Human traces scattered across urban landscapes can signify our everyday lives and societal vibrancy in subtle and poetic forms. In this paper, we explore how designed technology can engage biodata as evocative traces. To this end, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of HeartSway, an interactive hammock that captures a user’s heart rate and micro-movements as traces and replays them as an embodied experience for the next visitor. Through a qualitative field study (N=10), we find that HeartSway evokes feelings of connection, curiosity about prior users, and appreciation for shared human vitality. Our work contributes to understanding anonymous archival biodata as a design material for experiential urban traces. We offer design considerations for intimate asynchronous encounters between strangers in public spaces and for reimagining public amenities.

As generative AI (GenAI) chatbots become part of children’s lives, their perspectives on these technologies remain under-represented in research and design. This study examines how children use and perceive generative AI chatbots and how they imagine future possibilities with such tools. We conducted workshops in Vietnam, Finland, and Japan, where 32 children (ages 9-12) engaged in activities to imagine their future GenAI chatbots. Our findings show children’s perceptions of GenAI chatbots, which they use for information-seeking and learning. When imagining future GenAI chatbots, children envision chatbots that are bounded within domain-specific activities, helpful for learning, and safe. Our work highlights the importance of positioning children from being passive users of Gen AI chatbots to active contributors in shaping the future of human–AI interactions.

We share a speculative fabulation that imagines alternative relations to an increasingly polluted landscape, drawing from environmental illness narratives. The fabulation is brought to life through Ray-Flats, shoes that glow in proximity to toxic sites listed in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s publicly available database, and an accompanying navigational guide. The storied designs seek to make the extent of chemical pollution in our everyday landscapes perceptible while foregrounding environmental illness experiences as a resource for living in and navigating a toxic world. Bringing together crip and posthuman perspectives, we contribute: 1) an example of designing to stay with environmental precarity, 2) the concept of “felt space" for making diffuse and ongoing environmental problems affectively perceptible through embodied interaction design, and 3) critical reflections on using fabulations with material speculations to foreground marginal perspectives in design.

Emotion AI (EAI) is increasingly deployed and ethically controversial—motivating a need for greater public understanding, critique, and ethical discussions. Facial Emotion AI (FEAI) is a common type of EAI that infers emotions from facial expressions. We developed Explore-FEAI, an FEAI model and accompanying interactive website that offers open-ended exploration with FEAI firsthand. We designed a workshop wherein participants learn about FEAI using Explore-FEAI and discuss societal implications, partnering with local organizations to host community workshops (N=30). Our findings analyze participants’ growing critical AI literacy through exploring inputs/outputs, mechanistic reasoning, data critiques, sociocultural critiques, ethical concerns, and embodied and material exploration of FEAI. Our discussion offers informal embodied auditing as an approach for critical engagement with AI through embodied and material exploration, as well as reflections on informal auditing for supporting AI literacy, informal auditing for questioning EAI ethics, and expanding participation roles for more holistic EAI training.

To critically examine the role of AI in historical representation and resist anti-LGBTQIA+ biases and erasures, we leverage un/making and propose a tactic we name material reconfigurations. We share an autoethnographic account of un/making and materially reconfiguring AI-generated images of queer histories: the lead author’s memories of queer places and events. Through hand annotating, scratching, burying, submerging, and walking with physical images, they un/make and reconfigure, highlighting embodied aspects of archival records unparsable by generative AI. We propose that un/making and materially reconfiguring synthetic archival images can resist generative AI’s increasingly hegemonic role in misrepresenting historical data and erasing queer identities. We contribute reflections on un/making and material reconfigurations as tangible tactics for queering AI, attuning to queer temporalities to unsettle AI-generated histories, using embodied, autoethnographic practices as critical strategies, and working through tensions of use and refusal in Queer AI research.

Our project supports children's critical AI engagement with through participatory workshops envisioning public spaces. We ran a workshop with 9-12 year olds (n=7) combining AI, puppet-making, performance, and design futuring to reimagine civic spaces. Participants used ChatGPT to visualize changes to local places, created puppets representing different viewpoints, and performed debates about the proposed changes. Our findings reveal children's critical engagement with AI as a design tool, preference for iterative refinement, and desires for authentic over 'AI-like' content. This work contributes methods for engaging children in civic discussions through making and performing futures. It also demonstrates how these methods can scaffold critical AI literacy.

