Amid the recent uptake of Generative AI, sociotechnical scholars and critics have traced a multitude of resulting harms, with analyses largely focused on values and axiology (e.g., bias). While value-based analyses are crucial, we argue that ontologies -- concerning what we allow ourselves to think or talk about -- is a vital but under-recognized dimension in analyzing these systems. Proposing a need for a practice-based engagement with ontologies, we offer four orientations for considering ontologies in design: pluralism, groundedness, liveliness, and enactment. We share examples of potentialities that are opened up through these orientations across the entire LLM development pipeline by conducting two ontological analyses: examining the responses of four LLM-based chatbots in a prompting exercise, and analyzing the architecture of an LLM-based agent simulation. We conclude by sharing opportunities and limitations of working with ontologies in the design and development of sociotechnical systems.

AI-supported writing technologies (AISWT) that provide grammatical suggestions, autocomplete sentences, or generate and rewrite text are now a regular feature integrated into many people's workflows. However, little is known about how people perceive the suggestions these tools provide. In this paper, we investigate how Black American users perceive AISWT, motivated by prior findings in natural language processing that highlight how the underlying large language models can contain racial biases. Using interviews and observational user studies with 13 Black American users of AISWT, we found a strong tradeoff between the perceived benefits of using AISWT to enhance their writing style and feeling like ''it wasn't built for us'''. Specifically, participants reported AISWT's failure to recognize commonly used names and expressions in African American Vernacular English, experiencing its corrections as hurtful and alienating and fearing it might further minoritize their culture. We end with a reflection on the tension between AISWT that fail to include Black American culture and language, and AISWT that attempt to mimic it, with attention to accuracy, authenticity, and the production of social difference.

Why were Hollywood film workers striking or supporting strikes against AI in 2023? To investigate this question, we conduct participant observation on the picket line and interview 15 film workers, including 12 union members from SAG-AFTRA, WGA, and IATSE, as well as three non-unionized workers, across roles. From screenwriting to acting, our interlocutors described how studio use of AI might exacerbate wage squeeze, estrangement from embodied co-creation, rush for results, and inauthentic creativity. We find that film worker resistance to emergent and projected uses of AI echoes earlier technical developments, such as the incorporation of sound, color, HD, DVD, and CGI. These innovations initially sparked anxieties about the demise of cinema, but ultimately created new aesthetic possibilities and professions. We end with a reflection on core concerns for worker engagement, including topics of prophesy and the “soul” of sociotechnical labor.

Informed by legacies of textile activism, we design Resistive Threads as a wearable probe to investigate potential roles and trajectories of electronic streetwear in US urban social movements. Resistive Threads is an interactive denim jacket that refashions the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s (Dis)location Black Exodus print zine. The jacket plays audio stories, poetry, and music from embedded speakers when interactive patches sewn with conductive thread are tapped upon. Examining the artifact with 10 community organizers and partners, we find that augmented streetwear may take on the role of a housing organizing instrument or speculative garment. In turn, we discuss how we might learn from textile histories and solidarities to recognize—not rehearse—damage-centered research. We close with a reflection on what makes the electronic aspect of e-textiles meaningful to social movement practice and performance.

Over the past two decades, discussions of design patterns have turned from encouragement (what to do) toward discouragement (what to avoid). Termed dark, deceptive, or otherwise harmful, user experience (UX) patterns that serve to monetize engagement while reproducing and sedimenting structural inequities are prevalent, which calls for a shifting conversation around UX development and learning. This pictorial uses a visual case study of a childcare worker platform to help critically contextualize largely abstracted or universalizing UX patterns. Developing a form of critical documentation we call Care Layering, we show how approaching UX patterns as embodied and culturally-situated resources sheds light on both limitations and opportunities around gig work platform engagement. We end with a discussion of how Care Layering helps designers work towards greater accountability in UX design.

Care work is always already unequal. It involves looking after others’ physical, psychological, emotional, and developmental needs. Paid care work tends to be conducted in private spaces, lack regulation, and reproduce unequal dynamics between clients and workers. These conditions lead to porous boundaries, a permeability experienced by workers between care and work, professional and personal, and private and public (sectors and spheres). Drawing on interviews with 16 workers who find work using Care.com, we argue that the porous boundaries of care work are reified in new ways through the design and use of emerging digitally mediated matching platforms. This has particular impacts for ranking personhood, reducing worker safety, and increasing atomization. In contrast, we find benefits in the forum-like structure and visible, interactive conversations of other platforms used to access childcare work. We end with a discussion of porousness by design and the trouble of locating design within worker platforms.

Design cards have long played an important role in reflection-directing the designer's gaze toward unasked questions, hidden consequences, and new horizons for speculative futuring. But few questions have been asked about what motivates the design process and how deck designers see their role in inquiry and/or world building. This paper looks to the Tarot deck as one iconic example of such a process. Drawing on interviews with nine Tarot deck creators, we surface themes of Tarot as scaffolding modes of personal and collective growth, forms of carework, and pathways for different ways of knowing. We discuss expanding design inquiry methods for understanding and elevating forms of spiritual connection and care; and moving from anti-appropriation to ante-appropriation.

