We report on an ultra-long-term deployment of Olo Radio, a slow technology research product designed to support reflective, memory-oriented music listening. Following a single participant across multiple moves and life-stage transitions, we trace how Olo Radio was periodically foregrounded and backgrounded—cared for, reconfigured, and sometimes ignored—as it became woven into domestic life. Over the same period, researcher–participant relations shifted from a conventional study dynamic toward more reciprocal co-inquiry, culminating in the participant independently designing and building a successor device inspired by Olo Radio's core design qualities. Drawing on this “sample of one,” we show how temporal depth makes visible rhythms, frictions, and forms of continuation that shorter deployments rarely capture. We also articulate methodological and ethical implications of research products that outlive their projects, including stewardship, attachment, and participant-led continuation beyond project time.

People's annotations on books can serve as valuable traces for people to revisit their past thoughts, emotions, and other experiences. For e-books, however, the lack of physicality and their e-reading infrastructure make it difficult for people to revisit them as these traces continue to accumulate in digital archives. In this paper, we describe the design and deployment of Quologue, an LLM-powered web application that allows users to reconnect with their e-book highlights through ongoing dialogue and stepwise interactions. We conducted a field study with 10 participants over 8 weeks. Our aim was to investigate the reflective and self-expressive potentialities of personal e-book metadata; and to learn about any opportunities and tensions that emerge from surfacing one's data with a generative AI model. Findings revealed that Quologue generated diverse reflective experiences and influenced participants’ current digital highlighting practices. We conclude with implications and opportunities for future HCI studies and practice.

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.

Teenagers are in a unique position, having known no other reality than the current exploitative model of the data economy, and are particularly at risk of harm from it. Using a classroom intervention with 31 Grade 9 students, we deployed co-created Metaphor Workbooks as a tool to foster critical and reflexive thinking about their phones and data. Our research advances the HCI community's understanding of teenagers’ entanglements with the data economy, by highlighting how they experience it through their critical, reflective, and creative responses. This alludes to ways in which future initiatives could better support teenagers in developing a critical relationship with data. We identify key gaps in their understanding of the data economy and emphasize the need for critical data literacy interventions to address their limited understanding, complex emotional relationships with their phones, and the pervasive influence of technology addiction narratives.

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.

Alternative Research Outcomes (AROs) go beyond traditional academic publications, taking diverse forms such as documentaries, DIY tutorials, or exhibitions. With growing recognition of the need for more inclusive and contextually appropriate research dissemination, AROs are particularly relevant in HCI and design research. Yet, little has been discussed on why it is important to work on AROs. What are key qualities of AROs? How can the HCI community benefit from learning more about creating AROs? By analyzing six case studies, we propose four qualities of AROs and demonstrate how they emerge in the timeline of a research project. We argue AROs can be adapted to diverse audience needs and share research insights that may extend beyond the original research goals. Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of how AROs can support inclusive research dissemination practices, enabling HCI researchers to engage broader audiences and extend the relevance of their work.

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.

Sound is a preferred and dominant medium that people with blindness use to capture, share and reflect on meaningful moments in their lives. Within the timeframe of 12 months, we worked with seven people with blindness and two of their sighted loved ones to engage in a multi-stage co-creative design process involving multiple steps building toward the final co-design workshop. We report three types of sonic mementos, designed together with the participants, that Encapsulate, Augment and Re-imagine personal audio recordings into more interesting and meaningful sonic memories. Building on these sonic mementos, we critically reflect and describe insights into designing sound that supports personal and social experiences of reminiscence for people with blindness through sound. We propose design opportunities to promote collective remembering between people with blindness and their sighted loved ones and design recommendations for remembering through sound.

As digital photos grow exponentially, people need new approaches to engage with their photos over time. We describe our study of PhotoClock, a mobile application that leverages the temporal metadata embedded in digital photos to encourage contemplation of memories bound up in one's photo archive. PhotoClock uses the clock-time of the present moment to re-present one's photos taken around that same time of the day in the past. As time ticks away relentlessly, PhotoClock highlights the ephemeral and ongoing quality of time. We conducted the field study with 12 participants over 8 weeks. Our goals are: (i) to investigate the reflective potential of clock-time as an alternative design approach for supporting memory-oriented photo interaction, and (ii) to explore conceptual propositions related to slowness and temporality. Findings revealed that PhotoClock generated diverse and reflective experiences on participants’ life stories. We conclude with implications and opportunities for future HCI and design research.

Introspection is the practice of looking inward for ongoing self-examination. It involves considering one's past experiences and asking questions about the present and future. Our work investigates how AI could open new possibilities for supporting introspective experiences. Adopting a design fiction approach, we created a fictional company called Meta.Aware to contextualize 4 different Introspective AI product concepts in the form of video sketches. We used the Meta.Aware platform to conduct interviews with 17 participants, using the 4 concept videos as prompts for discussion. Participants had a range of reactions related to perceived benefits and tensions in this emerging design space. We interpret these results to outline future design directions for mobilizing AI as a resource to support introspective experiences over time, as well as to reflect on issues and dilemmas bound to this emerging design space.

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.