Thermal Painting is a probe to explore multisensory painting, aiming to defamiliarize, or present the familiar creative practice of painting in an unfamiliar way for artists. The system provides dynamic thermal feedback based on what color the artist is painting. In a qualitative, exploratory pilot study with 20 artists, we investigated how thermal sensations influenced their creative process. Artists described how thermal feedback impacted color selection, brush movements, comfort and flow, thematic associations, and memory triggers. This prompts plans for future work around design improvements, an in-situ field study, thermal associations, and multisensory defamiliarization. This project offers preliminary insights into the interplay of thermal sensation and creative process.

This pictorial presents a case study of "Into the Makerverse", a community workshop that engaged about 250 children and parents in combining AI and tangible making to express desired futures for our city. We thematically analyzed 43 exit interviews and 70 (intro) and 48 (outro) questionnaires to surface themes of craft as meaning-making, prioritizing craft over AI, recognizing AI limitations, and moving beyond technocentric futures. Our discussion reflects on tangible making for AI literacy, participatory design futuring for emphasizing human agency with AI, and the importance of collaborating with local communities for AI engagements that are driven by genuine local interest. We extend and amplify calls for AI engagements that work in service of community desires for local futures and argue for a tangible craft-based approach to support this.

Drawing on queer and disability theories alongside tangible body mapping techniques, we explore alternative ways of mapping embodied experiences and expressing affective sensations. Our collaborative autoethnographic approach incorporates sensors to trace our somatic experiences over time, pairing visualizations of contextual biodata with personal reflections in written or spoken form. We unpack how these alternative approaches to body mapping support reflecting on, communicating, and deepening understanding of embodied experiences by foregrounding temporal and situated aspects. We offer expanded body mapping methods by sharing a plurality of experiences that embrace queer and crip ways of knowing, foregrounding alternate temporal and spatial representations.

This pictorial helps expand thermal interaction design toward more situated experiences in everyday life. First, we map existing thermal display applications and techniques, identifying an under-explored niche of thermal displays that rapidly change temperature (fast-switching) without touching the body (non-contact). Second, we explore this niche with scenarios showing everyday interaction possibilities, including Candlelit Dinner, Calming Compact Mirror, Social Foot Bath, Fried Ice Cream, Thermal Painting, and VR Diwali, among others. Finally, our discussion contributes design directions regarding heat as a design material, personalized thermal comfort in shared settings, cultural and emotional associations with heat in everyday contexts, and facial thermal interactions. Overall, this pictorial contributes to designing for everyday thermal experiences.

ABSTRACT

In "Mold Sounds," we design a more-than-human encounter that explores how biomaterials, specifically molds, can reorient narratives of toxicity towards polyphonic, multi-species assemblages that speak to queer ecologies. We designed an environment in which molds grow and interact with conductive components, thus altering the sounds produced by the artifact. We reflect on how this helps complicate essentialist, heteronormative narratives in human and non-human relations. Through material engagements, "Mold Sounds" fosters reflections on how we might design for polyphony, or multi-species temporal rhythms, reconsider the nature of toxicity, and explore the unpredictability of queer ecological entanglements in more-than-human design.

Enhancing emotional well-being has become an important focus in HCI and CSCW, with technologies and AI increasingly designed to track, manage, and regulate emotions. However, these approaches have faced criticism for potentially suppressing certain emotional experiences. Through a scoping review of 53 empirical studies from ACM proceedings implementing Technology-Mediated Emotion Intervention (TMEI), we examine current practices through lenses from HCI critical theories. Our analysis reveals emotion intervention mechanisms that extend beyond ''emotion regulation'' paradigms, identifying care-centered goals that prioritize non-judgmental emotional support and preserve users' identities. The findings demonstrate how researchers design technologies to generate artificial care, intervene in power dynamics, and nudge behavioral changes. By grounding our review in critical HCI scholarship, we contribute the concept of '' emotion support '' as an alternative approach to ''emotion regulation,'' emphasizing human-centered approaches to emotional well-being. This work advances the understanding of diverse human emotional needs beyond individualistic and cognitive perspectives, offering design implications that critically reimagine how artificial intelligence systems can honor emotional complexity, curate spaces for bad feelings, preserve human agency, and transform power dynamics in care contexts.

