There is an expanding vocabulary in academia addressing the struggles surrounding what constitutes knowledge in design research. However, most approaches overlook the role of researchers themselves, along with their lived experiences and theoretical commitments. Building on Redström’s work on design programs, we retell stories of our architectural education and practice as a constructed ‘we’ and suggest design sensibilities as a way of knowing that allows for a less aseptic approach to the epistemological assumptions in interaction design research. We portray sensibilities as a skin rather than a lens, and propose that design relies strongly on breaching the theory/practice divide as situated, poetic, positional, relational, and corporeal; while still constituting transferable and collective knowledge. We propose the articulation of sensibilities as intermediate level knowledge in order to account for a view of theory as the skin through which we shape and are shaped by our work.

Computational weaving is an old form of HCI, where hand Jacquard machine weaving embodies rich interaction and digital computation. Low-cost Jacquard looms are becoming common in HCI, but they come with limitations due to technology standardization. Jacquard weaving looms are often customized to create different textile structures; in our case, 3D weaves. This research uses speculative itineration to investigate the iterative re-engineering of a low-cost computational Jacquard handloom. We rebuild and enhance an existing designed loom by co-constructing stories and conducting semi-structured interviews with novices and experts, allowing imaginaries to change the loom. Our findings reveal innovation potential across the spectrum of looms. Both novice and expert weavers seek looms that allow modification, driven by the potential for new weaving designs and design spaces of looms within digital craftsmanship. Itinerative co-constructive speculation allows for customized looms across skill levels, challenging prevailing paradigms where expertise level often dictates technology choice.

As designers, we often use annotations to add information and reflection to our work. We would like to suggest that these annotations let personal design languages emerge. We experiment with the materiality of the pictorial format itself to show how such languages emerge from a particular body of work, as it travels from sketches, text, and various material artefacts. This emergent language uses annotations and layers as design materials, providing access to the nuances in the thinking behind our research and making processes. Through this language, the voice of the maker emerges revealing subjective and situated knowledges that would not be available otherwise. We reflect on these insights and share a set of strategies using annotations and layerings for others to use. As a result, we contribute an approach of annotations and layering to engage complexity when making, reflecting, and disseminating design research.

3D printing generally makes use of CAD software and slicers to mediate designerly intentions and fabrication instructions to the machine. This can obstruct the making process to such a degree that the designer risks becoming an observer of an ongoing print. To trouble this situation, we devised a manual control that enables the designer to manipulate one of the axes of the 3D printer. Through this embodied process, the incoming toolpath becomes another material to be extruded together with the 3D printing filament. The negotiations of (im)precision and intent between designer and machine are recorded and can be used as input for a new beginning. In this pictorial, we share our annotated 3D prints as a way of highlighting and paying attention to the relations between code, material, machine, and designer. We contribute with the system and reflections on embodied fabrication.

Design ideation requires both creative and divergent thinking as well as collaboration and exchange to bring forth new insights and design possibilities. In this paper, we investigate such a collaboration with the use of emerging generative AI tools, and we explore how they may help in achieving agreement and semantic convergence between designers. We conducted workshops using Text-to-Image AI with design students and found that in addition to known advantages of brainstorming, the text prompts required by the AI system engaged students in verbal articulations that aided their design process. In collaborative contexts, the generated images shifted the centre of attention for team members to reach convergence through sharing their interpretations. We conclude that text-to-image AI can be beneficial for students’ design processes as a catalyst for brainstorming rather than a tool for generating design imagery and presentations.

Surveillance is at the core of today's monitored society. Privacy is becoming a fluid regulatory process the values and expectations of which are being actively rewritten, deconstructed, reconstructed and negotiated as new technologies open up novel forms of social relations and identity construction opportunities. Our proposal is based on using our bodies as tools for identity expression and personal proclamation, seeking to pervert surveillance and its embodied data as a site for opportunity, disruption and resistance. We asked XXX, a writer and journalist, to work with us on a design exploration, to understand new implications of what being an “influencer” means by shaping identities through technologies in an extreme way. After analyzing some of the most commonly employed surveillance technologies worldwide and the main biometric parameters used to monitor the human body, we came up with a series of prostheses and garments in order to exploit XXX's algorithmic presence.

