Heritage buildings are increasingly adapted to contemporary needs through technological interventions, yet these approaches remain human-centred, leaving limited recognition of the buildings’ own capacity to shape architectural change. Drawing on critical heritage and more-than-human perspectives, we investigate how heritage buildings can be approached as agentic actors in negotiations of spatial and technological adaptation. Through thing-interviews with ten architects, speaking from the perspective of the heritage buildings they designed, we examine how buildings express self-value, engage with social infrastructures, and “sense” reshaping through material and functional transformations. We extended these insights through a design fiction session with four experts, exploring future scenarios for human-nonhuman connection, fragmented reconfiguration over time. From this, we propose three implications for designing more-than-human futures in intelligent built environments with heritage values: (1) negotiating consent and power asymmetries, (2) framing stewardship through care and companionship, and (3) rethinking authenticity beyond originality.

’How was your lunch?’ Even simple food talk reveals how people translate multisensory impressions into language, offering insights for HCI applications such as food recommendation and health management. While prior work has emphasised the multisensory nature of eating, less is known about the linguistic strategies through which people articulate such experiences. We conducted a mixed-methods study combining self-reports and interviews to examine how non-verbal sensory input is transformed into verbal expression. Our analysis shows that participants structured their accounts through temporal phases that integrated perception, cognition, affective reaction, and behaviour; employed associative strategies that shaped expectations; and expressed ambivalence, where positive and negative evaluations coexisted in descriptions such as guilty pleasure. Building on these findings, we propose a lens that highlights the role of time, association, and evaluative language in food talk, enabling designers to translate everyday expressions into actionable insights for food-related HCI design.

Figure 1: The research involved: (i) a design futuring workshop on acoustophoresis, (ii) the development and feasibility assessment of two SONARIOS (i.e., scenarios), and (iii) the synthesis of three strong concepts, along with key tensions and responsibilities in shaping the future of acoustophoresis applications.

Recovering a lost ability is rarely easy, but unlike strengthening a muscle, progress in smell training, repeated exposure to specific scents to support recovery or maintain function, is often invisible. For those undergoing Digital Smell Training (DST), data visualisations may be the only markers of change. But how can graphs and numbers sustain motivation over months of slow, unpredictable recovery? This pictorial adopts a Research through Design approach to explore how data visualisations might better support motivation, adherence, and long-term engagement in DST. We draw on a six-month in-home study with 18 participants with varying olfactory abilities using a technology probe. Following initial feedback, we ran a co-design workshop to understand participants’ visualisation needs. These insights informed eight design directions and three visualisation concepts, later evaluated in a focus group. We explore how visualisations help ‘flip perspectives’, from tracking outcomes to nurturing perseverance across the uncertain journey of smell rehabilitation.

• To identify cyber-attacks on the AI, users must have some prior understanding of the AI parameters and their normativity. • Multimodal indicators embedded across the ecosystem of AI-enabled devices are an effective way in raising users’ attention to cyber-attacks. • Engaging users to actively diagnose and resolve cyber-attacks on AI-enabled devices in the home context must take into consideration the home routines, and be designed to avoid cognitive overload. • One way to minimise overload is to make use of users’ propensity to generalise their cybersecurity knowledge and skills where possible. AI-enabled devices are increasingly introduced in the home context and cyber-attacks targeting their AI component are becoming more frequent. Moving away from seeing the user as the problem to recognising the user as part of the solution, our research reports on a novel cybersecurity intervention (comprising Explainable AI features, assisted remediation) designed to support users to identify, diagnose and mitigate cyber-attacks on the AI component of their smart devices. We carried out a case study of a bespoke smart heating device inclusive of this intervention and conducted fieldwork with ten households who experienced simulated integrity cyber-attacks over a month. Our research contributes an understanding of how to design AI-enabled devices and their ecosystems to support users to perceive integrity cyber-attacks, offering new considerations for intervention design that exploits multimodal indicators and supports users to troubleshoot themselves the causes as well as actions of cyber-attacks. Contributing to the growing area of human-centred cybersecurity, we evidence the distinctive challenges users face when evaluating integrity attacks on the AI component in the home context.

