Digital technologies in agriculture are typically portrayed as enabling more sustainable production while increasing productivity. Yet, commercial solutions rarely address the root causes of unsustainable farming, limiting the uptake of more radical solutions such as agroecology. We conducted fieldwork on 11 UK small-scale agroecological farms investigating their adoption of digital technologies. Far from being anti-technological, agroecological farmers are currently poorly supported by appropriate digital tools. Further, the collaborative nature of agroecological farming, market productivity pressures, and regulatory requirements necessitate complex data practices for coordination, planning, monitoring, and learning. These data practices require labour that is often hidden and causes tension within farms. We develop these insights into a set of guiding principles for designing digital technologies appropriate for agroecology and suggest concrete design opportunities. We present a call to action for HCI to reimagine digital agriculture beyond capitalism and work with existing farmer-led grassroots networks towards technological sovereignty.

This paper offers new perspectives for More-Than-Human (MTH) design and Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) by rethinking technoscientific logics of temporality. To do this, we draw on alternative logics such as Hydrofeminism, interlocutor and autobiographical accounts, and Leaky Cups—a set of willfully dysfunctional data-enabled artefacts that leak in response to local water data. In doing so, it repositions more-than-human agency not as a passive conduit merely mediating human experiences but as a force capable of creating change and ethics through non-progressivist care labor. By engaging with these ideas, this work critiques and disrupts normative assumptions about progress, openness, fluidity, and objectivity in MTH research and design, and presents productive tensions that challenge dominant temporal frameworks.

Artist-Run Initiatives (ARIs) are grassroots art galleries and project spaces that support artists by providing space for creative expression, experimentation, and exposure. While culturally important, these non-institutional collectives exist in precarious circumstances, with limited access to funding, heavy dependence on volunteers, and uncertainty in securing permanent space. We are particularly interested in how these issues intersect with ARIs’ uses of technology in archival practice. Through interviews with ARI committee members, our findings show intriguing perceptions of technological influence on archival practice, with concerns over reliance on cloud storage services, difficulties of digitising archival content, and how to present archived material on various digital platforms. We conclude with discussion on how future research might help support these communities to develop archival practices that are better suited to their practice.

We introduce Data Probes, technology-mediated probes designed to reveal some of the inner workings of connected devices, including common embedded sensors and the data they collect. By making these common features both accessible and unfamiliar, the probes supported research participants in looking at these technologies from a different perspective and reflecting on capabilities and behaviours that may be obscured by the design of commercial products. During a study where participants lived and travelled with the probes for a month, we were able to gain generative design insights into people’s attitudes towards and relationships with connected devices, suggesting new opportunities for designs that take alternative approaches to currently entrenched visions of the Internet of Things. We present this exploratory study as an illustration of how a technology-mediated probe might prompt reflection on their technologies and open up new design spaces.

This paper explores the value of a participant-led walking method, during which matters of place in urban or rural contexts are explored. While walking, a diverse dataset is collected, including audio recordings, photographs, GPS tracks, as well as three words that participants are prompted for at each stop along the walk via a bespoke web application. We used this approach in an urban community in the UK and a rural community in Greece as part of ongoing place-based initiatives. Our findings show how participants connected personal and emotional stories with structural issues, countered official, ‘authorised’ discourses about both places, and how maps and videos created after the walks acted as boundary objects. We reflect on the claims of walking as a method that fosters equitable researcher-participant relationships, outline future design directions for participatory walking and mapping technologies, and consider the value of walking methods and map-making for participatory design.

As posthumanist or post-anthropocentric research in HCI and design proliferates and further commits to working with more-than-humans, design research practitioners are left with many open questions and uncertainties with how to productively engage with more-than-humans in their thinking and working. This paper present results from a workshop with 17 researchers working at the intersection of care ethics and posthumanism to highlight tensions in posthumanist engagement aimed at unpacking some of the challenges, obstacles, and questions encountered by researchers interested in more-than-human centered design. In foregrounding tensions with representation, legitimization, unseen labor, and material narratives we contribute to a design research agenda which seeks to explicate and challenge dominant anthropocentric forces from design. We conclude by discussing epistemological care and urge practitioners to take up new ways of imagining through truly messy methods which contribute to a feminist unsettling of HCI's methodological commitments, practices, and praxis.