Through an autoethnographic account of designing, exhibiting, and maintaining an interactive bioart installation with plants, we trace intersections between more-than-human design, disability theory, and lived experiences of chronic illness. Specifically, we deconstruct three "polished" exhibits of our installation through stories of breakdowns and failures, organized in three main themes: maintenance and care, buggy biodata, and collective resistance to purification and control. Our reflections show how plants, technologies, and a chronically ill body became entangled with each other conceptually and materially, surfacing new sites for more-than-human relationalities. In our discussion, we unpack how disability perspectives can expand more-than-human design practices, highlight opportunities for re-imagining exhibition spaces, and offer adaptation as a strategy for design in HCI.

Design research and HCI increasingly explore techno-spirituality. We investigated Sufi practices of group zikr, a ritual practice of remembrance of God. We focus on zikr groups that offer online or hybrid participation. We conducted a qualitative study using interviews with practitioners and collaborative autoethnography as researchers/practitioners. Our findings surface themes of (i) shared spiritual energy, (ii) sensory experiences’ role in spiritual energy, (iii) impact of technological mediation on sensory and spiritual experiences, and the (iv) importance of community. Our discussion contributes design considerations for techno-spirituality around (1) attunement, (2) practical audiovisual suggestions, and (3) ‘sensational forms’. Overall, we offer detailed experiential accounts of entanglements of sensory perception, spirituality, and attunement, and present generative design reflections suggesting avenues of further design research in supporting religious, faith-based, and/or spiritual practices in HCI.

``Red [Redacted] Theatre” is a tangible puzzle-based experience exploring queer history. We used queer methods to design puzzles with archival materials, guiding participants from a more normative “surface” understanding of history into exploring queer histories, breaking familiar language and constructs through play and tangible interaction. Our reflections contribute design considerations for queering tangible interaction through puzzles: (1) designing and deconstructing layers of queer understanding, (2) attending to situatedness in designing tangible puzzle artifacts, and (3) designing puzzles that solve to complexity. We also offer insights on how facilitation and debrief of the experience can prompt reflection on queer history and ways of understanding. Overall, this pictorial contributes to Queer HCI by deepening queer tangible interaction, particularly for exploring queer history.

How can tangible, wearable design encourage affective, embodied reflections on queer history? We expand Queer HCI scholarship, using queer theory to inform the design of wearable experiences that explore archives of gender and sexuality. Our project, “Button Portraits,” invites individuals to listen to oral histories from prominent queer activists by pinning archival buttons to a wearable audio player, eliciting moving personal impressions. We observed 17 participants’ experiences with “Button Portraits,” and with semi-structured interviews, surfaced reflections on how our design evoked personal connections to history, queer self-identification, and relatability to archival materials. We offer the following design directions: (1) designing tangible archives of feeling; (2) queering tangible, wearable interactions in design; (3) designing for personal, archival experiences; and (4) designing within difference. Through this work, we foreground queer stories to affect emotional reflections on marginalized histories, entangling the complex connections between bodies, feelings, histories, and shared queer experiences.

Sensing Bodies is an interactive installation that integrates plants, biosensors, and data displays in a series of tangible embodied encounters to facilitate reflection on the complex sociopolitical entanglements of plants. The triptych installation incorporates different forms of biodata and three plantation plants of the U.S. South to highlight reciprocal people-plant relationships while fostering a deeper sensibility toward colonial histories of local landscapes. In this paper, we put forth three design provocations for engaging with postcolonial perspectives in more-than-human interactions: materializing tensions to trouble multi-species relationships, embracing ambiguities and multiple relationalities, and highlighting geographic and cultural situatedness. In doing so, we contribute to how TEI might facilitate postcolonial understandings and sensibilities.

We control the temperature of materials in everyday interactions, recognizing temperature’s important influence on our bodies, minds, and experiences. However, thermal feedback is an under-explored modality in human-computer interaction partly due to its limited temporal (slow) and spatial (small-area and non-moving) capabilities. We introduce hydroptical thermal feedback, a spatial thermal feedback method that works by applying visible lights on body parts in water. Through physical measurements and psychophysical experiments, our results show: (1) Humans perceive thermal sensations when visible lights are cast on the skin under water, and perceived warmth is greater for lights with shorter wavelengths, (2) temporal capabilities, (3) apparent motion (spatial) of warmth and coolness sensations, and (4) hydroptical thermal feedback can support the perceptual illusion that the water itself is warmer. We propose applications, including virtual reality (VR), shared water experiences, and therapies. Overall, this paper contributes hydroptical thermal feedback as a novel method, empirical results demonstrating its unique capabilities, proposed applications, and design recommendations for using hydroptical thermal feedback. Our method introduces controlled, spatial thermal perceptions to water experiences.

