Elena Márquez Segura

University Carlos III de Madrid | UC3M · Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Sensory technologies alter how we perceive our body, which can have profound implications for multiple domains. Prior work has contributed a myriad of artefacts and evaluative studies, but we still lack design knowledge to design meaningful body perception alterations facilitated by sensory technologies. To address this gap, we draw from soma desig...

Wearables integrating movement sonification can support body-perception changes and relatedly physical activity; yet, we lack design principles for such sonifications. Through two mixed-methods studies, we investigate sound pitch and movement direction interaction effects on self-perception during squats exercises. We measured effects on body-perce...

Many technologies for promoting physical activity (PA) give limited importance to critical variables for engagement in PA, such as negative body perceptions. Here, we aim to address this gap by incorporating barriers and experienced body sensations into the design process for wearables and body-based devices thus expanding the design space for such...

Body perception has a significant impact on people’s motor, emotional, and social functioning. We evaluated the potential of four different existing wearable prototypes, which provide sound or haptic bodily feedback to alter body perception. In a Research through Design workshop, we invited professional dancers as expert study participants to explo...

Inspired by the strong concept of Intercorporeal Biofeedback, here we present the design and development of a minimalist embodied sketching toolkit for designing wearables for motor learning. The toolkit includes technology probes featuring minimalist wearable digital units that support hands-on explorations and the design of potential future inter...

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,...

An expert introduction to the world of “playful wearables” and their design, with a wide range of engaging examples, case studies, and exercises. This pioneering introduction to the world of wearable technology takes readers beyond the practical realm (think Fitbits, Apple Watches, and smartglasses) to consider another important side of the technol...

The paramount measure of success for a machine learning model has historically been predictive power and accuracy, but even a gold-standard accuracy benchmark fails when it inappropriately misrepresents a disabled or minority body. In this work, we reframe the role of machine learning as a provocation through a case study of participatory work co-c...

In this paper, we highlight how including technology, movement or play can boost a design process but with unbalanced amounts can also hamper the process. We provide a set of examples where we miscalculated the amount of technology, movement, or play that was needed in a design activity in such a way that it became counterproductive and for each ex...

Movement-based design methods are increasingly adopted to help design rich embodied experiences. While there are well-known methods in the field, there is no systematic overview to help designers choose among them, adapt them, or create their own. We collected 41 methods used by movement design researchers and employed a practice-based, bottom-up a...

Technology-supported movement learning has received increased attention in HCI. Previous design research has mostly focused on individual experiences, even though the social and situated context is essential to movement learning practices. Based on the experiences from two design projects in the fitness domain featuring open-ended biofeedback artef...

The growing interest in wearables for sports and fitness calls for design knowledge and conceptualizations that can help shape future designs. Towards that end, we present and discuss a design space of wearables for these practices, based on a survey of previous work. Through a thematic analysis of 47 research publications in the domain, we surface...

Despite 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...

Technology probes have been used in co-creative embodied design processes to spur creativity and generate design ideas. We present a range of Training Technology Probes (TTPs), designed to facilitate collocated physical and social training. We deployed them in the context of a physical training course for children with motor challenges, where they...

Therapy can be costly, time-consuming, repetitive, and difficult. Games have the power to teach transferable skills, can turn repetitive tasks into engaging mechanics, have been proven to be effective at delivering various forms of therapy, and can be deployed at large scales. Therapy games represent fertile ground for connected learning. In this w...

In this paper we discuss strategies to support our design research agenda of promoting playful engagement within everyday activities and situations. We argue that this agenda is in alignment with the ethos of the third wave of HCI. To support design in this space, we build upon Situated Play Design, an open methodological frame that focuses on unco...

Exergames and social physical play have many benefits, yet most exertion games have focused on singleplayer experiences or support only a veneer of social play affordances. The challenge remains: How can one design well-balanced exergames that are fun, an effective workout, AND a rich social experience for co-located players? The poster summarizes...

Despite the growth of Virtual Reality (VR), the design space of collocated social play in VR remains narrow. Here we present Astaire, a collaborative hybrid VR dance game for two players sharing an HTC Vive VR system. The game resulted from a design research process using embodied design methods, and drawing upon concepts in HCI and Play Design, in...

In user studies with children, it is important to use age appropriate evaluation tools to better understand their preferences, opinions, and thoughts. Here, we studied two accepted evaluation tools: The Five Degrees of Happiness, and the Sticky Ladder rating scale; together with the Paper Ladder, a paper version of the latter. Thirty-six preschoole...

Training can be challenging at times, and even more so to users with movement mastery and body awareness issues,. like children with sensory-based motor disorder (SBMD). They often experience less enjoyment when engaging with physical activities. In this project, our goal is to support physical training of children with SBMD through the design of p...

Despite many benefits of playing and exercising together in terms of motivation, engagement, and social relationships, many exergames are designed to be single player, while others implement only a facade of social play (e.g., leaderboards). The challenge remains: how can exergames be designed to balance fun, exertion, and social connection? In thi...

