive change, where revolution against the state power is no longer understood as overthrowing the governing body; but instead, being seen as the creation of bonding and reclaiming the public space - highlighting the sense of space, place, and community across different scales of the urban environment. A walk down the streets connect people and the environment, inhibits the sociopolitical tissues, and questions the temporal void in the civic setting. This paper aims to investigate the relation of walking cities and their collective identity in pursuit of leisure of the ideals

Touching Sounds: ASMR as a Digital Remedy

Contemporary media cultures are characterised by an overflow of stimuli. The constant need for connection leads to calls for disconnection and recuperation. What if some of this digital exhaustion may be undone through digital remedies? The emergent genre of ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is composed of videos, often shared and found on social media, that brings together visual and aural aesthetics to evoke a tactile response, arguably undoing some of the dispersing effects of digital media. This chapter explores the remedial potentials of digital media in countering the pathos associated with the (over)use of social media, computers, and smartphones, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, by examining the modes of connections offered by ASMR. It does so by analysing the formal similarities of media of disparate effects in their mode of dissemination and consumption but underscoring the different types of connection at stake in this techno-cultural context. The analysis will be directed at the aesthetics of ASMR videos on YouTube such as the channels of ASMR Darling and Gibi ASMR, with a particular emphasis on videos in which they perform in medical scenarios. The aesthetics of these videos articulated here extend from one explicitly about identity and performance to one that concerns a range of sensory experiences associated with this genre

Neurodiversity Meet-Up @ CHI: Building a Neuro-Affirming Community in HCI

This Meet-Up aims to support the neurodiverse communities at CHI and broaden our examination of our practices, with the goal of fostering neuro-affirming environments both within and outside academia. Following our Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting at CHI last year, we aim to further establish a sense of community, continuity, and tradition at CHI and continue these discussions in the long term. We build on our existing resources and community from this SIG and seek to continue extending it in future years, welcoming participants of any neurotype to join us in this endeavour. We focus on shared strategies, creating infrastructure, and providing access to information through documentation. We will discuss how different actors at micro(individual), meso(community), and macro(structural) levels can help distribute access labour through a World Café-style discussion, followed by a document of resources for the community to access