Prototypes and other ‘things’ have had many uses in HCI research—to help understand a problem, as a stepping stone towards a solution, or as a final outcome of a research process. However, within the messy context of a research through design project, many of these roles do not form part of the final research narratives, restricting the ability of other researchers to learn from this practice. In this paper we revisit prototypes used in three different design research projects, conducted over a period when the Internet of Things emerged into everyday life, exploring complex hidden relationships between the internet, people and physical objects. We aim to explore the unreported roles that prototypes played in these projects, including brokering relationships with participants and deconstructing opaque technologies. We reflect on how these roles align with existing understandings of prototypes in HCI, with particular attention to how these roles can contribute to design around IoT.

As the internet is increasingly embedded in the everyday things in our homes, we notice a need for greater focus on the role care plays in those relationships—and therefore an opportunity to realize unseen potential in reimagining home Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper we report on our inquiry of home dwellers’ relationships to caring for their everyday things and homes (referred to as thingcare). Findings from our design ethnography reveal four thematic qualities of their relationships to thingcare: Care Spectacle, Care Liminality, Ontological Braiding, and Care Condition. Using these themes as touchstones, we co-speculated to produce four speculative IoT concepts to explore what care as a design ethic might look like for IoT and reflect on nascent opportunities and challenges for domestic IoT design. We conclude by considering structures of power and privilege embedded within care practices that critically open new design imaginaries for IoT.

Emerging technologies---such as the voice enabled internet---present many opportunities and challenges for HCI research and society as a whole. Advocating for better, healthier implementations of these technologies will require us to communicate abstract values, such as trust, to an audience that ranges from the general public to technologists and even policymakers. In this paper, we show how a combination of film-making and product design can help to illustrate these abstract values. Working as part of a wider international advocacy campaign, Our Friends Electric focuses on the voice enabled internet, translating abstract notions of Internet Health into comprehensible digital futures for the relationship between our voice and the internet. We conclude with a call for designers of physical things to be more involved with the development of trust, privacy and security in this powerful emerging technological landscape.

What is ‘open design’ and who gets to say what it is? In the emerging body of literature on open design, there is a clear alignment to the values and practices of free culture and open source software and hardware. Yet this same literature includes multiple, sometimes even contradictory strands of technology practice and research. These different perspectives can be traced back to free culture advocates from the 1970s to the 1990s who formulated the ideal of the internet as inherently empowering, democratizing, and countercultural. However, more recent approaches include feminist and critical interventions into hacking and making as well as corporate strategies of “open innovation” that bring end-users and consumers into the design process. What remains today seems to fall into two schools of thought. On one hand, we have the celebratory endorsements of ‘openness’ as applied to technology and design. On the other hand, we have a continuous and expanding critique of these very ideals and questions, where that critique identifies persisting forms of racial, gender, age, and class-based exclusions, and questions about the relationship between open design, labor and power remain largely unanswered.

Hackathons have become a popular tool for bringing people together to imagine new possibilities for technology. Despite originating in technology communities, hackathons have now been widely adopted by a broad range of organisations. This mainstreaming of hackathons means they encompass a very different range of attendees and activities than they once did, to the extent that some events billed as hackathons may involve no coding at all. Given this shift away from production of code, they might instead be seen as an increasingly popular participatory design activity, from which designers and researchers in HCI can learn. Through fieldwork at six hackathons that targeted non-technical communities, we identify the types of activities and contributions that emerge through these events and the barriers and tensions that might exist. In doing so, we contribute a greater understanding of hackathons as a growing phenomenon and as a potential tool for participatory research.

