This paper examines the collaborative work of residents, housing associations, and property owners to manage household waste in the context of a multi-apartment housing complex. Framed within the feminist ecological perspective of digital environmental stewardship - that is, how diverse actors, motivations, and capacities producing care for the environment that can be digitally mediated - we unpack how the many involved actors work together to keep waste in place, maintain the local waste system, and call on 'responsibility' as a means to produce sustainable actions and accountability. We frame these practices of waste management within the mundane work of sociotechnical innovation. Borrowing from Jackson's notion of repair work, we weave together an argument for the novel and valuable contribution to CSCW sustainability research grounded in the everyday contingent emergencies of environmental care. We argue for approaches to sustainability that reflect both the work to maintain sustainability -not just to produce it- and aspects of the 'good enough', a locally and reflexively produced equilibrium between maintenance and repair. We conclude by discussing their relevance for the design of sociotechnical interventions that mediate practices of care in waste management.

Waste management in urban areas is a complex process, encompassing a variety of activities (e.g., acquiring, sorting, disposing), actors (e.g., single individuals, waste collectors, condominium associations), and capacities (e.g., from household recycling stations to physical infrastructures such as recycling and sorting facilities). Whereas previous HCI design research has tackled problems with waste management from an individual, behavioral change perspective, we approach this design space through a feminist ecological design perspective of Digital Environmental Stewardship. Through a combination of qualitative empirical data and materials generated at design workshops, we outline challenges related to waste management in a complex of five multi-apartment buildings. We propose a number of design explorations addressing such challenges, and reflect on the generative role of the DES framework in framing design from a collective and ecological perspective.

This paper discusses Digital Environmental Stewardship as an analytical framework that can help HCI scholarship to understand, design, and assess sociotechnical interventions concerned with sustainable waste management practices. Drawing on environmental studies, we outline key concepts of environmental stewardship – namely actors, capacity, and motivations – to unpack how different initiatives for handling waste are organised, both through grassroots and top-down interventions, and through varying sociotechnical configurations. We use these dimensions to analyse three different cases of waste management that illustrate how actions of care for the environment are ecologically organised, and what challenges might hinder them beyond –or besides– behavioural motivations. We conclude with a discussion on the orientation to action that the suggested framework provides, and its role in understanding, designing and assessing digital technologies in this domain. We argue that examining how stewardship actions fold into each other helps design sociotechnical interventions for managing waste from within a relational perspective.

With this studio-workshop we aim to explore and debate how disassembling computational things can yield a potential for design practices. We believe there are significant qualities to be found in extending the mundane 'taking things apart' into an elaborate practice of un-crafting. The studio workshop comprises a series of collaborative disassembly activities with the aim of beginning to identify the key qualities and issues at stake. We also hope to have a diverse crowd, whose interdisciplinary viewpoints will enable us to ground an un-crafting practice in a diverse set of contexts.

In this note we discuss and argue about how taking things apart and disassembling can be meaningful practices in explorative design projects. In particular, we report on an explorative design exercise about taking apart an unfamiliar device. Relating to this design situation, we provide accounts for how collaborative hands-on experience can support reaching common ground and acquiring shared material understanding in an interdisciplinary design team through establishing a material brief. In the end we reflect and discuss how this may complement our practices regarding materials and interaction design.

This paper describes a case study of the initial reactions to a transport robot running in a semi-public hospital environment. The robot was transporting goods and samples for an orthopedic department, moving within and between different departments for 13 days, and was used by the staff for five days. Based on this case, we discuss how the robot was perceived by staff and visitors and purpose an initial framework, a utopian model, describing four different perspectives; an alien, a machine, a worker and as a work partner. This has been derived from interviews, questionnaires and observation, and exemplifies different qualities that the robot was ascribed. We discuss how the perspectives may mutually co-exist and change, and are affected by time and familiarity with the robot at work.

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 work in progress discusses a persistent myth about robots, namely that 'future robots will be universal solutions', or in other words that robots should tackle many complex tasks and situations. In our approach we consider whether this is a case of posing robots as solutions to wicked problems or if robots can be considered wicked design problems in themselves. At the same time we make an argument for adopting a research through design approach. Our stance suggests that by viewing robots as composed of design materials we can sensitively address and in the long run perhaps even avoid wicked problems related to robotics.

