Design researchers are exploring noticing as a means of including more-than-human perspectives. Sketching can support concentrated observation, detailed documentation, and visualise complexity, making it particularly suitable for noticing. However, transitioning from observing to noticing requires reflection, which can be challenging without guidance on how to unearth the information buried in the sketch. The first author developed a set of elements to scaffold reflection on sketches for noticing through a four-month residency, adopting a first-person perspective. This practice was later introduced to nine participants, who reflected on their sketches, including breaking down compositional choices, influence of the medium, and the subjects they focused on. We found that this guided noticing practice can foster attentive engagement and reflection, exposing blind spots in their perspective that motivate further noticing. This pictorial offers guidance on how sketching can become an ongoing noticing practice, along with a way to structure reflection for multi-species ethnography.

In this pictorial, we explore alternative ways of knowing urban trees through a more-than-human lens. Using a municipal tree dataset, we focus on “unknown” trees—entries unclassified due to error, decay, or absence—highlighting the limits of quantification and fixed knowledge systems. Urban trees, while critical for ecosystems, are often shaped by technological interventions (e.g., GIS, IoT sensors, AI diagnostics) that prioritize their utility over other expressions. We engage in knitting as a material inquiry to foreground nonhuman agencies and relational entanglements. Through reflective shifts and compromises, this project questions normative design practices, seeking to amplify nonhuman participation. We make two contributions. Firstly, we offer insights into fostering alternative, relational engagements with urban ecologies. Secondly, we reflect on our process of surfacing and working with agentic capacities, articulating guidance for other design researchers. Through this, we advocate for fragmented approaches that embrace complicity and complexity in more-than-human design.

How more-than-human gatherings configure and change to support designing is not well understood. In the more-than-human theory of designing-with, these gatherings are called constituencies. This paper aims to shed light on the practices of a constituency, by analyzing the moving of a plant studio from one city to another. The plant studio includes over 250 plants and is where living-with and designing-with plants are conceptualized. The move offered an opportunity to understand the dynamics of the plant studio as a constituency using design events, a vocabulary and analytical tool, for understanding practices and temporality. In our analysis, we surface the role of humans as speaking subjects and five repertoires or considered actions that together articulate the practice of a constituency. We also illustrate the use of design events as an analytical tool for nuance and critical reflections on more-than-human design.

As design researchers committed to more-than-human designing, we found we were increasingly moving our research activities outside of our institutional studios and labs into yards and balconies where we lived. In this paper, we investigate this emerging pattern through collaborative autoethnography to arrive at the notion of backyard practices. These are distinct practices that signal the value and necessity of being there in more-than-human worlds to design-with over time. We describe the features of the practice that include time as duration and intensities, liminality as more-than-human presences, and proximity. We also describe commitments that emerged that include practice decentering, consistently engage more-than-humans as participants in the process, act with not-knowing and humility, queerly design alongside, and learn to be affected.

While decentering the human has been a key approach in posthumanist HCI, there are still questions and tensions around it.To address them, we outline emergent notions of decentering, tracing it back from HCI to critical posthumanism and connecting epistemological developments in the humanities to design scholarship.Then, reviewing how decentering is understood and practiced in HCI, we distill five emerging dimensions for articulating more-thanhuman practices.We conclude by unpacking "decentering through design" as an ongoing material practice through which more-than-human designers not only materialize (apply) posthuman theory but also "make" posthuman knowledge in their own unique ways.

Airbnb is well known for providing guests with local experiences by regular people worldwide. Many pioneer hosts experiment with emerging smart products to improve guests’ experiences. However, these initial efforts often merely provide functionality, neglecting to offer guests authentic experiences motivated by hosts’ authenticity. We addressed this gap by using bespoke design methods to understand hosts’ stories and co-develop interaction concepts that can express their authenticity and fit their Airbnb. We implemented a set of Digital Concierges (DCs) and deployed them in a real Airbnb to investigate guests’ experiences. Our results show that our design enhanced guests’ sense of welcome, fostered their discovery with serendipitous cues, and built richer connections with the host and locals. We concluded with the design implications of co-designing artifacts to embody hosts’ authenticity and use multiple modalities to enhance perceived authentic experiences. Most importantly, we shared our insights about working with hosts as co-creators.