This paper explores the value of archival theory as a means of grappling with bias in algorithmic design. Rather than seek to mitigate biases perpetuated by datasets and algorithmic systems, archival theory offers a reframing of bias itself. Drawing on a range of archival theory from the fields of history, literary and cultural studies, Black studies, and feminist STS, we propose absence—as power, presence, and productive—as a concept that might more securely anchor investigations into the causes of algorithmic bias, and that can prompt more capacious, creative, and joyful future work. This essay, in turn, can intervene into the technical as well as the social, historical, and political structures that serve as sources of bias.

What does it mean to design for a miracle—an ineffable phenomenon that might just exist in the world, but might also transcend it? Focusing on an esoteric strand of Jewish mystical thought known as Kabbalah, we draw from speculative interview activities with 11 Jewish creative interlocutors to describe a process of designing a “miracle machine.” Interweaving foundational Kabbalah literature with design inquiry, we find that lived experiences of miracles span life-saving events, effortful acts of love, and ineffable forms of knowledge. We also learn that people envision miracle machines as natural, cosmic, and sensory systems with transcendent capacities. These insights rework a normative focus on the human mind (cognition) and body (embodiment) by embracing the all-too-often overlooked soul as a design resource. We end with a reflection on what soulful speculation entails and the purview that it expands, reorienting our understanding of what machines are altogether.

Social virtual reality (VR) avatars hold promise for allowing people to represent themselves as they want to be seen. But most social VR environments constrain avatar options in ways that limit the accurate presentation of age and promote the assumption of youth. Through individual interviews with ten women in midlife, we explore experiences representing age and other aspects of identity in social VR. Participants expressed a desire to show age and gender with increased nuance: they sought more gradations of color, texture, and body types, and disliked the hypersexualization that resulted from integrated clothing and body parts. As they customized their avatars, participants struggled to depict both physical and personal characteristics, taking into account how others might evaluate their self-perception. These findings highlight opportunities for nuanced representations of physical attributes as well as options for representing the self at other levels: psychological, social, and aesthetic.

As a research tradition, participatory design (PD) tends to focus on power dynamics where researchers hold greater power than participants. This paper uses design fiction to consider what this tendency overlooks by examining settings where participants may exist in multiple power relationships simultaneously implicated by the research, specifically focusing on the contexts of misinformation, disinformation, and online hate (M/D/OH). Drawing from existing literature in M/D/OH, we present a series of imaginary method abstracts that prompt questions for researchers to reflect on as they adapt PD techniques for new, different contexts. We highlight three value tensions—authenticity, reciprocity, and impact—integral to sustaining a concern for responsibility in PD scholarship. We end with reflections and potential considerations for responsibly applying PD and design fiction methods in M/D/OH settings.

Despite the central role that stories play in social movement-building, they are difficult to sustainably document for many reasons. To explore this challenge, this paper describes the design of a community-based conversational storytelling agent (CSA) to document digital stories of housing insecurity. Building on insights from an ongoing grassroots project, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, we share how a study initially focused on CSA-support opened an investigation of the role that artificial intelligence may play in housing justice movements. Drawing from 17 interviews with narrators of housing insecurity experiences and collectors of such stories, we find that collectors perceive opportunities to expand means of documentation with multimedia and multi-language support. Meanwhile, some narrators perceive potential for a CSA to offer therapeutic storytelling experiences and document otherwise unrecorded stories. Yet, CSA encounters also surface perils of machine bias, as well as reduced possibilities of human connections and relations.

Given decades of Human computer interaction (HCI) research focused on scientific empiricism, it can be hard for the field to acknowledge that data analysis is both an emotional and speculative process. But what does it mean for this process of data analysis to embrace its situated and speculative nature? In this paper, we explore this possibility by building on decades of HCI mixed methods that root data analysis in design. Drawing on an autoethnographic design inquiry, we examine how data analysis can work as an implicating process, one that is not only critically grounded in a designer’s own situation but also offers modes of imagining the world otherwise. In this analysis, we find that autobiographical design can help HCI scholars to respond to current critiques of speculative design by grounding and rendering more personal certain kinds of speculation, opening a space for diverse voices to emerge.

The digital codification and measurement of food preparation has made strong contributions to HCI food research, whether through ingredient manipulation, workflow management, or recipe interaction. But prior work has shown that technical developments that emphasize precise gourmet practices tend to overlook the importance of cultural knowledge. Drawing on an integrative autobiographical design approach, we describe an open-source hardware toolkit that we developed to examine the process of integrating precision techniques with ritual cooking practices across three recipes: flour skin, rice wine, and doufu. Our work points to the importance of understanding precision as a cultural process with roots in personal and familial experience. We end with a reflection on the particular knowledge-forms that come from cultivating cultural relationships to fabrication processes and their implications for reading digital fabrication processes as meaningfully relational.

Why is the solution the end point to a problem? While many in HCI and design have examined the impulse to solve problems–the solutionist or techno-solutionist mindset–we examine the logic that binds the solution and the problem together as a pair. Focusing on the timely and consequential problem of systemic racial injustice, we think through the paradoxical possibility that the pairing of the problem and solution (so often treated as the default in design and HCI) perpetuates the very conditions we seek to improve. With Calvin Warren’s profound Afro-pessimism, we recognize how the tools used to solve structural inequities around Black life are constructed with inequities themselves. The problem-solution, therefore, is a dead end. We use this paradox as an invitation to rethink ongoing efforts to seek equity and justice more broadly, setting out a fragile but hopeful path for HCI and design.

