In traditional theatrical productions, audiences are ushered to seats, house lights dim, and curtains rise. When this experience moves into digital space, these audience engagement techniques shift. This poster outlines the onboarding tactics theatre-makers deploy in digital sites (i.e., social media platforms, video games), claiming that, as the first point of entry for digital audiences, onboarding is necessary for effective audience engagement. Through the lens of live productions made for and staged in digital sites – a new genre of performance we call “digitally site-specific theatre” – we explore a representative sample of eight theatrical productions and outline four major audience onboarding tactics. These theatre-makers bring creative insights to onboarding processes that help technologists incorporate world-building and quickly cement “rules of engagement” within a variety of digital sites, which can inform HCI approaches to onboarding workflows beyond performance contexts.

As the internet thrives on the circulation of easily copied content, ensuring attribution is properly given has been a perennial challenge. Following the rise of synthetic media and generative AI tools, and corresponding technologies which enable detailed media provenance, the picture has become considerably more complicated. We present a design research project to consider the implications of these developments from the perspective of the public, everyday (non-professional) user and ‘mundane content’ creation. Through the design, exhibition, and study of a collaborative storytelling tool, ORAgen Fables, we introduce technologies which enable detailed attribution and media provenance and explore contemporary attitudes and concerns about attribution. Our findings suggest that attribution should be understood as relational and dynamic with users having the right to ongoing management of their attribution. This opens a design space for understanding how technical systems could be deployed to define and ascribe attribution for past and future interactions.

Older adults are increasingly invited into speculative activities within HCI, yet little is known about how researchers facilitate these processes or how this population engages in shaping alternative presents and socio-technical futures. While speculative design methods often aim to support non-designers to contribute to design processes, engaging older adults poses unique challenges that complicate their involvement. To build a comprehensive understanding, we conducted a scoping review of 44 prior studies on speculative design involving older adults, focusing on the research objectives and methodological rationales, facilitation, and how older adults engage in speculation. Through this analysis, we identify persistent methodological tensions, opportunities to advance more inclusive speculative practices with aging populations, and suggest implications for future practice.

Figure 1: 'Money Mysteries' booklet and other items contained in the 'Detective Probe Pack'

Contemporary technologies and data-driven methods have much potential to support innovation in the creative industries - from fashion design and craft, to architecture and music. However, discussing and understanding the applied potential of data and technology can be especially difficult for creative practitioners who have limited previous experience with data-driven research and development. In this pictorial, we address this challenge through the design of a ‘Visual Vocabulary’ of illustrations aimed to scaffold creative practitioners’ thinking about how they might innovatively employ a diverse range of data and technology to address their creative and business challenges. The illustrations serve as a resource for subverting common imageries of technologies and computational methods in popular media - which often fail to showcase their many creative affordances. Moreover, as an ideation card deck, they also serve to support discussion and exploration of new data-driven projects for creative practitioners.

The proliferation of AI-generated digital content has intensified the user demand for accurate provenance information to ensure content authenticity.Technical advancements now provide tools to make the digital media content supply chain more transparent through the use of provenance data.This paper foregrounds the importance of understanding how the situated nature of user-content engagement influences perceptions and uses of this data.Insights from a workshop with experts in the creative media sector suggest that, as the adoption of provenance data becomes more common, users need richer and more nuanced information.We suggest that analyzing the increasing demand for content authenticity through the lens of multiple "authenticities", each reflecting different user needs and contexts, can help identify and address the needs for, and uses of, provenance data by creators and audiences alike.

Doughnut Economics offers a contemporary compass for navigating the complexities of creating a safe and just space where humanity can flourish while respecting ecological boundaries. This pictorial reports on how the Doughnut Economics model can be applied as a tool for facilitating complex stakeholder engagement. We present a novel visual framework and facilitation method to enable systemic and values-led thinking in the context of establishing a new interdisciplinary academic institution. Using a participatory design process, 115 stakeholders from academic, research, and administrative backgrounds explored this model over two studio sessions, co-creating an institutional compass to navigate the socio-ethical challenges of their professional practices. We leverage the pictorial format to (i) demonstrate the application of the Doughnut Economics model as an effective visual framework for fostering structured dialogue to surface shared and contesting values and boundaries and (ii) facilitate complex stakeholder engagement through a systemic design journey that encourages emergent dialogue.