Much reporting on research-through-design (RtD) is vague about markers of time and temporal qualities. This lack of temporal attunement risks obscuring important contextual knowledge, hidden labour, material agencies and potential knowledge contributions. We turn to the notion of the event to articulate the granularities and nuances of RtD processes with an expanded vocabulary. We draw on prior calls from RtD practitioners, the philosophical roots of events, and our previous work with the term in our own research. We describe seven terms to expand the temporal vocabulary of RtD, which can be used to build narratives that emphasize knowledge created along the way, and relieve pressure from the ‘final’ artifact. Our contributions are 1) design events as an ontological shift and analytical tool and 2) a vocabulary that scaffolds design events as a sensitizing tool. We end with a call for more experimentation of non-chronological narratives of RtD.

This pictorial presents an ongoing collaboration between a Haida/Kwakwaka'wakw/Irish artist and a multi-disciplinary team of settler researchers around Sky Blanket, a hybrid Yeil Koowu (Raven's Tail) and Naaxiin (Chilkat) style woven robe. We elaborate on our collaborative commitments that include a focus on materiality and particular team dynamics. We report on three frictions we experienced while working on a TC2 jacquard loom: the translation of weaving patterns from one production technique to another, working within the material limitations of the loom, and the design of a woven box that allowed us to articulate differing perspectives on failures. In our discussion, we argue that these material encounters are a way for design and creation research to work through tensions at play between digital technologies, artistic practices, and cultural continuities.

This paper is a Research through Design (RtD) investigation that deeply reflects on our ambivalence with three design choices we made while designing in a multispecies context. The ongoing RtD project, called Turner Boxes, aims to design a technological network to interact with wild bees in an urban environment. The design choices negotiate challenges we encountered, including the potential effects of electromagnetic fields (EMF) on bee ecologies; sucrose feeding as an established human-bee interaction; and the question of human intervention when designing in relation to other species. We analyze our negotiations of these challenges along with the practices of beekeepers and ecologists who were part of our investigation, to realize that ambivalence is a characteristic and a resource in multispecies designing. We extend this analysis through feminist epistemologies to articulate a position of diffraction, a standpoint from which to design in multispecies worlds in which interdependencies and differences are critical.

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.

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.

While much work is underway within the context of posthuman design, this research is often described from a dominantly human perspective. It rarely accounts for the creative capacities of nonhumans in design, such as materials, tools, and software. There is a need to further engage with posthuman theories conceptually, materially, and methodologically. We approach this challenge through Ron Wakkary's concept of repertoires: actions the human designer can take to increase participation of nonhumans in design research practice. This paper reports on potential repertoires' development by exploring three approaches from outside of HCI: describing the landscape, noticing, and translations. We use these methods to account for weaving events that the first author was engaged in. Through critical reflection of these accounts, we contribute three repertoires and an example of applying the theoretical framework of Designing Things.

This article investigates new relations with things that are expansive and inclusive of the pluralities and differences within our entanglements with technologies. We do this by extending our commitments to the methodological approaches of material speculation and co-speculation that led us to engage in multi-year conversations between ourselves as design researchers, philosophers, and a counterfactual artifact we designed, known as a Tilting Bowl. The philosophers lived with the Tilting Bowl during this period. We call these conversations, polylogues, of which the aim is to co-speculate on a range of new possible relations by which to consider living with technological things. The contributions of our article are two-fold. Firstly, through our polylogues, we offer descriptions of three relations with things. These include (1) non-anthropocentric care: care that is non-anthropocentric and existential; (2) non-presumptive relations: not-knowing in relating to and engaging with things; and (3) ideologized relations: ideologies that frame relations with technologies. Secondly, the article elaborates and critically reflects on co-speculation as a method for relational and situated knowing that can be of benefit to HCI researchers.

In this pictorial, we present critical reflections on the design process of crafting the deformTable. The table is a shape-changing device that can go up and down based on the weight of objects placed on it. This pictorial focuses on key design decisions in the making of a shape-changing artifact like the deformTable that explores how deformability, temporality, and materiality can encourage creative appropriations over time. We believe this pictorial contributes to how to design research products that can investigate shape-changing artifacts in everyday settings over time.

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.

Morse Things are Internet connected ceramic cups and bowls that communicate with each other in Morse Code. This ongoing research iteratively asks thing-centered questions of things and technology. A premise of the Morse Things is that any understanding of a thing or technology is unstable and arguably fragile. In this pictorial, we reflect on how we as researchers, in the course of doing research with the Morse Things, unexpectedly found ourselves literally entangled in the conceptual and physical fragility of the research. This pictorial describes our growing awareness of this instability, beginning with a kintsugi repair of a broken Morse Thing, our false confidence in our package design for shipping, and the difficulties to conceptualize the machine learning world that we ourselves created. We reflect on these experiences, and now see these as reminders of the inevitable fragility and instability of research on thing-perspectives.