We present a series of design explorations for controlling autonomous robotic movement based on a metaphor of clothing and accessorising. From working with various sketches, scenarios and prototypes we identify a number of particular features of this form of interaction, as well potential challenges for designers of other systems based on this design concept. Finally we conclude with a few general implications, especially concerning the inert properties of visibility, physicality and modularity with respect to the particular case of interaction and robotic movement.

Pleo is one of the more advanced interactive toys currently available for the home market, taking the form of a robotic dinosaur. We present an exploratory study of how it was interacted with and reflected upon in the homes of six families during 2 to 10 months. Our analysis emphasizes a discrepancy between the participants' initial desires to borrow a Pleo and what they reported later on about their actual experiences. Further, the data suggests an apparent tension between participants expecting the robot to work as a 'toy' while making consistent comparisons with real pet animals. We end by discussing a series of implications for design of this category of toys, in order to better maintain interest and engagement over time.

Robotic devices, such as the Roomba vacuum cleaner, are customised and personalised by their users, using for example signs, stickers and clothes.

We use the Cargo Cult metaphor to discuss visions, methods and communication of robot research. Essentially cargo cult involves performing of imitative rituals that are conducted without understanding the underlying cause of a phenomenon. We discuss how this is an ongoing challenge within the field of HRI, and what researchers could do to avoid contributing to a robotic cargo cult.

In this report we discuss some of the challenges when applying a user-centred design approach in the field of human-robot interaction (HRI). The discussion is based on a one-day workshop at the NordiCHI'08 conference, investigating how methods, techniques and perspectives from the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) could contribute to and learn from recent developments in the area of HRI. Emphasis was put on topics that are infrequent in mainstream HCI such as machine movement, autonomy, anthropomorphism, physical interaction, environmental issues and issues concerned more generally with cultural notions of robots.

We present an analysis based on user-provided content collected from online blogs and forums about the robotic artifact Pleo. Our primary goal is to explore stories about how human-robot interaction would manifest themselves in actual real-world contexts. To be able to assess these types of communicative media we are using a method based on virtual ethnography that specifically addresses underlying issues in how the data is produced and should be interpreted. Results indicate that generally people are staging, performing and have a playful approach to the interaction. This is further emphasized by the way people communicate their stories through the blogging practice. Finally we argue that these resources are indeed essential for understanding and designing long-term human-robot relationships.

This paper concerns the design of physical languages for controlling and programming robotic consumer products. For this purpose we explore basic theories of semiotics represented in the two separate fields of comics and fashion, and how these could be used as resources in the development of new physical languages. Based on these theories, the design concept of actDresses is defined, and supplemented by three example scenarios of how the concept can be used for controlling, programming, and predicting the behaviour of robotic systems.

We present the see-Puck, a round display module that extends an open robot platform, the e-Puck. It holds 148 LEDs (light emitting diodes) to enable the presentation of eye-catching visual animated patterns, while keeping hardware costs and energy consumption at a minimum. The see-Puck was a result of a study of future robot applications, where relationship and interaction qualities found in owners of unusual pets (e.g. spiders, snakes, and lizards) were transferred to the robotic domain. In our first proof-of-concept application, humans and robots can engage in a playful open ended interaction. We argue that open interactive robot platforms such as the see-Puck point to opportunities not only in robotics but also future user interfaces and ubiquitous computing.

We present a mode where media (e.g.music files) are autonomous entities that carry their own individua information. Our goal is to turn such files into autonomous, rule-following agents capable of building their own identities from interactions with other agents and users. We are exploring how collaborative filtering-like behaviour could emerge out of large ensembles of interacting agents, which are distributed over mobile devices in socia networks. We have implemented a first version of the mode in the form of a music player application for mobile devices, called Push!Music. This system takes advantage of active recommendations as we as implicit user activity to build a profile for each media file.

We are exploring strategies for designing novel robots, or more generally, personal embodied agents. The motivation is to open up the design space for robots in everyday environments, while at the same time grounding new designs in existing human interests. We have modified established methods from the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). First, we investigated specific human interests, in this case in exotic pets, to understand and design for possible interests of future robot owners. Based on the data from interviews with pet owners, we developed four active characters, so called personas. Each persona has a specific interest in robots as personal embodied agents, which has a particular form, role and behaviour. From the resulting personas we derived a number of possible designs, where the agents take on different roles in peoples' everyday activities