In a digital, and cashless economy, transactional data has become ubiquitous, telling and highly valuable. Yet, this data is rarely considered critically as a material for design. This pictorial presents two successive Research through Design projects exploring practically how we might design with transactional data. The first, ‘FTML: Financial Transaction Mark-up Language’ is a speculative design project and short film, which explores how value-laden ‘mark up’ of specific transactional data could underpin new services and digital applications. The second, ‘Money / Data Laundering’ adopted an approach of ‘designerly hacking’, with Point of Sale (PoS) payment card readers, to develop a web application to digitally ‘wash’ or launder specific values into an indivdual's bank account via a symbolic transaction. Reflecting on both interventions, we demonstrate the need, and opportunities, for designers to engage critically with transactional data and financial infrastructures, to enable new forms of value(s) exchange.

Recommender systems are increasingly employed by journalistic outlets to deliver personalised news, transforming news curation into a reciprocal yet insufficiently defined process influenced by editors, recommender systems, and individual user actions. To understand the tension in this dynamic and users’ preferences and perceptions of their role in personalised news curation, we conducted a study with UK participants aged 16-34. Building on a preliminary survey and interview study, which revealed a strong desire from participants for increased agency in personalisation, we designed an interactive news recommender provotype (provocative design artefact) which probed the role of agency in news curation with participants (n=16). Findings highlighted a behaviour-intention gap, indicating participants desire for agency yet reluctance to intervene actively in personalisation. Our research offers valuable insights into how users perceive their agency in personalised news curation, underscoring the importance for systems to be designed to support individuals becoming active agents in news personalisation.

This paper presents the design, deployment and qualitative study of a large-scale, public, generative art exhibition, through which passers-by could create artworks, and mint a non-fungible-token (NFT). Following the month-long exhibition, during which 229 anonymous participants produced artworks, 69 non-transferable NFTs were minted, we surveyed (33) and interviewed (14) expert and novice participants about their experiences. We explored contemporary challenges of owning digital things, and the extent to which NFTs, and 'Web3' technologies offer meaningful forms of ownership. Our findings describe how the inability to trade this NFT, and its unique circumstances of acquisition, made it meaningful in ways that extended beyond its immediate (limited) utility and offered participants something through which to construct identity. Reflecting on the aspirations, contradictions, and misconceptions of forms of ownership enabled by NFTs, we conclude with proposals for renewed attention in HCI to the nature of digital possessions, and the potential for 'ownership design'.

FestForward is a fictional, local, cultural magazine, set in 2030, designed to stimulate conversations about equitable and sustainable digital futures in performing arts festivals. This extensive design fiction was developed through a series of participatory workshops, where creative and cultural practitioners responded to various ‘provotypes’ suggesting narrative content for the magazine. In this pictorial, we annotate and unpack the making of FestForward to reflect upon various formats and approaches to design futuring, and to offer a platform for further world-building, research and discussion on equitable digital futures in arts festivals.

This paper reports on Zoom Obscura – an artist-based design research project, responding to the ubiquity of video-conferencing as a technical and cultural phenomenon throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. As enterprise software, such as Zoom, rapidly came to mediate even the most personal and intimate interactions, we supported and collaborated with seven independent artists to explore technical and creative interventions in video-conferencing. Our call for participation sought critical interventions that would help users counter, and regain agency in regard to the various ways in which personal data is captured, transmitted and processed in video-conferencing tools. In this design study, we analyse post-hoc how each of the seven projects employed aspects of counterfunctional design to achieve these aims. Each project reveals different avenues and strategies for counterfunctionality in video-conferencing software, as well as opportunities to design critically towards interactions and experiences that challenge existing norms and expectations around these platforms.

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.