Envisioning alternative futures and desirable worlds is a core element of design that must be cultivated, especially when a deep transition of practices, values, and power is necessary for vibrant and just future lifeworlds. In this paper, we contribute towards fabulation as an approach for design futuring that foregrounds feminist commitments and more-than-human concerns. Analyzing two fabulation case studies around biodata and bodily fluids, we offer three themes based on our process of developing these fabulations: how they engage materials, how they work to trouble temporalities, and how they cultivate imagination. We argue for the emerging potential of fabulation as an approach for open-ended, joyful design futuring, mobilizing speculative storytelling to foreground absent or neglected relations when imagining alternative lifeworlds.

A growing number of design researchers explore engagement with and through biodata. To help make sense of this growing space, we synthesize three emergent themes: (1) expanding notions of biodata and bodies, (2) attending to a greater diversity of human bodies and experiences with biodata, and (3) biodata collaborations between human and non-human bodies. We illustrate these themes with selected design examples. From this synthesis, we develop three interconnected fabulations reimagining alternative engagements with biodata: Weaving Alongside, Diffracting Selves, and Collective Affect. Our discussion unpacks conceptual work of the fabulations, offering invitations for design research to explore alternative ways of living and knowing together with biodata.

Recent design research has shown an interest in diffraction and agential realism, which promise to offer generative alternatives when designing with data that resist treating data as objective or neutral. We explore engaging diffractively with ‘lived data’ to surface felt and prospective aspects of data as it is entangled in everyday lives of designers. This paper presents five biodata-based case studies demonstrating how design researchers can create knowledge about human bodies and behaviors via strategies that allow them to engage data diffractively. These studies suggest that designers can find insights for designing with data as it is lived by working with it in a slow, open-ended fashion that leaves room for messiness and time for discovering difference. Finally, we discuss the role of ambiguous, open-ended data interpretations to help surface different meanings and entanglements of data in everyday lives.

What can design researchers learn from our own and each other's failures? We explore “failure” expansively—turning away from tidy success narratives toward messy unfoldings and reflexive discomfort—through retrospective trioethnography. Our findings reflect on failures we identified in six past design research projects: issues of relational labor of deployment, mismatched designer/participant imaginaries, burden of participation, and invisibility of researcher labor. Our discussion contributes to broader reflections on shifting design research practice: (a) methodological considerations inviting others to engage failures through retrospective trioethnography, (b) letting go as a mode of research care, (c) possibilities for more candid research reporting, and (d) how centering failure may contribute to design justice by providing a technique for attending to harm and healing in design research practices. Throughout, we call for challenging success narratives in design research, and underscore the need for systemic changes in design research practice.

Design futuring approaches, such as speculative design, design fiction and others, seek to (re)envision futures and explore alternatives. As design futuring becomes established in HCI design research, there is an opportunity to expand and develop these approaches. To that end, by reflecting on our own research and examining related work, we contribute five modes of reflection. These modes concern formgiving, temporality, researcher positionality, real-world engagement, and knowledge production. We illustrate the value of each mode through careful analysis of selected design exemplars and provide questions to interrogate the practice of design futuring. Each reflective mode offers productive resources for design practitioners and researchers to articulate their work, generate new directions for their work, and analyze their own and others' work.

In this pictorial, we explore how emergent menstrual biosensing technologies compound existing concerns for the everyday ethics of extracting and analyzing intimate data. Specifically, we review the data practices of a set of existing menstrual tracking applications and use that analysis to inform the design of speculative near future technologies. We present these technologies here in the form of a product catalog for a fictional company called Vivewell. Through this work, we contribute both a set of speculative design proposals and a case study of a design project that begins with the analysis of existing data policies.

"Smart city" narratives promise IoT data-driven innovations leveraging biosensing technologies. We argue this overlooks a potential benefit of city living: affirmation. We designed the Heart Sounds Bench, which amplifies the heart sounds of those sitting on it, as well as recording and playing back the heart sounds of previous sitters. We outline our design intent to invite rest, reflection, and recognition of others' lives in public space. We share results from a study with 19 participants. Participants expressed feeling connected to a shared life energy including others and the environment, and described heart sounds as feeling intimate yet anonymous. Finally, we elaborate the concept of life-affirmation in terms of recognition of others' lives, feeling connection, and respecting untranslatable differences with opacity, as a way of helping "smart city" designs embrace a multiplicity of desires.

