Creative work with generative image models is typically mediated through prompts, often requiring designers to translate visual and material intentions into words. Such translation can have a constraining effect on creative tasks in visual domains such as fashion and textile design. To understand how designers make sense of the material of AI based on its interpretable properties, we let users interact with the technology by manipulating the neurons that lie in its hidden layers. In two material-driven design workshops, we introduced fashion and textile practitioners to the technical material properties of a model trained to generate fashion imagery. We found that the interaction leads to new forms of material experiences by offering a gateway into AI’s otherwise implicit functioning and discuss the how thinking hidden layers might support intuitive rather than interpretative control when designing with AI, leading to more active material experiences.

Today's AI models learn rich internal representations, such as the visual features inside diffusion models that produce generated images, and offer a new kind of material for co-creation. However, interfaces for creating with generative AI typically operate on the level of inputs and outputs, obscuring the material formation that unfolds in between. To address this gap, this pictorial documents a material-driven journey of designing an interface for interacting with the hidden layers of diffusion models.

This pictorial describes the process of developing an interaction technique for directly engaging with the hidden layers of a generative AI model for image synthesis. First, we give some background to generative AI in HCI, arguing that current interaction techniques prevent us from directly interacting with the material of AI, foreclosing its use in design. Drawing on inspiration from the Computer Science field of feature visualization, we investigate the materiality of our prototype, a GAN model trained to generate fashion imagery, and show how Hidden Layer Interaction offers an alternative to standard prompting. In doing so, we illustrate how this change in approach leads to new forms of interaction with the internal semantics of generative AI, and demonstrate how one might use Hidden Layer Interaction to engage with AI as a material in design.

Sleep technologies promise optimised sleep by tracking sleep cycles or by affecting sleep environment. This paper expands sleep technology to address more complex notions of sleep, proposing dream technology as a path for reflective practices that focus on nightly dreams rather than hours slept. Because dreams are bizarre and hard to grasp, we turn to speculative design practices in an RtD framework to investigate the nature of dreaming. This process produced the ‘dream sticker machine’, a design proposal that visualises a user's dreams with an AI image generator. This tangible dream trace becomes sharable in both public and personal spaces. This proposal formed the basis of a probe to how people might imagine their dreams taking form in the real world, and led to ideas for how the materials of dreams might be taken up as part of design research practice.

Envisioning alternative futures and desirable worlds is a core element of design that must be cultivated, especially when a deep transition of practices, values, and power is necessary for vibrant and just future lifeworlds. In this paper, we contribute towards fabulation as an approach for design futuring that foregrounds feminist commitments and more-than-human concerns. Analyzing two fabulation case studies around biodata and bodily fluids, we offer three themes based on our process of developing these fabulations: how they engage materials, how they work to trouble temporalities, and how they cultivate imagination. We argue for the emerging potential of fabulation as an approach for open-ended, joyful design futuring, mobilizing speculative storytelling to foreground absent or neglected relations when imagining alternative lifeworlds.

This project uses research through design to explore how metadata could be used as a design material to create inheritable artefacts that make personal legacy experiential. Metadata is produced as traces of life, and by designing artifacts that capture and represent these traces, interaction design offers the possibility to experience the everyday practices of someone else as they are passed on and inherited. We use interviews with people interested in data practices, memorializing, and who have experienced grief to find themes and insights for designing with metadata as well as for legacy. Based on these, we developed the prototype Anekdota, a handheld metadata detector that lets an inheritor experience bequeathed location metadata. From a series of think-aloud walks, Anekdota was tested with participants to reveal sensitizing concepts for designing for metadata, and imaginative leaps for how this metadata may become a part of future legacy practices.

A growing number of design researchers explore engagement with and through biodata. To help make sense of this growing space, we synthesize three emergent themes: (1) expanding notions of biodata and bodies, (2) attending to a greater diversity of human bodies and experiences with biodata, and (3) biodata collaborations between human and non-human bodies. We illustrate these themes with selected design examples. From this synthesis, we develop three interconnected fabulations reimagining alternative engagements with biodata: Weaving Alongside, Diffracting Selves, and Collective Affect. Our discussion unpacks conceptual work of the fabulations, offering invitations for design research to explore alternative ways of living and knowing together with biodata.