Digital Craftsmanship, and other explorative design research practices using digital fabrication, depend on sample making and material exploration. Rather than describing a method of making use of the information present in samples co-inhabiting a timeline, this pictorial reports on the loose ends that may emerge out of the main journey, when taking a traveler's approach to making. By loose ends, we mean successful samples that are not suitable to the main inquiry of the present design research process, but that under certain circumstances can become starting points for new investigation lines. We describe four examples of such loose ends and introduce the concept of fellow travelers as a metaphor for describing the process of co-inhabiting a timeline and a journey while ultimately having diverging goals and outcomes.

Digital fabrication machines enable the creation of a wide range of artifacts and materials. In the process of exploring the possibilities within these digital modes of creation, many samples are made. To encourage cross-pollination between different practices and strive for a community that shares more information, this research investigates the state of the art of sample making and documentation practices in the context of Digital Craftsmanship. Through in-depth interviews with designers with a focus on digital craftsmanship, in this paper we unpack some of the practices and challenges in material driven processes related to how to design, evaluate, document and archive material samples. We reflect on making practices, what forms of knowledge are produced through making and how the use of samples in different design processes can be supported through documentation.

This pictorial is the result of a long-term research project focused on finding opportunities to use Apple Face ID software and infrastructure to build new hybrid identities, exploring its potential as a drag, queer and trans technology design tool. The aim of the project is to validate new paradigms for identity ambiguity, multiplicity and fluidity, using biometric artificial intelligence systems and technologies of control as tools for free identity expression, definition and personal proclamation. To do that, we present our motivation, methodology, approach to exploration, workshop results and validated outputs, and analyse the physical and digital implications of the research. The prostheses shown in this paper are functional, and allow users to train Apple Face ID software to design their own identities connected to their name, Apple ID Number, bank account, social networks, and any other data or online activity digitally associated to this persona.

We present a vision for conversational user interfaces (CUIs) as probes for speculating with, rather than as objects to speculate about. Popular CUIs, e.g., Alexa, are changing the way we converse, narrate, and imagine the world(s) to come. Yet, current conversational interactions normatively may promote non-desirable ends, delivering a restricted range of request-response interactions with sexist and digital colonialist tendencies. Our critical design approach envisions alternatives by considering how future voices can reside in CUIs as enabling probes. We present novel explorations that illustrate the potential of CUIs as critical design material, by critiquing present norms and conversing with imaginary species. As micro-level interventions, we show that conversations with diverse futures through CUIs can persuade us to critically shape our discourse on macro-scale concerns of the present, e.g., sustainability. We reflect on how conversational interactions with pluralistic, imagined futures can contribute to how being human stands to change.

Digital fabrication and craftsmanship is entering into a new phase with increasing levels of complexity and a renewed desire for composites and cross-material experimentation. However, allowing work to travel from machine to machine, remains a challenge in terms of workflow, communication, orientation and material. Based on an exploration to combine embroidery and 3D printing in the pursuit of inflatable solutions, we propose the metaphor of the drawing game Exquisite Corpse to outline the three emerging concerns: turn taking, orientation and trade-offs. We propose a set of guidelines that suggest ways in which, we may allow different digital fabrication machines to be used in sequence, as a method for adding complexity to the things we make and the ways our machines may talk to one another.

Mechanical pushbuttons, which provide physical landmarks and clear tactile feedback, are easily accessible and highly reliable in eyes-free use. Potentially, their merits can improve the experiences of on-body or wearable HCI. However, they are not commonly adopted as a user interface of smart textiles because the physical mechanism of conventional pushbutton hardware requires further integration, which should be seamless enough to be comfortably worn. In this pictorial, we present a design exploration of the methodologies for interweaving mechanical pushbuttons into fabrics. The exploration used a frame system, which unifies the workflow of digital embroidery and 3D printing and enables the exploration of the physical design. Through the process, we investigated methods of integration and fabrication through making and presented our findings with proof-of-concept implementations. We also discussed the alternative designs and interaction methods as well as their implications to enlighten future research directions and opportunities.

