This paper presents a framework of ethical encounters in design practice, grounded in 98 accounts of practitioners’ experiences with ethics in their work. While HCI and design scholarship have produced a growing body of empirical work on design ethics, less attention has been given to concept-building informed by practice. Building on practice-oriented design ethics research in HCI, we define ethical encounters as practitioner-identified situations that expose tensions and value-laden decisions, emerging from the situated realities of day-to-day design work. Our analysis reveals three key dimensions of these encounters: the perceived issues, the actions taken to navigate them, and the new capacities emerging through them. Our analysis also considers how these dimensions play out differently across project phases. The framework offers a shared language and practical guidance for understanding and engaging with ethical challenges, and it contributes by framing ethical encounters as generative for relationships, ideas, and directions in HCI and design practice.

The three prototypical AutCorder designs

Practice-based design research is often emergent. Methods, tactics, goals and even topics can unfold and change as researchers adapt and learn in the course of their projects. This adaptability is one of the strengths of design as an approach to research, but it seems to contradict assumptions about research as a systematic, inquiry-led investigation. This leads to a tension in practicing and reporting research that we unpack here, before making a series of suggestions for practice-based researchers and reviewers about how to better navigate emergence when pursuing, reporting and evaluating practice-based design research.

Explainable AI (XAI) seeks to disclose how an AI system arrives at its outcomes. But the nature of the disclosure depends in part on who needs to understand the AI and the available explanation modalities (e.g., verbal and visual). Users’ preferences regarding explanation modalities might differ, as some might prefer spoken explanations compared to visual ones. However, we argue for broadening the explanation modalities, to consider also tangible and physical forms. In traditional product design, physical forms have mediated people’s interactions with objects; more recently interacting with physical forms has become prominent with IoT and smart devices, such as smart lighting and robotic vacuum cleaners. But how tangible interaction can support AI explanations is not yet well understood.

Since the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), researchers have asked how intelligent computing systems could interact with and relate to their users and their surroundings, leading to debates around issues of biased AI systems, ML black-box, user trust, user’s perception of control over the system, and system’s transparency, to name a few. All of these issues are related to how humans interact with AI or ML systems, through an interface which uses different interaction modalities. Prior studies address these issues from a variety of perspectives, spanning from understanding and framing the problems through ethics and Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives to finding effective technical solutions to the problems. But what is shared among almost all those efforts is an assumption that if systems can explain the how and why of their predictions, people will have a better perception of control and therefore will trust such systems more, and even can correct their shortcomings. This research field has been called Explainable AI (XAI). In this studio, we take stock on prior efforts in this area; however, we focus on using Tangible and Embodied Interaction (TEI) as an interaction modality for understanding ML. We note that the affordances of physical forms and their behaviors potentially can not only contribute to the explainability of ML systems, but also can contribute to an open environment for criticism. This studio seeks to both critique explainable ML terminology and to map the opportunities that TEI can offer to the HCI for designing more sustainable, graspable and just intelligent systems.

In this pictorial, we offer an overview of the design and step-by-step guidance on crafting a leather self-tracking device for pollen allergies. We designed the device to support patients’ daily lives allowing them to track symptoms and their severity and medicine intake while on the go, multiple times per day. The self-tracker sends the data to an accompanying smartphone application to support patients in understanding their illness, be used in doctors’ consultation, and collect data for allergy research. We chose natural leather as a material for this domestic medical device due to its associations with everyday artifacts, so it would be easier to integrate it into allergy patients’ everyday lives.

Cross-device interactions enable ad hoc sharing of content and control in co-located collaboration. Cross-device research often draws from proxemics theory for designing interactions based on detection of spatial relations such as distance and orientation between people and devices. However, detection of human-human or human-device proximity also constrains flexibility in co-located social interaction. We suggest a proxemics-based approach to designing flexible cross-device interactions. From observations in a field study, we articulate how co-located sharing practices are shaped by the interplay between everyday mobile devices and the physical environment. Based on these insights, we present three cross-device prototypes as proofs-of-concept, demonstrating three design sensitivities for considering proxemics beyond proximity; incorporating features in the environment, enabling flexibility in interpersonal distance and orientation, and providing multiple alternative action possibilities. Drawing from characteristics of our prototypes, we discuss concrete proposals for designing cross-device interactions to enable flexible social interaction.