Despite widespread interest in civic technologies, empowering neighbourhoods to take advantage of these technologies in their local area remains challenging. This paper presents findings from the Ardler Inventors project, which aimed to understand how neighbourhoods can be supported in performing roles normally carried out by researchers and designers. We describe the end-to-end process of bringing people together around technology, designing and prototyping ideas, and ultimately testing several devices in their local area. Through this work, we explore different strategies for infrastructuring local residents' participation with technology, including the use of hackathon-like intensive design events and pre-designed kits for assembly. We contribute findings relating to the ability of these strategies to support building communities around civic technology and the challenges that must be addressed.

This paper describes a series of Inventor Days designed to catalyse sustainable relationships between communities and makers to support grassroots innovation. By appropriating core properties of hackathons, the Inventor Days brought together residents in a community and makers from across the city. Over three events, makers and community members worked together to learn about the local area, design novel ideas that addressed local issues and build prototypes. We show evidence that these events created enthusiasm around use of technology to support the community, while developing ongoing relationships that enabled members of the community to continue building on their experiences beyond the events. We propose this as a new means of enabling innovation in communities.

Social Printers are physical devices that create a pseudonymous social network between households during televised political debates. Through studies conducted around the Scottish Parliamentary Election and EU Referendum in 2016, we aimed to understand how physical devices could be used to engage viewers with televised political debates. By displacing the interaction from conventional social media and second screens we observed that the printers were successful in encouraging the participants to share their thoughts and create a personal social experience. Based on the results we discuss potential implications for conventional social media and second screens in the context of political television programs.

In recent years there has been an increased focus upon developing platforms for community decision-making, and an awareness of the importance of handing over civic platforms to community organisations to oversee the process of decision-making at a local level. In this paper, we detail fieldwork from working with two community organisations who used our distributed situated devices as part of consultation processes. We focus on some of the mundane and often-untold aspects of this type of work: how questions for consultations were formed, how locations for devices were determined, and the ways in which the data collected fed into decision-making processes. We highlight a number of challenges for HCI and civic technology research going forward, related to the role of the researcher, the messiness of decision making in communities, and the ability of community organisations to influence how citizens participate in democratic processes.

Makerspaces public workshops where makers can share tools and knowledge are a growing resource for amateurs and professionals alike. While the role of makerspaces in innovation and peer learning is widely discussed, we attempt to look at the wider roles that makerspaces play in public life. Through site visits and interviews at makerspaces and similar facilities across the UK, we have identified additional roles that these spaces play: as social spaces, in supporting wellbeing, by serving the needs of the communities they are located in and by reaching out to excluded groups. Based on these findings, we suggest implications and future directions for both makerspace organisers and community researchers.

Online and digital technologies support and extend the action repertoires of localized social movements. In this paper we examine the ways by which digital technologies can support "on-the-ground" activist communities in the development of social movements. After identifying some of the challenges of deploying conventional voting and consultation technologies for activism, we examine situated political action in local communities through the design and deployment of a low-cost community voting prototype, PosterVote. We deploy PosterVote in two case studies with two local community organizations identifying the features that supported or hindered grassroots democratic practices. Through interviews with these communities, we explore the design of situated voting systems to support participation within an ecology of social action.

We describe the process of insight journalism, in which local amateur journalists were used to generate unique insights into the digital needs of a community. We position this as a means for communities to represent themselves to designers, both as a method of designing community technologies and as a first step towards supporting innovation at a local level. To demonstrate insight journalism, we present two case studies of community technologies that were directly inspired, informed and evaluated by journalistic content. Based on this experience, we evaluate the role that insight journalism can play in designing for communities, the particular characteristics that it lends to the design process and how it might be employed to support sustainable community innovation.