The Tilting Bowl is a ceramic bowl that unpredictably but gently tilts multiple times daily. This pictorial reports on the crafting of the electronics of the Tilting Bowl within the concept of a research product [10]. From this perspective, the seemingly simple task of making a bowl tilt holds unique challenges and demands - especially as a research product that is deployed in everyday settings for lengthy periods of time. We highlight electronic design challenges that came up in three processes of making the Tilting Bowl: the tilting mechanism, hardware integration of electronics and power management. Lastly, we offer three suggestions for designing electronics for research products.

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.

In this paper, we argue for framing the crafting and studying of research products as doing philosophy through things. We do this by creating an annotated portfolio of such Research through Design (RtD) artifact inquiries as postphenomenological inquiries. In our annotated portfolio, we first provide an account of the postphenomenological commitments of 1) taking empirical work as the basis of the inquiry, 2) analyzing structures of human-technology relations and 3) studying technological mediation. Secondly, we trace these commitments across six RtD artifact inquiries. We conclude with a discussion on how research products can be seen as an experimental way of doing postphenomenology and how HCI design researchers can work with that. As a result, the presented philosophical framing can be leveraged in HCI research to form a deeper and more dimensional understanding of the human-technology relations we craft and study. This also adds a methodological path to moving beyond foci of use, utility, interaction, and human-centeredness.

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.

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.

This paper reports on a postphenomenological inquiry of six trained philosophers, who as study participants lived with and reflected on a research product we designed known as the Tilting Bowl: a ceramic bowl that unpredictably but gently tilts multiple times daily. The Tilting Bowl is a counterfactual artifact that is designed specifically for this study as part of a material speculation approach to design research. A postphenomenological inquiry looks to describe and analyze accounts of relationships between humans and technological artifacts, and how each mutually shapes the other through mediations that form the human subjectivity and objectivity of any given situation. This paper contributes an empirical account and analysis of the relations that emerged (background and alterity) and the relativistic views that co-constitute the philosophers, Tilting Bowl, and their specific worlds. The findings demonstrate the relevance of this philosophical framing to fundamentally and broadly understand how people engage digital artifacts.

Applying a thing-centered, material speculation approach we designed the Morse Things to acknowledge and inquire into the gap between things and us. The Morse Things are sets of ceramic bowls and cups networked together to independently communicate through Morse code in an Internet of Things (IoT). We deployed the Morse Things in the households of six interaction design practitioners and researchers for six weeks. Following the deployment, we conducted a workshop to discuss the role of the Morse Things and ultimately the gap between things and people. We reflect on the nature of living with IoT things and discuss insights into the gap between things and humans that led to the idea of a new type of thing in the home that is neither human-centered technology nor non-digital artifacts.

In this paper we present Videos of Things: videos that portray the mediated, lived world of computational artifacts informed by postphenomenology. In a post-phenomenological understanding, things and us are interdependent in that they mutually shape each other. And as a whole, technology or designed things mediate the relations between our world and us. This can be a challenge for designers. Through the making of design videos, we explored narrative strategies for creating stories featuring technological mediation. These include humanness, patterns in time, and non-human ensembles. We reflect on how the videos at different stages of the design process have helped to a) speculate on technological mediated relationships, b) synthesize and reflect on qualitative data on technological mediation and c) anticipate technological mediation. The paper contributes different narrative strategies for design videos and the role these videos can play within a design process aimed at elaborating the mediated qualities of technologies.

In this paper, we show the development of the Ideating in Skills (IiS) toolset: an embodied design tool aimed at supporting co-design processes. The iterative process of developing the toolset was carried out by students. They worked individually at first, exploring their own skills and moods through movement, visualisations and poetry. These explorations were translated into objects that were able to communicate and connect with each other. In each iteration, the design of the qualities of these connections was based on the findings of the previous explorations. After several individual and team-based iterations, a final toolset was collaboratively created and evaluated in various short design sessions. Based on the potential of the first version of the toolset, a second version was created that is currently used and tested in one-on-one settings all over the world and in multi-stakeholder settings in a creative hub in Sweden.