In the pursuit of more-than-human approaches to designing it is a challenge to understand the plurality of more-than-human worlds, especially the multiplicity of the more-than-human lives or biographies of things designed. In this pictorial, we experiment with speculative mapping as a process to explore pluralities of a thing we designed, called wi-fi-no-wi-fi. Using the wi-fi-no-wi-fi as a case study, we speculated through workshops, empirical investigations, and speculation to create speculative maps of different biographies. This pictorial offers three speculative maps and revealed design insights into materials as time, forming of assemblages and spaces, and multispecies perspectives of regeneration.

Design researchers are exploring noticing as a means of including more-than-human perspectives. Sketching can support concentrated observation, detailed documentation, and visualise complexity, making it particularly suitable for noticing. However, transitioning from observing to noticing requires reflection, which can be challenging without guidance on how to unearth the information buried in the sketch. The first author developed a set of elements to scaffold reflection on sketches for noticing through a four-month residency, adopting a first-person perspective. This practice was later introduced to nine participants, who reflected on their sketches, including breaking down compositional choices, influence of the medium, and the subjects they focused on. We found that this guided noticing practice can foster attentive engagement and reflection, exposing blind spots in their perspective that motivate further noticing. This pictorial offers guidance on how sketching can become an ongoing noticing practice, along with a way to structure reflection for multi-species ethnography.

While it’s becoming increasingly popular for designers to adopt a posthumanist view that conceptually positions nonhumans as collaborators through which relational creativity and knowledge emerge, challenges remain for human designers to practice decentering themselves in design activities. We approach this challenge through an autoethnography study of open weaving accompanied by written reflections in a workbook. Through a more-than-human lens, we see opportunities for open weaving to surface the multiplicity of relational entanglements in making with nonhumans. Our analysis presents emerging narratives that examine nonhuman creativity and their active participation. We then discuss the frictions in decentering and how the nonhuman agency could be extended through the use of woven textiles. This ongoing work contributes with a posthuman perspective to open weaving that potentially enables designers to enter non-human relations in decentered ways.

Environmental crises demand HCI to shift from human-centered design to more-than-human (MTH) care. Current MTH care often focuses on singular species, overlooking the role of the place in which these care relations are situated. To address this, we turn to mycoremediation—bioremediation of soil and water with fungi. We present findings from a two-week living probe study where participants (N=12) placed and cared for a living mycelium composite in a place of their choosing. Our findings show that engaging with mycoremediation fostered stewardship, extended noticing of multispecies ecologies, and made distant places proximate. Participants’ relationships evolved from expecting feedback from the fungi (a dyadic model) towards attending to their relations with the broader place (a place-based ecological model). We contribute to Bio-HCI and MTH HCI with: 1) an empirical account of mycoremediation as a situated MTH care practice, and 2) design implications for living artifacts that foster affective, ecological connections in place.

How more-than-human gatherings configure and change to support designing is not well understood. In the more-than-human theory of designing-with, these gatherings are called constituencies. This paper aims to shed light on the practices of a constituency, by analyzing the moving of a plant studio from one city to another. The plant studio includes over 250 plants and is where living-with and designing-with plants are conceptualized. The move offered an opportunity to understand the dynamics of the plant studio as a constituency using design events, a vocabulary and analytical tool, for understanding practices and temporality. In our analysis, we surface the role of humans as speaking subjects and five repertoires or considered actions that together articulate the practice of a constituency. We also illustrate the use of design events as an analytical tool for nuance and critical reflections on more-than-human design.

As design researchers committed to more-than-human designing, we found we were increasingly moving our research activities outside of our institutional studios and labs into yards and balconies where we lived. In this paper, we investigate this emerging pattern through collaborative autoethnography to arrive at the notion of backyard practices. These are distinct practices that signal the value and necessity of being there in more-than-human worlds to design-with over time. We describe the features of the practice that include time as duration and intensities, liminality as more-than-human presences, and proximity. We also describe commitments that emerged that include practice decentering, consistently engage more-than-humans as participants in the process, act with not-knowing and humility, queerly design alongside, and learn to be affected.