Over the past few years, AI bias has become a central concern within design and computing fields. But as the concept of bias has grown in visibility, its meaning and form have become harder to grasp. To help designers realize bias, we take inspiration from textile bias (the skew of woven material) and examine the topic across its myriad forms: visual, textual, and tactile. By introducing a slanted experience of material and therefore of reality, we explore the translation of fraught machine learning algorithms into personal and probing artifacts. In this pictorial, we present nine pieces that materialize complex relationships with machine learning; ground these relationships in the present and the personal; and point to generative ways of engaging with biased systems around us.

Mobile banking applications have become a primary mode of sharing and managing financial resources. However, prior work has questioned its role in serving Black communities amid legacies of structural racial inequity. To investigate this critical topic, we conducted a 30-day diary study with 21 participants and an interview study with 15 participants, all Black American users of the mobile payment platform Cash App. We observed that addressing hurdles to financial inclusion requires the navigation of institutional distrust, banking barriers, and financial literacy disparities. Our findings suggest that Black Americans persist and navigate contemporary financial systems through legacies of social and cultural capacities. We offer grounded-truth considerations for the continued design of fin-tech that could have equitable impact among historically marginalized communities. Reflecting on the tenor of financial services to lack empathy, we urge designers and scholars of financial technology to reflect on their power to promote racial justice and financial inclusion.

Over the past decade, the growth of voice assistants has presented new challenges within domestic life. Prior research has shown that such technologies affect users unevenly or fail to account for some relationships and domesticities entirely. Our work investigates the under-examined topic of queerness at home. Drawing on the experience of queer breakup, we describe a design inquiry and a first-person research approach exploring two concurrent relationships in separate households both using Alexa. We explore issues of temporality, glitch, and shared accountability. We also ask critical questions with audio experiments, including: How do voice assistants differentiate between queer voices? How should we converse with voice assistants about queerness? And are voice assistants “queer enough”? We contribute a discussion of difference, inclusion, and queer cultures of adversarial use to highlight the limitations of both everyday and professional language for describing and analyzing the particulars of queerness and interaction design.

Explainability has become a dominant aspect of developing more accountable AI systems. But for AI to be more accountable, we as designers must also reflect on our own positioning—including aspects of ourselves that are difficult or impossible to fully explain, yet still influence our design processes. Just as designers develop explainable AI, we explore how AI can be used to develop the unexplainable designer through documenting our creation and use of a machine learning-generated tarot deck. Alongside design researchers, we consider the promise of such machine learning-generated artifacts for self-reflection on our creative and collaborative roles—and our responsibilities—when designing AI systems, and we discuss how the artifact sparked acts of inspiriting, a process of bringing the ineffable (back) into our engagements with machine learning systems.

The rise of consumer augmented reality (AR) technology has opened up new possibilities for interventions intended to disrupt and subvert cultural conventions. From defacing corporate logos to erecting geofenced digital monuments, more and more people are creating AR experiences for social causes. We sought to understand this new form of activism, including why people use AR for these purposes, opportunities and challenges in using it, and how well it can support activist goals. We conducted semi-structured interviews with twenty people involved in projects that used AR for a social cause across six different countries. We found that AR can overcome physical world limitations of activism to convey immersive, multilayered narratives that aim to reveal invisible histories and perspectives. At the same time, people experienced challenges in creating, maintaining, and distributing their AR experiences to audiences. We discuss open questions and opportunities for creating AR tools and experiences for social change.

“Are they all mostly Dave? I’ll just call everybody Dave” (Dona Bailey voice in cut scene no. 1, Remixed Pac-man, AtariWomen.org)Public narratives of computing often render its gender problems inev...

This pictorial examines the relationship between inquiry and activism within academic settings through the design of protest artifacts. Inspired by lineages of feminist print production, we illustrate our own process of creating simple acts of resistance through electronic posters and buttons. Naming these interventions "lightweight design interactions," we hold on to the ways design practice might work as modest, partial, and incremental shifts in the circumstances through which design futures unfold. Lightweight design interactions encourage us as design researchers to look beyond the bold creation of alternatives (new design artifacts) to the subtle nurturing of the circumstances that make alternatives possible.

This pictorial uses imagery of human-robot collaboration, or cobots, as a site to examine the potential of queer use within design research. Through close documentation of our process, we reflect on acts of teaching a commercially available robot to knit with us-a messy and seemingly unproductive process. However, this uselessness of the chosen task allows us to re-consider the idealization of robotic collaboration. We question the optimization of a largely human labor force and the associated drive to increase efficiency within a range of sectors, from the service industry to industrial production. Building on non-use literatures examining technological limits, and drawing on performative explorations and critique, we show how knitting enlarges our capacity to visualize what might be a suitable use case for cobots.

Current approaches to AI and Assistive Technology (AT) often foreground task completion over other encounters such as expressions of care. Our paper challenges and complements such task-completion approaches by attending to the care work of access-the continual affective and emotional adjustments that people make by noticing and attending to one another. We explore how this work impacts encounters among people with and without vision impairments who complete tasks together. We find that bound up in attempts to get things done are concerns for one another and how well people are doing together. Reading this work through emerging disability studies and feminist STS scholarship, we account for two important forms of work that give rise to access: (1) mundane attunements and (2) non-innocent authorizations. Together these processes work as sensitizing concepts to help HCI scholars account for the ways that intelligent ATs both produce access while sometimes subverting people with disabilities.

