Access to justice includes mechanisms enabling people to have their voice heard, exercise their rights, and hold decision-makers accountable. This paper reports on an exploratory study aiming to understand Domestic Abuse (DA) survivors’ experiences of legal journeys through Family Court (FC) and Family Justice Systems (FJS) in England and Wales, and the potential for digital technologies to support their access to justice. We used qualitative methods including interviews and designed prompts to engage eight DA survivors and three Family Court professionals. Designed prompts enabled discussions and articulation of perceptions of socio-technical systems’ potential to support access to justice in FJS. Our findings describe challenges faced by survivors when accessing FJS, participating in proceedings, and living with outcomes stemming from Family Courts processes. We discuss opportunities for digital interventions in these contexts and provide design orientations for relational approaches to design research seeking to advance access to justice for DA survivors across legal jurisdictions.

This paper responds to sustainable HCI’s call to design long-term participatory projects with grassroots communities to counter the local effects of climate change and support more viable practices. We contribute a methodological approach to participatory speculative design as a series of interrelated experiments in living, working in symbiosis with a food-growing community moving towards collective resilience and food sovereignty. As an example of sustainability research within HCI, community food-growing has predominantly focused on collaborative acts of growing rather than disagreements, divergences and frictions. Limited attention has been paid to the challenges of effectively negotiating collaborative, sustainable speculative futures in this context. This paper reports on a workshop series on sustainable community food-growing using situated participatory speculation to address potential tensions when working collaboratively towards socio-technical alternatives.

The role of HCI in informal caregivers’ lives has been a focus of research for some time. Yet to gain significance in HCI, are the implications of healthcare systems’ transformation into a personalised care paradigm, where citizens gain choice and control over the delivery of their care. We provide a first HCI paper to examine self-directed care budgets for disabled citizens, where care funding is controlled by the individual. We explore how digital technology can assist citizens, promoting peer support to create meaningful, personalised healthcare infrastructures. This qualitative study contributes insights from interviews and focus groups with 24 disabled citizens, informal caregivers and healthcare officers, to provide understanding of their experiences and practices. These insights highlight relational care, invisible labour, power struggles with authorities and how citizens seek socio-technical capability. We contribute design implications for self-directed care budgets and HCI research concerned with developing technologies that support this population.

While HCI research has often addressed the needs of older adults, they are often framed as being sceptical of digital technologies. We argue that while many older adults are circumspect users of digital technology, they bring rich and critical perspectives on the role of technology in society that are grounded in lived experiences across their life courses. We report on 20 technology life story interviews conducted with retirees over the age of 60. Our analysis shows how experiences of technology across their life courses significantly undermined participants’ sense of competency, independence, resilience, agency and control. Dissonances between what our participants valued and the perceived values of technology have led them to become critical adopters of technology, and resist its intrusion into certain aspects of their lives. We discuss how the critical perspectives of older adults and the value dissonances they experience are valuable for designing future digital technologies.

It is well documented that people living with mental health conditions are more likely to experience financial difficulties. When explaining this association, emphasis has often been placed on financial capability, i.e. the capacity of those living with poor mental health to manage their money. This paper challenges such capability-based explanations by reporting on a diary study and interviews with 14 people who self-identify as living with a mental health condition. We focused on their experiences of financial technology use, and explored the role technology played in their strategies to minimise the impact of mental health on their economic circumstances. Rather than lacking capability, participants’ practices revealed shortcomings of existing financial technologies and how they sought to work around these. We conclude by providing a set of design directions for technologies that engage those living with poor mental health not as vulnerable targets for financial inclusion, but as full financial citizens.

This paper explores some of the new possibilities for financial third party access that are enabled by "open banking". The term open banking is used to designate the availability of banks' customer data through application programming interfaces (APIs). Financial third party access refers to the mechanisms that facilitate the engagement of others in the management of our personal finances. Engaging trusted others in personal finances may be especially valuable for individuals experiencing financial hardship or life circumstances that place their financial stability at risk. We deployed a new third party access tool enabled by the UK Open Banking APIs for 90 days with 14 people who self-identified as living with a mental health condition. The tool, which was developed by a financial technology startup founded by the second author, allowed participants to select a trusted "ally" who was notified when certain transactions took place in participants' bank accounts. During the deployment, the 14 participants and 8 of their "allies" took part in a diary study and pre- and post-deployment interviews. The experiences of our participants reveal the inadequacy and shortcomings of existing formal third party access mechanisms, and the moneywork involved in financial third party access. We argue that focusing on this moneywork can help us design flexible, proportionate and practice-sensitive services for financial third party access that move beyond discourses of protection and control in order to enable meaningful financial collaboration.

Experience Centered Design (ECD) implores us to develop empathic relationships and understanding of participants, to actively work with our senses and emotions within the design process. However, theories of experience-centered design do little to account for emotion work undertaken by design researchers when doing this. As a consequence, how a design researcher's emotions are experienced, navigated and used as part of an ECD process are rarely published. So, while emotion is clearly a tool that we use, we don't share with one another how, why and when it gets used. This has a limiting effect on how we understand design processes, and opportunities for training. Here, we share some of our experiences of working with ECD. We analyse these using Hochschild's framework of emotion work to show how and where this work occurs. We use our analysis to question current ECD practices and provoke debate.