Alternative Research Outcomes (AROs) go beyond traditional academic publications, taking diverse forms such as documentaries, DIY tutorials, or exhibitions. With growing recognition of the need for more inclusive and contextually appropriate research dissemination, AROs are particularly relevant in HCI and design research. Yet, little has been discussed on why it is important to work on AROs. What are key qualities of AROs? How can the HCI community benefit from learning more about creating AROs? By analyzing six case studies, we propose four qualities of AROs and demonstrate how they emerge in the timeline of a research project. We argue AROs can be adapted to diverse audience needs and share research insights that may extend beyond the original research goals. Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of how AROs can support inclusive research dissemination practices, enabling HCI researchers to engage broader audiences and extend the relevance of their work.

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.

This work explores an alternative human-silkworm relationship through crafting a triad of interactive research artifacts that serve as a temporary habitat for domestic silk moths, Bombyx mori. In the first part of the paper, we present the design journey from acquiring the eggs to harvesting movement in orchestrating the improvised ambient music and elaborate on the aspects of materiality and temporality that crafting the habitability involved. In the second part, we reflect on the alternative relationship as intended and embodied during the four months of co-habitation and discuss the ethical and other emergent issues informed by designer-researcher’s autoethnography.

This paper is a Research through Design (RtD) investigation that deeply reflects on our ambivalence with three design choices we made while designing in a multispecies context. The ongoing RtD project, called Turner Boxes, aims to design a technological network to interact with wild bees in an urban environment. The design choices negotiate challenges we encountered, including the potential effects of electromagnetic fields (EMF) on bee ecologies; sucrose feeding as an established human-bee interaction; and the question of human intervention when designing in relation to other species. We analyze our negotiations of these challenges along with the practices of beekeepers and ecologists who were part of our investigation, to realize that ambivalence is a characteristic and a resource in multispecies designing. We extend this analysis through feminist epistemologies to articulate a position of diffraction, a standpoint from which to design in multispecies worlds in which interdependencies and differences are critical.

This paper presents a long-term field study of the coMorphing stool: a computational thing that can change shape in response to the surrounding light. We deployed 5 coMorphing stools to 5 participants' homes over 9 months. As co-speculators, the participants reflected on their mediated relations with the coMorphing stool. Findings suggest that they perceived the subtle transformations of the coMorphing stool in the early days of the deployment. After becoming familiar with these features, they interpreted their daily entanglements with the coMorphing stool in diverse personalized ways. Over time, the co-speculators accepted the coMorphing stool as part of their homes. These findings contribute new empirical insights to the shape-changing research field in HCI and enrich discussions on higher-level concepts in postphenomenology. Reflecting on these experiences promotes further HCI explorations on computational things.

HCI research on shape change has highlighted the importance of materiality and temporality in design practice. However, little research has addressed the challenges of tailoring these qualities for everyday interactions with a shape-changing artifact. In this paper, we report from a designer-researcher perspective into the crafting of deformTable: a shape-changing form that responds to the weight of objects placed on its surface. We crafted 5 deformTables over 18 months with special attention given to the physical, temporal, and computational aspects. Specifically, we describe how we focused on speed adjustments and response times in the process to frame the temporal expressions of computing; we also discuss how the material and tools helped shape our decisions in the context of the materiality of computing. This study contributes an RtD case of designing a particular shape-changing artifact through the lens of temporality and materiality to support long-term engagements and everyday interactions.

While much work is underway within the context of posthuman design, this research is often described from a dominantly human perspective. It rarely accounts for the creative capacities of nonhumans in design, such as materials, tools, and software. There is a need to further engage with posthuman theories conceptually, materially, and methodologically. We approach this challenge through Ron Wakkary's concept of repertoires: actions the human designer can take to increase participation of nonhumans in design research practice. This paper reports on potential repertoires' development by exploring three approaches from outside of HCI: describing the landscape, noticing, and translations. We use these methods to account for weaving events that the first author was engaged in. Through critical reflection of these accounts, we contribute three repertoires and an example of applying the theoretical framework of Designing Things.