This paper aims to elevate stories of design by people with disabilities. In particular, we draw from counter-storytelling practices to build a corpus of stories that prioritize disabled people as contributors to professional design practice. Across a series of workshops with disabled activists, designers, and developers, we developed the concept of biographical prototypes: under-recognized first-person accounts of design materialized through prototyping practices. We describe how the creation of such prototypes helps position disabled people as central contributors to the design profession. The artifacts engendered an expanded sense of coalition among workshop participants while prompting reflection on tensions between recognition and obligation. We end by reflecting on how the prototypes-and the practices that produced them-complement a growing number of design activities around disability that reveal complexities around structural forms of discrimination and the generative role that personal accounts may play in their revision.

This pictorial engages with the concept of 'diversity' as it has been taken up in the current technology industry by companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Drawing on methods of design fiction, we use a visual parody of a fictional social media corporation to explore possible consequences of diversity efforts-both within industrial workplace settings and the platforms they produce. By outwardly foregrounding diversity through explicitly absurd presentations, our investigation uses humor and farce to draw attention to how such efforts further entrench the very forms of institutional racism, ableism, and sexism they are meant to disrupt; for example, by creating additional work for the people they are designed to include. We offer these visual explorations not to promote or discourage diversity efforts, but to help design researchers imagine what such efforts become when labor and unintended consequences go unaccounted.

This paper describes a series of collaborative studio explorations in examining waste. We assembled a design team to explore how designers might conceive, handle, and rework the material left behind as waste within an on-campus makerspace and adjacent design labs. We turned discarded 3D printing filament into a reparative glue for broken prints and dissolved cardboard boxes into a medium for pollinator habitats. We describe how attending to waste involves understanding the relationships that define it, like how a material comes to be categorized as biodegradable but is impossible to break down in practice. Bringing this insight to the design context, we introduce the tactic of ecological inversions, experiments in reversing material flows to expose the wider infrastructure on which they depend. We discuss how ecological inversions could invite design researchers to notice the infrastructural relationships that exceed the physical limitations of the makerspace, revealing challenges around complicity and legibility.

This paper examines the promise of empathy, the name commonly given to the initial phase of the human-centered design process in which designers seek to understand their intended users in order to inform technology development. By analyzing popular empathy activities aimed at understanding people with disabilities, we examine the ways empathy works to both powerfully and problematically align designers with the values of people who may use their products. Drawing on disability studies and feminist theorizing, we describe how acts of empathy building may further distance people with disabilities from the processes designers intend to draw them into. We end by reimagining empathy as guided by the lived experiences of people with disabilities who are traditionally positioned as those to be empathized.

Notions of what counts as a contribution to HCI continue to be contested as our field expands to accommodate perspectives from the arts and humanities. This paper aims to advance the position of the arts and further contribute to these debates by actively exploring what a "non-contribution" would look like in HCI. We do this by taking inspiration from Fluxus, a collective of artists in the 1950's and 1960's who actively challenged and reworked practices of fine arts institutions by producing radically accessible, ephemeral, and modest works of "art-amusement." We use Fluxus to develop three analogous forms of "HCI-amusements," each of which shed light on dominant practices and values within HCI by resisting to fit into its logics.

This paper examines the entangled development of governance strategies and networked technologies in the pervasive but under-examined domain of public restrooms. Drawing on a mix of archival materials, participant observation, and interviews within and beyond the city of Seattle, Washington, we look at the motivations of public restroom facilities managers as they introduce (or consider introducing) networked technology in the spaces they administer. Over the course of the research, we found internet of things technologies-or, connected devices imbued with computational capacity-became increasingly tied up with cost-reducing efficiencies and exploitative regulatory techniques. Drawing from this case study, we develop the concept of managerial visions: ways of seeing that structure labor, enforce compliance, and define access to resources. We argue that these ways of seeing prove increasingly critical to HCI research as it attends to computer-mediated collaboration beyond white-collar settings.

This paper draws on a collaborative project called the Africatown Activation to examine the role design practices play in contributing to (or conspiring against) the flourishing of the Black community in Seattle, Washington. Specifically, we describe the efforts of a community group called Africatown to design and build an installation that counters decades of disinvestment and ongoing displacement in the historically Black Central Area neighborhood. Our analysis suggests that despite efforts to include community, conventional design practices may perpetuate forms of institutional racism: enabling activities of community engagement that may further legitimate racialized forms of displacement. We discuss how focusing on amplifying the legacies of imagination already at work may help us move beyond a simple reading of design as the solution to systemic forms of oppression.