Take a deep breath; what do you smell? While sight and hearing dominate our perceptions, the sense of smell is often overlooked, even undervalued. However, the importance of our sense of smell goes beyond detecting odours. It shapes our emotions, memories, behaviour, and quality of life. Recent advances in olfactory interfaces have sparked discussions about the future of smell in human-computer interaction. While efforts mainly focus on the realization of new olfactory interfaces, here we collectively explore alternative worlds centred around the sense of smell. First, we conducted a design futuring workshop involving individuals with varying smell capabilities and expertise to envision and discuss smell-centred futures. Then, through iterative reflection, we arrived at three smell worlds presented as narratives and visuals. From this conceptual work, we offer new perspectives and generative possibilities for design research that prioritizes our noses.

Smart Home Heating Technologies (SHHT) have been designed to improve demand flexibility and energy conservation. SHHT rely on rational theories of energy use postulating that people will use less energy when the energy cost is higher. The inclusion of AI within SHHT is poised to optimise energy use in the future as the introduction of lower carbon energy sources place new demands on the grid. When SHHT is introduced in the home, however, they become situated in temporal heating practices that are shaped by an interplay of materiality, meanings, and competencies. We report findings from a mixed methods field study involving eleven households utilising an AI-enabled SHHT probe ‘Squid’. Taking a temporal focus throughout, our study contributes a new lens as to why households may not fully engage with SHHT's rational design, given that energy conversation is already embedded in their ongoing socio-material practices with heating. Focusing on the AI-human relation, we articulate the necessity for human agency where heating is involved, whilst also advancing an understanding of the new forms of hidden labour that households incur before they can engage with the AI. Crucially, our research informs the ongoing HCI concern over how humans understand AI, raising the question of who is responsible to assess the appropriateness of AI when the effects of human-AI performance remain opaque. Our findings contribute a new theoretical perspective into the intricate relationship between individuals and AI in the home and raise several new design implications for SHHT.

Magnitude understanding, an understudied topic in Child-Computer Interaction, entails making nonsymbolic ‘more-less’ comparisons that influence young children's later math and academic achievements. To support this ability, designing tangible user interfaces (TUIs) demands considering many facets, ranging from elements within the physical world to the digital design components. This multifaceted activity brings many design decisions often not reflected in research. Therefore, we present this reflection via our research through design process in developing a vital design element, the physical form. We share our (i) physical object design criteria elicitation for magnitude understanding, (ii) hands-on making process, and (iii) preliminary studies with children engaging with objects. With our insights obtained through these steps, we project how this physical object-initiated research inspires the TUI in the upcoming steps and present design takeaways for CCI researchers.

Recent developmental studies state that nonsymbolic number representation (i.e., more-less comparisons) is important for math development, and children's judgment about such non-numerical magnitudes can be affected by sensory properties (i.e., volume, space). Yet, to our knowledge, there are no tangible based systems for training this math concept. Building on theories of cognition and learning, we developed MaR-T, a projector-camera setup. This paper is a step towards investigating the effects of projection-based mixed-reality (MR) system with tangibles on nonsymbolic number representation of 3- to 5-year-old children. We present our user studies with a total of 14 participants, conducted to observe their interaction with the setup and the possible effects of our design on learning. The results indicate that MaR-T can provide active, engaging, and social learning, and our insights can inspire other interaction design and education studies.

A child's early math development can stem from interactions with the physical world. Accordingly, current tangible interaction studies focus on preschool children's formal (symbolic) mathematics, i.e. number knowledge. However, recent developmental studies stress the importance of nonsymbolic number representation in math learning, i.e. understanding quantity relations without counting(more/less). To our knowledge, there are no tangible systems based on this math concept. We developed an initial tangible based mixed-reality(MR) setup with a small tabletop projector and depth camera. Our goal was observing children's interaction with the setup to guide our further design process towards developing nonsymbolic math training. In this paper, we present our observations from sessions with four 3-to-5 year old children and discuss their meaning for future work. Initial clues show that our MR setup leads to exploratory and mindful interactions, which might be generalizable to other tangible MR systems for child education and could inspire interaction design studies.