Embodied design is fostering relevant advancements in novel design methods for learning and innovation. Nevertheless, practice and research show that teaching and facilitating embodied design is a challenging task. This paper presents a playful approach for conducting embodied design sessions, which adapts existing card-game mechanics to improve the accessibility and usability of existing embodied design toolboxes during a design session. Our approach hypothesizes that card-game mechanics can address usual pitfalls common to card-based facilitation toolkits by adding structure, guidelines, and playfulness. We also envision that such toolboxes, that have become popular in the research in participatory and co-design contexts, can seamlessly incorporate card-game mechanics like the ones we propose. We describe the setting of the design session, as well as present and discuss the results obtained from observation and participant questionnaires. Finally, we also outline the next steps for designing an embodied workshop in sustainability based on the results from this study. We strive to analyze our proposed method by its capacity to blend into the structure and materials of a card-based toolbox, eliciting the playfulness embedded in the leveraged card-game mechanics to implicitly provide support and guidance through the session, to both facilitators and participants, without disrupting the flexible and open flow of an movement-based design session.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), is a quickly developing field capable of revolutionizing educational digital escape rooms. Traditionally reliant on static content, these immersive environments have faced limitations in adaptability, replayability, and personalization. However, recent advancements in AI and GenAI enable dynamic puzzle generation, adaptive storytelling, and AI-driven non-player characters (NPCs) with agentic AI, allowing for highly responsive and personalized experiences. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in integrating AI (with the focus on GenAI) into educational digital escape rooms, integrating interdisciplinary insights from cognitive science, game design, and machine learning, and showing how AI can improve engagement, scalability, and content diversity, but also indicates challenges related to ethical AI use, bias in algorithmic decision-making, and the need for robust evaluation frameworks to assess player satisfaction and learning outcomes.

Movement-based design methods have gained increased attention across various research fields and practices, particularly in interaction design. By engaging the body in movement, these methods have the potential to explore a richer, more intuitive, and immersive user experience. A recent project MeCaMinD1 brought together researchers from interaction and sports design to explore, collect, and document movement-based methods and make them practically useful across domains. The methods were explored through a series of workshops, furthering the team’s understanding of their use and practical applicability. This understanding was compiled into a set of design cards that we present here. We discuss the experience of using the resulting cards in movement-based design sessions. We found that while the cards are mostly used in designing, planning, and preparing sessions, they also function as support during the design sessions, used by both facilitators and participants. Based on a final ideation session with both novice and experienced facilitators, we sketch ways to support managing the cards during sessions, integrating them with movement and physical action.

More-than-human approaches to HCI design research have gained traction in recent years, facilitating a need to employ new methods that decenter the human perspective. We propose live-action roleplay (larp), as a method and practice within HCI that can support perspective taking and empathy-building with non-humans actors. In this paper, we discuss a local community workshop where we facilitated numerous body-based and larp activities surrounding the theme of sustainability, and reflect on the strengths larp offers in service of decentering the human perspective.

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 example mention possible adaptations. Finally, we highlight three existing approaches that can balance the overabundance of technology, movement, and play in design processes: activity-centered design, somaesthetic design, and perspective-changing movement-based design.  

Warm-ups, as preliminary activities to physical training, are an inherent part of any physical exercise and sports practice. Rooted in the concept of embodied cognition, embodied design is a paradigm that shifts the focus of interaction design from external artefacts and devices to the human body (Svanæs & Barkhuus, 2020). A body-centred design emphasises the importance of having the human body at the centre of the entire design cycle, conveying movement, physical expressivity, feelings, and aesthetics, in a design process that uses the body as both a resource and target. Designing with the body is, therefore, a physically demanding activity that requires a specific set of warm-ups to educate and prepare designers mentally, socially, and physically for the act of embodied design. We propose social videogames as a resourceful framework for creating such a set of warm-up exercises. This paper presents a methodology comprising off-the-shelf commercial videogames whose rules have been adapted for embodied design. Three studies have been executed to validate the game's capacity as warm-up activity and icebreaker for embodied creativity and to study the conditions for an optimal method facilitation to external instructors in preparation for an applied session. The method applied is qualitative and quantitative feedback data gathered from the three studies using questionnaires, tests, observation, and open interviews. The results of the series of studies showed the potential of the proposed methodology as warm-ups for teaching, training, and practising embodied design, as well as giving insights on how to facilitate it. Overall, the game-based warm-ups for embodied design preparation using off-the-shelf movement games have a social and playful nature. The proposed twisted gameplays make them suitable to exert body moves and get ready to think and design with their bodies. The study on facilitation shows the need for a preparation session supported by an experienced person. However, one introductory session is enough for the toolbox to become an easily configurable resource that adapts to the facilitator's needs and goals. We suggest including sample implementation cases along with instruction cards of the embodied games. Further, the warm-up games are customisable using the toolbox's modifier cards. 

