More-than-Human (MtH) design increasingly engages biomaterials such as fungi and algae through practices of noticing, care, and decentering beyond utilitarian framings. We extend this by examining play as a situated inquiry into MtH design. Through a two-month interspecies ethnography of attempting to play alongside fungal growth, and thematic analysis of our experiences, we formulated six play potentials (PPs) that surface playful practices such as making play moves and negotiating care with unpredictable playmates at the boundaries of growth, breaching growth and being surprised by how it’s taken them up, co-making funny, mysterious traces to revisit their change in time, and taking up the challenge of remembering what growth has hidden. Our work contributes (1) an empirical account of play as a situated way of knowing with biomaterials through joyful yet sometimes risky negotiations across temporalities, agencies, and entanglements, and (2) design directions for fostering playful, relational engagements with growing biomaterials.

Walking is an essential aspect of daily life, while walking with companions offers numerous benefits. Recently developed mobile robots, through their ability to navigate challenging terrains, open new possibilities for outdoor walking companionship. Yet, little is known about how such companions shape the human walking experience. In this study, nine participants walked outdoors with a robot and later reflected on their walking experience in semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis showed that the robot influenced how participants related to it, how they managed proximity, and how their attention, control, and social presence were affected. Building on these insights, we identify five key dimensions of human–robot walking: attunement, awareness mediation, proxemics, social perception, and playful curiosity. These dimensions capture how walking with robots transforms this ordinary activity into a co-experienced practice and additionally offer concrete design implications for designing and creating more meaningful, comfortable, and socially attuned human-robot walking interactions.

This study examines fashionability in computational fashion wearables (CFWs) through the reflective accounts of ten academic researcher–designers. While wearables are often studied for technical functions, fashionability, a key to adoption and sustained use, has received less attention. Using semi-structured interviews, we captured designers’ reflections-on-action as they revisited their own prototypes and surfaced forms of tacit, practice-based knowledge that are difficult to access through conventional user studies. Reflexive thematic analysis generated five themes: Desirable Friction, Contextual and Sub-Cultural Relevance, Symbiotic Sensory Envelopes, Narrative Social Performance, and Adaptive Longevity and Circularity. These themes reposition CFWs not as seamless devices but as expressive, situated, and evolving interfaces that mediate sensory, social, and cultural experience. Our findings contribute to fashion theory and HCI by showing how designers mobilize friction, context, sensory depth, and temporality as design resources. We conclude with actionable directions for embodied prototyping, multisensory calibration, narrative staging, and modular longevity.

Human well-being is inseparable from environmental context, with nature long recognized for its restorative potential. As everyday life becomes increasingly mediated by technology, access to nature is reconfigured through digital media. Virtual nature is often proposed as a tool for supporting well-being, yet the assumptions guiding its design and evaluation remain under-examined. This paper presents a systematic review of 124 empirical studies on virtual nature and well-being. Results generally trend toward clear positive effects on well-being; however, the current state-of-the-art remains considerably limited. Research is dominated by short-term, passive interventions grounded in stress reduction and attention restoration theories, prioritizing affective and physiological outcomes over cognitive or relational dimensions. We conclude by outlining four design inspirations that reposition virtual nature within HCI, shifting attention from short-term relief toward more diverse forms of human–nature interaction including cultural, participatory, and more-than-human perspectives.

We share an emergent repository of nature-entangled methods-to-be shared, experimented with, and discussed during a conference workshop. We present them in-use, as they are in formation. We do not seek to theorise or even fully articulate these methods-to-be. Rather, to make them approachable and actionable for others by showing them not fully polished. By doing this, we advocate for increased transparency in the difficulties of creating new methods, techniques, tools, and approaches. Our contribution is threefold: we provide 1) an annotated portfolio of methods-to-be; 2) illustrative examples of how cross-pollination of these methods can enrich their situated use; and 3) a discussion of ways to further articulate the methods and deepen reflection on their roles in nature-entangled design processes.

The ongoing ecological crisis is the current biggest threat for our species. As we attempt to address the situation through policy, interventions, and education, we urgently need to understand how people encounter and relate to nature: As it is, in the world, and portrayed through different media. As an exemplary medium facilitating digital nature, this paper focuses on video games. Using first-person research methods, we report on the first author sensitising themselves to nature as a ubiquitous feature, theme, and actor in video games. They played eight nature-focused games for three months. Through auto-ethnography, close reading and “noticing” (after Tsing), we make sense of their experiences using the humanistic concept of ecological (in)congruence: We draw out the relational gap and potential meanings between real nature and its virtual equivalent. Based on these insights, we outline two design impulses for how the HCI community might approach nature—within games and beyond.

Walking is an integral part of daily human lives which also has a great influence on happiness and wellbeing. Walking with a dog companion is one of the most popular forms of recreational walking that has similar benefits. The recent development of mobile zoomorphic robots, especially robot dogs has opened up new opportunities in the landscape of walking with companions. This led us to investigate how such robots can accompany humans in walking, and how the mobility and behavior of robots in a daily-life walking scenario affect humans’ walking experience. We interviewed nine participants who took a 15–20-minute walk with a companion robot around a university campus, to understand how diverse walking behaviors of a companion robot influence their perceived experiences. We have generated four key themes through thematic analysis. They imply that affective relationalities between humans and robots can build intimacy and empathy, whereas personal space and physical proximity need to be thought carefully to ensure interaction comfort and spontaneity. Additionally, the robot influenced people’s self-reflection and social values refraining them from enjoying an unknown experience, while ambiguity in communication led to less confidence and trust.

