Flexible work is increasingly pursued as a means of achieving work-life balance, particularly as growing caregiving responsibilities for children and aging family members shape workers’ lives. Yet most HCI research has examined flexibility primarily through productivity and organizational perspectives, with less attention to how it intersects with workers’ personal and family responsibilities. To address this gap, we conducted a qualitative study with 20 workers in Singapore engaging in flexible arrangements to manage paid work and care responsibilities. Using an asset-based lens, we show that flexibility is not a static benefit but a continual practice of rhythm-making. Participants maintained rhythms by drawing on temporal and spatial assets, negotiated them through relational and institutional dynamics, and sustained them through intrapersonal assets such as self-care and positive reframing. Our study reframes blurred boundaries as resources rather than disruptions and offers design implications for technologies that support flexible workers’ everyday rhythm-making practices.

Despite technology's pervasive integration into aged care to address aging populations and labor shortages, its deployment often overlooks the critical role of care workers who shape the experience of care through technologies. This paper presents a four-month ethnographic study at a long-term residential aged care facility in Singapore, involving 37 staff members from frontline workers to senior management. We examine how they adopt, implement, and use three distinct digital technologies at different stages of maturity in the delivery of care. Adopting an infrastructuring lens, our findings, presented through six affective vignettes, reveal the invisible labor involved in ''patchworking'' technologies implemented in a top-down, fragmented manner as well as the significant impacts on workers' liability and professional agency. The discussion unpacks the invisible burden of organizational unpreparedness in technology integration, the resulting negotiation of care work's meaning and power differentials with care workers for decent work.

Service design has gained tractions in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) as an approach to deal with changes of technology design scopes. In the meantime, there are confusions around definitions of service design and its relevance to HCI. Despite the co-existence of interests and confusions, little research has been done for a comprehensive overview of how HCI interprets and adopts service design. This research performed a systematic literature review on extant HCI publications that claim to use service design. The review findings from the 179 publications revealed varying dimensions of service design taken up in HCI, relations between service design scopes and emerging technologies, as well as unclarity to service design in HCI and HCI's current tendency to use service design for the interaction level rather than the system level. We discuss future design and research opportunities for HCI by integrating the system level dimensions of service design.

The ongoing transition within tech industry towards holistic service journey orchestration pushes user experience design (UXD) closer to service design (SD). At the same time, new digital channels for traditional services pushes SD closer to UXD. The increasing interplay between UXD and SD can cause confusion about their relationship, boundaries, and responsibilities. Little research has examined perceptions of these aspects in industry and academia. We surveyed 197 UXD and SD practitioners and academics about their understanding of the overlaps and boundaries between the two design practices. Our findings reveal several conflicting views around the scope of UXD and SD work, the subsumptive relation between UXD and SD, and the theoretical roots and methods each draws upon. We suggest constructive ways for the two design practices to complement each other. Our study shows that UX work is changing, and understanding this change is important to maintain the relevance of UX research.

With the wave of data-driven design, data literacy is increasingly important for designers, so current design education aims to incorporate data literacy. However, designing with data can be challenging to design students as it might appear more abstract than tangible. In this research, we explore how design students could build creative data literacy by materializing data into tangible card formats, to inform their ideation process. We developed a method called Datastorming for design students to learn to create new design concepts using various data sets. Datastorming was tested in a university's service design course with 23 undergraduate students. Results show that Datastorming helped the students physically interact with various data sets to create meaningful connections and contextualize data for possible use scenarios. We discuss how Datastorming supports the designerly way of using data and helps students build creative data literacy for their design work.

Children's usage of online services expands as they transition into adolescence. However, many are unaware or ill-equipped about how their informational privacy is compromised through continuous tracking and data collection online. This paper explores how to enable early adolescents be more aware of informational privacy online and make informed decisions, taking a research-through-design approach. Based on technology probes with adolescents, the four-stage framework was developed and a smartphone-embedded book was chosen as a medium for defamiliarization yet relatability. Through the iterative design and testing with early adolescents, we investigated the novelty of blended interaction between physical and digital, and the effectiveness of various narratives based on the four stage framework. We found the importance for privacy educational materials to incorporate multiple levels of information complexity and discuss how to achieve that.

Energy harvesting is an emerging concept that could open new design vistas for sensor-embedded environments as it provides battery-independent capabilities to sensors. In this pictorial, we illustrate how the topic of energy harvesting is approached from the lens of designers. Through the dynamic use of images coupled with physical prototyping, a new design direction for energy harvesting has been formulated. We introduce Livefeed, a prototype series of sensor-embedded objects that live through ambient energy.

We present findings from a study of Tokens of Search, a system comprising physical RFID "tokens" that point to web content, and a wooden tray fixed to a small screen, which can be used to access that content. Three families lived with the system for a month, as an exploration of how tokens might be used as resources for practical action. Our findings highlight existing web practices and their individual and collective nuances; tokens were employed in the creation of short-term collections and long-lasting mementos, their physicality giving bookmarking a visibility that could be used to attract attention, serve as reminders, and make observable progress through tasks. However, while all families saw the potential for shared use, only one used it this way in earnest. We reflect on design choices that were expected to encourage collaboration, and the need to support key users such as parents when establishing joint practices.

Design researchers are increasingly interested in techniques that support creative teams in various design processes. The methods developed for sharing knowledge and generating solutions are mostly focusing on adults. Creative collaboration with and among children have a specific set of challenges to be considered. In this paper, we describe two design experiments that were conducted with children aged 7 to 9, to explore the applications of co-design methods with children. In those experiments, we observed that children are capable of utilizing make tools but have challenges in group dynamics and reflecting everyday experiences into design ideas.