Smart Donations is a blockchain-based platform that offers users ‘contracts’ that donate funds to certain causes in response to real-world events e.g., whenever an earthquake is detected or an activist tweets about refugees. We designed Smart donations with Oxfam Australia, trialled it for 8-weeks with 86 people, recorded platform analytics and qualitatively analysed questionnaires and interviews about user experiences. Temporal qualities emerge when automation enforces conditions that contributed to participants’ awareness of events that are usually unconscious, and senses of immediacy in contributing to crisis response and ongoing involvement in situations far-away while awaiting conditions to be met. We suggest data driven automation can reveal diverse temporal registers, in real-world phenomena, sociality, morality and everyday life, which contributes to experiencing a ‘right time’ to donate that is not limited to productivity or efficiency. Thus, we recommend a sensitivity to right time in designing for multiple temporalities in FinTech more generally.

This paper conceptualizes ‘creative transactions’ – payment for creative work – as a rich site for the study, design and innovation of new financial technologies, and ‘special digital monies’. For most, creative labor remains highly precarious and underfunded and those working in the creative industries frequently rely on diverse forms of funding for their work. As a case study, we draw on a corpus of 87 ‘Break Kickstarter’ crowdfunding campaigns, where project creators were encouraged to break conventions and “rethink what a Kickstarter campaign can be”. By studying how these innovative projects broke fundraising conventions and experimented with the transactional attributes of a Kickstarter campaign, we show how they reconfigured the payment for creative work, and developed new relations between creators and their audiences. Drawing on these analyses, we derive new ideas and opportunities for the design of special digital monies to support novel creative transactions beyond crowdfunding campaigns.

This pictorial describes in detail the design, and multiple iterations, of PizzaBlock - a role-playing game and design workshop to introduce non-technical participants to decentralised identity management systems. We have so far played this game with six different audiences, with over one hundred participants - iterating the design of the artefacts and gameplay each time. In this pictorial, we reflect on this RtD project to unpack: a) How we designed artefacts and roleplay to explore decentralised technologies and networks; b) How we communicated the key challenges and parameters of a complex system, through the production of a playable, interactive, analogue representation of that technology; c) How we struck a balance between playful tangible gameplay and high-fidelity technical analogy; and d) How approaches like PizzaBlock invite engagement with complex infrastructures and can support more participatory approaches to their design.

Design futuring approaches, such as speculative design, design fiction and others, seek to (re)envision futures and explore alternatives. As design futuring becomes established in HCI design research, there is an opportunity to expand and develop these approaches. To that end, by reflecting on our own research and examining related work, we contribute five modes of reflection. These modes concern formgiving, temporality, researcher positionality, real-world engagement, and knowledge production. We illustrate the value of each mode through careful analysis of selected design exemplars and provide questions to interrogate the practice of design futuring. Each reflective mode offers productive resources for design practitioners and researchers to articulate their work, generate new directions for their work, and analyze their own and others' work.

This paper presents a qualitative study of the recent integration of a UK-based, digital-first mobile banking app - Monzo - with the web automation service IFTTT (If This Then That). Through analysis of 113 unique IFTTT 'recipes' shared by Monzo users on public community forums, we illustrate the potentially diverse functions of these recipes, and how they are achieved through different kinds of automation. Beyond achieving more convenient and efficient financial management, we note many playful and expressive applications of conditionality and automation that far extend traditional functions of banking applications and infrastructure. We use these findings to map opportunities, challenges and areas of future research in the development of 'programmable money' and related financial technologies. Specifically, we present design implications for the extension of native digital banking applications; novel uses of banking data; the applicability of blockchains and smart contracts; and future forms of financial autonomy.

This paper reports on a co-speculative interview study with charitable donors to explore the future of programmable, conditional and data-driven donations. Responding to the rapid emergence of blockchain-based and AI-supported financial technologies, we specifically examine the potential of automated, third-party 'escrows', where donations are held before they are released or returned based on specified rules and conditions. To explore this we conducted pilot workshops with 9 participants and an interview study in which 14 further participants were asked about their experiences of donating money, and invited to co-speculate on a service for programmable giving. The study elicited how data-driven conditionality and automation could be leveraged to create novel donor experiences, however also illustrated the inherent tensions and challenges involved in giving programmatically. Reflecting on these findings, our paper contributes implications both for the design of programmable aid platforms, and the design of escrow-based financial services in general.

