This paper argues that wireless home networking has been critically underexamined and yet is an infrastructure that has come to configure everyday life.This design research inquiry offers a contemporary account of the domesticated Internet, with specific attention to the participants' mundane practices (configurations, living with, and maintenance) of WiFi.Six rented households were remotely engaged through probe activities and three bespoke WiFi meters that allowed participants to measure otherwise invisible qualities of the network.It is found that while wireless opens the possibility of a home network for people who do not own their homes, the complex invisible dynamics of these networks are too inscrutable for even simple fixes to be made.The discussion closes with a question: if the services and infrastructures of the home become further entangled in the wireless network, might the problem of WiFi maintenance become an existential threat to a functioning home? CCS Concepts• Human-centered computing → HCI design and evaluation methods.

We present 'Resound', a Research through Design inquiry into alternative techno-spiritual practices of a UK Buddhist community, informed by a first-person and participatory approach with the members. In this pictorial we portray a moment of reflection as we consolidate our design work towards deployment with the community. We introduce the Resound Sphere, a materialisation of our learning and speculations to date, designed as a research product to empirically explore alternatives for how tangible interaction could mediate religious/spiritual practices. We contribute with the framing of a design space, the presentation of our design approach and artefact response to this design space.

We introduce Data Probes, technology-mediated probes designed to reveal some of the inner workings of connected devices, including common embedded sensors and the data they collect. By making these common features both accessible and unfamiliar, the probes supported research participants in looking at these technologies from a different perspective and reflecting on capabilities and behaviours that may be obscured by the design of commercial products. During a study where participants lived and travelled with the probes for a month, we were able to gain generative design insights into people’s attitudes towards and relationships with connected devices, suggesting new opportunities for designs that take alternative approaches to currently entrenched visions of the Internet of Things. We present this exploratory study as an illustration of how a technology-mediated probe might prompt reflection on their technologies and open up new design spaces.

This paper contributes a new design research artifact, The Router of All Evil. This is a Research Product that results from and scaffolds a Research Through Design exploration of the domestic Internet. The Router of All Evil is designed to reveal the technical possibility of the humble home router, to define a network of one’s own, where homelife can unfold in creative, fulfilling and private ways, as an alternative to the prevalent corporate and surveillant logics of Silicon Valley’s Internet of Things. Through a methodological contribution described as Designerly Hacking, this paper demonstrates how technical alternatives can first be revealed by hacking or breaking-up a system and then put back together for the use of a broader (designerly) public. To these ends, the Router of All Evil exemplifies Pace Layer design, where rapid design reconfigurations of hardware and software are purposefully afforded.

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.

This paper reports on Zoom Obscura – an artist-based design research project, responding to the ubiquity of video-conferencing as a technical and cultural phenomenon throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. As enterprise software, such as Zoom, rapidly came to mediate even the most personal and intimate interactions, we supported and collaborated with seven independent artists to explore technical and creative interventions in video-conferencing. Our call for participation sought critical interventions that would help users counter, and regain agency in regard to the various ways in which personal data is captured, transmitted and processed in video-conferencing tools. In this design study, we analyse post-hoc how each of the seven projects employed aspects of counterfunctional design to achieve these aims. Each project reveals different avenues and strategies for counterfunctionality in video-conferencing software, as well as opportunities to design critically towards interactions and experiences that challenge existing norms and expectations around these platforms.

Yo–Yo Machines are playful communication devices designed to help people feel socially connected while physically separated. We designed them to reach as many people as possible, both to make a positive impact during the COVID-19 pandemic and to assess a self-build approach to circulating research products and the appeal of peripheral and expressive communication devices. A portfolio of four distinct designs, based on over 30 years of research, were made available for people to make by following simple online instructions (yoyomachines.io). Each involves connecting a pair of identical devices over the internet to allow simple communication at a distance. This paper describes our motivation for the project, previous work in the area, the design of the devices, supporting website and publicity, and how users have made and used Yo-Yo Machines. Finally, we reflect on what we learned about peripheral and expressive communication devices and implications for the self-build approach.

Research through design (RTD) is commonly conceived as a material and discursive practice of articulating knowledge. This paper contributes to the understanding of RTD as a form of critical inquiry by considering how inarticulacy can also be a productive element of this process. We present two reflective accounts of critically-engaged RTD practices in which our attempts to articulate concerns or questions were met with resistance from technology that was both the subject and medium of our investigation. We argue that encountering inarticulacy is not a failure of RTD but instead points to how material exploration can sensitise us to how network technology resists articulating certain values or concerns. Encountering inarticulacy led us to formulate new problems and new lines of inquiry. We conclude by suggesting that the central role given to ambiguity in RTD prepares us to witness and respond to inarticulacy in our practices, design outcomes and critical understandings.

We report on the design of ThinkActive - a system to encourage primary aged school children to reflect on their own personal activity data in the classroom. We deployed the system with a cohort of 30 school children, over a six-week period, in partnership with an English Premier League Football club's health and nutrition programme. The system utilizes inexpensive activity trackers and pseudonymous avatars to promote reflection with personal data using an in-situ display within the classroom. Our design explores pseudonymity as an approach to managing privacy and personal data within a public setting. We report on the motivations, challenges, and opportunities for students, teachers, and third-party providers to engage in the collection and sharing of activity data with primary school children.