Playing remote tabletop games is a fun way to connect with distant friends. Yet most systems for remote tabletop gaming lack support for tangible and social interaction, two important aspects of gameplay for most players. We are interested in how to better design systems for remote tangible gameplay that support social connection. We investigate this topic through the design and evaluation of a prototype system for playing the board game Wavelength across two locations. First, we describe the design goals that informed our prototype: “Remote Wavelength”. Then, we discuss the results of a qualitative user study in which ten friend groups played Remote Wavelength. Our findings indicate that a synchronized, tangible gameboard benefits player engagement, communication, and awareness. Our results also illustrate the value of integration across communication and gameplay systems. We conclude by offering considerations for the design of both digital and remote tangible gameplay systems.

With the massive adoption of smartphones, location trackers, and GPS-based applications, data is being generated that captures people's geographic locations in more precise detail than ever before. Personal location history archives offer a potentially valuable and overlooked resource for supporting reminiscence and recollection of the past. Yet, little design research has explored how location histories can be used as a material in designing such experiences. To investigate this space, we engaged in a practice-based design research process that resulted in two design artifacts. Memory Tracer is a tangible device that occasionally, yet perpetually surfaces locations from the past bound to today's date. Memory Compass is a smartwatch application that uses a ‘casting’ interaction enabling a user to retrieve and explore locations from their past, across space and time. We unpack and reflect on key decisions in our design process and conclude with opportunities for future HCI research and practice.

This paper presents a long-term field study of the coMorphing stool: a computational thing that can change shape in response to the surrounding light. We deployed 5 coMorphing stools to 5 participants' homes over 9 months. As co-speculators, the participants reflected on their mediated relations with the coMorphing stool. Findings suggest that they perceived the subtle transformations of the coMorphing stool in the early days of the deployment. After becoming familiar with these features, they interpreted their daily entanglements with the coMorphing stool in diverse personalized ways. Over time, the co-speculators accepted the coMorphing stool as part of their homes. These findings contribute new empirical insights to the shape-changing research field in HCI and enrich discussions on higher-level concepts in postphenomenology. Reflecting on these experiences promotes further HCI explorations on computational things.

Participatory design means building reciprocal relationships with research participants and opening up conversations with larger communities. We describe and reflect on our design-led research of creating an hour-long audio documentary. Participants’ desires to better understand the experiences of others within our study is our key motivation. We see the creation of the documentary as an important reciprocal step to invite further participation within a longer-term, multi-year project. Rooted in a decolonial perspective on translating academic knowledge to the general public, our work builds on our own prior fieldwork with 9 people with blindness on their reminiscence experiences. The audio documentary aims to deliver insights from research findings and inquiries, inspired by participants' stories through their voices in the interview recordings. The documentary serves as a gift for participation and a genuine invitation for future research. We conclude with opportunities for future HCI research and practice.

HCI research on shape change has highlighted the importance of materiality and temporality in design practice. However, little research has addressed the challenges of tailoring these qualities for everyday interactions with a shape-changing artifact. In this paper, we report from a designer-researcher perspective into the crafting of deformTable: a shape-changing form that responds to the weight of objects placed on its surface. We crafted 5 deformTables over 18 months with special attention given to the physical, temporal, and computational aspects. Specifically, we describe how we focused on speed adjustments and response times in the process to frame the temporal expressions of computing; we also discuss how the material and tools helped shape our decisions in the context of the materiality of computing. This study contributes an RtD case of designing a particular shape-changing artifact through the lens of temporality and materiality to support long-term engagements and everyday interactions.

People’s daily experiences and the environments they inhabit have become saturated with digital devices and systems. With this shift, new concerns have emerged across the HCI community over the rol...

This special issue focuses on new perspectives of time within HCI research. We begin by explicating how HCI’s views of time have broadened over the years, going beyond the traditional subjective-objective dichotomy. We describe how the HCI community was originally anchored to clock time, but more recently the field has begun to incorporate the existential, social, and cultural dimensions of time. We introduce the papers in this special issue by contextualizing them according to different research areas. We conclude by identifying open issues and opportunities that should be explored in future HCI research and practice.

Abstract We designed and implemented Musée to capture the novel experience of interpreting cover versions of music, which contain both familiar and unfamiliar musical components and are curated based on the user’s music-streaming history data. Musée is a tangible music player that enables users to explore and listen to professional or amateur covers of songs (via YouTube) in two categories: covers of songs from users’ most-liked artists and covers of users’ most-played songs. To investigate its potential value in situ, we conducted field trials of Musée in four households for 1 month. Findings showed that unfamiliar musical elements in cover music provided a sense of ‘freshness’ to past songs and helped the listener appreciate over-consumed music in new ways. In addition, restricting detailed information about cover songs that were playing helped users focus on the sound, thus priming them to infer and reflect on the original song and their memories associated with it. Our findings point to new insights for the design of interfaces that use historical personal data to expand users’ experience beyond solely revisiting prior tastes.

Introspection is the practice of looking inward and examining our ideas, thoughts, and feelings. It involves considering past experiences and asking questions about the future. We report on a design research inquiry that explores Artificial Intelligence (AI), combined with personal data, as a resource for introspection. We investigate how AI might offer possibilities for generating alternative perspectives on one's life to support introspection and paradoxes that this might raise. We describe our design-led inquiry, motivate fi approaches to introspective practice as opportunities for potential Introspective AI interventions, and explore them through seven design proposals. Taken together, our proposals provoke questions around how introspective AI might be critiqued, imagined, and designed. We conclude with a reflection on our work and the opportunities it suggests for future research and practice.