We detail the design of the Department of Hidden Stories (DoHS), a mobile-based game to support playful digital storytelling among primary school children in public libraries. Through a process of iterative design in collaboration with library staff and children's writers we designed DoHS to support the potential for playful storytelling through interactions with books. A deployment of DoHS with two classes of 8 to 10 years olds as part of their regular library visits revealed insights related to how to balance the expectations of a child-at-play and the requirement to further develop their creative reading and writing skills. Based on our experiences we recommend that designers create playful digitally based activities that encourage children to explore libraries and experience new interactions with physical books.

We describe a qualitative study of delegate engagement with technology in academic conferences through a large-scale deployment of prototype technologies. These deployments represent current themes in conference technologies, such as providing access to content and opportunities for socialising between delegates. We consider not just the use of individual technologies, but also the overall impact of an assemblage of interfaces, ranging from ambient to interactive and mobile to situated. Based on a two-week deployment followed by interviews and surveys of attendees, we discuss the ways in which delegates engaged with the prototypes and the implications this had for their experience of the conferences. From our findings, we draw three new themes to inform the development of future conference technologies.

As research increasingly turns to work 'in the wild' to design and evaluate technologies under real-world conditions, little consideration has been given to what happens when research ends. In many cases, users are heavily involved in the design process and encouraged to integrate the resulting technologies into their lives before they are withdrawn, while in some cases technologies are being left in place after research concludes. Often, little is done to assess the impact and legacy of these deployments. In this paper, we return to two examples in which we designed technologies with the involvement of communities and examine what steps were taken to ensure their long-term viability and what happened following the departure of researchers. From these examples, we provide guidelines for planning and executing technology handovers when conducting research with communities.

The proliferation of digital signage systems has prompted a wealth of research that attempts to use public displays for more than just advertisement or transport schedules, such as their use for supporting communities. However, deploying and maintaining display systems “in the wild” that can support communities is challenging. Based on the authors’ experiences in designing and fielding a diverse range of community-supporting public display deployments, we identify a large set of challenges and issues that researchers working in this area are likely to encounter. Grouping them into five distinct layers -- (1) hardware, (2) system architecture, (3) content, (4) system interaction, and (5) community interaction design -- we draw up the P-LAYERS framework to enable a more systematic appreciation of the diverse range of issues associated with the development, the deployment, and the maintenance of such systems. Using three of our own deployments as illustrative examples, we will describe both our experiences within each individual layer, as well as point out interactions between the layers. We believe our framework provides a valuable aid for researchers looking to work in this space, alerting them to the issues they are likely to encounter during their deployments, and help them plan accordingly.

Creating film content for broadcast is a high pressure and complex activity involving multiple experts and highly specialized equipment. Production teams are under continuous pressure to produce ever more creative and groundbreaking content while reducing the budgets and human resources required. While technologies are being developed for digitizing and streamlining sections of the production workflow, a gap remains between creative decisions made on location, and those made during digital editing and post-production. We describe a prototype tangible, tabletop interface to be deployed on a film shoot, which uses a storyboard as a shared data representation to drive team creativity. We define creativity in terms of team production, discuss our implementation and describe a deployment in which the prototype was used by a professional production team during a film shoot. Finally we describe a number of interesting interactions that were observed and consider the implications of our design decisions on the creative process of film making and the benefits of tangible, tabletop collaborative interactive displays in live film production.

Viewpoint is a public voting device developed to allow residents in a disadvantaged community to make their voices heard through a simple, lightweight interaction. This was intended to open a new channel of communication within the community and increase community members' perception of their own efficacy. Local elected officials and community groups were able to post questions on devices located in public spaces, where residents could vote for one of two responses. Question authors were subsequently required to post a response indicating any actions to be taken. Following a two-month trial, we present our experiences and contribute guidelines for the design of public democracy tools and dimensions impacting their effectiveness, including credibility, efficacy and format.

We present our experiences of using an iterative, prototype-driven approach to developing social systems with the participation of communities, inspired by probe-based methodologies. This approach is illustrated by our attempts to design and understand the role of situated display technologies in a rural community, which has led to the development of a photo display and digital notice board, guided by the community's involvement.