The miniaturization of electronic technologies, as well as advances in organic and material science, have contributed to the development of composite, smart, and computational materials that create promising narratives for the future of ubiquitous computing. The goal of this one-day studio is to develop tools to acquire a deeper conceptual and critical understanding of materiality in HCI. The studio will draw on strategies from a broad range of sources including critical making, speculative design, experiential prototyping, and indigenous ontologies, in order to map out key questions and concerns. The studio will give the participants the opportunity to discuss the concept of Critical Materiality as a framework for developing tangible, embedded, and embodied interfaces, by brainstorming narratives around the past lives, current uses, and the future imaginaries of materials. Participants will co-develop a shared vocabulary and theoretical framework for Critical Materiality as a strategy to be deployed in conceiving and implementing HCI artifacts and experiences. The studio will culminate in the design and production of a deck of cards that propose keywords, questions, concerns, and opportunities for Hybrid Materials within this Critical Materiality framework. The deck of cards will be made available during the conference and distributed online.

We present an evaluation of three prototype tangible user interfaces (TUIs) for mealtimes for preschoolers. Building on past work identifying value tensions between adults' and children's perspectives at meals, we evaluated TUIs to address different tensions in this context (for example, the tension between children's interest in experimenting with food versus adults' interest in cleanliness). Thirteen pre-school children and their parents tried out the prototypes, as did an additional seven preschool teachers. Adults and children alike were excited by the prototypes; parents were surprised by children's increased food intake, and children used the prototypes to engage in artistic expression with food traces. However, children's increased consumption was extrinsically motivated by the prototypes rather than intrinsically motivated by hunger. We conclude that TUIs have the potential to enhance shared meals between children and adults but also have the potential to distract or persuade children in inappropriate ways. We present design guidance differentiating these two outcomes, such as incorporating the TUI into pre-existing mealtime objects and routines.

Three-dimensional printing is widely celebrated as enabling open design and manufacturing practice. With easy-to-use techniques such as automated modeling, fabrication machines ostensibly help designers turn ideas into fully fledged objects. Prior HCI literature focuses on improving printing through optimization and by developing printer and material capabilities. This paper expands such considerations by asking, how do 3D printing practitioners understand and create “printability?” And how might HCI better support the work that holds together printing workflows and changing ecosystems of materials and techniques? We conducted studies in two sites of open design: a technology firm in Silicon Valley, California and a makerspace in Stockholm, Sweden. Deploying workshops and interviews, we examine how practitioners negotiate the print experience, revealing a contingent process held together by trial and error exploration and careful interventions. These insights point to the value of tools and processes to support articulation work, what Strauss and colleagues have called the acts of fitting together people, tasks, and their ordering to accomplish an overarching project. We show that despite the sought-after efficiencies of such manufacturing, 3D printing entails articulation work, particularly acts of alignment, exposing messy modes of production carried out by a varied cast of practitioners, machines, and materials.

This paper describes the reparative Internet of Things (Riot), a project investigating the role of IoT devices in maintaining public resource accessibility. Drawing on a mix of interviews, technology development, and ethnographic engagements, we explore the distribution and stratification of menstrual hygiene resources in Seattle, WA. We redesigned menstrual product dispensers placed in public settings by outfitting them with networked sensor inserts to make them easier to stock by custodial staff and easier to access by members of the public. We use this case to show how such newly connected devices structure experiences of hygiene access and help expose important consequences of integrating those devices into the socioeconomic logics and infrastructure of public life. Our interventions further examine the role of public IoT devices once they pass the proof-of-concept stage, revealing their capacity to cultivate and maintain collective responsibility.

Most technology designed for young children at mealtime centers around conceptions of how the child should eat or behave at the table. Expanding this view to include children's perspectives, we present a two-part study to explore the design of technology for mealtimes in preschools. We first worked to identify existing value tensions through interviews and observations, then designed three prototypes to address different value tensions (e.g., the tension between children's interest in experimenting with food versus the teachers' interest in cleanliness). Although there are specific ways adults' and children's values are in conflict, our work suggests the potential for novel designs to provide creative and meaningful experiences such as playful productivity that support the needs of both parties.

This paper describes an eighteen-month ethnography of timber framing at a tiny house construction program in Port Townsend, Washington. This case exposes the intricate, ongoing processes that define a project where people learn to imagine, create, and ultimately maintain living materials. This case sheds light on the nature and scope of interaction design with living materials, an area of growing significance to HCI scholarship on new materials, sustainable design, and digital fabrication. Drawing from this project, we distill five lessons for design with living, finite materials. We end by discussing three emerging areas for HCI: designing for material recuperation, collaborating with more-than-human actors, and approaching material properties as prototyping sites.

This paper describes the development of Parody in Place, a design parody that depicts Seattle neighborhoods with typographic arrangements derived from data generated by technology platforms such as Yelp and Zillow. The project invites inquiry into what technology corporations make matter and where, in ways that challenge the neutrality of neighborhood-based data. We designed the subject of our parody, a mock company called Dork Posters, to explore how the modes of parody by which the system operates expose socio-spatial exclusions both contested and propagated by digital platforms. Our interventions reveal shifts in response toward mapping techniques, from ambivalence to curiosity. We used Dork Posters to question reductionist techniques of data aggregation and ad hoc theories of data provenance. Our engagements also prompted reflection on the politics of measurement: how data sources shape result- ing insights and valuations. We end by discussing possibilities for expanding the design research program within human-computer interaction through parody.