Research into shape-changing and deformable artifacts that explore novel interactions has been growing in design and HCI. Yet, there is little discussion on the design processes behind these approaches and in particular, a theoretical understanding of materiality that is central to deformation. Informed by Wiberg's compositional interaction design, we contribute an investigation into supporting long-term relations with deformation: the transTexture lamp. Specifically, we crafted a dynamic physical form with materials at hand. We instantiated the materiality of interaction being designed as a computational whole. Reflecting on our theory-informed RtD process enriched our understanding of compositional interaction design. These reflections on our design approach may benefit further explorations into the intersections between materiality, longevity, and actuality in the context of design-oriented HCI.

There is growing attention in the HCI community on how technology could be designed to support experiences of reminiscence on past life experiences. Yet, this research has largely overlooked people with blindness. We present a study that aims to understand everyday experiences of reminiscence for people with blindness. We conducted a qualitative study with 9 participants with blindness to understand their personal routines, wishes and desires, and challenges and tensions regarding the experience of reminiscence. Findings are interpreted to discuss new possibilities that offer starting points for future design initiatives and openings for collaboration aimed at creating technology to better support the practices of capturing, sharing, and reflecting on significant memories of the past.

Motion graphics videos offer a powerful means of communicating complex concepts through engaging visuals and animation. While filmmaking, marketing, or video games industries use these videos to tell compelling stories, others such as educators or domain experts face a steep learning curve. Creating even a short motion graphics video can be an arduous process that requires competency in scriptwriting, graphic design, animation, and skills in using various feature-rich software applications. We interviewed 19 casual and professional motion designers working on a range of motion graphics projects to understand their design processes and challenges. Our results reveal several difficulties that new motion designers face in getting started in the field and how they struggle to devise workarounds. We identify opportunities for HCI to lower entry barriers by designing user-centered tools that simplify the motion design process and incorporate example-based learning and collaborative approaches.

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.

The advent of cloud platforms and mobile devices has complicated personal data management and decisions about what data to keep or discard. To explore how to help people curate their data, we designed Data Dashboard, a prototype system that provides: 1) a centralized overview of data from across platforms and devices, 2) customizable filters for sorting through many types of data. We evaluated the prototype with 18 participants. Building on top of previous literature, we use the concept of data boundaries (the idea of invisible but important separations across data) to explain participants' reactions to the prototype. We show that centralizing data in a single management system blurs boundaries and requires safety guarantees. Customization options, instead, uphold boundaries and reinforce user control. We discuss how to use these results for integrating data boundaries in the design of new tools, rethinking the language of personal data, and envisioning a post-cloud future.

Family members who are separated across time zones can easily miss out on feeling connected. We designed and studied the usage of an asynchronous storytelling system, called FamilyStories, to explore the use of audio-based sharing. FamilyStories allows family members to share activities and experiences over distance in different time zones using three different devices that contain different contextual features. To evaluate the design, we conducted a five-week long field study with two family member pairs. Our results show the value of slow, flexible, and non-suggestive interfaces for asynchronous audio communication. We also found ephemerality helped in the sharing of 'instant' feelings, while large time zone differences could be 'synchronized' with time delayed messages. We raise these as design opportunities for asynchronous audio storytelling systems.

Many non-profit peer-to-peer exchange arrangements and profit-driven, multi-sided online marketplaces leverage underutilized resources, such as tools, to optimize their use to capacity. They often rely on a digital platform in pursuit of their social aspirations and/or economic objectives. We report on a field study of a local sharing community that employs a set of stickers illustrating different household items, typically placed on community members' mailboxes, along with complementary digital tools. The stickers are used to communicate the availability of resources among neighbors to facilitate social encounters and to encourage sustainable use and re-use of shared resources. Through in-depth qualitative interviews with sixteen participants, we describe the opportunities and limitations of this approach to peer-to-peer exchange. We offer insights for designers of resource sharing communities into facilitating face-to-face encounters and the online interactions needed to support them.

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.

This paper discusses how a networked object in the form of a small robot designed to mediate experiences of care, social connectedness, and intimacy, was used by adolescents with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, a condition that reduces their normal functioning, including the ability to socialize. A study with nine adolescents, each using the robot for about a year in average, revealed that it was largely effective at mediating their everyday experiences of relatedness, triggering productive new habits and social practices. We interpret these findings to propose a set of strategies for designing technologies that support relatedness while requiring minimal interactivity and engagement. Balance, extension-of-self, coolness, and acts-of-care, in addition to commonly used physicalness, expressivity and awareness, enable the robot to extend the adolescents' ability to relate to others, people and animals.

We report on a design research inquiry aimed at understanding and exploring the values, practices, and perspectives of people that actively embrace and choose to live within collective houses and mobile vehicles as their homes. A goal of our work is to inquire into how such lived alternatives of 'home' can take a step toward broadening possibilities for conceptualizing 'domestic' technology and provoking questions around how it might be critiqued, imagined, and designed. We offer a brief overview of our ongoing research with a sample of collective and mobile dwellers, and propose three themes that extend prior generative work in this area: critique through living, taking time to adapt, and the transitional home. We use these themes in a design-led approach to propose six fictional future technology concepts that aim to (i) critically reflect on and provoke questions about commitments in current mainstream visions of domestic technology and (ii) explore new possibilities for engaging with the material, social, and technological conditions shaping the lives of our collective and mobile dweller participants. We conclude with a reflection on our work, its limitations, and opportunities it suggests for future research and practice.

