Playful interactions have the potential to resolve some of the shortcomings inherent in collaboration in VR space, and offer a potential path for improving collaboration by taking greater advantage of the wide range of interactions possible in the virtual environment. Building toward this goal, this thesis experimentally evaluates two potential approaches to developing social VR collaborative experiences. The first approach offers a visual abstraction of conversational state, allowing participants to see the recent history of their conversation and adjust accordingly. The other introduces an ambient agent which does not participate in the conversation or provide any prescriptive advice, but instead passively indicates whether the conversations has become "imbalanced". They were evaluated through user tests involving a collaborative problem solving task in order to establish their effectiveness in social VR situations.

Virtual reality is a new medium slowly getting popularized that introduced a new form of merged play: hybridized reality. Collocated physical virtual reality games are an interesting and diverse design sub-space of this that offers a wealth of improvements over traditional virtual reality games. This work tries to probe only a small facet of this area to demonstrate its potential for more technology-supported and hybridized reality games that lead to increased interpersonal relationships and experiences for both the spectators and the players.

Social VR currently includes a diverse set of applications and competing models of what it means to be social in VR. This work tries to grasp the current situation of what industry is focusing upon and then demonstrates a few interventions in the social VR meeting spaces and analysing the usability with other developers and understanding the future research in Social VR.

Toward innovating ways to help people develop interdependent, more connected ways of relating, I took research through design (RtD) approach to explore how ubiquitous and embodied technology design could encourage connection and draw people's attention to each other. Focused on wearable technology, I built on my background in fashion design, psychology, and interactive storytelling. I identified and explored the design space of social wearables, i.e., wearable technology that augments co-located interaction. This dissertation contributes: (1) practice-based knowledge through three case studies of social wearables design prototypes, (2) conceptual contributions through a design framework for social wearables, the strong concept of synergistic social technology, and the experiential quality of vulnerability, and (3) translational contributions that bridge theoretical framing with practice in the form of instructional materials, to teach and practice social wearable design. The prototypes described in the case studies serve as design exemplars for the design space. I made copies of each final wearable design to test with people in social situations. These studies resulted in surfacing intermediate-level knowledge, thus contributing to theoretical framing. Finally, the instructional materials are starting points for educators and designers to teach and develop social wearables.

My dissertation research has explored the potential of novel interactive prototypes aimed at supporting social connection and understanding in social virtual reality (VR) meetings. Working with a research team, I engaged in a Research through Design (RtD) process to prototype design interventions, and to evaluate their effectiveness in supporting team process through targeted surveys, focus group interviews, lab studies, and technology probes. This work resulted in both conceptual and practice-focused contributions, deepening understanding of how novel design interventions might scaffold social processes in meetings, support balanced participation, help people come to decisions, and achieve shared support for ideas.

In this dissertation, I present my participatory design-led doctoral research exploring how to co-design technology that playfully enriches the experiential texture of people’s mundane, everyday activity. My work responds to the dominance of productivity-focused agendas in technology design; it aligns with an existing body of works that foreground the importance of designing technologies and experiences that cultivate alternative, less materially productive societal values such as social connection, emotional fulfillment, or cultural richness.

To facilitate a move towards technology futures that are more socio-emotionally sensitive and democratic, I present a three-fold contribution. The first dimension is conceptual: I present the “Technology for Situated and Emergent Play” “bridging concept”, an “intermediate-knowledge” form that highlights three experiential qualities of play that have socio-emotional value and provides inspirational examples of how technology might incorporate them. My second contribution is methodological: I propose “Situated Play Design” as a novel methodology for designing for play from the bottom-up and in contextually sensitive ways, as well as an early toolkit of methods to put it in practice. Finally, I contribute domain-specific knowledge in two specific areas within tech design: by experimenting with the above concepts and methodology, I investigated increasingly playful avenues for technology innovation in the domains of mealtime and urban experiences. Overall, my work will provoke, inspire, and empower designers to co-create, from the bottom-up and in imaginative ways, technology that enriches the experiential texture of mundane, day-to-day situations and activities. I hope it serves as the seed for an exciting research program exploring how to engage diverse stakeholders in co-designing technology futures that realize the playful potential of people’s day-to-day, in ways that privilege a diversity of perspectives alongside the designer’s expertise.