We propose a Situated Play Design (SPD) workshop aimed at exploring how culture and traditions can guide playful design. Using food as an accessible starting point, we invite scholars from diverse communities to share, analyze, and make creative use of playful traditions, and prototype new and interesting eating experiences. Through hands-on engage...

A promising domain technology design for physical training is as assistive tangible and wearable tools to help people understand, access, and act on their movement senses. To design these tools in close relation to a targeted training practice, we propose an embodied design activity using Training Technology Probes (TTPs). These are pieces of techn...

We present 'True Colors,' a social wearable prototype designed to augment co-located social interaction among players in a LARP (live action role play). We designed it to enable the emergence of rich social dynamics between wearers and non-wearers. True Colors is Y-shaped, worn around the upper body, and has distinct front and back interfaces to af...

We present 'True Colors': a social wearable prototype designed to augment co-located social interaction of players in a LARP (live action role play). We designed it to enable the emergence of rich social dynamics between wearers and non-wearers. True Colors is Y-shaped, worn around the upper body, and has front and back interfaces to distinguish be...

User involvement is well established in game and play design. But in a time when play design is becoming relevant in domains beyond pure entertainment, and play blends into everyday activity in diverse ways, we need to revisit old, and develop new, user involvement methods. Using a situated perspective and Research through Design, we present Situat...

Wearables are integrated into many aspects of our lives, yet, we still need further guidance to develop devices that truly enhance in-person interactions, rather than detract from them by taking people's attention away from the moment and one another. The value of this paper is twofold: first, we present an annotated portfolio of 'social wearables'...

Embodied design methods are gaining popularity among design researchers. They leverage the physical and situated experience of designers to access and better understand present and future situations, humans, and design opportunities. Here, we propose a workshop to learn about, engage with, and discuss larping (live action role playing) as an embodi...

Designing technology to support instructed physical training is challenging, due to how instructions rely on complex interactional and situational social processes. To support in-the-moment instruction, we engaged in a co-creative Research through Design process with a Yoga instructor. Together, we designed and deployed Enlightened Yoga: a training...

Physical training can be frustrating and hard, especially for those who experience additional challenges to access and control their proprioceptive senses. In the context of designing for children with Sensory-based Motor Disorder, we designed and deployed a series of Training Technology Probes to be used in circus training. Here we focus on how th...

Today's spectrum of playful fitness solutions features systems that are clearly game-first or fitness-first in design; hardly any sufficiently incorporate both areas. Consequently, existing applications and evaluations often lack in focus on attractiveness and effectiveness, which should be addressed on the levels of body, controller, and game scen...

Vulnerability 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...

Balance is an essential physical skill to master, but a challenging one given that it requires a heightened body awareness to control, maintain and develop. In HCI physical training research, the design space of technology support for developing such body awareness remains narrow. Here, we introduce BalBoa, a balancing board to support balance trai...

Although the use of technology to support physical training has been gaining traction in HCI, the design space of sensory augmentations to improve and support physical training remains narrow. To help open this design space in the domain of collocated instructed physical training, we first present Sensory Bodystorming, a hybrid ideation method infl...

SpokeIt is a mobile serious game for health designed to support speech articulation therapy. Here, we present SpokeIt as well as 2 preceding speech therapy prototypes we built, all of which use a novel offline critical speech recognition system capable of providing feedback in real-time. We detail key design motivations behind each of them and repo...

Documenting embodied ideation activities is challenging, as they often result in ephemeral design constructs and elusive design knowledge difficult to document and represent. Here, we explore documentation forms designers can use internally during the design process in the domain of movement-based interaction in collocated, social settings. Using p...

The use of technology to assist in instructed fitness training in collocated social settings is underexplored. Here we focus on how technology can be designed to fit within, leverage, and be part of the strategies and tools that fitness trainees and instructors use to detect and correct performance errors. Drawing on ethnomethodological approaches...

The emerging ecology of commercial social VR currently includes a diverse set of applications and competing models of what it means to be social in VR. This study maps a slice of this ecology, comparing and contrasting ways different applications frame, support, shape, or constrain social interaction. We deploy a method of design-oriented autobiogr...

In 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 a...

Designing 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 element...

Proprioceptive awareness is an essential but challenging skill to master. In HCI physical training research, the design space of how technology can help people to develop such awareness remains narrow. Here, we present a technological device that exteriorizes misalignments of different body parts by translating them to haptic feedback. We present p...

Here we present a social wearables prototype, i.e. a wearable that augments collocated social interaction: the Lågom. This design is meant to support people to be aware of and better regulate their verbal participation in group discussions. Lågom takes the shape of a colorful, bulky and funny looking flower that senses the wearer's speaking and res...

The Firefly is a wearable designed to encourage the physical and emotional connection of players of a larp (live action role play game). It is worn as a bracelet whose color changes depending to their connection to another Firefly. This wearable design reflects the positive personal and emotional impact that casual and deeper social interactions ma...

