Bodies are interfaces, thresholds, vestibules, and gateways capable of hosting, carrying and birthing other life forms. Occupying indeterminable positions, interfacing with multidimensional borders, cultures, media, and ecologies; mediating internal and external inputs/relations - bodies feel vibrations, perceive and collect information, remediate, respond, negotiate expectations, and make connections through the limbs, eyes, ears, skin, cells and beyond. Scholars, critics, and theorists describe this complex interfacing as a multispecies relationship consisting of deep histories, continually re-forming and transitioning into something new (Dooren et al., 2016). What Eben Kirksey deems as the microorganism, Wolbachia, a post-human actor that meshes a variety of species together that exist in different time frames and realities (Kirksey, 2018). For this exhibition, we introduce Mothering Bacteria: A Speculative Forecast of the Body as an Interface (2018), a multichannel artwork with an embedded AI that interacts with bacteria, as it grows in real-time.

The home has been a major focus of the HCI community for over two decades. Despite this body of research, nascent works have argued that HCI's characterization of 'the home' remains narrow and requires more diverse accounts of domestic configurations. Our work contributes to this area through a four-month ethnography of three collective homes in Vancouver, Canada. Collective homes represent an alternative housing model that offers agency to individual members and the collective group by sharing values, resources, labour, space and memory. Our paper offers two contributions. First, we offer an in-depth design ethnography of three collective homes, attending to the values, ownership models, practices, and everyday interactions observed in the ongoing making of these domestic settings. Second, we interpret and synthesize our findings to provide new opportunities for expanding the way we conceptualize and design for 'the home' in HCI.