Traditional clothing is commonly worn in India and are visual markers of caste, religion, region, political affiliation, and gender. While family, friends, and communities implicitly monitor what is worn, it causes tensions between personal choices of self-expression and social expectations of conformity. This paper describes a speculative design project that explores clothing taboos and possible futures in private, public, and regional/national contexts. We describe a participatory workshop conducted to facilitate reflection about the clothing choices people make today, and to re-imagine the purpose of clothing in the future. The result was the design of a dystopian speculative world called Oneness exhibited in a series of photographs depicting provocative transformations in private, public, and regional/national life. The exhibition became a catalyst for deeper reflections and insights and we suggest speculative techniques could be used more often to create supportive spaces for discussions around culturally sensitive and taboo topics.

The Air Quality Index (AQI) is a set of numerical, color-coded metrics used to communicate air pollution levels. AQI data is available through a variety of mediums such as mobile apps, websites and public displays. However, the information communicated through these may not be easily interpretable to everyone. Especially when scientific data and associated representations are used to convey information to communities whose shared knowledge and practices are significantly different from Western scientific contexts. We discuss findings from a qualitative study conducted in Delhi, India to understand how residents across both low- and high-resourced communities, assess their personal risk around air pollution and the safety measures they take to mitigate that risk. We reveal incompatibilities between the air-quality information displayed in digital platforms and whether that information is interpretable for people with different cultural sensitivities. We conclude with design implications for improving the interpretability and relevance of air quality interfaces.

With the forced reboot of our lives due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our interpersonal relationships are nowhere yet everywhere. However, opportunities for initiating or maintaining friendships and romance in the physical world have dwindled. Within the context of India where multiple realities exist, the question arises – what is the future of these relationships? In this paper, we present the outcomes of a workshop looking at the future of relationships using design fiction. Participants worked in small teams to create scenarios that critically consider the future of love, friendships, and romance within the Indian context. Through the lenses of criticality, empowerment, and value creation, we examine the design scenarios and the design process including criticality of the designs, empowering experiences of the participants, and the perceived value gained from participating in such a workshop. Our findings indicate the potential of design fiction to allow participants to step out of their comfort zone into a critical stance in discussing love and intimacy. Based upon our findings, we discuss implications for design research, practice, and education.

The discourse concerning computer ethics qualifies as a reference discourse for ethics-related IS research. Theories, topics and approaches of computer ethics are reflected in IS. The paper argues that there is currently a broader development in the area of research governance, which is referred to as ‘responsible research and innovation’ (RRI). RRI applied to information and communication technology (ICT) addresses some of the limitations of computer ethics and points toward a broader approach to the governance of science, technology and innovation. Taking this development into account will help IS increase its relevance and make optimal use of its established strengths.

The potential social consequences that may arise as a result of the development and widespread use of ICT are of increasing interest to the general public, policymakers and researchers. Prominent examples include transformations of our concept of privacy when using social networking and other websites, ownership and control of personal data, and the ways crowd-sourced information transform how events are coordinated and how they unfold in real-time. Although there is broad acceptance that questions of professional responsibility are relevant to ICT it is often unclear how this could be achieved or how responsibilities should be defined and managed when considering the potential social consequences of ICT. `Responsible Research and Innovation' (RRI) has emerged in Europe proposing approaches for researchers to identify and consider the potential social consequences and impact of their research outputs within the entire research and innovation lifecycle. First, it asks researchers to take on a practice of critical reflection considering the potential societal impacts of their research outputs, and second to include the general public in a dialogue around the development of research goals and strategy. We discuss findings from interviews conducted with a broad range of stakeholders regarding challenges to identifying, debating and resolving social and ethical concerns associated with ICT research and practice. We also consider how we might extend existing or develop new approaches that facilitate both critical reflection and wider participation within the entire research and innovation lifecycle.

A concern with “embodied action” has informed both the analysis of everyday action through technologies and also suggested ways of designing innovative systems. In this article, we consider how these two programs, the analysis of everyday embodied interaction on the one hand, and the analysis of technically-mediated embodied interaction on the other, are interlinked. We draw on studies of everyday interaction to reveal how embodied conduct is embedded in the environment. We then consider a collaborative technology that attempts to provide a coherent way of presenting life-sized embodiments of participants alongside particular features of the environment. These analyses suggest that conceptions of embodied action should take account of the interactional accomplishment of activities and how these are embedded in the material environment.