The position and workings of interactive interior elements matter greatly on the relations people may enact. This paper reports on the conception and evaluation of an interactive table and its interior effects designed to support sensitive consultations between healthcare personnel, patients and relatives as they happen during treatment of cancer diseases in a hospital department of oncology. The interior design includes the physical shape of artefact, its digital functionality and how the seating around it is to take place. The design of the table is substantiated through observations of current practice, framing of the design challenge, conceptualization, and exploring form giving alternatives. Through a set of evaluations in actual use settings it is argued how the design concept of the table as interactive interior points to how notions in interaction proxemics should be rearticulated. In particular, this paper argues how proxemics thresholds should be regarded as dynamic and relational.

The field of Shape-Changing Interfaces explores the qualities of physically dynamic artifacts. At furniture-scale, such artifacts have the potential of changing the ways we collaborate and engage with interiors and physical spaces. Informed by theories of proxemics, empirical studies of informal meetings and design work with shape-changing furniture, we develop the notion of proxemic transitions. We present three design aspects of proxemic transitions: transition speed, stepwise reconfiguration, and radical shifts. The design aspects focus on how to balance between physical and digital transformations in designing for proxemic transitions. Our contribution is three-fold: 1) the notion of proxemic transitions, 2) three design aspects to consider in designing for proxemic transitions, and 3) initial exploration of how these design aspects might generate designs of dynamic furniture. These contributions outline important aspects to consider when designing shape-changing furniture for informal workplace meetings.

People inherently share spaces with other people. Congenitally, interactive technologies and ubiquitous environments shape our opportunities for enacting social relations. Proxemics and Spatial Sharing have been suggested as foundations for our understanding of the socio-spatial aspects of computing. By tandeming these theoretical perspectives in a set of cases in the office domain, we develop a contribution comprised of 3 key sensitizing concepts: Proxemic Malleability, Proxemic Threshold and Proxemic Gravity articulating socio-spatial qualities at the interplay between interactive systems, spaces, interior elements and co-located people. The sensitizing concepts qualify interaction designers in considering proxemic consequences of technology design; they serve both as analytic lenses and as generative instruments in a design process. The proposed sensitizing concepts and the theoretical work of the paper contribute to enhanced Socio-spatial literacy in HCI.

Following the research field of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), we explore and expand upon the notion of media richness. We consider the term outside its ordinary domain of conventional communication mediums, such as email, phone or video calls. We focus on minimal communication, and the qualities of suggestive interactions that mediate communication. We introduce Knock-Knock as a novel, shape-changing communication medium, and use it as a rhetorical tool to reflect upon the notion of media richness. In doing so, we highlight the value of meaning and language creation that suggestive communication mediums make possible. Finally, we propose three directions for the future evaluation of the richness experienced in communication, mediated by suggestive communication artefacts.

For many people home making is an activity, which extends beyond a single house. We introduce the terminology of Homing as the act of home making, when in a primary home, secondary home or more temporary spaces. By point of departure in existing literature on home making and through ethnographic studies of extremely mobile people we identify general tactics for homing. We present the identified tactics and show how people deploy not only one but several tactics in their intention of making a homely feeling despite not being in their primary home.

There is a growing interest in considering aesthetic aspects in the design of interactive systems. A set of approaches are emerging each representing different applications of the terminology as well as different inherent assumptions on the role of the user, designer and interaction ideals. In this paper, we use the concept of Pragmatist Aesthetics to provide a framework for distinguishing between different approaches to aesthetics. Moreover, we use our own design cases to illustrate how pragmatist aesthetics is a promising path to follow in the context of designing interactive systems, as it promotes aesthetics of use, rather than aesthetics of appearance. We coin this approach in the perspective of aesthetic interaction. Finally we make the point that aesthetics is not re-defining everything known about interactive systems. We provide a framework placing this perspective among other perspectives on interaction.