MnemoRoom4U is an AR (Augmented Reality) tool that uses a memory-palace strategy for foreign-language training. A memory palace helps information recall with the aid of object association in visualizations of familiar spatial surroundings. In MnemoRoom4U, paper or digital flashcards are re-placed with virtual notes containing L1 words and their L2 translations that are placed on top of real physical objects inside a familiar environment, such as one’s room, home, office space, etc. The AR-supported notes aid associative memory by establishing a relationship between the physical objects in the user’s mind and the virtual lexis to be retained in L2. Learners first set up a path through their familiar environment, attaching virtual sticky notes—each containing a target word to be memorized together with its corresponding source-language translation—to real-life objects (e.g. furniture in their homes or offices). They then take the same path again, reviewing all the words, and finally carry out a retention test. MnemoRoom4U is a technological artifact designed for specific didactic purposes in the Unity game engine with the ARCore augmented-reality plug-in for Android. This work takes a Design-Science approach with phenomenological, exploratory underpinnings tracking back to the efficiency of spatial mnemonics previously reported quantitatively and combines it with AR technology to effect L2 vocabulary recall.

We propose the Interactive Constrained MAP-Elites, a quality-diversity solution for game content generation, implemented as a new feature of the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer (EDD): a mixed-initiative co-creativity tool for designing dungeons. The feature uses the MAP-Elites algorithm, an illumination algorithm that segregates the population among several cells depending on their scores with respect to different behavioral dimensions. Users can flexibly and dynamically alternate between these dimensions anytime, thus guiding the evolutionary process in an intuitive way, and then incorporate suggestions produced by the algorithm in their room designs. At the same time, any modifications performed by the human user will feed back into MAP-Elites, closing a circular workflow of constant mutual inspiration. This paper presents the algorithm followed by an in-depth evaluation of the expressive range of all possible dimension combinations in several scenarios, and discusses their influence in the fitness landscape and in the overall performance of the procedural content generation in EDD.

Narratives are a predominant part of games, and their design poses challenges when identifying, encoding, interpreting, evaluating, and generating them. One way to address this would be to approach narrative design in a more abstract layer, such as narrative structures. This paper presents Story Designer, a mixed-initiative co-creative narrative structure tool built on top of the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer (EDD) that uses tropes, narrative conventions found across many media types, to design these structures. Story Designer uses tropes as building blocks for narrative designers to compose complete narrative structures by interconnecting them in graph structures called narrative graphs. Our mixed-initiative approach lets designers manually create their narrative graphs and feeds an underlying evolutionary algorithm with those, creating quality-diverse suggestions using MAP-Elites. Suggestions are visually represented for designers to compare and evaluate and can then be incorporated into the design for further manual editions. At the same time, we use the levels designed within EDD as constraints for the narrative structure, intertwining both level design and narrative. We evaluate the impact of these constraints and the system’s adaptability and expressiveness, resulting in a potential tool to create narrative structures combining level design aspects with narrative.  

We propose modeling designer style in mixed-initiative game content creation tools as archetypical design traces. These design traces are formulated as transitions between design styles; these design styles are in turn found through clustering all intermediate designs along the way to making a complete design. This method is implemented in the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer, a research platform for mixed-initiative systems to create adventure and dungeon crawler games. We present results both in the form of design styles for rooms, which can be analyzed to better understand the kind of rooms designed by users, and in the form of archetypical sequences between these rooms, i.e., Designer Personas.