Families creatively negotiate many different types of digitally mediated communication to do social family work – sometimes playfully and sometimes due to urgent need. This negotiation can manifest in numerous ways, reflecting the dynamic nature of modern family life. Such creative acts are performed across a multitude of interfaces and media forms and serve to maintain family intimacy and cohesion. In this study, we combine the concept of creative un-use with the study of family life and digital technology. We analyse in-depth interviews with Swedish extended family members who are curating, cutting, reducing, or modifying their uses to ‘do family’. Our results show that these social and creative acts are constantly negotiated and shifting as new technologies are adopted and uses, norms, routines, habits, and expectations change. We show how acts of creative un-use, always oscillating between use and non-use, and as small or sometimes quirky they may be, are deeply entangled with family work and used as a means to support both within and between household family ties. The study finally explores what creative family appropriation of digital communication technology means for how these very systems are designed.

Abstract Movement-based design methods have gained increased attention across various research fields and practices, particularly in interaction design. By engaging the body in movement, these methods have the potential to explore a richer, more intuitive, and immersive user experience. A recent project MeCaMinD1 brought together researchers from interaction and sports design to explore, collect, and document movement-based methods and make them practically useful across domains. The methods were explored through a series of workshops, furthering the team’s understanding of their use and practical applicability. This understanding was compiled into a set of design cards that we present here. We discuss the experience of using the resulting cards in movement-based design sessions. We found that while the cards are mostly used in designing, planning, and preparing sessions, they also function as support during the design sessions, used by both facilitators and participants. Based on a final ideation session with both novice and experienced facilitators, we sketch ways to support managing the cards during sessions, integrating them with movement and physical action.

Feminist self-defense combines physical self-defense with mental strength exercises through role-playing scenarios. It aims to challenge limiting beliefs about women's abilities to respond to interpersonal violence. We present the experiences from feminist self-defense classes in Sweden and the results of a set of speculative designs that combined contribute to imagine how technology could play a role in experiencing these holistic practices. The goal is to illustrate the potential of embodied interaction design to empower beginner feminist self-defense practitioners. To do so, the study was conducted via two methods: semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, and a participatory speculative design workshop with novice practitioners. The speculative concepts demonstrate how design can support the practice of feminist self-defense. Through this study we contribute to the corpus of embodied design interventions, in this case combining design for bodily movements with feminist consciousness raising in relation to the topic of gender-based violence.

Bullet journals are hand-written and self-created combinations of calendar, journal and planner. Central to this practice is how personal information is managed through a craft-based process. Based on a qualitative study, we discuss a set of themes that emerged in our analysis of this practice. We discuss how open-ended use of various materials for crafting of personal information engages in: 1) deliberate and strategic boundary work of what information to include and how combinations of data provide holistic and novel views of practitioner's life situations; 2) processes of self-creation and reflection on personal life trajectories; 3) appreciation of ourselves and the world around us as imperfect; and 4) ways of resisting the "business-like efficiency" that come with the large quantities of information that permeate contemporary life. We propose that this opens up new directions for thinking about how technologies of personal information may come into play in people's lives.

This paper presents a case study of an interactive performance that was produced and designed to encourage civic engagement and reflection in relation to the social tensions in a low-income suburb, mostly inhabited by people with immigrant backgrounds. The design of the technological setup in the performance encouraged participation by means of text entries that audience members could share with others. The analysis draws on the corpus of interview and observational data collected, as well as the related text messages that were shared during the performance. We illustrate the different levels at which citizens make sense of societal issues they are concerned about, as well as the audience-citizens' perception of participating in such an artistic experience.

The EcoFriends application was developed as an attempt to support grocery shopping adjusted to vegetables? seasonality through a performative approach to interaction and interactive applications. The design aimed at critical reflection and inspiration among users, rather than achieving a certain kind of persuasion. This guided the practical design to be modelled around open-endedness and social voices to challenge ideas and points of view. We argue that research addressing design for interactions about value-laden concepts such as sustainable action need to find ways of supporting various knowledge discourses, by distinguishing between performative and representational technologies. The approach allowed us to identify a number of design challenges regarding interactive technology and interaction design in relation to aspects of knowledge and truth, trust, negotiation and responsibility.

We draw on the concept of agency in order to understand the process of how design materials 'talk back' to designers. In so doing, we illustrate the various levels at which agency can emerge in the context of intensive short-time prototyping sessions. In HCI, it is often assumed that the designer is the agent that acts intentionally in the design process. Contrary to this, recent notions of agency provide a way of analysing the performative role of design materials as intra-actions between components within a given phenomenon, rather than as meanings merely ascribed by actions of designers. The notion of agency puts focus on the emerging properties of materials and how they actively contribute to the way that design activity unfolds. The analyses showed how interaction design is to a large extent driven by emergent characteristics of available materials. The results have implications for understanding material interactions and materiality in interaction design.

The Ecofriends application was designed to encourage people to reflect on their everyday grocery shopping from social and ecological perspectives. Ecofriends portrays the seasonality of various grocery products as being socially constructed, emphasizing subjective dimensions of what it means for a product to be in season, rather than attempting to communicate it as an established fact. It provides the user with unexpected information (news, weather, blog posts and tweets) about the place where the product was grown, and visualises how the product's popularity shifts throughout the year, among the user's friends, among chefs and other food experts, and the general public. Key findings from users' first encounters with the system are presented. In particular, we discuss aspects of trust, information fragments as catalysts, and how several of the participants were challenged by the system's portrayal of season.

This paper introduces Express Location, a mobile web application, supporting drivers in delivery service in the daily coordination of work. Remote communication and cooperation takes place on a shared map view around the drivers' locations and next stop, through a drawing/doodling tool and multiple visual object representations. The aim is to understand the working situation and the use of locations in the daily work to better support the coordination of mobile delivery work.

Cooperation in time-critical and physically distributed work settings, such as air traffic control, requires extensive coordination between the involved actors. For this coordination to be efficient the controllers rely both on the comprehensive use of rules and procedures, and on artifacts supporting them in following these procedures. At the Copenhagen Air Traffic Control Center this coordination is largely carried out through the use of a flight plan database system, paper flight strips, and a closed-circuit television system. In relation to the introduction of a new and increasingly automated system in the year 2003 this paper discusses the coordinative functions served by these three, soon to be replaced, artifacts from a design perspective. Despite the skepticism expressed in previous research, our results show that a further computerization could be successful if the coordinative functions the system currently fulfills are properly preserved.