Biosensing displays, increasingly enrolled in emotional reflection, promise authoritative insight by presenting users' emotions as discrete categories. Rather than machines interpreting emotions, we sought to explore an alternative with emotional biosensing displays in which users formed their own interpretations and felt comfortable critiquing the display. So, we designed, implemented, and deployed, as a technology probe, an emotional biosensory display: Ripple is a shirt whose pattern changes color responding to the wearer's skin conductance, which is associated with excitement. 17 participants wore Ripple over 2 days of daily life. While some participants appreciated the 'physical connection' Ripple provided between body and emotion, for others Ripple fostered insecurities about 'how much' feeling they had. Despite our design intentions, we found participants rarely questioned the display's relation to their feelings. Using biopolitics to speculate on Ripple's surprising authority, we highlight ethical stakes of biosensory representations for sense of self and ways of feeling.

We investigate a speculative future in which we celebrate happiness by capturing laughter and representing it in tangible forms. We explored technologies for capturing naturally occurring laughter as well as various physical representations of it. For several weeks, our participants collected audio samples of everyday conversations with their loved ones. We processed those samples through a machine learning algorithm and shared the resulting tangible representations (e.g., physical containers and edible displays) with our participants. In collecting, listening to, interacting with, and sharing their laughter with loved ones, participants described both joy in preserving and interacting with laughter and tension in collecting it. This study revealed that the tangibility of laughter representations matters, especially its symbolism and material quality. We discuss design implications of giving permanent forms to laughter and consider the sound of laughter as a part of our personal past that we might seek to preserve and reflect upon.

Emotional biosensing is rising in daily life: Data and categories claim to know how people feel and suggest what they should do about it, while CSCW explores new biosensing possibilities. Prevalent approaches to emotional biosensing are too limited, focusing on the individual, optimization, and normative categorization. Conceptual shifts can help explore alternatives: toward materiality, from representation toward performativity, inter-action to intra-action, shifting biopolitics, and shifting affect/desire. We contribute (1) synthesizing wide-ranging conceptual lenses, providing analysis connecting them to emotional biosensing design, (2) analyzing selected design exemplars to apply these lenses to design research, and (3) offering our own recommendations for designers and design researchers. In particular we suggest humility in knowledge claims with emotional biosensing, prioritizing care and affirmation over self-improvement, and exploring alternative desires. We call for critically questioning and generatively re-imagining the role of data in configuring sensing, feeling, 'the good life,' and everyday experience.

This paper explores the social meaning of clothing-based displays of biosignals. How do friends make sense of their own and each other's skin conductance display in the context of a conversation? We developed Hint, a dynamic thermochromic t-shirt whose ambiguous pattern changes color when its wearer's skin conductance increases, an indication of sudden arousal. We investigated how pairs of friends each wearing the shirt conversed and interpreted the display. Participants shared a broad range of interpretations; e.g., joy and embarrassment were associated with an increase in skin conductance. Additionally, participants expressed desires for their skin conductance display to help validate their feelings and show emotional engagement with others. We explore ambiguity in the context of clothing-based information displays and discuss how skin conductance display became part of social performance in our study. From there, we suggest framing biosignals as social cues along with facial expression, gestures, etc., and begin to question what design territories this might uncover.

This paper explores the role dynamic textile displays play in relation to personal style: What does it mean to wear computationally responsive clothing and why would one be motivated to do so? We developed a novel textile display technology, called Ebb, and created several woven and crochet fabric swatches that explored clothing-specific design possibilities. We engaged fashion designers and non-designers in imagining how Ebb would integrate into their design practice or personal style of dressing. Participants evaluated the appeal and utility of clothing-based displays according to a very different set of criteria than traditional screen-based computational displays. Specifically, the slowness, low-resolution, and volatility of Ebb tended to be seen as assets as opposed to technical limitations in the context of personal style. Additionally, participants envisioned various ways that ambiguous, ambient, and abstract displays of information could prompt new experiences in their everyday lives. Our paper details the complex relationships between display and personal style and offers a new design metaphor and extension of Gaver et al.'s original descriptions of ambiguity in order to guide the design of clothing-based displays for everyday life.