Existing approaches to combat the opacity of large language models tend to centre around post-hoc explanations of model processes. We explore an alternative approach to fostering critical understanding through intuitive, experience-driven exploration of an LLM’s inner workings. Toward that end, we present “Stepping Into the Black Box” (SIBB): a critical artefact which enables participants to “see like an LLM” and take on an active role in its generative process. Through the box, pairs of participants enact a dynamic interaction with a chatbot presented as a local expert. Participants are invited to intervene in its algorithmic decisions, building responses in tandem with the model. Their interactions and reflections speak to the kinds of criticality developed by experiential learning, highlighting the particular ways that exploring an enclosed system from within affects trust. In this way, SIBB demonstrates the potential of collaborative, experiential research-through-design practices to foster community understanding of emerging technologies.

Community sharing fosters resourceful, socially engaged lifestyles that challenge current economic systems based on extraction and exploitation. Previous designs for supporting sharing communities often target digital platforms and physical sharing sites, relying on members to promote the culture of sharing. This paper reports on the initial exploration of utilising shared objects as a site of design and as active agents in promoting sharing cultures. We introduce Senito, a speculative cordless drill designed with agency to encourage sharing cultures through speech and movement. We report on the design and initial testing of Senito with 14 members of sharing communities. Our results indicate that agency in shared objects could be leveraged to enhance accountability, strengthen community bonds, and facilitate knowledge sharing. Our design approach further proposes directions for future research to explore different ways of configuring and understanding the potential of agentic objects in community sharing.

Menstruation is a highly subjective and situated embodied experience, yet these aspects are frequently overlooked in current menstrual tracking technologies and healthcare settings. This research proposes weaving as a feminist approach to material narrative that can illuminate subjectivity and situated embodiment. Through three woven pieces exhibited in the UK, the study explores how weaving can express menstrual experiences in tangible and sensory ways, specifically focusing on: (1) cyclical bodily perceptions of time within cycles; (2) trivialised endometriosis pain in medical contexts; and (3) daily lived experiences beyond datafication. By describing and reflecting on the making process, we found that the tactile, slow, and reflective qualities of weaving facilitate deeper and more introspective bodily awareness. It also allows menstrual experiences to be expressed in more fluid and flexible ways, supporting individuals in validating and appreciating their bodies. Those insights encourage designers to focus on materially oriented, sensory, and felt approaches, thereby expanding the design possibilities within menstrual technologies and healthcare.

Menstrual pain is an embodied, unpredictable, and diverse lived experience. However, current menstrual tracking technologies mainly adopt medicalised and quantitative approaches, reducing pain to numerical data, concealing its organic and messy nature. To uncover the felt, lived experience of pain, we explored soft robotics as a tactile, dynamic medium. Through a series of material workshops, we designed MenstaRay, a novel artefact that mimics the temporality and fluctuations of menstrual pain. Findings from sensory interactions with MenstaRay show that soft robotic materials sensitise and enhance menstruators’ bodily awareness, supporting them in contextually recalling, introspecting, and reflecting on their pain experiences, and encouraging a sense of self-care, self-acceptance, and companionship toward menstrual pain. We frame MenstaRay’s dynamic entanglements with fluid bodily experiences as a meaningful material practice through a feminist lens, highlighting the creative potential of novel programmable interactions of knitted soft robotics to express nuanced pain characteristics, extending to other somatic experience design beyond menstruation.

Mainstream digital technologies tend to be designed without reflection on how the way they structure knowledge can decontextualise it from its surroundings, affecting different cultural groups. In this work, we discuss how community-led databases could be created while accounting for Indigenous values and land-based wisdoms, following a collaboration with Radio Tosepan Limakxtum, an organisation of Masewal People. Emerging from metaphors of sowing, growing and harvesting, a series of activities entwining technology with traditional knowledge systems were crafted. In response, exploratory roles and assemblies were created as data practices, reimagining the ancestral self-organisation processes, language and views that have shaped Masewal autonomy and self-determination. The work demonstrates how Indigenous knowledges can reframe ways of thinking about technology, creating a digital territory that extends intricate relations with the land as a living entity. This study contributes relational approaches to data, technologies and participation, emphasising community context, Indigenous research methods and collective wellbeing.

