In HCI, material engagement is often conceptualised as an ongoing dialogue between designer and material. However, how such dialogues are situated in time remains underexplored, which is particularly relevant in educational contexts where time is a limited resource. This paper examines e-textile crafting processes through a temporal lens in a two-phase study: Phase I involved three exploratory workshops varying in duration, participants’ skills, and materials; Phase II comprised a synthesising workshop with 17 interaction design students. Our findings show how time constraints actively shape negotiations between skills and materials, and conclude by proposing three strategies for attending to temporality in dialogues with materials: (1) Navigating Temporal Flows, (2) Allying With Time Constraints, and (3) Attending to Pacing through Material Complexity. These strategies offer insights and strategies educators can adopt to embrace time constraints and integrate time-aware approaches when planning and facilitating e-textile workshops.

Hackathons have become popular collaborative events for accelerating the development of creative ideas and prototypes. There are several case studies showcasing creative outcomes across domains such as industry, education, and research. However, there are no large-scale studies on creativity in hackathons which can advance theory on how hackathon formats lead to creative outcomes. We conducted a computational analysis of 193,353 hackathon projects. By operationalizing creativity through usefulness and novelty, we refined our dataset to 10,363 projects, allowing us to analyze how participant characteristics, collaboration patterns, and hackathon setups influence the development of creative projects. The contribution of our paper is twofold: We identified means for organizers to foster creativity in hackathons. We also explore the use of large language models (LLMs) to augment the evaluation of creative outcomes and discuss challenges and opportunities of doing this, which has implications for creativity research at large.

The energy cost of developing and deploying Generative AI (GenAI) models has exploded with their mass adoption, as has the ensuing carbon emissions. The climate impact of this is currently unknown. In Human-Computer Interaction, GenAI models are rarely trained but often used. Based on detailed review of 282 papers, we estimate this footprint from energy consumption of the total use of GenAI for CHI 2024 research as between 10,769.63 and 10,925.12 kg CO2e - equal to driving a car for more than 100,000 km. We show that in CHI research, GenAI is most often used for Prototyping, Evaluation & User studies, and that Data Collection and Fine-tuning models incurs the highest CO2st.1 We find that CHI submissions are unlikely to report GenAI use transparently, which makes precise calculations difficult. By measuring the usage of a subset of the papers on local hardware, we obtain estimations of the energy consumption and carbon footprint. Based on this evidence, we discuss and demonstrate ways to mitigate the issues of GenAI carbon footprint and lack of transparency.

In HCI there have been calls for diversity-driven research and insights into how this may be carried out in practice. One way of conducting diversity-driven HCI research is by doing participatory design. In this paper we contribute with lessons identified from organizing a PD workshop that enabled diverse ways of participating for our participants. The workshop design is based on insights from two years of doing diversity-driven PD with two middle school classes, which are particularly interesting settings to explore as diverse children spend substantial time together in a period of their development that is formative for their socialisation. We describe the workshop itself before reflecting on its structure and facilitation as well as the role of the physical space and the choice of design materials with the aim to distil insights and recommendations about what researchers can do to enable diverse pathways of participation in design processes.

We present the insights from participatory design work that explores notions of Diversity Computing (DivComp) and how HCI can meaningfully engage with designing technology around diversity without resorting to tokenistic approaches. A future goal overarching the initial findings in this paper is to design technologically mediated, physical spaces (DivComp Spaces) within a school context where children meet, experiment and learn the complex dynamics of othering. We report on a series of nine workshops with 48 children. Based on a thematic analysis, we present four themes — Technology as Utility and Authority, Individual and Collective Place-Making, Staged and Emerging Conflicts, Belonging to the Group and Self-Expression — which we use to inform three design directions for developing DivComp Spaces specifically in the context of school. Finally, we critically reflect on our design practice and the difficulties of designing not only for, but also with diversity meaningfully embedded into design processes.

In this paper, we argue for the potential and relevance of modelling novel AI co-creative systems after key aspects which characterises the specific kind of design processes unfolding in hackathons. There has recently been an increased interest into the potentials and challenges of creative collaborations between humans and AI, however, there have not been many practical implementations of co-creative systems. We argue that by designing co-creative systems to support the specific kind of creative design work in hackathons, valuable contributions can be made in the context of an overlooked aspect in interaction design; how to support fast design thinking. The specificity of hackathon participation involves high demands for fast idea generation, decision-making, and prototyping, which ideally ends in a functioning and novel prototype. Specifically, we identify three key characteristics of hackathon participation, and for each characteristic we discuss how they may model Human-AI interaction in the context of co-creative systems for fast design thinking. The contribution of this paper is to provide future research on co-creative systems with inspiration grounded in the parallels between aspects of AI and key characteristics of hackathon participation.

Hackathons are increasingly embraced across diverse sectors as a way of democratizing the design of technology. Several attempts have been made to redefine the format and desired end goal of hackathons in recent years thereby warranting closer methodological scrutiny. In this paper, we apply program theory to analyze the processes and effects of 16 hackathon case studies through published research literature. Building upon existing research on hackathons, our work offers a critical perspective examining the methodological validity of hackathons and exemplifies how specific processes for organizing hackathons are modified for different purposes. Our main contribution is a program theory analysis of hackathon formats that provides an exploration and juxtaposition of 16 case studies in terms of causal relations between the input, process and the effects of hackathons. Our cataloguing of examples can serve as an inspirational planning resource for future organizers of hackathons.

Hackathon formats have been praised for their potential for promoting innovative thinking and making in a short time-frame. For this reason, hackathons have also been embraced by many researchers who use hackathons as part of their research in various ways. Through an extensive review of 381 publications published during a 10 year time span, we document the multiple ways in which hackathons are embraced and used by researchers The paper contributes to a better understanding of hackathons as part of research by providing a broad overview as a resource for researchers. We identify three main motivations for using hackathons as part of research: 1) Structuring learning, 2) structuring processes, and 3) enabling participation. For each of the motivations, we identify research with hackathons, and research on hackathons as two main categories. Drawing on several examples from the review we discuss benefits and challenges of using hackathons as part of research.

Leveraging knowledge generated in design activities for subsequent design and research purposes is an important yet challenging task due to the complex and messy nature of design work. In this paper, we discuss opportunities and challenges for documentation in design processes to support the transformation of design knowledge across different levels of abstraction. We argue for an activity-centred approach to underscore the construction of intermediate forms of knowledge, where immediate responses to design activities inform mediated representations of design work. The relation between immediate and mediated knowledge is explored through a case study of Co-notate, a research prototype enabling automatic synthesis of audio/video recordings and textual annotations simultaneously captured during design activities. We argue that real-time annotated design documentation limits the risk of recorded activities being misinterpreted, or simply disregarded, and we identify and discuss potentials for employing real-time technology to inform retrospective analysis.