This paper offers new perspectives for More-Than-Human (MTH) design and Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) by rethinking technoscientific logics of temporality. To do this, we draw on alternative logics such as Hydrofeminism, interlocutor and autobiographical accounts, and Leaky Cups—a set of willfully dysfunctional data-enabled artefacts that leak in response to local water data. In doing so, it repositions more-than-human agency not as a passive conduit merely mediating human experiences but as a force capable of creating change and ethics through non-progressivist care labor. By engaging with these ideas, this work critiques and disrupts normative assumptions about progress, openness, fluidity, and objectivity in MTH research and design, and presents productive tensions that challenge dominant temporal frameworks.

As posthumanist or post-anthropocentric research in HCI and design proliferates and further commits to working with more-than-humans, design research practitioners are left with many open questions and uncertainties with how to productively engage with more-than-humans in their thinking and working. This paper present results from a workshop with 17 researchers working at the intersection of care ethics and posthumanism to highlight tensions in posthumanist engagement aimed at unpacking some of the challenges, obstacles, and questions encountered by researchers interested in more-than-human centered design. In foregrounding tensions with representation, legitimization, unseen labor, and material narratives we contribute to a design research agenda which seeks to explicate and challenge dominant anthropocentric forces from design. We conclude by discussing epistemological care and urge practitioners to take up new ways of imagining through truly messy methods which contribute to a feminist unsettling of HCI's methodological commitments, practices, and praxis.

Animated GIFs are often viewed as a nod to early internet culture or as tools for digital communication, but in this pictorial, we highlight a new use of GIFs, as tools for design research. We walk through four case studies from our own research that exemplify GIFs used throughout the design process as empirical probes, prototypes, communication tools, and finalized artifacts. By conducting a collaborative, reflexive analysis of these cases, we present an annotated portfolio of the goals, crafting and aesthetic choices of our GIFs and how creating GIFs added to our research. We conclude by noting that both the aesthetics of movement and the rich, concise, and contextualized nature of gifs added to our depth of thinking and ability to communicate speculative and imaginative concepts. Finally, we also suggest that research dissemination, especially for design research, would be enriched by supporting more diverse knowledge-production artifacts such as GIFs.

As the internet is increasingly embedded in the everyday things in our homes, we notice a need for greater focus on the role care plays in those relationships—and therefore an opportunity to realize unseen potential in reimagining home Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper we report on our inquiry of home dwellers’ relationships to caring for their everyday things and homes (referred to as thingcare). Findings from our design ethnography reveal four thematic qualities of their relationships to thingcare: Care Spectacle, Care Liminality, Ontological Braiding, and Care Condition. Using these themes as touchstones, we co-speculated to produce four speculative IoT concepts to explore what care as a design ethic might look like for IoT and reflect on nascent opportunities and challenges for domestic IoT design. We conclude by considering structures of power and privilege embedded within care practices that critically open new design imaginaries for IoT.

While attention in Research Through Design (RtD) is often on the findings, in this pictorial, we choose to attend to the 'through' part of RtD in order to reveal the messy stories of how those insights were arrived at-stories that are often untold, truncated, or streamlined. We use a yearlong RtD project on human-data entanglements in the home as a case study to explore the contours of this process. We detail how our messy lines of inquiry crossed, dead ended, wove together, and looped. Grounded in illustrations of lines, we offer practical reflections on experiences we encountered while navigating these scribbly lines.

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for the home are gaining in popularity, generating exponential data byproducts. Yet, everyday relationships between home dwellers and domestic IoT data often remain secondary interactions, preventing deeper understanding and awareness of data tracked in the home. Our paper offers a design ethnography and design inquiry which examine these human-data entanglements. Findings from working with 10 inhabitants who interact with their IoT data illustrate five characteristics of current data encounters: manifesting, inquiring, exposing, repositioning, and broadening. In response, we used speculative sketches to refine, refract and complicate these encounters. We argue that data do not have to be laborious, tidy or the byproduct of a service, but rather lively and affecting. We further suggest new modes of engagement with data which expand or step away from self-improvement and reflection: through diverse acts of noticing, by allowing data to remain invisible, and by embracing imaginative practices.

We present Bespoke Booklets: a design research method utilizing booklets of situated, imaginary, and personalized conceptual sketches to co-speculatively envision alternative futures (in our case for domestic Internet of Things). The Bespoke Booklets create a space where designers and participants can co-imagine alternative futures while also engaging each other at the level of embodied experiences. After refining our method, we discovered it had many qualities previously championed by feminist HCI and STS theorists. To this end, we draw out, analyze, and critique our method using feminist concepts as a lens to emphasize four specific qualities: collaborative, post-functional, situated, and partial. We found that the booklets, as material artifacts, were a productive tool to generate a physical record of our co-speculation and a fruitful catalyst for research that reflects feminist theory, offering an example of how it can be used as a heuristic for design methodologies.

We report on the findings of a co-speculative design inquiry that investigates alternative visions of the Internet of Things (IoT) for the home. We worked with 16 people living in non-stereotypical homes to develop situated and personal concepts attuned to their home. As a prompt for co-speculation and discussion, we created handmade booklets where we took turns overlaying sketched design concepts on top of photos taken with participants in their homes. Our findings reveal new avenues for the design of IoT systems such as: acknowledging porous boundaries of the home, exposing neighborly relations, exploring diverse timescales, revisiting agency, and embracing imaginary and potential uses. We invite human-computer interaction and design researchers to use these avenues as starting points to broaden current assumptions embedded in design and research practices for domestic technologies. We conclude by highlighting the value of examining divergent perspectives and surfacing the unseen.