Recent design research has shown an interest in diffraction and agential realism, which promise to offer generative alternatives when designing with data that resist treating data as objective or neutral. We explore engaging diffractively with ‘lived data’ to surface felt and prospective aspects of data as it is entangled in everyday lives of designers. This paper presents five biodata-based case studies demonstrating how design researchers can create knowledge about human bodies and behaviors via strategies that allow them to engage data diffractively. These studies suggest that designers can find insights for designing with data as it is lived by working with it in a slow, open-ended fashion that leaves room for messiness and time for discovering difference. Finally, we discuss the role of ambiguous, open-ended data interpretations to help surface different meanings and entanglements of data in everyday lives.

Contemporary self-tracking devices take forms that reflect particular cultures of self-tracking that emphasize clinical perspectives and numerical precision. In this pictorial, we explore alternative forms to speculate on other possible self-tracking cultures. We present how we involved experts on the relationship between the gut and the brain to inspire a design brief for an alternative gut tracking device. This led to the design of Loupe and Lightbox, which together operate to externalize gut biota for closer examination, aesthetic appreciation, and reflection on the self. The device represents an example of self-tracking as cultivation-building a longer-term relationship with the self as something to be nurtured, tended to, and cared about.

Cohousing IoT uses research through design to both probe alternative modes of living and prototype speculative domestic Internet of Things devices. These prototype technologies are informed by a public design process that works in two ways. First, it imagines alternatives to existing arrangements of things and devices in the home; and second, it produces prototypes that argue for new roles for internet-connected things that both support and sustain the social life of a cohousing community.

This Studio offers researchers and designers an opportunity to investigate and discuss prototypes and in-process projects from a perspective that expands beyond material aspects, to also cover social and cultural ones. Participants will bring a project, device, or platform, which will be discussed as sociomaterials that actively participate across multiple social and cultural contexts. This perspective, as well as the prototypes and projects brought by the participants, forms the core of the Studio, where conversation will emerge over several phases: from the demonstration of the individual projects as things, to the generation of speculative fictions as to the role and use of these artifacts in the world. Finally, we end with a discussion of infrastructuring and appropriation of the artefacts and their social roles. The themes that will be examined in this Studio are agency, emerging behaviors, embeddedness and design strategies from a sociomaterial perspective of artifacts.

Smart cities are one area of interactive systems design where the technologies and services of the Internet of Things (IoT) have the potential to serve public interest. In this paper we present a design research project that explores the use of IoT technologies-specifically environmental sensing-to support urban foraging. We describe the design of a simple proof-of-concept sensing platform to monitor the relative ripeness of fruit in trees, and reflect upon its potential effectiveness for urban foraging. From the project, we draw out themes for designing in the context of smart cities, including questioning the presumed "smartness" of IoT systems, and highlight issues in designing to support diverse community economies.

This paper presents qualitative studies of cohousing, a model where individual homes cluster around common space, share some meals weekly, and make community decisions together via consensus. It analyzes 80 descriptions of cohousing community websites to reveal the values common to cohousing, as well as site visits to three cohousing communities in the USA. These consist of tours, attending multiple common meals, and interviews with residents to gain insight into cohousing practices and experiences. The goal of this work is to understand how cohousing is lived and structured with an eye towards considering this model of living from an HCI perspective. Keeping that in mind, this paper concludes with a discussion of the relevance of cohousing to existing and emerging trends in HCI such as civics, technologies for building community, and how cohousing might unravel the concept of a "smart home."

As human computer interaction design research continues to expand domains, civics is emerging as an important subject through which to explore how computation shapes our public lives. In this paper we present and reflect upon a series of research through design (RtD) projects that investigate speculative civic contexts. From this, we identify and discuss tactics that can be employed in RtD projects: RtD as Representations of Systems Yet-to-Come, RtD as Prototyping Systems and RtD as Use of a System. Then we identify and discuss thematic interpretations of civics that emerged through our designs: Mediated Civics, Computed Civics, and Proxied Civics. This work contributes to discourses of speculative design, research through design, and those of civics in human computer interaction design research.

Social computing-or computing in a social context-has largely concerned itself with understanding social interaction among and between people. This paper asserts that ignoring material components-including computing itself-as social actors is a mistake. Computing has its own agenda and agencies, and including it as a member of the social milieu provides a means of producing design objects that attend to how technology use can extend beyond merely amplifying or augmenting human actions. In this paper, we offer examples of projects that utilize the capacity of object-oriented publics to both analyze the conditions and consequences around existing publics and engage with matters of concern inherent to emerging publics. Considering how computing as an actor contributes to the construction of publics provides insight into the design of computational systems that address issues. We end by introducing the idea of the object ecology as a way to coordinate design approaches to computational publics.

