How might alternative encounters with personal hiking data support practices of noticing nature as well as changes in one's self over time? To investigate this question, we conducted a multi-year first person study with Capra—a system that combines the collection and exploration of hiking experiences in nature with an emphasis on longer-term, occasional yet indefinite use. Over several years, three researchers that represented different hiking frequencies, paces, locations, and life stages concurrently and independently hiked, used, and lived with Capra. Findings revealed unique individual and collective changes in attitude among the team, from an initial interest in intentionally capturing specific natural phenomena towards a shift in attentiveness when re-exploring hikes as well as when hiking outdoors. It is these insights that emerged through our long-term experiences with Capra that we present and reflect on in this paper.

As music streaming libraries continually grow and digitally capture elements of our evolving life histories, finding meaningful ways to revisit, reflect on, and share these collections—both individually and socially—has become increasingly important. This pictorial unpacks the creation of Queue Player, a network of four domestic music players that enable synchronous distributed co-listening across geographical distance and for the long-term exploration of the collective listening histories among four close friends. Adopting a Research through Design (RtD) approach, we examine how Queue Player mobilizes a slow technology lens to support experiences of social presence, interaction, and reflection that unfold over time. We provide a detailed critical-reflective account of key design decisions and frictions that shaped the development of this slow technology research product. In doing so, we contribute insights on designing with tempo as an embodied temporal interaction modality and offer strategies for supporting ongoing engagement with collective digital archives.

We describe the design and deployment of Queue Player, four networked domestic music players that combine music listening histories of close friends to explore new potentialities for interacting with this shared archive. We deployed the Queue Players with four close friends living in separate homes for six weeks. Our goals are to (i) explore how this system might enable co-listening experiences that foster social presence, interaction, and reflection and (ii) empirically explore conceptual propositions related to slow technology. Findings revealed that, after overcoming initial frictions, Queue Player became integrated in participants’ lives and triggered a range of social interactions and reflections on past life experiences. They also showed that Queue Player provoked questions on the benefits and limits of data capturing one's life history as well as the role and pace of technology in everyday life at home. Findings are interpreted to present opportunities for future HCI research and practice.

As the practice of hiking becomes captured through personal data, it is timely to consider how technology might support noticing and connecting to nature as well as one's self over time. Capra is a system we designed that brings together the capture, storage, and exploration of personal hiking data with an emphasis on longer-term use. In this pictorial, we unpack our process of making a short film that aims to communicate the workings and experience of Capra to a broader audience. We encountered frictions in mobilizing key theoretical concepts framing Capra as a Research through Design (RtD) artifact in the making of our film. We reflect on tactics for working through such frictions, how they can support future work, and how the filmmaking process can offer a valuable approach for distributing RtD artifacts to broader audiences.

As the practice of hiking becomes increasingly captured through personal data, it is timely to consider what kinds of alternative data encounters might support forms of noticing and connecting to nature as well as one's self and life history over time. To investigate this emerging design space, we designed Capra — a system that brings together the capture, storage, and exploration of personal hiking data with an emphasis on longer-term, occasional yet indefinite use. Over four years, our team adopted a designer-researcher approach where we progressively designed, built, refined, and tested Capra. This process produced frictions in terms of balancing unobtrusiveness, transforming hiking data into evolving interconnected elements in the archive, and managing the sheer quantity and diversity of information with our goal of supporting open-ended and ongoing engagements. It is these insights that emerged through the practice-based design research approach involved in creating Capra that we reflect on in this paper.

We describe a field study of Chronoscope, a tangible photo viewer that lets people revisit and explore their digital photos with the support of temporal metadata. Chronoscope offers different temporal modalities for organizing one's personal digital photo archive, and for exploring possible connections in and across time, and among photos and memories. We deployed four Chronoscopes in four households for three months to understand participants’ experiences over time. Our goals are to investigate the reflective potential of temporal modalities as an alternative design approach for supporting memory-oriented photo exploration, and empirically explore conceptual propositions related to slow technology. Findings revealed that Chronoscope catalyzed a range of reflective experiences on their respective life histories and life stories. It opened up alternative ways of considering time and the potential longevity of personal photo archives. We conclude with implications to present opportunities for future HCI research and practice.

We describe a long-term field study of Olo Radio, a music player that lets people re-experience digital music they have listened to previously. Olo Radio offers different 'timeframe modes' for organizing one's personal listening history data, and for exploring possible connections among songs and across time. We deployed 5 Olo Radios in 5 households for 8 months to understand participants' experiences over time. Our goals are to: (i) investigate the reflective potentialities of personal data for memory- oriented music listening and (ii) empirically explore conceptual propositions related to slow technology. Findings revealed Olo Radio became highly integrated in participants lives and triggered reflection on past life experiences. They also showed that Olo Radio was perceived to subtly change over time, and open up different ways of experiencing time. Findings are interpreted to present opportunities for future HCI research and practice.

Morse Things are Internet connected ceramic cups and bowls that communicate with each other in Morse Code. This ongoing research iteratively asks thing-centered questions of things and technology. A premise of the Morse Things is that any understanding of a thing or technology is unstable and arguably fragile. In this pictorial, we reflect on how we as researchers, in the course of doing research with the Morse Things, unexpectedly found ourselves literally entangled in the conceptual and physical fragility of the research. This pictorial describes our growing awareness of this instability, beginning with a kintsugi repair of a broken Morse Thing, our false confidence in our package design for shipping, and the difficulties to conceptualize the machine learning world that we ourselves created. We reflect on these experiences, and now see these as reminders of the inevitable fragility and instability of research on thing-perspectives.