Public commentary related to reality TV can be overwhelmed by thoughtless reactions and negative sentiments, which often problematically reinforce the cultural stereotyping typically employed in such media. We describe the design, and month-long evaluation, of a mobile "second-screening" application, Screenr, which uses co-voting and live textual tagging to encourage more critical co-viewing in these contexts. Our findings highlight how Screenr supported interrogation of the production qualities and claims of shows, promoted critical discourse around the motivations of programmes, and engaged participants in reflecting on their own assumptions and views. We situate our results within the context of existing second-screening co-viewing work, discuss implications for such technologies to support critical engagement with socio-political media, and provide design implications for future digital technologies in this domain.

There is a growing body of literature in HCI examining the intersection between policymaking and technology research. However, what it means to engage in policymaking in our field, or the ways in which evidence from HCI studies is translated into policy, is not well understood. We report on interviews with 11 participants working at the intersection of technology research and policymaking. Analysis of this data highlights how evidence is understood and made sense of in policymaking processes, what forms of evidence are privileged over others, and the work that researchers engage in to meaningfully communicate their work to policymaking audiences. We discuss how our findings pose challenges for certain traditions of research in HCI, yet also open up new policy opportunities for those engaging in more speculative research practices. We conclude by discussing three ways forward that the HCI community can explore to increase engagement with policymaking contexts.

Recent work within HCI and CSCW has become attentive to the politics of data and metrics in order to highlight the implications of what counts and how. In this paper, we relate these discussions to the longstanding distinctions made between value and values. We introduce literature on 'Valuation Studies' and argue for understanding the politics of data through valuation - an ongoing social practice that transforms socially embedded values into different forms of more abstract value. This theoretical work is developed through an ethnographic study of contemporary UK charity shops, as a site focused on the labour of valuation, but embedded in both local and global values. Through this study, we consider implications for the intervention and design of 'data-driven innovation', with a particular focus on distributed ledger technologies. We argue that these technologies inevitably engage in valuation, and require careful attention to the ongoing processes by which value is translated and performed by different stakeholders.

Blockchain is an emerging infrastructural technology that is proposed to fundamentally transform the ways in which people transact, trust, collaborate, organize and identify themselves. In this paper, we construct a typology of emerging blockchain applications, consider the domains in which they are applied, and identify distinguishing features of this new technology. We argue that there is a unique role for the HCI community in linking the design and application of blockchain technology towards lived experience and the articulation of human values. In particular, we note how the accounting of transactions, a trust in immutable code and algorithms, and the leveraging of distributed crowds and publics around vast interoperable databases all relate to longstanding issues of importance for the field. We conclude by highlighting core conceptual and methodological challenges for HCI researchers beginning to work with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.

Technologies such as distributed ledgers and smart contracts are enabling the emergence of new autonomous systems, and providing enhanced systems to track the provenance of goods. A growing body of work in HCI is exploring the novel challenges of these systems, but there has been little attention paid to their impact on everyday activities. This paper presents a study carried out in 3 office environments for a 1-month period, which explored the impact of an autonomous coffee machine on the everyday activity of coffee consumption. The Bitbarista mediates coffee consumption through autonomous processes, presenting provenance data at the time of purchase while attempting to reduce intermediaries in the coffee trade. Through the report of interactions with and around the Bitbarista, we explore its implications for everyday life, and wider social structures and values. We conclude by offering recommendations for the design of community shared autonomous systems.

In this paper we describe a Research through Design inquiry about a speculative wedding documentation service, in the mode of the Quantified Self. We reflect on our design research, which included design ethnography, interviews, enactments of parts of the service, and the production of a concept brochure. In so doing, we explore the design of personal tracking as a documentary activity, one intended for longer-term self-expression and remembering -- rather than simply to monitor, regulate and motivate a data-driven life. Developing the Lived Informatics discourse, we use our design-led inquiry to propose "Documentary Informatics" as an alternative and longer-term design perspective on self-tracking tools.