Today, most technology users have to deal with a growing amount of personal data across many devices and online platforms. There is a growing need for tools that can help people decide more intentionally what data to keep or discard. We created five design concepts in the form of video prototypes to probe on alternative design strategies for supporting users. Automation, aggressiveness, and temporality were key dimensions we explored. We conducted interviews with 16 participants using the concepts as a starting point for discussion. Participants had a range of reactions: some wanted to retain full control over keeping and discarding decisions, while others welcomed more automatic tools. We identify common ground in the need for a contextual and nuanced approach in design. We use these results to outline and reflect on possible future design directions for personalization, automation, new keeping or discarding actions, and privacy.

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.

Research on product experience has a history in investigating the sensory and emotional qualities of interacting with objects. However, this notion has not been fully expanded to the design space of co-designing smart objects. In this paper, we report on findings from a series of co-design workshops where we used the toolkit Loaded Dice in conjunction with a card set that aimed to support participants in reflecting the sensory qualities of domestic smart objects. We synthesize and interpret findings from our study to help illustrate how the workshops supported co-designers in creatively ideating concepts for emotionally valuable smart objects that better connect personal inputs with the output of smart objects. Our work contributes a case example of how a co-design approach that emphasizes situated sensory exploration can be effective in enabling co-designers to ideate concepts of idiosyncratic smart objects that closely relate to the characteristics of their domestic living situations.

Sharing economy services have become increasingly popular. In addition to various well-known for-profit activities in this space (e.g., ride and apartment sharing), many community groups and non-profit organizations offer collections of shared things (e.g., books, tools) that explicitly aim to benefit local communities. We expect that both non-profit and for-profit approaches will see an increased use in the future. To support designers in devising new sharing economy services, we developed the Sharing Economy Design Cards, a design toolkit in the form of a card deck. We present two deployments of the cards: (1) in individual interviews with 16 designers and sharing economy domain experts; and (2) in two workshops with 5 participants each. Our findings show that the use of the cards not only facilitates the creation of future sharing platforms and services in a collaborative setting, but also helps to evaluate existing sharing economy services as an individual activity.

We describe the design and deployment of Olly, a domestic music player that enables people to re-experience digital music they listened to in the past. Olly uses its owner's Last.FM listening history metadata archive to occasionally select a song from their past, but offers no user control over what is selected or when. We deployed Olly in 3 homes for 15 months to explore how its slow pace might support experiences of reflection and reminiscence. Findings revealed that Olly became highly integrated in participants lives with sustained engagement over time. They drew on Olly to reflect on past life experiences and reactions indicated an increase in perceived value of their Last.FM archive. Olly also provoked reflections on the temporalities of personal data and technology. Findings are interpreted to present opportunities for future HCI research and practice.

The home has been a major focus of the HCI community for over two decades. Despite this body of research, nascent works have argued that HCI's characterization of 'the home' remains narrow and requires more diverse accounts of domestic configurations. Our work contributes to this area through a four-month ethnography of three collective homes in Vancouver, Canada. Collective homes represent an alternative housing model that offers agency to individual members and the collective group by sharing values, resources, labour, space and memory. Our paper offers two contributions. First, we offer an in-depth design ethnography of three collective homes, attending to the values, ownership models, practices, and everyday interactions observed in the ongoing making of these domestic settings. Second, we interpret and synthesize our findings to provide new opportunities for expanding the way we conceptualize and design for 'the home' in HCI.

An increasing number of non-profit groups and organizations have formed "libraries" of shared things to leverage the collaborative use of underutilized resources (e.g., power tools) for the benefit of local communities. Their key challenges are the transience and anonymity of their members, and how to nurture creative interactions among them. We designed and developed Roaming Objects, an interactive system aimed at supporting the capture and sharing of equipment-use experiences among these members. We deployed the system for two months in a tool-sharing cooperative to explore how it may help to address these challenges. We offer insights into how resource sharing cooperatives and collectives could be better supported, by proposing design opportunities that facilitate sharing both physical objects and digital information about their use.

We report on the design and deployment of a probe study aimed at understanding the values, practices, and perspectives of people that actively embrace living situations that could be considered 'alternative' to normative domestic dwellings. In response to the returned probes, the pictorial describes and unpacks speculative interpretations and design responses that (i) propose alternative ways technology could be designed for the home, (ii) embody different ideas of where home is located, (iii) explore how home is constructed, re-made, curated, and pursued, and (iv) productively question material, technological, and social boundaries between the home and the outside world.

Focusing on the design of technology for mourning and memorialization, we describe the emergence of Automatic Conveyor-belt Columbaria, locally developed in Japan, as an example of an interactive system combining physical and digital remains, and discuss its user experiences and social influences. It concludes with implications for future HCI research and practice with a focus on future gravesites and memorialization sites in dense urbanized regions.

