Menopause is an important life transition characterised by physiological, emotional, and social changes. It is surrounded by stigma and taboo. Thus, conversations about menopause are often rare, even among family members, and people often don't know what to expect from menopause. We leverage design and collaborative making to promote (intergenerational) communication about menopause, between mothers and daughters and between members of a broader audience. We describe a collaborative Research through Design process where we collaborated with six mother-daughter dyads to create material representations capturing and describing their diverse menopause experiences. Iterating on these representations, we designed and exhibited 5 interactive artifacts at Dutch Design Week 2024. We contribute with empirical findings on plural experiences around menopause, present the five artifacts built upon these experiences, and discuss the importance of pluralizing narratives around menopause through design.

In an age of data, we are increasingly defined by the data sets collected about us. Expressing identity in these data sets can be difficult as they are aggregated and collected according to specific values and beliefs that might not match our own. Through an elaborate process that I refer to as data introspection, I explored three data sets about myself (books I read, board games I played and my yoga practice) to create a feminist, hand-embroidered physicalisation of those data sets. Building on the principles of Data Feminism, I reflect on the process of creating that artefact, including the selection and cleaning of the data, the materiality of the artefact and the crafting process. The artefact exemplifies new ways to use unconventional personal data as a creative, feminist material for design.

Most people are entangled with an ever-growing trail of data that results from their daily interactions with products and services. Yet, they are hardly aware of the nature and characteristics of the data within this trail. We design dataslip, a provocative artifact that materializes the personal data trail into a receipt and aims to elicit creepiness. We demonstrate dataslip at two events in Delft, The Netherlands. Dataslip is a starting point to foster conversations with local community members about the underlying challenges and potential alternatives to personal data collection and use. We use these as prompts for further speculation through a collaborative futuring exercise with children, where we part from challenges towards hopeful and empowering futures. We contribute with an artifact that invites individuals to interrogate the current personal data practices they are embedded in and a set of five speculative design scenarios that suggest hopeful and empowering alternatives.

We present a vision for conversational user interfaces (CUIs) as probes for speculating with, rather than as objects to speculate about. Popular CUIs, e.g., Alexa, are changing the way we converse, narrate, and imagine the world(s) to come. Yet, current conversational interactions normatively may promote non-desirable ends, delivering a restricted range of request-response interactions with sexist and digital colonialist tendencies. Our critical design approach envisions alternatives by considering how future voices can reside in CUIs as enabling probes. We present novel explorations that illustrate the potential of CUIs as critical design material, by critiquing present norms and conversing with imaginary species. As micro-level interventions, we show that conversations with diverse futures through CUIs can persuade us to critically shape our discourse on macro-scale concerns of the present, e.g., sustainability. We reflect on how conversational interactions with pluralistic, imagined futures can contribute to how being human stands to change.

Design cards are a popular way for designers to encode and communicate design knowledge. Aiming to inform the designers of such design tools we set out to characterize the design space of design cards in a two-pronged approach involving a) a systematic literature survey on the use of design cards and b) card sorting interviews, which were carried out in order to characterize the first impressions of design cards from design students, for different formal qualities and content of design cards. Our results point towards a need to develop more abstract and evocative presentations, that are visually attractive while supporting a flexible application of cards. Future research could explore whether such preferences are consistent with how card sets are used during design processes in practice.

This paper explores how a design fiction can be designed to be used as a pragmatic user-centred design method to generate insights on future technology use. We built HawkEye, a design fiction probe that embodies a future fiction of dementia care. To learn how participants respond to the probe, we employed it with eight participants for three weeks in their own homes as well as evaluating it with six HCI experts in sessions of 1.5h. In addition to presenting the probe in detail, we share insights into the process of building it and discuss the utility of design fiction as a tool to elicit empathetic and rich discussions about potential outcomes of future technologies.