The physical and digital worlds are wide apart. Each has its own design professionals: product designers and human-computer interaction experts. However, as computers are becoming ubiquitous, embedded in our everyday objects and environments and embodied in the way we experience them in our everyday lives, this divide becomes problematic. This dilemma is accentuated by the parallel threat of demassification, the potential loss of material and social properties when artefacts become digital. In this paper we argue for embodied interaction as a useful stance for designing beyond this physical-digital divide. This term has been coined by Paul Dourish in the phenomenological tradition, for the creation, manipulation and sharing of meaning through engaged interaction with artefacts. 

Within the Participatory Design community as well as the Computer Supported Cooperative Work tradition, a lot of effort has been put into the question of letting field studies inform design. In this paper, we describe how game-like approaches can be used as a way of exploring a practice from a design point of view. Thinking of ethnographic fieldwork as a base for sketching, rather than descriptions, creates openness that invites collaborative authoring. The concept of playful collaborative exploration suggests certain ways of interacting with material from field studies so that it becomes a design material for an open-ended design process. We have carried out field studies, transformed the field material into design material, and set up a design game for working with it together with the people we followed in the field. The design game builds on an idea about the power of narratives and the benefits of constraining rules. We believe that this framework for collaboration opens for playfulness, experimentation, and new design ideas.

Despite the interest in physical interfaces, field studies directly informing development and field trials of prototypes are rare. Particularly rare are design projects that integrate the space and existing artifacts as a resource. We report on the development of an interactive learning environment in support of students of architecture and interaction design. Based on ethnographic fieldwork we specified a set of qualities of the learning environment, which guided the development of physical interfaces (using tags, sensors, video tracking, physical and digital infrastructures). To investigate how students would integrate technologies in their work settings we have organized field trials with open prototypes. These showed the value and some means of mixing evolving artifacts with digital media. In interactive installations students used the space as a stage to experience and explore aspects of places and situations.

As digital media are becoming more and more ubiquitous in our environments, it has the potential to capture and mediate situated information expressing the embedded nature of practice. Within healthcare settings, such information is often important for patients' learning about diseases or injuries as well as their own engagement in rehabilitation and treatment. It is possible to design the necessary interaction around digital media in such a way that it becomes part of a collaborative articulation in consultations, hence increasing the degree of patient participation. This paper reports on two interrelated projects exploring how this can be achieved within the domain of hand surgery rehabilitation. Our aim is to contribute to patients' possibilities to learn about the injury and the recovery process. Furthermore we seek to contribute to the field of human-computer interaction by showing how physical forms and explicit interaction can facilitate collaborative articulation processes.