TaskCams are simple digital cameras intended to serve as a tool for Cultural Probe studies and made available by the Interaction Research Studio via open-source distribution. In conjunction with an associated website, instructions and videos, they represent a novel strategy for disseminating and facilitating a research methodology. At the same time, they provide a myriad of options for customisation and modification, allowing researchers to adopt and adapt them to their needs. In the first part of this paper, the design team describes the rationale and design of the TaskCams and the tactics developed to make them publicly available. In the second part, the story is taken up by designers from the Everyday Design Studio, who assembled their own TaskCams and customised them extensively for a Cultural Probe study they ran for an ongoing project. Rather than discussing the results of their study, we focus on how their experiences reveal some of the issues both in producing and using open-source products such as these. These suggest the potential of TaskCams to support design-led user studies more generally.

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.

With the massive adoption of music streaming services globally, metadata is being generated that captures people's music listening histories in more precise detail than ever before. These metadata archives offer a valuable and overlooked resource for designing new ways of supporting people in experiencing the music they have listened to over the course of their lives. Yet, little research has demonstrated how metadata can be applied as a material in design practice. We describe the design of OLO Radio, a device that leverages music listening history metadata to support experiences of exploring and living with music from one's past. We unpack and reflect on design choices that made use of the exacting precision captured in listening history metadata archives to support relatively imprecise qualities of feedback and interaction to encourage rich, open-ended experiences of contemplation, curiosity, and enjoyment over time. We conclude with implications for HCI research and practice in this space.

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.

Families preserve memories of their special and everyday experiences, though it can be hard to capture all these moments in everyday life. We explore the concept of automated forms of capturing family life and presenting them through situated, tangible everyday artifacts in the home. We designed Time-Turner, an always-on video recording system along with a set of three drink coasters that allow family members to easily search, filter and replay videos to connect to their past. We engaged households in speculative enactments and interviews to explore the design space. Our findings point to the value of witnessing real rather than staged moments and the ways in which the affordances of everyday artifacts can allow media to be 'lived with' as a part of everyday life. Yet our design also revealed tensions around sharing and changing perceptions across time and generations. This points to design challenges around safeguarding this media and capturing 'reality' as opposed to curated content.

This paper presents an analytical approach that we call the focus framework. The framework aids the analysis of the intended and unintended design attributes that emerge within a project's design process. The framework helps to reveal how prototypes and decision making interact together to shape the final design features and make visible the trajectory of central design attributes and unexplored alternatives. In this paper, we report on the framework and its development by way of a retrospective analysis of a tangible light installation we designed known as the Urban Data Posts. We see the potential for designers to use the focus framework as a post-mortem tool to retrospectively analyze their own work and thus inform their design practice. The knowledge gained through the analysis can then be applied in future projects more generatively.

In this pictorial, we propose an alternative approach to investigating human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers' epistemological commitments in research on the home. While researchers' commitments can be discussed through textual aspects of their research, in this pictorial we conduct a pattern analysis of visual elements as a productive way to further inquire into such kinds of commitments. By analyzing visual elements from 121 works in HCI research on the home, we identify seven types of observers, which can be associated with epistemological commitments in research. We also propose two new complementary observers: the absent observer and the protagonist observer.

Mobile devices have begun to raise questions around the potential for overuse when in the presence of family or friends. As such, we conducted a diary and interview study to understand how people use mobile devices in the presence of others at home, and how this shapes their behavior and household dynamics. Results show that family members become frustrated when others do non-urgent activities on their phones in the presence of others. Yet people often guess at what others are doing because of the personal nature of mobile devices. In some cases, people developed strategies to provide a greater sense of activity awareness to combat the problem. Mobile phone usage was sometimes perceived as beneficial by providing a mechanism for needed disengagement from family members. These findings suggest several opportunities for redesigning mobile device software to mitigate emergent frustrations, and open up new opportunities for nurturing social interactions among family members.

People accumulate huge assortments of virtual possessions, but it is not yet clear how systems and system designers can help people make meaning from these large archives. Early research in HCI has suggested that people generally appear to value their virtual things less than their material things, but theory on material possessions does not entirely explain this difference. To investigate if changes to the form and behavior of virtual things may surface valued elements of a virtual archive, we designed a technology probe that selected snippets from old emails and mailed them as physical postcards to participating households. The probe uncovered features of emails that trigger meaningful reflection, and how contextual information can help people engage in reminiscence. Our study revealed insights about how materializing virtual possessions influences factors shaping how people draw on, understand, and value those possessions. We conclude with implication and strategies for aimed at supporting people in having more meaningful interactions and experiences with their virtual possessions.

Prototypes and prototyping have had a long and important history in the HCI community and have played a highly significant role in creating technology that is easier and more fulfilling to use. Yet, as focus in HCI is expanding to investigate complex matters of human relationships with technology over time in the intimate and contested contexts of everyday life, the notion of a 'prototype' may not be fully sufficient to support these kinds of inquiries. We propose the research product as an extension and evolution of the research prototype to support generative inquiries in this emerging research area. We articulate four interrelated qualities of research products inquiry-driven, finish, fit, and independent and draw on these qualities to describe and analyze five different yet related design research cases we have collectively conducted over the past six years. We conclude with a discussion of challenges and opportunities for crafting research products and the implications they suggest for future design-oriented HCI research.