Design is commonly understood as a storytelling practice, yet we have few narratives with which to describe the felt experiences of struggle, pain, and difficulty, beyond treating them as subjects to resolve. This work uses the praxis of embodied design as a way to bring more complex narratives to the community for contemplation---to engage and entangle personal and difficult stories within a public context. We propose the term Design Memoirs for these first-person practices and reflections. Design Memoirs are subjective and corporeal in nature, and provide a direct and observable way to reckon with felt experiences through, and for, design. We demonstrate Design Memoirs by drawing on our own experiences as mothers, caregivers, and corporeal subjects. Following Barad, we propose a practice of diffractive reading to locate resonances between Design Memoirs which render difficult autobiographical material addressable, shareable, and open for new interpretations. We present this strategy as a method for arriving at deeper understandings of difficult experiences.

Present day ideals of good parenting are socio-technical constructs formed at the intersection of medical best practices, cultural norms, and technical innovation. These ideals take shape in relation to the fundamental uncertainty that parents/mothers face, an uncertainty that comes from not knowing how to do what is best for one's children, families, and selves. The growing body of parent-focused smart devices and data-tracking platforms emerging from this intersection frame the responsible parent as one who evaluates, analyzes, and mitigates data-defined risks for their children and family. As these devices and platforms proliferate, whether from respected medical institutions or commercial interests, they place new demands on families and add an implicit emphasis on how humans (often mothers) can be augmented and improved by data-rich technology. This is expressed both in the actions they support (e.g., breastfeeding, monitoring food intake), as well as in the emotions they render marginal (e.g., rage, struggle, loss, and regret). In this article, we turn away from optimization and self-improvement narratives to attend to our own felt experiences as mothers and designers. Through an embodied practice of creating Design Memoirs, we speak directly to the HCI community from our position as both users and subjects of optimized parenting tools. Our goal in this work is to bring nuance to a domain that is often rendered in simplistic terms or frames mothers as figures who could endlessly do more for the sake of their families. Our Design Memoirs emphasize the conflicting and often negative emotions we experienced while navigating these tools and medical systems. They depict our feelings of being at once powerful and powerless, expressing rage and love simultaneously, and struggling between expressing pride and humility. The Design Memoirs serve us in advocating that designers should use caution when considering a problem/solution focus to the experiences of parents. We conclude by reflecting on how our shared practice of making memoirs, as well as other approaches within feminist and queer theory, suggest strategies that trouble these optimization and improvement narratives. Overall, we present a case for designing for mothers who feel like they are just making do or falling short, in order to provide relief from the anxiety of constantly seeking improvement.

New technologies emerge into an increasingly complex everyday life. How can we engage users further into material practices that explore ideas and notions of these new things? This paper proposes a set of qualities for short, intense, workshop-like experiences, created to generate strong individual commitments, and expose underlying personal desires as drivers for ideas. By making use of open-ended making to engage participants in the imagination of new things, we aim to allow a broad range of knowledge to materialise, focused on the making of work that is about technology, rather than of technology.

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.

Wearable and e-textiles as a field has tended to overlook its own documentation, as notions and overarching ideas are developed over time and across individual projects. We would like to begin addressing this by charting the development of Digital Craftsmanship through a number of projects over time. Practically, we propose to show a small selection of garments and samples alongside a simple framework for future documentation of work.

his paper reports on design strategies for critical and experimental work that remains constructive. We report findings from a design workshop that explored the "home hub" space through "imaginary design workbooks". These feature ambiguous images and annotations written in an invented language to suggest a design space without specifying any particular idea. Many of the concepts and narratives which emerged from the workshop focused on extreme situations: some thoughtful, some dystopian, some even mythic. One of the workshop ideas was then developed with a senior social worker who works with young offenders. A "digital social worker" concept was developed and critiqued simultaneously. We draw on Foucault's history of surveillance to "defamiliarise" both the home hub technology and the current youth justice system. We argue that the dichotomy between "constructive" and "critical" design is false because design is never neutral.

