Techno-positivist narratives of efficiency, productivity, and “democratised” creativity risk obscuring the material, situated realities of creative work; narrowing how HCI can imagine and enable alternative futures. This pictorial presents four futures workshops with seventy creative professionals that surfaced nuanced visions of creative practice with AI in 2030 through structured exploration of three temporal forces: the weight of history, the push of the present, and the pull of the future. We contribute to HCI and DIS by offering a visually-documented framework for futures workshops with creative communities, extending futures-oriented design methods with a structured, dialogic approach that makes ambivalent attitudes toward technology visible rather than reducing them to simple polarities. By translating these discussions into visual vignettes, created in collaboration with an illustrator, we show how pictorials can surface and compare nuances across cohorts, making the work accessible to researchers, educators, and the creative communities that this research is intended to support.

As the internet thrives on the circulation of easily copied content, ensuring attribution is properly given has been a perennial challenge. Following the rise of synthetic media and generative AI tools, and corresponding technologies which enable detailed media provenance, the picture has become considerably more complicated. We present a design research project to consider the implications of these developments from the perspective of the public, everyday (non-professional) user and ‘mundane content’ creation. Through the design, exhibition, and study of a collaborative storytelling tool, ORAgen Fables, we introduce technologies which enable detailed attribution and media provenance and explore contemporary attitudes and concerns about attribution. Our findings suggest that attribution should be understood as relational and dynamic with users having the right to ongoing management of their attribution. This opens a design space for understanding how technical systems could be deployed to define and ascribe attribution for past and future interactions.

The proliferation of AI-generated digital content has intensified the user demand for accurate provenance information to ensure content authenticity.Technical advancements now provide tools to make the digital media content supply chain more transparent through the use of provenance data.This paper foregrounds the importance of understanding how the situated nature of user-content engagement influences perceptions and uses of this data.Insights from a workshop with experts in the creative media sector suggest that, as the adoption of provenance data becomes more common, users need richer and more nuanced information.We suggest that analyzing the increasing demand for content authenticity through the lens of multiple "authenticities", each reflecting different user needs and contexts, can help identify and address the needs for, and uses of, provenance data by creators and audiences alike.

Amidst a growing body of work in HCI focusing on designing systems that engage with care relationships, there is increasing interest in expanding notions of care beyond transactional practices, towards broader notions of “care ecologies”. However, how can we support care systems designers to apply these concepts in practice? This paper presents the Care Spectrums, a set of sensitising concepts for designers to explore and apply to their practice. Developed as a response to a design probe exercise (the CareTree) which was carried out with 14 participants over one month, the Care Spectrums respond to the multiplicity of expressions of care in participants’ everyday lives. Translated into a design resource (the ‘Co-Designing with Care’ card deck), and trialled with 10 designers, the Care Spectrums revealed hidden caring and uncaring practices in designers’ projects, and stimulated opportunities for designing with and for people's complex and entangled care ecologies.

People’s data practices and their supporting personal informatics are imbued with a wide range of concepts of value that are central to their data imaginaries. They inform how individuals adopt particular products and services. This elusiveness of value creates a challenge for designers to gauge users’ value preferences, which are personal, contextual and abstract. We propose deliberation as a process to operationalise design for elicitation, reflection and value formation, using Live Action Role Play (LARP). The paper demonstrates how our deliberative LARP precipitates the otherwise ethereal data values to unfold in a social setting. We argue that engaging people in reflecting on and playing out their own value formation offers designers more powerful insights to address complex challenges of data-driven societies. We report on our findings that agency and negotiability are key to transcend the politics of preferences in data practices and thus enhance acceptability.

Distributed energy resources are expected to radically change the way energy is produced and distributed through decentralised generation and storage. Current distributed energy models tend to hide the complexity of these systems in order to improve ease of use, while restricting people's participation to predefined roles of passive users who can benefit from more reliable infrastructures, more competitive prices, and more access to sustainable energy. In this paper, we question these roles and present the Karma Kettle, an open-ended device that aims to explore perceptions of different levels of agency in distributed energy resources. A study of the Karma Kettle with 20 residents of a block of flats in the UK reveals strategies and values of these residents, the effectiveness of the Karma Kettle to inspire discussion on levels of agency, and how these systems could be designed to promote more participatory approaches in distributed energy systems.

Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) have been celebrated for promoting transparency, trust, and efficiency in several domains. However, recent research has also pointed out the potential of these technologies to increase power asymmetries and deepen social inequality. In this paper, we contribute to this discussion by reporting on a collective effort of academics, development partners, local authorities, businesses, and farming groups to look at the potential of DLTs, particularly Blockchains, to support socio-economic development in rural communities in the Caribbean. We present a series of design concepts resulting from this effort and reflect on a method to facilitate stakeholders' experience of possible implementations and enable them to voice concerns, preferences, and expectations. Results from workshops with different groups of stakeholders contribute insights into opportunities and limitations of these applications to enable social development and to level the playing field in agricultural exchanges in developing countries.