The term 'critical design' is on the upswing in HCI. We analyze how discourses around 'critical design' are diverging in Design and HCI. We argue that this divergence undermines HCI's ability to learn from and appropriate the design approaches signaled by this term. Instead, we articulate two ways to broaden and deepen connections between Design and HCI: (1) develop a broader collective understanding of what these design approaches can be, without forcing them to be about 'criticality' or 'critical design,' narrowly construed; and (2) shape a variation of design criticism to better meet Design practices, terms, and ways of knowing.

Building objects that question implicit assumptions of common systems can help to reframe technological artifacts. This work builds on an inexpensive prototyping platform that augments everyday objects in minimal ways as an early move towards engaging with the Internet of Things as a site for contestation in interaction design. These intend to account for a broader understanding of design as generating political objects - design things - that draw from the work of Bruno Latour and Studio Atelier. Finally, it introduces the concept of object ecologies as a way to both analyze existing ecosystems of design objects and generate new, speculative ones.

"Making" has been gaining traction in HCI and related fields both as a community of practice and as a method for creating objects and systems. While making is an important cultural practice, this paper claims that there is a disconnect between the rhetoric of making and "real world" notions of domain relevance and embedded hardware development. In considering how making operates in practice, we offer the metaphor of a sandbox to describe this contradiction. We exemplify the metaphor with a small-scale prototyping platform of our own, and offer visions on how making might progress in the future.

Science studies scholar Bruno Latour suggests that contemporary democracy is shifting from "matters of fact"to "matters of concern": contentious conditions entwined with everyday life. What is the role of human-computer interaction (HCI) design in this shift' In this paper we draw from five design projects to explore how design can express matters of concern by communicating the factors and consequences of issues. In the process, we consider the role of design in contributing to the formation of publics and discuss an emerging orientation to publics in HCI design.

In this paper, we describe EarSketch, an integrated curriculum, software toolset, and social media website, grounded in constructionist principles, that targets introductory high school computing education. We hypothesize that the use of collaborative computational music composition and remixing may avoid some of the engagement and culture-specific issues that other approaches, both in music and other media, have had. We discuss the design of EarSketch, its use in a pilot summer camp, and the evaluation results from that pilot.

While we should celebrate our success at evolving many vital aspects of the human-technology interactive experience, we question the scope of this progress. Step back with us for a moment. What really matters? Everyday life spans a wide range of emotions and experiences - from improving productivity and efficiency to promoting wonderment and daydreaming. But our research and designs do not reflect this important life balance. The research we undertake and the applications we build employ technology primarily for improving tasks and solving problems. Our claim is that our successful future technological tools, the one we really want to cohabitate with, will be those that incorporate the full range of life experiences. In this paper we present wonderment as a design concept, introduce a novel toolkit based on mobile phone technology for promoting non-experts to participate in the creating of new objects of wonderment, and finally describe probe style interventions used to inform the design of a specific object of wonderment based on urban sounds and ringtones called Hullabaloo.

Urban Atmospheres captures a unique, synergistic moment - expanding urban populations, rapid adoption of Bluetooth mobile devices, tiny ad hoc sensor networks, and the widespread influence of wireless technologies across our growing urban landscapes. The United Nations recently reported that 48 percent of the world's population current live in urban areas and that this number is expected to exceed the 50 percent mark world wide by 2007 [1]. In developed nations the number of urban dwellers is even more dramatic - expected to exceed 75%. Current studies project Bluetooth-enabled devices to reach 5.4 billion units by 2005 - five times the number of mobile phones or Internet connections [2]. Mobile phone penetration already exceeds 80% of the population in places like the European Union (EU) and parts of Asia [3]. WiFi hardware is being deployed at the astonishing rate of one every 4 seconds globally [4]. We argue that now is the time to initiate inspirational research into the very essence of these newly emerging technological urban spaces. We desire to move towards an improved understanding of the emotional experience of urban life. This paper describes Urban Probes - a lightweight, provocative, intervention methodology designed to rapidly deconstruct urban situations, reveal new opportunities for technology in urban spaces, and guide future long term research in urban computing. We also describe a completed Urban Probe exploring urban trash.