We describe the design, implementation, and deployment of Fenestra, a domestic technology embodied in the form of a wirelessly connected round mirror, photo frame, and candle that displays photos of departed loved ones. Fenestra's interaction design, form, and materials are inspired by Japanese domestic practices of memorializing departed loved ones with a home altar called butsudan. We deployed Fenestra in three Japanese households to explore how this design artifact might support everyday domestic practices of memorialization, and where complications might potentially emerge. Findings reveal that a range of outcomes emerged across our participants' experiences of living with Fenestra--from profound remembrance to unexpected uses to unsettling encounters. These findings are interpreted to present opportunities for future research and practice initiatives in the HCI community.

We adopt a design-oriented approach aimed at motivating and expanding the notion of everyday creativity beyond explicit interactions or purposed manipulations to also include the implicit, incremental and, at times even, unknowing encounters that emerge among people, technologies, and artifacts over time. Specifically, we explore these ideas through the design and investigation of two interaction design research artifacts: the Photobox and table-non-table. Through analyzing and synthesizing insights that emerged across our studies, we describe a related set of concepts in support of a more implicit form of everyday creativity, which include: unaware objects, intersections and ensembles. We conclude by interpreting findings in context of prior implications for everyday creativity and outline considerations for future work.

The home and domestic experiences have been studied from multiple points of view and disciplines, with an array of methodologies in the past twenty-five years in HCI. Given the attention to the home and the volume of research, what further areas of research might there be? Based on a critical analysis of 121 works on the topic, we present seven genres of domestic technology research in HCI: social routines in the home, ongoing domestic practices, the home as a testing ground, smart homes, contested values of a home, the home as a site for interpretation, and speculative visions of the home. We articulate dominant research perspectives in HCI, and we offer two complementary perspectives about how to investigate the domestic experience in future research: the material perspective and the first person perspective.

Emerging over a decade ago, slow technology is a design philosophy aimed at supporting experiences of reflection through and on technology in everyday life. Recent research has suggested that slow technologies can open up new forms of interaction with digital content that support self-reflection and re-visitation of the past. However, little work has investigated people's long-term interactions with systems that embody this design strategy. To investigate, a qualitative study with 31 participants was conducted to understand their long-term experiences with FutureMe-a slow technology that has been in use for over twelve years by more than one million people. Findings reveal that, despite its simplicity, FutureMe produced a range of outcomes-from profound reminiscence to unsettling encounters. Findings are interpreted to present opportunities and implications for future research and practice initiatives.

The creation of a personal legacy is a process through which information, values, and memories are passed down to future generations. This process is inherently subjective, both as a curated collection of the elements of one's life, and as an evolving form of remembrance that is subject to the interpretations of those to whom it is left. Based on directed storytelling sessions with 14 adults from a large Midwestern city in the USA, we explore users' perceptions of how their use of digital systems and information will impact how their lives are interpreted and reflected upon by their families and by future generations. Our findings describe nuances regarding how shifting notions about technological systems and the long-term accessibility of digital information impact the ways in which we share, and subsequently manage, information online. This work, explored here in the context of legacy, exposes opportunities to help users engage with their digital information through the curation of meaningful records, the dispossession of digital debris, and a reexamination of how digital systems and services influence the accessibility and lifespan of digital information.

People worldwide are increasingly acquiring virtual possessions. While virtual possessions have become ubiquitous, little work exists on how people value them, and how their experiences of them differ from material possessions. In this paper, we reflect on and synthesize findings from five studies we conducted over the past five years that investigated people's perceptions of and practices with virtual possessions. Through the higher-level perspective we adopt, we propose three thematic qualities that help characterize people's experiences with virtual possessions, as compared to their material things: placelessness, spacelessness, and formlessness. We draw on these proposed qualities as lenses to help frame future research and practice opportunities for better supporting value construction activities with virtual possessions.

We have developed User Enactments to help support design teams in more successfully investigating radical alterations to technologies' roles, forms and behaviors in uncharted design spaces. To date, no work exists that explicitly unpacks the practical development of a cohesive set of user enactments. Interest is growing in the method with its recent inclusion in a popular design method handbook for practitioners and also as it becomes integrated into graduate-level university curriculum in interaction design. The contribution of this Pictorial is to unpack the thinking and making behind a set of user enactments through visual documentation and annotations.

In this Pictorial we explain and describe Eclipse, a method aimed at eliciting subjective qualities of people's experiences of and relationships with public places. Our method guides participants to sequentially explore their memories, sensations, sense of place, and stories related to a public place. Our goal is to present this method in a pictorial form to make it more concise and more easily usable by other interaction designers; in this, we want to depict the richness and qualities of the elicitations, and ultimately the subjective qualities of a public place.

We describe the design, implementation and deployment of Photobox, a domestic technology that prints four or five randomly selected photos from the owner's Flickr collection at random intervals each month. We deployed Photobox in three homes for fourteen months, to explore how the slow pace at which it operates could support experiences of anticipation and re-visitation of the past. Findings reveal changes in attitude toward the device, from frustration to eventual acceptance. Participants drew on the photos to reflect on past life events and reactions indicated a renewed interest for their Flickr collection. Photobox also provoked reflection on technology in and around the home. These findings suggest several opportunities, such as designing for anticipation, better supporting reflection on the past, and, more generally, expanding the slow technology research program within the HCI community.