This article investigates new relations with things that are expansive and inclusive of the pluralities and differences within our entanglements with technologies. We do this by extending our commitments to the methodological approaches of material speculation and co-speculation that led us to engage in multi-year conversations between ourselves as design researchers, philosophers, and a counterfactual artifact we designed, known as a Tilting Bowl. The philosophers lived with the Tilting Bowl during this period. We call these conversations, polylogues, of which the aim is to co-speculate on a range of new possible relations by which to consider living with technological things. The contributions of our article are two-fold. Firstly, through our polylogues, we offer descriptions of three relations with things. These include (1) non-anthropocentric care: care that is non-anthropocentric and existential; (2) non-presumptive relations: not-knowing in relating to and engaging with things; and (3) ideologized relations: ideologies that frame relations with technologies. Secondly, the article elaborates and critically reflects on co-speculation as a method for relational and situated knowing that can be of benefit to HCI researchers.

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.

In this pictorial, we present critical reflections on the design process of crafting the deformTable. The table is a shape-changing device that can go up and down based on the weight of objects placed on it. This pictorial focuses on key design decisions in the making of a shape-changing artifact like the deformTable that explores how deformability, temporality, and materiality can encourage creative appropriations over time. We believe this pictorial contributes to how to design research products that can investigate shape-changing artifacts in everyday settings over time.

Research into shape-changing and deformable artifacts that explore novel interactions has been growing in design and HCI. Yet, there is little discussion on the design processes behind these approaches and in particular, a theoretical understanding of materiality that is central to deformation. Informed by Wiberg's compositional interaction design, we contribute an investigation into supporting long-term relations with deformation: the transTexture lamp. Specifically, we crafted a dynamic physical form with materials at hand. We instantiated the materiality of interaction being designed as a computational whole. Reflecting on our theory-informed RtD process enriched our understanding of compositional interaction design. These reflections on our design approach may benefit further explorations into the intersections between materiality, longevity, and actuality in the context of design-oriented HCI.

In this paper we investigate how a combination of "speculative" design methods can be used to generate theoretical understandings for dynamic, colour-changing fabrics for garments. Specifically, we combine a first-person, autobiographical, research through design (RtD) approach that draws strategies from speculative design. We call this approach alternative presents, inspired by the work of James Auger, and explore it as a way to generate theoretical propositions for dynamic fabric that emphasize the lived experience over technological innovation. The contributions of this framing are twofold. Firstly, we offer a theoretical contribution to the literature on dynamic fabric. Secondly, we make a methodological contribution for how autobiographical design and RtD can be oriented speculatively to generate intermediate knowledge, with particular emphasis on social-technical aspects.

Morse Things are Internet connected ceramic cups and bowls that communicate with each other in Morse Code. This ongoing research iteratively asks thing-centered questions of things and technology. A premise of the Morse Things is that any understanding of a thing or technology is unstable and arguably fragile. In this pictorial, we reflect on how we as researchers, in the course of doing research with the Morse Things, unexpectedly found ourselves literally entangled in the conceptual and physical fragility of the research. This pictorial describes our growing awareness of this instability, beginning with a kintsugi repair of a broken Morse Thing, our false confidence in our package design for shipping, and the difficulties to conceptualize the machine learning world that we ourselves created. We reflect on these experiences, and now see these as reminders of the inevitable fragility and instability of research on thing-perspectives.

Family members who are separated across time zones can easily miss out on feeling connected. We designed and studied the usage of an asynchronous storytelling system, called FamilyStories, to explore the use of audio-based sharing. FamilyStories allows family members to share activities and experiences over distance in different time zones using three different devices that contain different contextual features. To evaluate the design, we conducted a five-week long field study with two family member pairs. Our results show the value of slow, flexible, and non-suggestive interfaces for asynchronous audio communication. We also found ephemerality helped in the sharing of 'instant' feelings, while large time zone differences could be 'synchronized' with time delayed messages. We raise these as design opportunities for asynchronous audio storytelling systems.

This paper provides a materiality perspective to understanding lived experiences with a deformable domestic artefact, named transTexture lamp. The lamp is an interactive light with a deformable lampshade surface. We deployed transTexture lamps in the homes of three professional designers for two months with the aim of exploring possible interactions and engagements with the deformable lamp. Our findings show how participants experienced transTexture through pleasurable interactions and how they experienced deformation over time from reflections on these interactions. Analyzing the data through a materiality lens unpacked a creative process of drawing on the deformable lampshade surface, which results in the accumulation of substrates and transformations of deformations. These findings suggest opportunities for future material-centered interaction design research and practices in HCI.