With the massive proliferation of digital photos, new approaches are needed to enable people to engage with their vast photo archives over time. We describe the Research through Design process of Chronoscope, a domestic technology that leverages temporal metadata embedded in digital photos as a resource to encourage more temporally diverse, rich, and open-ended experiences when re-visiting one's personal digital photo archive. We unpack and reflect on design choices that made use of digital photo metadata to support new ways of interacting with personal photo archives through and across time. We conclude with opportunities for future HCI research and practice.

The Tilting Bowl is a ceramic bowl that unpredictably but gently tilts multiple times daily. This pictorial reports on the crafting of the electronics of the Tilting Bowl within the concept of a research product [10]. From this perspective, the seemingly simple task of making a bowl tilt holds unique challenges and demands - especially as a research product that is deployed in everyday settings for lengthy periods of time. We highlight electronic design challenges that came up in three processes of making the Tilting Bowl: the tilting mechanism, hardware integration of electronics and power management. Lastly, we offer three suggestions for designing electronics for research products.

Motivated by prior work on everyday creativity, we adopt a design-oriented approach seeks to move beyond designing for explicit interactions to also include the implicit, incremental and, at times even, unknowing encounters that slowly emerge among people, technologies, and artifacts over time. We contribute an investigation into designing for slowness grounded in the practice of making a design artifact called Slow Game. We offer a detailed critical-reflective accounting of our process of making Slow Game into a research product. In attending to key design moves across our process, we reveal hidden challenges in designing slow technology research products and discuss how our findings can be mobilized in future work.

Design-oriented research in HCI has increasingly migrated towards theoretical perspectives to understand the implications of newly crafted technology in everyday life. However, in this context, the relations between theory and understanding the things we make are not always clear, especially the degree to which the nature of research artifacts is revealed through or determined by theory. We examine a series of field deployment studies we conducted with our research artifact table-non-table over the course of four and a half years that we came to see as a postphenomenological inquiry. Importantly, our interpretations of this artifact, methodological concerns, and theoretical groundings evolved over time. We account for and critically reflect on these shifts in the relationship between theory and our design artifact. We detail how theory was enacted and embodied in our design research practice and offer insights into the complex relations between theory and things in design-oriented HCI research.

Slowness has emerged as a rich lens to frame HCI investigations into supporting longer-term human-technology relations. Yet, there is a need to further address how we design for slowness on conceptual and practical levels. Drawing on the concepts of unawareness, intersections, and ensembles, we contribute an investigation into designing for slowness and temporality grounded in design practice through two cases: Olly and Slow Game. We designed these artifacts over two and a half years with careful attention to how the set of concepts influenced key design decisions in terms of their form, materials, and computational qualities. Our designer-researcher approach revealed that, when put into practice, the concepts helped generatively grapple with slowness and temporality, but are in need of further development to be mobilized for design. We critically reflect on insights emerging across our practice-based research to reflexively refine the concepts and better support future HCI research and practice.

This paper reports on a postphenomenological inquiry of six trained philosophers, who as study participants lived with and reflected on a research product we designed known as the Tilting Bowl: a ceramic bowl that unpredictably but gently tilts multiple times daily. The Tilting Bowl is a counterfactual artifact that is designed specifically for this study as part of a material speculation approach to design research. A postphenomenological inquiry looks to describe and analyze accounts of relationships between humans and technological artifacts, and how each mutually shapes the other through mediations that form the human subjectivity and objectivity of any given situation. This paper contributes an empirical account and analysis of the relations that emerged (background and alterity) and the relativistic views that co-constitute the philosophers, Tilting Bowl, and their specific worlds. The findings demonstrate the relevance of this philosophical framing to fundamentally and broadly understand how people engage digital artifacts.

Applying a thing-centered, material speculation approach we designed the Morse Things to acknowledge and inquire into the gap between things and us. The Morse Things are sets of ceramic bowls and cups networked together to independently communicate through Morse code in an Internet of Things (IoT). We deployed the Morse Things in the households of six interaction design practitioners and researchers for six weeks. Following the deployment, we conducted a workshop to discuss the role of the Morse Things and ultimately the gap between things and people. We reflect on the nature of living with IoT things and discuss insights into the gap between things and humans that led to the idea of a new type of thing in the home that is neither human-centered technology nor non-digital artifacts.

In this paper we discuss the low-volume production of an interaction design research product known as the tilting bowl. The form of the tilting bowl was designed with 3D modeling tools and utilized digital fabrication for rapid prototyping. The final form was produced in a small number of glazed ceramic forms with embedded electronics and actuators. We focus on the lessons we learned from the challenges and design opportunities that arose in moving from digital processes to ceramic processes. We reflected on these lessons and developed thematic notions we refer to as frictions. These include shifting constraints, naïve expertise, manual automation, and dynamic materiality. The contributions of this paper are new design insights into the combination of digital and material processes for studio based prototyping and low-volume production and adds to the emerging relevance of digital fabrication, physical fabrication, and physical materials to interaction design and HCI research.

Tutorials are critical to the success and vitality of DIY practices. In this paper, we elevate the importance of tutorial authorship as one way to maintain and improve the quality of tutorials in DIY. We discuss the role interaction designers can play as hybrid designers, mediating between author and audience to contribute to the improvement of practices of tutorial authorship in DIY. We examine the quality of tutorials through the building and analysis of ten DIY projects and tutorials. We analyze key issues across three categories: 1) competences, components and tools, 2) sequencing, 3) and communication. We offer findings that are both practical guidelines for detailed improvements of tutorials and structural themes for improving tutorial authorship including the themes of accurate information, competences and tools, and tutorial format. In conclusion, we discuss the potential for interaction designers to simultaneously mediate and shape tutorials and tools in a form of hybrid design.