Legacy is the meaningful and complex way in which information, values, and possessions are passed on to others. As digital systems and information become meaningfully parts of people's everyday and social relationships, it is essential to develop new insights about how technology intersects with legacy and inheritance practices. We designed three interactive systems to investigate how digital materials might be passed down in the future. We conducted in-home interviews with ten parents using the systems to provoke discussion about how technology might support or complicate their existing practices. Sessions revealed parents desired to treat their digital information in ways not fully supported by technology. Findings are interpreted to describe design considerations for future work in this emerging space.

People worldwide are increasingly acquiring collections of virtual possessions. While virtual possessions have become ubiquitous, little work exists on how people value and form attachments to these things. To investigate, we conducted a study with 48 young adults from South Korea, Spain and the United States. The study probed on participants' perceived value of their virtual possessions as compared to their material things, and the comparative similarities and differences across cultures. Findings show that young adults live in unfinished spaces and that they often experience a sense of fragmentation when trying to integrate their virtual possessions into their lives. These findings point to several design opportunities, such as tools for life story-oriented archiving, and insights on better forms of Cloud storage.

For over 40 years the notion of the file, as devised by pioneers in the field of computing, has been the subject of much contention. Some have wanted to abandon the term altogether on the grounds that metaphors about files can confuse users and designers alike. More recently, the emergence of the 'cloud' has led some to suggest that the term is simply obsolescent. In this paper we want to suggest that, despite all these conceptual debates and changes in technology, the term file still remains central to systems architectures and to the concerns of users. Notwithstanding profound changes in what users do and technologies afford, we suggest that files continue to act as a cohering concept, something like a 'boundary object' between computer engineers and users. However, the effectiveness of this boundary object is now waning. There are increasing signs of slippage and muddle. Instead of throwing away the notion altogether, we propose that the definition of and use of files as a boundary object be reconstituted. New abstractions are needed, ones which reflect what users seek to do with their digital data, and which allow engineers to solve the networking, storage and data management problems that ensue when files move from the PC on to the networked world of today.

Over a decade ago Hallnäs and Redström's seminal article on Slow Technology [6] argued that the increasing availability of technology in environments outside of the workplace requires interaction design to be expanded from creating tools for making people's lives more efficient to creating technology that could be embedded in everyday environments over long periods of time. Since then, the Slow Technology design agenda has expanded to include issues such as (i) designing for slowness, solitude, and mental rest, (ii) designing interactive systems to be used across multiple generations and lifespans, and (iii) designing for slower, less consumptive lifestyles and practices. This workshop aims to advance the Slow Technology design program by exploring the various practical, methodological and theoretical motivations, challenges, and approaches implicated in doing research and design in this growing space.

We describe the design and implementation of Photobox, a device intended to be used over many years, which occasionally prints a randomly selected photo from the owner's Flickr collection inside of a wooden chest. We describe and reflect on how engaging in the design of this slow technology [5] led to some unexpected challenges and provoked us to re-think approaches to making technologies that are intended to be used over long time scales and which might act infrequently. We also reflect on how living with the device during the implementation phase led to unexpected insights. We conclude with implications for research and practice in the slow technology design space.

Designing radically new technology systems that people will want to use is complex. Design teams must draw on knowledge related to people's current values and desires to envision a preferred yet plausible future. However, the introduction of new technology can shape people's values and practices, and what-we-know-now about them does not always translate to an effective guess of what the future could, or should, be. New products and systems typically exist outside of current understandings of technology and use paradigms; they often have few interaction and social conventions to guide the design process, making efforts to pursue them complex and risky. User Enactments (UEs) have been developed as a design approach that aids design teams in more successfully investigate radical alterations to technologies' roles, forms, and behaviors in uncharted design spaces. In this paper, we reflect on our repeated use of UE over the past five years to unpack lessons learned and further specify how and when to use it. We conclude with a reflection on how UE can function as a boundary object and implications for future work.

Material artifacts are passed down as a way of sustaining relationships and family history. However, new issues are emerging as families are increasingly left with the digital remains of their loved ones. We designed three devices to investigate how digital materials might be passed down, lived with and inherited in the future. We conducted in-home interviews with 8 families using the devices to provoke discussion about how technology might support (or complicate) their existing practices. Sessions revealed families desired to treat their archives in ways not fully supported by technology as well as potential tensions that could emerge. Findings are interpreted to detail design considerations for future work in this emerging space.

People are amassing larger and more diverse collections of digital things. The emergence of Cloud computing has enabled people to move their personal files to online places, and create new digital things through online services. However, little is known about how this shift might shape people's orientations toward their digital things. To investigate, we conducted in depth interviews with 13 people comparing and contrasting how they think about their possessions, moving from physical ones, to locally kept digital materials, to the online world. Findings are interpreted to detail design and research opportunities in this emerging space.

Over the past several years, people have acquired more and more virtual possessions. While virtual possessions have become ubiquitous, little work exists to inform designers on how these growing collections should be displayed and how they should behave. We generated four design concepts that changed the form and behavior of these digital things, making them more present within a teen bedroom. We then conducted speed dating sessions to investigate how these new forms and behaviors influence perceptions of value. Sessions revealed how new technologies might better support self-exploration and reflection, as well as how they could complicate identity construction processes. Findings are interpreted to detail opportunities and tensions that can guide future research and practice in this emerging space.