This paper describes the Crackle exhibition, an interactive exhibition presented at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1975. We propose that it can be seen as a foreshadowing of aspects of the current state of the art of TEI avant la lettre; and that there might not only be value in examining historical work to construct a longer historical framework for TEI, but that the methods used in the construction of this exhibition might be useful in constructing new visions that foreshadow into the future from our current technological position. We present a detailed description of the exhibition based on documentation and interviews with the people who built it, and suggest that the current state of disappearing computers and embedded computational ability in everyday devices form an opportunity to imagine novel interaction paradigms that may transcend the digital in a similar way as the Crackle exhibition in 1975 transcended the electrical.

Much of the academic and commercial work which seeks to innovate around technology has been dismissed as "solutionist" because it solves problems that don't exist or ignores the complexity of personal, political and environmental issues. This paper traces the "solutionism" critique to its origins in city planning and highlights the original concern with imaging and representation in the design process. It is increasingly cheap and easy to create compelling and seductive images of concept designs, which sell solutions and presume problems. We consider a range of strategies, which explicitly reject the search for "solutions". These include design fiction and critical design but also less well-known techniques, which aim for unuseless, questionable and silly designs. We present two examples of "magic machine" workshops where participants are encouraged to reject realistic premises for possible technological interventions and create absurd propositions from lo-fi materials. We argue that such practices may help researchers resist the impulse towards solutionism and suggest that attention to representation during the ideation process is a key strategy for this.

We propose a new paradigm for searching for sound by allowing users to graphically sketch their mental representation of sound as query. By conducting interviews with professional music producers and creators, we find that existing, text-based indexing and retrieval methods based on file names and tags to search for sound material in large collections (e.g., sample databases) do not reflect their mental concepts, which are often rooted in the visual domain and hence are far from their actual needs, work practices, and intuition. As a consequence, when creating new music on the basis of existing sounds, the process of finding these sounds is cumbersome and breaks their work flow by being forced to resort to browsing the collection. Prior work on organizing sound repositories aiming at bridging this conceptual gap between sound and vision builds upon psychological findings (often alluding to synaesthetic phenomena) or makes use of ad-hoc, technology-driven mappings. These methods foremost aim at visualizing the contents of collections or individual sounds and, again, facilitating browsing therein. For the purpose of indexing and querying, such methods have not been applied yet. We argue that the development of a search system that allows for visual queries to audio collections is desired by users and should inform and drive future research in audio retrieval. To explore this notion, we test the idea of a sketch interface with music producers in a semi-structured interview process by making use of a physical non-functional prototype. Based on the outcomes of this study, we propose a conceptual software prototype for visually querying sound repositories using image manipulation metaphors.

Taking it's origin from the notion of the cargo cult as an elaborate misunderstanding, this paper suggests a series of exploratory design methods to support users in generating requirements and scenarios-of-use for technological objects that do not yet exist. Strategies from fields such as art and performance are used to create experiences of user-involvement centered on the making of non-functional mock-ups. These can then act as props through which the participant can express their intuitions and concerns with a given technological notion. The processes described makes use of a broad range of cultural drivers to engage users in playful misunderstandings that facilitate new, out of the ordinary, interpretations of objects. The paper outlines the basis of three projects, discuss the drivers behind each project and suggests guidelines for creating these kinds of exploratory embodied experiences.

This paper proposes a series of simple interactive boxes designed to investigate children's experience and understanding of abstract electronic interaction. The black box project is the first step of an investigation into the width of the potential uses of electronic sensing devices.