This paper describes the Making Core Memory project, a design inquiry into the invisible work that went into assem-bling core memory, an early form of computer information storage initially woven by hand. Drawing on feminist tradi-tions of situated knowing, we designed an electronic quilt and a series of participatory workshops that materialize the work of the core memory weavers. With this case we not only broaden dominant stories of design, but we also reflect on the entanglement of predominantly male, high status labor with the ostensibly low-status work of women's hands. By integrating design and archival research as a means of cultural analysis, we further expand conversations on design research methods within human-computer inter-action (HCI), using design to reveal legacies of practice elided by contemporary technology cultures. In doing so, this paper highlights for HCI scholars that worlds of hand-work and computing, or weaving and space travel, are not as separate as we might imagine them to be.

This paper offers a critical reflection on the term "hybrid"? a term describing the merging of distinct and often contradictory entities. We trace how the term has been taken up in HCI's programs of design research to explore resolutions between two disparate entities, typically human and machine or the digital and analog. Drawing from programs of feminist technoscience, we suggest an alternative metaphor for designing coproductions. This approach emphasizes the contradictory and collective work of smoothly integrating social categories. We show how designing coproductions begins by locating places where categories break down-where humans are like machines or where the digital can be experienced physically-and uses design to draw out and reflect upon the ever-changing relationship with digital and non-digital domains.

This commentary discusses the article “The Meaning of Interactivity—Some Proposals for Definitions and Measures” by Lars-Erik Janlert and Erik Stolterman (2017).Over the past few years, hyperbolic ...

This pictorial illustrates how objects can illuminate people's experience of public space, an approach we call itinerant probes. Itinerant probes are not individualized, mediated artifacts, but instead dynamic events that en- liven people's personal and collective memories. Building on the probes literature and recent ecological perspectives, we describe three probes related to lighting that we investigated at three public sites. Our explorations with these probes highlight the intimate histories associated with public spaces.

This paper is about the aspects of ability, selfhood, and normalcy embodied in people's relationships with prostheses. Drawing on interviews with 14 individuals with upper-limb loss and diverse experiences with prostheses, we find people not only choose to use and not use prosthesis throughout their lives but also form close and complex relationships with them. The design of "assistive" technology often focuses on enhancing function; however, we found that prostheses played important roles in people's development of identity and sense of normalcy. Even when a prosthesis failed functionally, such as was the case with 3D-printed prostheses created by an on-line open-source maker community (e-NABLE), we found people still praised the design and initiative because of the positive impacts on popular culture, identity, and community building. This work surfaces crucial questions about the role of design interventions in identity production, the promise of maker communities for accelerating innovation, and a broader definition of "assistive" technology.

This paper examines the work to bring HCI research back to the people and sites under study. We draw on our ongoing collaboration with members of feminist hackerspaces in Northern California where we conducted fieldwork over eighteen months in 2014 and 2015. Together we created and distributed a zine -- a self-published magazine produced with a photocopier -- that knit together content of a published paper with local histories of feminist print production. By tracing the efforts involved in this collaboration and its effects on our research project, our research community, and ourselves, we extend HCI's efforts to foster continued dialogue with our sites of study. We end by outlining strategies for bolstering this mission both within and beyond HCI.

This paper examines the question of "values in repair" -- the distinct forms of meaning and care that may be built into human-technology interactions through individual and collective acts of repair. Our work draws on research in HCI and the social sciences and findings from ethnographic studies in four sites -- two amateur "fixers" collectives' in Brooklyn and Seattle, USA and two mobile phone repair communities in Uganda and Bangladesh -- to advance two arguments. First, studies of repair account for new sites and processes of value that differ from those appearing at HCI's better-studied moments of design and use. Second, repair may embed modes of human interaction with technology and with each other in ways that surface values as contingent and ongoing accomplishments, suggesting ongoing processes of valuation that can never be fully fixed or commoditized. These insights help HCI account for human relationships to technology built into the world through repair.

This paper examines the collaborative process of developing Arc, a computer numerical controlled (CNC) engraving tool for ceramics that offers a new window onto traditional forms of craft. In reflecting on this case and scholarship from the social sciences, we make two contributions. First, we show that fabrication tools may integrate multiple and distinct roles (as copiers, translators and connectors) in their production of form, selectively limiting the agency of the maker and machine. Second, we situate small-scale manufacturing in a wider historical context of "mimetic machinery": machines for mechanical reproduction that draw their symbolic power from a material connection with the phenomena represented (in this case, sound and gesture). We end by sharing lessons learned for fabrication research based on this study.

This paper examines design workshops as research practice: how workshops bind time and participation in ways that privilege certain types of action and foreclose others. In five workshops we facilitated, we asked members to design a new item from two existing items in need of repair and studied their acts of appropriation and reuse. Although we hoped to explore possibilities for collaborative practice, we more clearly saw what happens when garments with rich histories meet the blunt instrument of workshop interventions. Members aligned anticipated outcomes in opposition to our guidelines and abandoned projects due to personal obligations. In reflecting on these encounters we further show how workshops shape what it means to study collaborative settings. This work contributes a reflective study of workshops that gathers and extends CSCW methods for interventionist inquiry.