Examining developmental periods of the human lifespan has been a useful tradition for focusing HCI research (e.g., technologies for children or the elderly). In this paper, we identify the end of life as another period of the human lifespan that merits consideration by technology designers and researchers. This paper maps out current and future research in HCI at the end of life by first describing how this area raises questions concerning materiality and artifacts, social identities, temporality and methodologies. Having provided a description of the richness of this area, we then frame it against HCI traditions and practices in an orientation we term the lifespan-oriented approach. This paper maps early efforts in end of life research, structures and suggests areas for continued work, and situates the end of life among existing areas of HCI research.

Over the past several years, people have increasingly acquired virtual possessions. We consider these things to include artifacts that are increasingly becoming immaterial (e.g. books, photos, music, movies) and things that have never traditionally had a lasting material form (e.g. SMS archives, social networking profiles, personal behavior logs). To date, little research exists about how people value and form attachments to virtual possessions. To investigate, we conducted a study with 21 teenagers exploring the perceived value of their virtual possessions, and the comparative similarities and differences with their material things. Findings are interpreted to detail design and research opportunities and issues in this emerging space.

Sensing has played a significant role in the evolution of ubiquitous computing systems, enabling many of today's compelling interactive and ubiquitous experiences. In this paper, we argue for expanding the current landscape of sensing to include living organisms such as plants and animals, along with traditional tools and digital devices. We present a field study of ten individuals who routinely work with living organisms such as plants, fish, reptiles and bees, and rely on these organisms as well as analog instruments and digital sensors to infer environmental conditions and inform future actions. Our findings offer a new perspective on everyday biomarkers, and we use the lens of organic and non-digital sensing to reflect on current sensing paradigms in ubiquitous computing. We conclude with three opportunity areas to help frame future work in ubiquitous sensing: (1) incorporating traditional technologies and living systems into ubiquitous sensing applications, (2) developing information technologies that teach new ways of 'seeing', and (3) supporting richer forms of metadata to unite stakeholders through their actions, interests and concerns.

We describe findings from ethnographic fieldwork and a participatory design workshop conducted with members of urban agriculture communities. The aim of this work is to critically understand community members' agricultural practices as well as uses of interactive technologies in the service of investigating how the values of these communities might shape future sustainable HCI research. We found members heavily resisted technological augmentation of their agricultural practices, but suggested several novel ways in which interactive systems could be leveraged to help achieve their goals and potentially engender more sustainable ways of living. We conclude with a discussion of opportunities for designing interactive systems to support small-scale urban food production and implications for future research.

While the HCI community has long investigated issues of designing for family and the home, very little attention has focused on the lives of divorced families and the ways in which interactive systems might be better designed to address the very real and growing issues they face. In this paper we present an overview of related research on divorce and families. We then report field evidence from 13 in depth interviews conducted with families of parents and children in joint custody situations, and unpack key emergent problems and tensions. We conclude with a discussion of the design implications and opportunities that give shape to how the HCI community may be able to have a positive effect on this set of potential users. The overarching goal of this research is to better understand how the HCI community might begin to approach designing for this alternative family.

For more than forty years, researchers have detailed how people develop attachments to their material possessions as they create and evolve a sense of self. Over the past several years people have increasingly acquired virtual possessions. These include both possessions that are losing their material integrity (books, photos, music, movies) as well as things that have never had material form (e.g. email archives, social networking profiles, personal behavior logs). However, little is known about how people perceive, value, and form attachments to their virtual possessions. To investigate, we conducted a study with teens exploring their virtual possessions. Preliminary findings reveal three key themes and suggest emerging interaction design opportunities for new forms for people's virtual things.

While it can be a delicate and emotionally-laden topic, new technological trends compel us to confront a range of problems and issues about death and bereavement. This area presents complex challenges and the associated literature is extensive. In this paper we offer a way of slicing through several perspectives in the social sciences to see clearly a set of salient issues related to bereavement. Following this, we present a theoretical lens to provide a way of conceptualizing how the HCI community could begin to approach such issues. We then report field evidence from 11 in-depth interviews conducted with bereaved participants and apply the proposed lens to unpack key emergent problems and tensions. We conclude with a discussion on how the HCI design space might be sensitized to better support the social processes that unfold when bereavement occurs.

This paper takes up the problem of understanding why we preserve some things passionately and discard others without thought. We briefly report on the theoretical literature relating to this question, both in terms of existing literature in HCI, as well as in terms of related literatures that can advance the understanding for the HCI community. We use this reading to refine our frameworks for understanding durability in digital artifice as an issue of sustainable interaction design in HCI. Next, we report in detail on our ongoing work in collecting personal inventories of digital artifice in the home context. We relate our prior and most current personal inventories collections to the framework that owes to our reading of the theoretical literature. Finally, we summarize the theoretical implications and findings of our personal inventories work in terms of implications for the design of digital artifice in a manner that is more durable.

This paper describes the design and interprets the results of a survey of 435 undergraduate students concerning the attitudes of this mainly millennial population towards sustainability apropos of the material effects of information technologies. This survey follows from earlier work on notions of Sustainable Interaction Design (SID)---that is the perspective that sustainability can and should be a central focus within HCI. In so doing it advances to some degree the empirical resources needed to scaffold an understanding of the theory and principles of SID. The interpretations offered yield key insights about understanding different notions of what it means to be successful in a material sense to this population and specific design principles for creating interactive designs differently such that more sustainable behaviors are palatable to individuals of varying attitudes.