Recent advances in AI are integrating AI into the fabric of human social life, creating transformative, co-shaping relationships between humans and AI. This trend makes it urgent to investigate how these systems, in turn, shape their users. We conducted a three-phase design study with 24 participants to explore this dynamic. Our findings reveal critical tensions: (1) social AI often exacerbates the very interpersonal problems it is designed to mitigate; (2) it introduces nuanced privacy harms for secondary users inadvertently involved in AI-mediated social interactions; and (3) it can threaten the primary user’s personal agency and identity. We argue these tensions expose a problematic tendency in the user-centered paradigm, which often prioritizes immediate user experience at the expense of core human values like interpersonal ethics and self-efficacy. We call for a paradigm shift toward a more provocative and relational design perspective that foregrounds long-term social and personal consequences.

Amid escalating ecological challenges, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers have begun adopting More-than-Human design (MtHD) approaches as a means of reimagining and strengthening the bonds between the human and non-human world. Taking a MtHD approach, this work investigates how loofah, a plant-based, biodegradable material, can be used to foster ecological awareness in everyday life. We present a material exploration of loofah, including initial encounters with loofah as a uniquely structural material, a design space focused on how loofah can be combined with various indicators that respond to different environmental factors like temperature, UV radiation, pH of water and soil, the Iron and moisture in soil and utilizing loofah as a substrate for plant growth. Based on this design space, we create two wearables: a hat and a glove. These artifacts incorporate environmental sensing capabilities and host live microgreens, highlighting loofah‘s potential as both an interface and habitat. Through a 15-day autoethnographic journaling process by the first and second authors, we reflect on the embodied experiences of “wearing” environmental change and cultivating on-body ecological practices. This pictorial contributes to the HCI community by introducing a biomaterial-based embodied interaction to provoke reflections on the relationships between materials, non-human forms, and the environment, while integrating functional considerations into MtHD.