This paper describes a study of algorithmic living with Trace, a mobile mapping application that generates walking routes based on digital sketches people create and annotate without a map. In addition to creating walking paths, Trace enables people to send the paths to others. We designed Trace to explore the possibility of emphasizing guided wandering over precise, destination-oriented navigation. Studies of sixteen people's use of Trace over roughly one week reveal how walkers find Trace both delightful and disorienting, highlighting moments of surprise, frustration, and identification with GIS routing algorithms. We conclude by discussing how design interventions offers possibilities for understanding the work of mapping and how it might be done differently in HCI.

While some in the CSCW community have researched the values in technology design and engineering practices, the underlying ideologies that reinforce and protect those values remain under-explored. This paper seeks to address this gap by identifying a common ideological framework that appears across four engineering endeavors: the OLPC Project, the National Day of Civic Hacking, the Fixit Clinic, and the Stanford d.school. We found that all four of these communities utilized elements of religious practice to affirm their membership and shared vision. We describe the forms of worship we saw in these engineering worlds, their practices of evangelism, and the ways in which they addressed doubt. We also demonstrate the role mythologies play as ideologically charged narratives. Our discussion of these parallels illuminates the extent and consequences of quasi-religious practices in engineering worlds and illustrates the utility of using religion as a "lens" for understanding ideological commitments in engineering culture.

This paper examines the motivations, activities, and ideals of people organizing feminist hackerspaces: collaborative workspaces developed to support women's creative and professional pursuits. Drawing on interviews, participant observation and archival data collected across the Pacific Northwest over nine months, we show how members of these spaces use small-scale collaborative design and acts of making to work out their place in society in ways that contest widely accepted understandings of hacking, technology, and collaboration. In designing how the space should look, feel, and run, members reframe activities seldom associated with technical work (e.g., weaving, identity workshops) as forms of hacking. In so doing, they shift concerns for women in technology from questions of access (who is included) to questions of recognition (who is visible) while grappling with productive ambiguities in between. We describe lessons these tension present for examining women's relations with technology in CSCW.

Today thousands of artists, designers, and craftspeople turn to digital fabrication tools to invent and manufacture new forms. They use vector-graphics software to sketch models, laser-cutters to customize parts, and 3D printers to generate prototypes. However, how our experiences of expressivity, skill and value shift with these developments remains under-explored. This paper describes our early engagements with emerging fabrication technologies in the domain of ceramics, one of our oldest and most enduring artistic mediums. In particular, we detail a collaboration with Helen Martino that resulted in the Sound Bowl, a vessel designed to record an audio message through surface undulations, much like a vinyl record. As an example of design as inquiry, we developed the bowl to explore the integration of digital fabrication in ceramics production. In the process, we found new and intriguing tensions in the entanglement of code and clay: contrasting temporal frames, blurred traces of breakage, and coinciding human senses. We discuss implications of these observations on the nature and organization of embodied interaction.

This paper explores issues that come up in practices of breakage and repair through two projects: the 'XO' laptops of One Laptop Per Child in Paraguay and public sites of facilitated repair in California, USA. Collectively drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, 156 interviews, and archival research, we find that breakdown and repair are not processes that designers can effectively script ahead of time; instead, they emerge in everyday practice. These practices are shaped by material, infrastructural, gendered, political, and socioeconomic factors -- such as manufacturing limitations, access to repair parts and expertise, and environmental convictions -- which designers often did not, and may not have been able to, anticipate. We call the material realities and practices of repair negotiated endurance, which is illustrated by four themes from our findings: the negotiated identification of breakdown, collaborative definitions of worth, the fraught nature of collaborative expertise, and the gendered stakes of repair.

This paper draws on new materialist perspectives to introduce the analytic category of "material traces" to the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). Material traces reveal the dynamic and evocative nature of form by concretizing a unique location in time and space. Traces of skill, use, and time, for example, are valued for their emotional resonance in addition to the pragmatic goals in which they are embedded. Using this category, we develop a framework for design pedagogy that offers the lenses of attributes, entanglements, and trajectories as tools for gaining critical purchase on the objects produced. Mobilizing this framework within a classroom, design students envision poignant relationships to the non-human, engaged physics learning, and opportunities for reflection around breakage and repair. These design examples reveal how the category of material traces comes alive in practice and pedagogy. We end by discussing how this study of traces points to new opportunities for critical reflection in HCI.

This paper aims to enrich the design research community's notions of quality by turning to the techniques and values of master craftspeople. We describe and analyze interviews conducted with elite craft practitioners in the US and Taiwan to consider how they perceive and produce quality. The crafters articulate a consensus view of interaction with integrity. American participants tend to frame their understanding of quality in terms of self-expression through a creative interaction with materials, while participants from Taiwan emphasize the role of communities in establishing---and benefitting from---craft quality. As HCI continues to turn to design approaches on account of their strengths producing works of socio-cultural relevance and value, our study sheds light on the qualities of interacting with integrity, the pleasures of self-expression through creative interaction with materials, and the practical benefits of positioning creative work in relation to the material resources, aesthetic tastes, and socio-economic needs of a public.

Drawing on a three-month bookbinding apprenticeship, this paper examines how people's coordination work is tightly bound up in material practices, the union of material arrangements and social relations. Through the construction of a book, I reveal how sensitivities to delicacy, flexibility and delay emerge through detailed engagements with the book, the binders and the workshop environment. From small adjustments of the hand, to the coordination and exchange of materials and tools, the accomplishment of each task rests on how digital and age-old resources are woven into everyday collaborative practice. This approach extends how computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) frames and mobilizes the material to recognize materials as compositional elements, surfaces and flows. It also contributes to conversations on digital materiality by emphasizing the temporality of material practice. Thus, I use the bookbinding workshop as a resource for understanding the ways materials, techniques, and relationships are continually rebound in a digital age.