Remote collaboration has become increasingly necessary in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many coworkers and collaborators have moved in-person meetings to video conferencing (VC) interfaces such as Zoom. While not yet as common as video conferencing platforms, social virtual reality (VR) tools are becoming an increasingly viable option for how we choose to work remotely. Unlike other remote collaboration interfaces, VR affords near-complete immersion in a virtual environment while allowing users to construct virtual representations of themselves in the form of avatars. Remote teams may choose to use VR applications over traditional VC interfaces to feel more connected with one another, or enter office-like virtual spaces to foster a work-like environment. However, there is a surprising lack of research investigating how avatar presentation affects group collaboration, on both the individual and group level, with the added variable of environment. The present research investigates how creative brainstorming in virtual group settings is affected by avatar styles, environment, and an interplay between these two main elements of social VR platforms. We show that when given the choice, participants overwhelmingly prefer to embody fanciful-styled avatars as opposed to humanoid in both creative and business-style environments during a brainstorming task. Choosing such avatars led participants to report increased comfort and ease in engaging with their partner, as well as more potent feelings of creativity. Such results demonstrate that creative freedom in avatar choice matters more than using environment or situational context as a proxy in decision making. We expect that the findings of our research will catalyze reflection for developers and designers of social VR applications, namely those offering business or productivity-styled platforms, on what avatars their users truly want to embody and what should be offered to them.

All the Feels is a tool I created 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 for two purposes: one, to enhance the spectator experience and improve streamer-spectator connection and two, to evaluate players’ emotional response to games. I present results of a few preliminary studies (phase 1 and phase 2) investigating reactions to the

introduction of this tool in various environments through the Twitch streaming platform. The first two studies are accounts of results via live-testing with streamers and spectators, and the third is with the tool used in combination with other methods to evaluate player

experience in games. This work opens up opportunities to improve the streaming experience and spectator engagement through the introduction of an interface that includes biometric signals, and also has broader applications as a tool for understanding player experience in general. The thesis describes this tool both as a way of evaluating players’ emotional response to games, and also as a way for spectators to see players’ emotional response to games. I discuss the implementation in terms of these two different contexts, while providing ideas for future use of this tool in games user research.

Games and play have the potential to offer people with disabilities a cost-effective, personalized, data-driven, connected, and motivating context for otherwise tedious and repetitive wellness routines. The paramount challenge in creating playful health structures and games is creating a motivating experience with mechanics that translate into improved health outcomes—a wicked problem. To this end, I use Research through Design to explore multiple approaches to the co-creation of games and play with various populations, including children with speech impairments, adults with developmental disabilities, stroke survivors, and children with Sensory-Based Motor Disorder. I have initiated and developed three health applications, which serve as case studies where I explore identifying best practices, unique insights, and suggestions for future creators. Specifically, I discuss game-first versus therapy-first approaches and closed-game systems versus more open-ended playful systems. Through this work, I have co-created two design methods for creating playful technology drawing inspiration from social media and from content creators with disabilities. The first, Situated Play Design, is a novel approach to uncovering contextual manifestations of play as design material for everyday technology. The second, DREEM (Disability-Related Empathy from Existing Media) leverages the rich cultural labor from content creators with disabilities as an entry point for developing an authentic, empathy-based assistive technology research agenda. For both of these design methods, I have employed a series of design strategies resulting in the co-creation of speculative design catalogs that serve as case studies to exemplify the value of these methods.

The contributions of this dissertation are two-fold. The first dimension is applied: I build well-informed systems that provide a motivating context for various forms of therapy for multiple populations of people with disabilities. The second dimension is methodological: I propose Situated Play Design and DREEM as novel approaches to creating playful technology rooted in perspectives of disability social justice. Overall, my work hopes to inspire, provoke, and empower designers to co-create innovative technology that improves the condition of some of today’s toughest Wicked Problems through play and disability advocacy.

This body of work uses Research-through-Design methods to develop deformable controllers that serve target populations in self-regulation techniques. Two key projects are described, with several iterations of each. The controllers were developed using off-the-shelf materials as a basis for shared development between research groups. The first project presented is the development of an anthropomorphic creature, in the tradition of Socially Assistive Robotics, designed to scaffold children's emotional self regulation through an intimate-space interaction (taking place with the object held close to the body). I describe the project from brainstorming to iteration to deployment, as well as knowledgetransfer to a private company for deployment and some of their findings. The second project described is a deformable controller in the form of a ball that can be used to track fidgeting differences and focus intervention, between neuro-typical and ADHD users. Both these projects were developed as part of multidisciplinary teams with members at and beyond UCSC. The development and deployment of these devices extends research insights about the benifits of deformable controllers that leverage granular repetitive interactions to provide practical and expressive value to end users, while providing a research platform for further investigation into personalized interaction.