Researchers working in domains such as Research through Design and Feminist HCI have been questioning "dissemination practices" and their impact on our capacity to produce reflexive accounts of research in publications. This paper examines academic dissemination practices within HCI research communities from an institutional to individual level. We unpack the practice via a meta-review of recent literature published in CHI and other venues on 'What is HCI?'. We review the core text on this debate and other similar discussions on HCI methodologies and reflexive accounts of research in domains such as 'Research through Design' and 'Feminist HCI'. We highlight the importance of practicing reflexivity through dissemination and introduce 'Research Fictions' in the form of video essays and live performances, produced by the first author with her colleagues, based on their HCI submissions. Through experimenting with alternative dissemination formats, we argue that our exploratory processes engender a practice of reflexivity within a research lab.

With the increased relevance of digital technologies in civil life comes the challenge of how to design research for citizen engagement. Drawing from three reflexive case studies presenting socially engaged arts (SEA) projects, we describe how, as artists, collaborators and researchers, we engaged in socially inclusive community-based projects. We argue that our roles required us to be both flexible and to adopt critical openness in practices of collaborative social facilitation. We conclude with insights to inform community-based research and enable nurturing and inclusive engagement in research design for the exploration of near-future digital technologies.

Much of the academic and commercial work which seeks to innovate around technology has been dismissed as "solutionist" because it solves problems that don't exist or ignores the complexity of personal, political and environmental issues. This paper traces the "solutionism" critique to its origins in city planning and highlights the original concern with imaging and representation in the design process. It is increasingly cheap and easy to create compelling and seductive images of concept designs, which sell solutions and presume problems. We consider a range of strategies, which explicitly reject the search for "solutions". These include design fiction and critical design but also less well-known techniques, which aim for unuseless, questionable and silly designs. We present two examples of "magic machine" workshops where participants are encouraged to reject realistic premises for possible technological interventions and create absurd propositions from lo-fi materials. We argue that such practices may help researchers resist the impulse towards solutionism and suggest that attention to representation during the ideation process is a key strategy for this.

We explore how digital technology might support the documentation of experiences of participatory arts engagement. During a fourteen session workshop series, we worked with artists, project managers, support workers and participants to explore the integration of digital media capture and presentation technologies into participatory arts workshops, and the implications that this would have for the experiences and practices of key stakeholders involved. We contribute insight into the social and practical challenges faced when using digital technology to create documentation of participatory arts. Our findings highlight the importance of situating documentation, sense making and re-telling of experiences in sensitive contexts such as participatory arts within the practices of skilled interpreters that are mindful of the complexities involved.

The joint study of computer security, privacy and human-computer interaction (HCI) over the last two decades has shaped a research agenda focused upon usable privacy & security. However, in HCI research more generally there has long been an awareness of the need to understand and design for user experience, in recognition of the complex and multi-faceted role that technology now plays in our lives. In this paper we add to the growing discussion by introducing the notion of experience-centered privacy and security. We argue that in order to engage users of technology around issues related to experiences of privacy and security, research methods are required that may be outside of the normal repertoire of methods that we typically call upon. We describe three projects that developed non-typical research methods to reveal experiential insights into user interactions with privacy and security-related technologies. We conclude by proposing a research agenda that begins to illustrate how the discourse and methods of experience-centered design might serve to provide valuable alternative perspectives on new and enduring user-facing privacy and security problems.

This paper explores how technology could support the re-building of lives after domestic violence. We worked in the context of a women's centre where women are accessing support after leaving abusive relationships. The paper contributes a feminist participatory arts action research approach to studying photo-sharing practices and helps to frame an understanding of the ongoing tensions in the construction of self with others that the women experience. We argue that the affirmation of new bonds, control in sharing the process of 'moving on', and supporting discursive negotiations of privacy are important considerations for design focused on interpersonal social processes around the use of digital technology.

The term 'participation' is traditionally used in HCI to describe the involvement of users and stakeholders in design processes, with a pretext of distributing control to participants to shape their technological future. In this paper we ask whether these values can hold up in practice, particularly as participation takes on new meanings and incorporates new perspectives. We argue that much HCI research leans towards configuring participation. In exploring this claim we explore three questions that we consider important for understanding how HCI configures participation; Who initiates, directs and benefits from user participation in design? In what forms does user participation occur? How is control shared with users in design? In answering these questions we consider the conceptual, ethical and pragmatic problems this raises for current participatory HCI research. Finally, we offer directions for future work explicitly dealing with the configuration of participation.

This workshop brings together a cross-disciplinary community of researchers and practitioners interested in participative practice and interactive systems design. The workshop addresses growing fascination with participation across interaction design, community informatics, the arts, science and social science, and asks workshop participants to reflect on the ethics and efficacy of the tools and methods used in these diverse practices. The aim of the workshop will be to map out a critical framework exploring the qualities of participation from multiple disciplines. The workshop outcomes will outline how cross-disciplinary perspectives on participation can contribute to participatory and user-centred interaction design.

A shift is occurring, particularly evident in art-and- technology practice, in which the artist-led-workshop is transformed into an distinct and distinguishable artistic form. Resulting from, and contributing to, the new access and relationships people have to information, creative culture, materials and like-interested individuals, the "workshop-as-artwork" is herein proposed and outlined. As a set of multiple artistic (material), social and learning agent interactions, thinking this new form as an ecology has shown benefits in terms of the aims and design of these new works, as well as their thinking, planning and execution. Further, from the artist-interventionist point of view, positing the workshop-as-artwork and ecological thinking seeks to update notions of legacy, consequence and significance for the art-and-technology practitioner and his or her audience.