In this paper we describe a Research through Design inquiry about a speculative wedding documentation service, in the mode of the Quantified Self. We reflect on our design research, which included design ethnography, interviews, enactments of parts of the service, and the production of a concept brochure. In so doing, we explore the design of personal tracking as a documentary activity, one intended for longer-term self-expression and remembering -- rather than simply to monitor, regulate and motivate a data-driven life. Developing the Lived Informatics discourse, we use our design-led inquiry to propose "Documentary Informatics" as an alternative and longer-term design perspective on self-tracking tools.

The application of Organic User Interface (OUI) technologies will revolutionize interior design, through the development of interactive and actuated surfaces, furnishings and decorative artefacts. However, to adequately explore these new design landscapes we must support multidisciplinary collaboration between Architects, Interior Designers and Technologists. Herein, we present the results of two workshops, with a total of 45 participants from the disciplines of Architecture and Interior Design, supported by a group of HCI researchers. Our objective was to study how design disciplines can productively engage with smart materials as a design resource using an evolving set of techniques to prototype new interactive interior spaces. Our paper reports on our experiences across the two workshops and contributes an understanding of techniques for supporting multidisciplinary collaboration when designing interactive interior spaces.

Viewing the mobile telephone as a networked material, we demonstrate the ways in which we have used it to make Research Products for the "Family Rituals 2.0" inquiry of families separated by work. Drawing from a diversity of sources we survey and deconstruct the phone as a material that can be worked to a vast range of technical effects, extended by hardware and configured by software. We demonstrate the transformations of hacking and prototyping practices necessary to construct complex Research Products through the case study of our machines. We offer the Interaction Design community seven specific and actionable techniques for using mobile telephones in Research Products. Finally, we open up a broader discussion for researchers and practitioners using mobile phones as a design material in their work.

We present findings from a qualitative study about how Internet use supports self-functioning following the life transition of retirement from work. This study recruited six recent retirees and included the deployment of OnLines, a design research artifact that logged and visualized key online services used by participants at home over four-weeks. The deployment was supported by pre- and post-deployment interviews. OnLines prompted participants' reflection on their patterns of Internet use. Position Exchange Theory was used to understand retirees' sense making from a lifespan perspective, informing the design of supportive online services. This paper delivers a three-fold contribution to the field of human-computer interaction, advancing a lifespan-oriented approach by conceptualizing the self as a dialogical phenomenon that develops over time, advancing the ageing discourse by reporting on retirees' complex identities in the context of their life histories, and advancing discourse on research through design by developing OnLines to foster participant-researcher reflection informed by Self Psychology.

Speculative Enactments are a novel approach to speculative design research with participants. They invite the empirical analysis of participants acting amidst speculative but consequential circumstances. HCI as a broadly pragmatic, experience-centered, and participant-focused field is well placed to innovate methods that invite first-hand interaction and experience with speculative design projects. We discuss three case studies of this approach in practice, based on our own work: Runner Spotters, Metadating and a Quantified Wedding. In distinguishing Speculative Enactments we offer not just practical guidelines, but a set of conceptual resources for researchers and practitioners to critique the different contributions that speculative approaches make to HCI discourse.

We introduce Metadating -- a future-focused research and speed-dating event where single participants were invited to "explore the romance of personal data". Participants created "data profiles" about themselves, and used these to "date" other participants. In the rich context of dating, we study how personal data is used conversationally to communicate and illustrate identity. We note the manner in which participants carefully curated their profiles, expressing ambiguity before detail, illustration before accuracy. Our findings proposition a set of data services and features, each concerned with representing and curating data in new ways, beyond a focus on purely rational or analytic relationships with a quantified self. Through this, we build on emerging interest in "lived informatics" and raise questions about the experience and social reality of a "data-driven life".

Changing patterns of both work-related mobility and do-mestic arrangements mean that 'mobile workers' face chal-lenges to support and engage in family life whilst travelling for work. Phatic devices offer some potential to provide connection at a distance alongside existing communications infrastructure. Through a bespoke design process, incorpo-rating phases of design ethnography, critical technical prac-tice and provotyping we have developed Ritual Machines I and II as material explorations of mobile workers' lives and practices. In doing this we sought to reflect upon the prac-tices through which families accomplish mobile living, the values they place in technology for doing 'family' at a distance and to draw insights in to the potential roles of digital technology in supporting them. We frame the design of our phatic devices in discussion of processes of bespoke design, offer advice on supporting mobile workers when travelling and articulate the values of making a technology at home when designing for domestic and mobile settings.

In this paper we present experimental results measuring the success of users manipulating a physical map interface to navigate to specific locations. We evaluate four different mappings between the action of the user and the reaction of the display, two where axis act consistently and two where they are inconsistent. Consistent mappings outperform those that are not and of these one mapping is significantly better and quicker to learn. Measures of error, speed of completion and reports of difficulty and task enjoyment support this. We use this to make specific recommendations for such interfaces and highlight new challenges.

In this paper we present experimental results rating the experience of users conversing in a casual video/audio dialogue, in a simulated home environment. Here video-realistic images are problematic and prone to numerous "medium effects", such as unaligned eye-gaze, which can be misattributed as personal flaws. We tested three levels of manipulated video to see if they improved user's sense of: (a) presence, (b) portrayal and (c) preference. By blurring the background we found a manipulation that is both preferred and more efficiently coded than the original.