Viewing the mobile telephone as a networked material, we demonstrate the ways in which we have used it to make Research Products for the "Family Rituals 2.0" inquiry of families separated by work. Drawing from a diversity of sources we survey and deconstruct the phone as a material that can be worked to a vast range of technical effects, extended by hardware and configured by software. We demonstrate the transformations of hacking and prototyping practices necessary to construct complex Research Products through the case study of our machines. We offer the Interaction Design community seven specific and actionable techniques for using mobile telephones in Research Products. Finally, we open up a broader discussion for researchers and practitioners using mobile phones as a design material in their work.

We present findings from a qualitative study about how Internet use supports self-functioning following the life transition of retirement from work. This study recruited six recent retirees and included the deployment of OnLines, a design research artifact that logged and visualized key online services used by participants at home over four-weeks. The deployment was supported by pre- and post-deployment interviews. OnLines prompted participants' reflection on their patterns of Internet use. Position Exchange Theory was used to understand retirees' sense making from a lifespan perspective, informing the design of supportive online services. This paper delivers a three-fold contribution to the field of human-computer interaction, advancing a lifespan-oriented approach by conceptualizing the self as a dialogical phenomenon that develops over time, advancing the ageing discourse by reporting on retirees' complex identities in the context of their life histories, and advancing discourse on research through design by developing OnLines to foster participant-researcher reflection informed by Self Psychology.

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.

Smart journals are both an emerging class of lifelogging applications and novel digital possessions, which are used to create and curate a personal record of one's life. Through an in-depth interview study of analogue and digital journaling practices, and by drawing on a wide range of research around --technologies of memory?, we address fundamental questions about how people manage and value digital records of the past. Appreciating journaling as deeply idiographic, we map a broad range of user practices and motivations and use this understanding to ground four design considerations: recognizing the motivation to account for one's life; supporting the authoring of a unique perspective and finding a place for passive tracking as a chronicle. Finally, we argue that smart journals signal a maturing orientation to issues of digital archiving.

The use of data and metrics on a professional and personal level has led to considerable discourse around the performative power and politics of 'big data' and data visualization, with academia being no exception. We have developed a university system, ResViz, which publicly visualizes the externally funded research projects of academics, and their internal collaborations. We present an interview study that engages 20 key stakeholders, academics and administrators who are part of the pilot release for the first version of this system. In doing so, we describe and problematize our design space, considering the implications of making metrics visible and their social use within a large organization. Our findings cut across the way people communicate, review and manage performance with metrics. We raise seven design issues in this space -- practical considerations that expose the tensions in making metrics available for public contestation.

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 article questions how people will interact with a quantified past—the growing historical record generated by the increasing use of sensor-based technologies and, in particular, personal informatics tools. In a qualitative study, we interviewed 15 long-term users of different self-tracking tools about how they encountered and made meaning from historical data they had collected. Our findings highlight that even if few people are self-tracking as a form of deliberate lifelogging, many of them generate data and records that become meaningful digital possessions. These records are revealing of many aspects of people’s lives. Through considerable rhetorical data-work, people can appropriate such records to form highly personal accounts of their pasts. We use our findings to identify six characteristics of a quantified past and map an emerging design space for the long-term and retrospective use of personal informatics. Principally, we propose that design should seek to support people in making account of their data and guard against the assumption that more, or “better,” data will be able to do this for them. To this end, we speculate on design opportunities and challenges for experiencing, curating, and sharing historical personal data in new ways.

Research on actuated interfaces has shown that people respond in certain socialized ways to interfaces that exhibit autonomous behaviours. We wished to explore the elements of design that drive people to regard an autonomous, interactive system as a social agent. To explore perceptions of autonomous behaviour in interfaces we created Diri - an autonomous helium balloon, used to document activity in spaces. We implemented two different technological sophistications of Diri, to compare the outcomes of our design decisions. We present our design process, technical details and evaluation workshops, concluding with implications for designing for autonomous behaviour in interfaces.