This paper analyses practices of data perception and usage, as well as ongoing and envisioned community technology projects carried out by a Masewal Indigenous group in Mexico through their union of cooperatives, Tosepan. Through fieldwork interviews, Masewal participants expressed how they have been appropriating existing technologies for their people’s self-determination. During a workshop, they imagined how diverse knowledges and lived experiences of their worldview, passed down through generations, could be represented and translated into digital practices more broadly. We draw considerations for the HCI community to embrace novel approaches to data and information systems from the community’s concept of Cosmovision, and develop Micro-, Meso- and Macro- lenses within it. Through these lenses, we discuss how technologies could be designed for specific individual practices and connections with nature (Micro-cosmos) while supporting communal actions for autonomy and self-determination (Meso-cosmos), and considering broader worldmaking processes and implications for identity, prosperity, ecology and plural representations (Macro-cosmos).

This article presents an annotated portfolio of projects that seek to understand and communicate the social and societal implications of blockchains, DLTs and smart contracts. These complex technologies rely on human and technical factors to deliver cryptocurrencies, shared computation and trustless protocols but have a secondary benefit in providing a moment to re-think many aspects of society, and imagine alternative possibilities. The projects use design and HCI methods to relate blockchains to a range of topics, including global supply chains, delivery infrastructure, smart grids, volunteering and charitable giving, through engaging public, exploring ideas and speculating on possible futures. Based on an extensive annotated portfolio we draw out learning for the design of blockchain systems, broadening participation and surfacing questions around imaginaries, social implications and engagement with new technology. This paints a comprehensive picture of how HCI and design can shape understandings of the future of complex technologies.

Obtaining meaningful user consent is increasingly problematic in a world of numerous, heterogeneous digital services. Current approaches (e.g. agreeing to Terms and Conditions) are rooted in the idea of individual control despite growing evidence that users do not (or cannot) exercise such control in informed ways. We consider an alternative approach whereby users can opt to delegate consent decisions to an ecosystem of third-parties including friends, experts, groups and AI entities. We present the results of a study that used a technology probe at a large festival to explore initial public responses to this reframing -- focusing on when and to whom users would delegate such decisions. The results reveal substantial public interest in delegating consent and identify differing preferences depending on the privacy context, highlighting the need for alternative decision mechanisms beyond the current focus on individual choice.

Design and HCI researchers are increasingly working with complex digital infrastructures, such as cryptocurrencies, distributed ledgers and smart contracts. These technologies will have a profound impact on digital systems and their audiences. However, given their emergent nature and technical complexity, involving non-specialists in the design of applications that employ these technologies is challenging. In this paper, we discuss these challenges and present GeoCoin, a location-based platform for embodied learning and speculative ideating with smart contracts. In collaborative workshops with GeoCoin, participants engaged with location-based smart contracts, using the platform to explore digital 'debit' and 'credit' zones in the city. These exercises led to the design of diverse distributed-ledger applications, for time-limited financial unions, participatory budgeting, and humanitarian aid. These results contribute to the HCI community by demonstrating how an experiential prototype can support understanding of the complexities behind new digital infrastructures and facilitate participant engagement in ideation and design processes.

Speculative Enactments are a novel approach to speculative design research with participants. They invite the empirical analysis of participants acting amidst speculative but consequential circumstances. HCI as a broadly pragmatic, experience-centered, and participant-focused field is well placed to innovate methods that invite first-hand interaction and experience with speculative design projects. We discuss three case studies of this approach in practice, based on our own work: Runner Spotters, Metadating and a Quantified Wedding. In distinguishing Speculative Enactments we offer not just practical guidelines, but a set of conceptual resources for researchers and practitioners to critique the different contributions that speculative approaches make to HCI discourse.