Throughout human history, communication has evolved and diversified t hrough v arious m eans, f rom natural languages to modern forms like video and virtual reality. Now, a paradigm shift, transhumanism, is proposing the integration of machines and computers into the human body to augment individuals physically, sensorily, cognitively, and emotionally. In this pictorial, we examine “How can we approach the design of transhuman technologies for communication?” and “How might future research examine their impact on communication?” For this, we conducted co-speculation workshops to identify design opportunities, and based on them, created fictional a bstracts envisioning future research. Our work contributes a set of design speculations and a range of thought-provoking research ideas that will foster discussions about probable pitfalls and benefits of transhuman technologies in the future of communication.

The advancement of human-computer integration as a research field promises to introduce transhumanistic ways of communicating through the enhanced abilities of augmented humans. Our work seeks to illuminate this experiential landscape, exploring a diverse set of human augmentation technologies (HATs) for communication purposes. We investigated this topic through four co-speculation workshops focusing on physical, cognitive, sensory and emotional augmentations with 35 participants. Through a reflexive thematic analysis of the workshop data, we outlined eight HAT speculations for transhuman communication, grouped into four overarching augmentation clusters: (1) Bodily Changes in/for Communication, (2) Communication with Transferrable and Collective Beings, (3) Communication through Emotion and Memory, and (4) Communication with Augmented/Altered Perception. By serving as a foundation for discussions on transhumanism and communication in CSCW and beyond, these speculations contribute to a design space highlighting design opportunities and challenges to developing and researching near-future communication technologies.

Game jams are collective events that bring people together to think about, make and play games. As collaborative encounters built on community, game jams create unique interpersonal possibilities. Tapping into this relational potential, we integrated elements of humanistic psychology and the person-centred approach into a game jam: We engaged 19 participants in the making of games for self-care and mental health, over the course of a week, as a remote event hosted by the National Videogame Museum, UK. We go on to thematically analyse our shared discussions to unpack the jam as a mutual sense-making activity between facilitators and participants, demonstrating how the jam functioned as a space in which the status quo of mental health could be negotiated; contributing to the jam's sense of community, and generation of caring, novel designs. Finally, we outline two design opportunities for game designers, developers and researchers that seek to engage with the experiential nature of game jams care-fully.

Here we present an exploration into the playful potential of forests and how interactive tech might respond to it. Through first-person, speculative, and situated generative design methods, we engaged with a range of forestry activities to explore their capacity to afford experiences based on joy and care. An analysis of our 16 trips to the forest (and the reflections they motivated) revealed 13 play potentials [6] of human-forest interactions: 13 aspects of forestry experiences that can be intrinsically joyful. We present them clustered as 5 overarching directions that can guide the design of technology that pays more attention to nature's inherent playful character. Our work can inspire a new wave of forest technology that transcends techno-solutionism and privileges alternative values of joy and care.

Engaging with nature enriches people’s life greatly, and it is a particularly powerful wellbeing activity. Unsurprisingly, researchers in HCI and beyond seek to augment and extend the relationship people have with nature through technology, to positively enhance their health as a result. In this paper, we report on a scoping review that examines research exploring health, nature, and technology research. By charting 29 papers from the last five years, we produce a situated snapshot of the current research landscape and identify three trends within the paper pool: Despite the potential for rich, experiential engagements, human-nature interaction is often understood as an endeavour that is 1) universal, 2) flattened and 3) disconnected from everyday life. We reflect on our findings to outline design opportunities for human-nature interaction that extend and re-orientate it; to design for multi-dimensional caring experiences that allow for a more-than-just-human understanding of nature.

Self-care apps offer a wide variety of different therapy paradigms, pedagogies and concepts for people to maintain and make sense of their mental health. However, as human-made artefacts, these apps are being imbued with their designers’ interests, opinions, biases and assumptions about self-care. This paper is interested in making these (often) implicit notions visible. After selecting 69 apps from the Google Play Store, we use Feminist Content Analysis to investigate the store descriptions of these apps: Inductively through thematic analysis and deductively through charting concepts found within the descriptions. Our findings indicate that commercial self-care apps portray themselves as “future creating” tools for individual self-discovery, but they also create narratives that propagate an overly simplistic, individualistic and potentially harmful view of mental distress. We conclude this paper by sketching out alternative design considerations for how self-care apps can portray themselves and communicate in a more transparent, plurality-embracing fashion.

Games have the potential to not only entertain and immerse people, but can be used as vehicles for meaning-making. Given these qualities, games are approached as inspiration for caring technologies, especially for mental health. This transformative process often prioritises learning from games as systems, but not necessarily from the experiences of people with mental distress who play games for self-care. In this paper, we report on a participatory workshop series that sets out to further illuminate the connection between games, self-care and mental health from a humanistic, person-centred perspective. Over four workshops, we engaged 16 people with experiences of mental distress in speculative making activities and discussions of how self-care technology inspired by games could be re-envisioned. By thematically analysing our discussions and collective sense-making, we showcase how participants actively "re-frame" games for self-care. Finally, we sketch out how game developers and makers of gameful self-care technologies could build on our findings.