In response to research concerns that smartphone usage negatively impacts intimate relationships, this paper presents a study exploring how design can encourage smartphone accountability in family home settings. We developed and deployed three provotypes with seven families via a Research through Design study intended to encourage reflections on ubiquitous and routinised smartphone usage. The provotypes progressively explore ways of making smartphone use visible by facilitating individualised accountability, competitive accountability, and collective accountability. We present insights into how these provotypes shaped family practices based on a qualitative study with 26 participants. We found that, by emphasising different forms of shared accountability, the provotypes reduced smartphone use, which in turn fostered family intimacy and togetherness, rooted in meanings of caring and sharing. Finally, we discuss our study’s implications for how provotypes can help explore forms of accountability in practices involving sustainable technology use within the home.

In this pictorial, we conceptualize how modern designs take on the roles of either ‘devices’ or ‘things’ to shape everyday practices in fundamentally different ways. Drawing on Borgmann's device paradigm and provocative design, we visually recount how two designs, starting from the same brief using the same materials ultimately culminate in a ‘device’ and a ‘thing’. As householders embedded the two designs in their sustainable practices, different design qualities emerged. We use these householders’ experiences to discuss how ‘spicing up’ a design process with elements of provocation can help people engage more deeply with environmental challenges.

The intersection of philosophy and HCI is a longstanding site of interest for the field that has been attracting special attention in recent years. In this paper, we present metaphysical probes (Metaprobes) as a tool for design-led philosophical inquiry. A Metaprobe is a design artifact used to study a metaphysical idea without concealing the philosophical tools mobilized by the designers or the designerly knowledge attained after deployment. We introduce the concept of a Metaphysical Workshop. This is the set of sketchy philosophical notions that a designer mobilizes in order to research a philosophical idea through design. We then present a case study that comprises: the philosophical issue under examination, the Metaprobes designed to study it, the metaphysical workshop used and the designerly insight produced. We conclude with a discussion of the potentials and weaknesses of Metaprobes in relation to other critical and speculative research-through-design practices. We aim to provide one way to make philosophies already present in design more explicit and make other philosophical concepts relevant to HCI more accessible and workable for designers.

Developing systems to spark face-to-face interactions between strangers is a recurring challenge that may benefit from drawing together inspiration from many different creative fields. This paper presents a design fiction that makes accessible over 50 diverse examples of objects and environments that might help foster new social encounters. Unlike most design fiction, this narrative is not about the future, but about an alternative present. The designs discussed are all real objects - either functional prototypes or interactive exhibits. The fiction is that these already existing artefacts are a commonplace, and not particularly remarkable part of the everyday. Thus the strange is made familiar by unusual designs being presented as a universal normality. Each individual element is "real" in that it has not been invented for the purpose of this review, however the overarching story uses a fictional frame to place all this work in the same world. We hope immersion in this narrative can enrich perspectives and debates around designing to support social interaction.

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.

HCI draws on a variety of traditions but recently there have been calls to consolidate contributions around the problems researchers set out to solve. However, with this comes the assumption that problems are tractable and certain, rather than constructed and framed by researchers. We take as a case study a Tumblr community of teen shoplifters who post on how to steal from stores, discuss shoplifting as political resistance, and share jokes and stories about the practice. We construct three different "problems" and imagine studies that might result from applying different design approaches: Design Against Crime; Critical Design and Value Sensitive Design. Through these studies we highlight how interpretations of the same data can lead to radically different design responses. We conclude by discussing problem making as a historically and politically contingent process that allow researchers to connect data and design according to certain moral and ethical principles.

Positive social and collaborative effects are hailed as a major advantage of embodied and tangible approaches to interaction. This studio offers a hands-on exploration of potentially extreme versions of such benefits Systems and techniques that somehow share or transfer embodiment between two or more people. Through participatory demos, studio attendees will explore and compare a variety of approaches to experiencing the perspectives of another body, and controlling bodies other than their own. These comparisons will be a launch pad for collaboratively combining existing "body sharing" systems and mocking up new design concepts. By bringing together ideas and approaches in an actionable manner, this studio will share and develop imagination, theory, and skills relevant to the design and study of interactive systems in which the body plays a central role.

This paper argues that design fiction is a powerful term in part because it is malleable. A wide range of differing design fictions are emerging and we pursue a spatial metaphor to provide a map based on literary approaches. Following Margaret Atwood we trace design fiction back to marvel and wonder tales such as the Arabian Nights through to the science fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth century. We suggest science, magic, ambiguity and irony as the cardinal points of design fiction. We then apply these four different approaches to design fiction to the concept of a divorce app for older people. We argue that currently design fiction is dominated by scientistic and ironic design fiction and suggest that magic and ambiguity are currently under explored.