We report on a long-term participatory design research project in three social housing apartments that explores how design can extend the catalogue of domestic (energy) technologies beyond dominant industrial premises of scalability and efficiency. This pictorial walks through dioramas of the homes and their idiosyncrasies – constructed from visits, sketches, probes, participant-taken photographs, floor plans, local histories and theories, reflections, and speculations. We argue that homes and households, particularly in contexts that require resourcefulness, act as repositories of alternative potentials. Through a situated spatial analysis, we explore how residents navigate the gaps between standardized architecture and diverse, lived spaces using low and high-tech solutions that work. Four resulting designs collectively sensitize and expand an alternative approach to designing domestic technologies, challenging dominant notions of what counts as novel in the context of the home.

Together with 11 lower-income households, we explored how assumptions embedded in domestic energy interfaces match their needs, expectations, and everyday practices around domestic energy use and comfort. Catalyzed by cultural probes, residents (1) shared the diverse strategies and know-how involved in making themselves comfortable, (2) offered arguments for their everyday futures, and (3) explained what we can learn from them. A first tentative definition of energy interfaces opens the door to what we consider interfaces, how they support developing know-how and how they co-construct everyday practices. Residents’ resourceful solutions elicit reflections on what is considered valid participation in the energy transition. From the findings, we synthesize alternative starting points for the design of energy interfaces: We outline design opportunities to expand the (un)comfortable by revisiting comfort as fluid and multi-sensory. Furthermore, we sensitize how design can build on residents’ existing strategies for making comfortable, rather than replace them.

Ironically, global warming is leading to increased demand for artificial space cooling, which in turn fuels greenhouse gas emissions. In this pictorial, we present a set of deliberately uncomfortable design fictions aimed at disrupting this harmful cycle and opening new design spaces for alternative forms of summer comfort. Through the fictions, we argue how designers’ assumptions about comfort play a role in steering responses to global warming in narrow, resource-intensive and exclusionary directions. In our discussion, we increase the heat by reflecting on the role of assumed users in fueling resource intensive lifestyles, and challenge designers to consider users that are affluent but nonetheless willing and able to invest effort and change their expectations in the face of current global crises. We close with a visual provocation that links designing low effort technological solutions to the breeding practices of the cuckoo.

In this pictorial, we illustrate steps towards a novel approach that situates connected technologies for older people as resources. In contrast to mainstream approaches in gerontechnology that consider elderly as frail and passive, we aim to complement older people's vital competences by designing technologies that can be used in less prescriptive, and broader ways. The pictorial describes our design process in which resourceful strategies were identified through thing ethnography and used as inspiration to create a series of new connected objects conceived as resources.

This paper introduces the notion of co-performance, with the aim to offer Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers and practitioners a new perspective on the role of artificial agency in everyday life, from automated systems to autonomous devices. In contrast to 'smartness,' which focuses on a supposed autonomy of artifacts, co-performance considers artifacts as capable of learning and performing next to people. This shifts the locus of design from matters of distributions of agency at design time, to matters of embodied learning in everyday practice for both human and artificial performers. From this perspective, co-performance acknowledges the dynamic differences in capabilities between humans and artifacts, and highlights the fundamentally recursive relation between professional design and use. Implications for HCI design practice are unpacked through reflections on smart thermostat design in light of historic changes in roles between humans and heating systems, and changing ideas of appropriateness in everyday practices of domestic heating.

In research on health and wellbeing, resourcefulness is seen as an important skill that can improve quality of life. In design and HCI literature, it has long been acknowledged that resourcefulness is about more than human skills and involves the adaptation, modification and reinvention of technologies in everyday life. In this paper we argue how certain aspects of resourcefulness have so far remained under-theorized, and present a new design perspective on resourcefulness that is grounded in practice theory. In this view, resourcefulness is conceptualised as the dispersed practice of dealing with everyday crises of routine. By elaborating on the complex interplay between means and purpose, we tease out resourcefulness as a practice of reconfiguration. The paper closes by discussing implications of this conceptualisation by zooming in on ways of capturing and designing for resourcefulness.

The sustainability challenges facing society today require approaches that look beyond single product-user interactions. Focusing on socially shared practices—e.g. cooking, laundering—has been identified as a promising direction. Building on a growing body of research in sustainable HCI that takes practices as unit of analysis, this article explores what it means to take practices as a unit of design. Drawing on theories of practice, it proposes that practice-oriented design approaches should: involve bodily performance, create crises of routine and generate a variety of performances. These guidelines were integrated into a Generative Improv Performances (GIP) approach, entailing a series of performances by improvisation actors with low-fidelity prototypes in a lab environment. The approach was implemented in an empirical study on bathing. Although the empirical example does not deal with common types of interactive technologies, the guidelines and GIP approach offer sustainable HCI a way to think beyond immediate interactions and to conceptualize change on a practice level.