This paper identifies a body of HCI research wherein the researchers take part in digitally mediated creative experiences alongside participants. We present our definition and rationale for "self-situated performance research" based on theories in both the HCI and performance literatures. We then analyse four case studies of this type of work, ranging from overtly "performative" staged events to locative audio and public making.

We present insights from an extended engagement and design intervention at an urban regeneration site in SE Lon-don. We describe the process of designing a walking trail and system for recording and playing back place-specific stories for those living and working on the housing estate, and show how this is set within a wider context of urban renewal, social/affordable housing and "community building". Like prior work, the research reveals the frictions that arise in participatory engagements with heterogeneous actors. Here we illustrate how material interventions can re-arrange existing spatial configurations, making productive the plurality of accounts intrinsic in community life. Through this, we provide an orientation to HCI and design interventions that are concerned with civic engagement and participation in processes of making places.

We introduce Metadating -- a future-focused research and speed-dating event where single participants were invited to "explore the romance of personal data". Participants created "data profiles" about themselves, and used these to "date" other participants. In the rich context of dating, we study how personal data is used conversationally to communicate and illustrate identity. We note the manner in which participants carefully curated their profiles, expressing ambiguity before detail, illustration before accuracy. Our findings proposition a set of data services and features, each concerned with representing and curating data in new ways, beyond a focus on purely rational or analytic relationships with a quantified self. Through this, we build on emerging interest in "lived informatics" and raise questions about the experience and social reality of a "data-driven life".

This paper describes three interactive artefacts created for a children's exhibition intended to encourage creativity and allow educational opportunities to emerge naturally through playful exploration. We describe five sensibilities that were used to inform our designs: considering artefacts as resources and scaffolds for imaginative engagement, rewarding extended investment, facilitating requisite unpredictability, encouraging an imaginative orientation to participation, and permitting multiple loci for interaction. Based on observation of how our interactives were used by the public, we discuss how our approach facilitated "open interactions" in a manner that was sensitive to the museum context, favoured a mix of materialities, and manifested a subtle mix of participation and designer autonomy.

This paper explores a design-led approach to digital fabrication which situates it in participatory data translation activities to demonstrate that this technology can find application beyond its use as tool for manufacture. We present two contrasting design contexts in which, respectively, data from conference twitter conversations and craft practitioners' movements are translated into interactively generated and fabricated physical artefacts. We argue that direct involvement in such digital fabrication activities can help people invest meaning into artefacts and facilitate social interaction and reflection upon their activities, while encouraging practitioners to incorporate new forms into their own work. On this basis, we reconsider digital fabrication within data translation activities as situated along an extended 'trajectory of use' in which reflective, meaningful 'data-things' can be created.

Much of the knowing employed in skilled craft practice is difficult to communicate solely through written or verbal description. Consequently, the reflection and development of a craft practice in this manner may miss important nuances of practitioners' skills and experiences. We created digital technologies to sonify (using audio to perceptualize data) a group of craft practitioners' gestures to explore how we can aid their reflection in and on their craft, and consequently develop it. Over a number of workshops, the design of these sonifications were iterated based on how the practitioners responded to them. We found that direct sonification of gesture (sounds generated directly from motion sensor data) helped practitioners understand and reflect upon their own and each other's practice, encouraged discussion and enabled modification of craft technique.

We present the findings of an empirical design study exploring how situating digital fabrication within a souvenir-making activity can enrich an audience's encounter with cultural events and engage visitors in discussion and reflection upon their experiences. During an incremental accumulative design process, in collaboration with an arts organisation, we developed a series of fabrication activities that offered visitors the opportunity to create their own personalised souvenirs based on their experience of a cultural event. By analyzing visitors' trajectories of engagement with the event we explore three key findings: activity embedded digital fabrication engages new audiences, encourages conversation and reflection, and presents organisations with new and more playful ways to gain insights into audience experiences.