The Tilting Bowl is a ceramic bowl that unpredictably but gently tilts multiple times daily. This pictorial reports on the crafting of the electronics of the Tilting Bowl within the concept of a research product [10]. From this perspective, the seemingly simple task of making a bowl tilt holds unique challenges and demands - especially as a research product that is deployed in everyday settings for lengthy periods of time. We highlight electronic design challenges that came up in three processes of making the Tilting Bowl: the tilting mechanism, hardware integration of electronics and power management. Lastly, we offer three suggestions for designing electronics for research products.

Schön describes the way a designer engages with their materials as a "conversation". In clothing design this typically involves tangible and situated actions such as draping, ripping, and cutting-actions that evoke responses from the fabric at hand. Dynamic fabrics-surface-changing fabrics that combine digital and physical states-are still novel fashion-design materials. When working with the digital, intangible qualities of these fabrics, how does a dialogue unfold for designers accustomed to working physically with fabrics? In this paper we examine the design process of Phem, a collection of garments that use dynamic fabrics that function similarly to augmented reality. We reflect upon the improvisations required to satisfy a productive dialogue with the digital forms of these materials. We conclude with a discussion that proposes revisiting Schön's notion of a conversation in the context of digital forms, and use Ingold's perspectives on making to inform this inquiry.

Motivated by prior work on everyday creativity, we adopt a design-oriented approach seeks to move beyond designing for explicit interactions to also include the implicit, incremental and, at times even, unknowing encounters that slowly emerge among people, technologies, and artifacts over time. We contribute an investigation into designing for slowness grounded in the practice of making a design artifact called Slow Game. We offer a detailed critical-reflective accounting of our process of making Slow Game into a research product. In attending to key design moves across our process, we reveal hidden challenges in designing slow technology research products and discuss how our findings can be mobilized in future work.

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.

Data is changing how we design consumer products. Shoe production is a prime example of this; foot size, footstep pressure and personal preferences can be used to design personalized shoes. Research done around metamaterials, programming materials and computational composites illustrate the possibilities of creating complex data & material relationships. These new relationships allow us to look at future products almost like software apps, becoming a kind of product service systems, where the focus is on its iterative personalization improvement over time. Can we create systems of such data driven objects that in turn allow us to design new objects that are informed by the data trail? In this paper we report on four RtD project iterations that explore this challenge and provide a set of insights on how to close this new iterative loop.

We describe the design and deployment of Olly, a domestic music player that enables people to re-experience digital music they listened to in the past. Olly uses its owner's Last.FM listening history metadata archive to occasionally select a song from their past, but offers no user control over what is selected or when. We deployed Olly in 3 homes for 15 months to explore how its slow pace might support experiences of reflection and reminiscence. Findings revealed that Olly became highly integrated in participants lives with sustained engagement over time. They drew on Olly to reflect on past life experiences and reactions indicated an increase in perceived value of their Last.FM archive. Olly also provoked reflections on the temporalities of personal data and technology. Findings are interpreted to present opportunities for future HCI research and practice.

Personalization of shoes is of increasing importance to designers, design researchers, and manufacturers as mass customization progresses towards ultra personalized product service systems. Many attempts have been made to design co-creation platforms that allow end users to personalize their own shoes. Those co-creation platforms primarily concentrate on color selection. This research takes a different approach and designs a toolkit for maker-oriented users to co-manufacture their own shoes. The toolkit was designed in different levels and deployed to makers via crowdsharing worldwide. Backers were surveyed before deployment and interviewed after two years to understand personalization over a larger amount of time with the research product. We find that users who have greater bespoke tools and materials in their toolkits are more likely to personalize their shoes while co-manufacturing. The research provides guidelines for researchers and designers creating toolkits, designing personalization product service systems/configurators and engaging in tangible bespoke processes.

An increasing number of non-profit groups and organizations have formed "libraries" of shared things to leverage the collaborative use of underutilized resources (e.g., power tools) for the benefit of local communities. Their key challenges are the transience and anonymity of their members, and how to nurture creative interactions among them. We designed and developed Roaming Objects, an interactive system aimed at supporting the capture and sharing of equipment-use experiences among these members. We deployed the system for two months in a tool-sharing cooperative to explore how it may help to address these challenges. We offer insights into how resource sharing cooperatives and collectives could be better supported, by proposing design opportunities that facilitate sharing both physical objects and digital information about their use.