We present SpokeIt, a novel speech therapy game co-created with users, medical experts, speech pathologists, developmental psychologists, and game designers. Our serious game for health aims is to augment and support in-office speech therapy sessions with an at-home supported speech therapy experience. SpokeIt was co-created using participatory met...

A set of prominent designers embarked on a research journey to explore aesthetics in movement-based design. Here we unpack one of the design sensitivities unique to our practice: a strong first person perspective—where the movements, somatics and aesthetic sensibilities of the designer, design researcher and user are at the forefront. We present an...

We present Paper Ladder, a low-cost, light-weight, and paper-based variant of the Sticky Ladder rating scale to collect children's product preferences in user studies. This paper version revamps the original, effective but arguably impractical evaluation method by making it more accessible to researchers. In this paper, we show its potential with p...

In this paper, we present All the Feels, a tool that provides an overlay of biometric and webcam-derived data onto the interface of the popular video game streaming service, Twitch. This overlay provides visualization of heart rate, skin conductance, and facial emotion recognition. It is intended to enhance the spectator experience and improve stre...

During the last decade, there has been an increasing interest in supporting social play through the design of collocated digital games, alongside efforts to better understand social-physical modes of play. In this paper, we present relevant insights from a well-established gaming community, the larp (Live Action Role Play) community. This community...

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". I...

Numerous studies have foregrounded how play is only partially shaped by the artifacts that their designers design. The play activity can change the structures framing it, turning players into co-designers through the mere act of playing. This article contributes to our understanding of how we can design for play taking into account that play has th...

Designing for interactive performances is challenging both in terms of technology design, and of understanding the interplay between technology, narration, and audience interactions. Bio-sensors and bodily tracking technologies afford new ways for artists to engage with audiences, and for audiences to become part of the artwork. Their deployment ra...

After a decade of movement-based interaction in human-computer interaction, designing for the moving body still remains a challenge. Research in this field requires methods to help access, articulate, and harness embodied experiences in ways that can inform the design process. To address this challenge, this article appropriates bodystorming, an em...

The concept of playification has recently been proposed as an extension of, or alternative to, gamification. We present a playification design project targeting the re-design of physiotherapy rehabilitative sessions for elderly inpatients. The menial and repetitive nature of the physical exercises targeted for design might seem ideal for shallow wi...

This paper presents a design case study of Yamove!, a well-received dance battle game. The primary aim for the project was to design a mobile-based play experience that enhanced in-person social interaction and connection. The game emphasized the pleasures of mutual, improvised amateur movement choreography at the center of the experience, achieved...

Designing bodily experiences is challenging. In this paper, we propose embodied sketching as a way of practicing design that involves understanding and designing for bodily experiences early in the design process. Embodied sketching encompasses ideation methods that are grounded in, and inspired by, the lived experience and includes the social and...

Designing body games, games in which the main source of enjoyment comes from bodily engagement, is not an easy task. This article reports on a holistic design approach that considers the social and physical setting of the activity as design resources, together with the technology. We introduce the concept of embodied sketching as a method to gauge...

During the last decade, we have witnessed an increased interest in social play in digital games. With this comes an urge to understand better how to design and evaluate for this new form of play. In this chapter, we encapsulate best practices for game design and evaluation, grounded in other game researchers’ work, as well as our own research and p...

The Kathmandu kids workshops at Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE) brought together local children and leading entertainment media researchers from around the world in a daylong exploration of how children interact with and think about the latest innovations in computer entertainment and what these innovations or the lack thereof mean to thei...

Characters that cross dimensions have elicited an avid interest in literature and cinema. In analogy to these characters, we explore the concept of migration: process by which an agent moves between embodiments, being active in only one at a time. We developed an autonomous artificial pet with two embodiments: a virtual within a smartphone and a ph...

The challenge of designing for games and playful activities has moved past the technical, to focus on how to design for a design space where the threads of the digital technologies and the physical world interweave and entangle creating a hybrid fabric where play can take place. But how can we bridge between the digital and physical world where pla...

This paper investigates user perceptions of continuous identity as agents migrate between different embodiments. It reports an experiment seeking to establish whether migrating or not migrating the interaction memory of the agent would affect the user’s perception of consistent agent identity over different embodiments. The experiment involved a tr...

This paper discusses an experiment examining the impact of interaction memory on user perceptions of a virtual agent with multiple embodiments and migration between them. The outcome showed users perceived agents with memory as more competent, but it had no significant effect on a strong perception of consistent identity across multiple embodiments

The past decade has seen an increased focus on body movement in computer games. We take a step further to look at body games: games in which the main source of enjoyment comes from bodily engagement. We argue that for these games, the physical and social settings become just as important design resources as the technology. Although all body games b...

This paper highlights initial observations from a user study performed in an assisted living facility in Spain, in which we introduced the NAO to assist regular physiotherapy practices. The NAO is introduced in order to take on one of the usual roles of the physiotherapist: modeling movements for the inpatients. We also introduced a virtual version...

We created a fictional story about a bunch of interactive robot toys, the Oriboos, which travel to different schools where children interact and play with them. The story is based on two workshops done in Sweden and Nepal.