From home improvement to scrapbooking, leisure activities performed "by hand" increasingly involve digital tools. In turn, software and devices to support handwork are proliferating. We use data from an observational field study of gardening and knitting to examine relationships to information technology. Handwork experiences of patience, effort, sensation, and cleverness can shift with the introduction of new tools. Our participants' attachment to these experiences made them sensitive to the potential consequences of introducing new tools. Digital tools were sometimes rejected and other times woven into handwork activities. In response, we propose three metaphors for handwork practice - extending, interjecting, and segmenting - as a resource for moving beyond the binary opposition of digital and physical practices.

As technologies age, they experience wear and degradation, sometimes resulting in loss of functionality. In response, parts are replaced and software is updated. Yet restoration - the process of returning something to a previous condition, often regardless of its instrumental value -"is a relatively rare practice with computational technologies. The aim of this paper is to enrich HCI design practices by considering the material qualities of restoration. We consider what makes a technology worth restoring and what constitutes the process of restoration by examining data collected from a three-month apprenticeship-based qualitative study of bookbinding. Building on relevant literatures, we offer antiquarian books -"long-established information technologies - as a lens onto the ways values are enacted through material engagements. We conclude with a discussion of restoration's role in HCI.

As technologies, finely bound books are compact, durable forms that get passed from one generation to the next. As handcrafted objects, they exemplify manual control and dexterity, patience and care, and continuity with the past. Paper-based electronic books, by contrast, are relatively new objects that enable novel interactions with material. Here we explore connections between centuries-old and contemporary building techniques by adding electronics to traditional binding. What kinds of details would be interesting to learn about the past? How could we use conductive fibers to talk to the future? What could gilded edges tell us about our interactions with books? In this studio, participants will build basic bookbinding and e-textiles skills to enable new material explorations.

We present data collected from a field study of 12 needle-crafters introduced to Spyn-mobile phone software that associates digital records (audio/visual media, text, and geographic data) with locations on fabric. We observed leisure needle-crafters use Spyn to create one or more handmade garments over two to four weeks and then give those garments to friends, partners, and family members. Using Spyn, creators left behind digital and physical traces that heightened recipients' appreciation for the gift and enabled a diverse set of meanings to emerge. Digital engagements with Spyn became a means for unraveling the value of the gift: recipients used digital information associated with the physical objects to interpret the story behind the objects and their creators. We discuss the nature of this relationship between digital and physical material and its implications for craft.

Through reuse, reinvention and modification of materials, people easily prototype tangible interactive systems and redesign their everyday environments. Off-the shelf devices, such as the Nintendo Wii remote, provide one entrance into this world of hackable parts and Do-it-Yourself (DIY) activity. The Wii remote and extension controllers are a family of easily available devices whose hackability is informally supported by online DIY communities. Easy to open and containing joysticks, accelerometers, gyroscopes, Bluetooth and IR cameras, they are excellent tools for the affordable and rapid prototyping of tangible interactive systems. In this studio we hope to build some basic skills to equip participants with the confidence and knowledge to use these devices in their future prototyping and design efforts.

Crafters today blend age-old techniques such as weaving and pottery with new information and communication technologies such as podcasts, online instructions, and blogs. This intersection of tradition and modernity provides an interesting site for understanding the adoption of new technology. We present a qualitative study of seven knitters introduced to Spyn - a system that enables the association of digitally recorded messages with physical locations on knit fabric. We gave knitters Spyn in order to elicit their reflections on their craft practices and learn from their interactions with material, people, and technology. While creating artifacts for friends and loved ones, knitters expanded the creative and communicative potential of their craftwork: knitters envisioned travel journals in knitted potholders and sung lullabies in knitted hats. We describe how these unusual craft activities provide a useful lens onto contemporary technological appropriation.

We present a qualitative study based on interviews with nine IKEA Hackers - people who go online to share the process of repurposing IKEA products to create personalized objects. Whether they were making a self-conscious artistic statement or simply modifying a towel rack to fit in a small bathroom, IKEA hackers illuminate an emergent practice that provides insights into contemporary changes in creativity. We discuss the motivations for IKEA hacking and explore the impact of information technology on do-it-yourself culture, design, and HCI.

Ubicomp research has spurred the exploration of more "natural" or "invisible" interfaces that can be seamlessly embedded into their environment. In this paper, we discuss the role such technology can play in augmenting existing creative practice to enhance the sharing of the handcraft process. We present the design and implementation of Spyn, a system for knitters to record, playback, and share information involved in the creation of their hand-knit artifacts. Guided by a formative study of knitting practices, we designed Spyn to capture information while a person knits and allow for the subsequent retrieval of the information using the knit artifact. Spyn uses computer vision techniques in combination with patterns of infrared ink printed on yarn to correlate locations in knit fabric with messages recorded during the knitting process. Rather than seeking to improve the speed or accuracy of the knitter, we designed Spyn to enrich the knitter's craft while preserving the look and feel of the knit artifact.