In this paper, we argue for framing the crafting and studying of research products as doing philosophy through things. We do this by creating an annotated portfolio of such Research through Design (RtD) artifact inquiries as postphenomenological inquiries. In our annotated portfolio, we first provide an account of the postphenomenological commitments of 1) taking empirical work as the basis of the inquiry, 2) analyzing structures of human-technology relations and 3) studying technological mediation. Secondly, we trace these commitments across six RtD artifact inquiries. We conclude with a discussion on how research products can be seen as an experimental way of doing postphenomenology and how HCI design researchers can work with that. As a result, the presented philosophical framing can be leveraged in HCI research to form a deeper and more dimensional understanding of the human-technology relations we craft and study. This also adds a methodological path to moving beyond foci of use, utility, interaction, and human-centeredness.

Design-oriented research in HCI has increasingly migrated towards theoretical perspectives to understand the implications of newly crafted technology in everyday life. However, in this context, the relations between theory and understanding the things we make are not always clear, especially the degree to which the nature of research artifacts is revealed through or determined by theory. We examine a series of field deployment studies we conducted with our research artifact table-non-table over the course of four and a half years that we came to see as a postphenomenological inquiry. Importantly, our interpretations of this artifact, methodological concerns, and theoretical groundings evolved over time. We account for and critically reflect on these shifts in the relationship between theory and our design artifact. We detail how theory was enacted and embodied in our design research practice and offer insights into the complex relations between theory and things in design-oriented HCI research.

Slowness has emerged as a rich lens to frame HCI investigations into supporting longer-term human-technology relations. Yet, there is a need to further address how we design for slowness on conceptual and practical levels. Drawing on the concepts of unawareness, intersections, and ensembles, we contribute an investigation into designing for slowness and temporality grounded in design practice through two cases: Olly and Slow Game. We designed these artifacts over two and a half years with careful attention to how the set of concepts influenced key design decisions in terms of their form, materials, and computational qualities. Our designer-researcher approach revealed that, when put into practice, the concepts helped generatively grapple with slowness and temporality, but are in need of further development to be mobilized for design. We critically reflect on insights emerging across our practice-based research to reflexively refine the concepts and better support future HCI research and practice.

This paper reports on a postphenomenological inquiry of six trained philosophers, who as study participants lived with and reflected on a research product we designed known as the Tilting Bowl: a ceramic bowl that unpredictably but gently tilts multiple times daily. The Tilting Bowl is a counterfactual artifact that is designed specifically for this study as part of a material speculation approach to design research. A postphenomenological inquiry looks to describe and analyze accounts of relationships between humans and technological artifacts, and how each mutually shapes the other through mediations that form the human subjectivity and objectivity of any given situation. This paper contributes an empirical account and analysis of the relations that emerged (background and alterity) and the relativistic views that co-constitute the philosophers, Tilting Bowl, and their specific worlds. The findings demonstrate the relevance of this philosophical framing to fundamentally and broadly understand how people engage digital artifacts.

This paper presents an analytical approach that we call the focus framework. The framework aids the analysis of the intended and unintended design attributes that emerge within a project's design process. The framework helps to reveal how prototypes and decision making interact together to shape the final design features and make visible the trajectory of central design attributes and unexplored alternatives. In this paper, we report on the framework and its development by way of a retrospective analysis of a tangible light installation we designed known as the Urban Data Posts. We see the potential for designers to use the focus framework as a post-mortem tool to retrospectively analyze their own work and thus inform their design practice. The knowledge gained through the analysis can then be applied in future projects more generatively.

Applying a thing-centered, material speculation approach we designed the Morse Things to acknowledge and inquire into the gap between things and us. The Morse Things are sets of ceramic bowls and cups networked together to independently communicate through Morse code in an Internet of Things (IoT). We deployed the Morse Things in the households of six interaction design practitioners and researchers for six weeks. Following the deployment, we conducted a workshop to discuss the role of the Morse Things and ultimately the gap between things and people. We reflect on the nature of living with IoT things and discuss insights into the gap between things and humans that led to the idea of a new type of thing in the home that is neither human-centered technology nor non-digital artifacts.

In this paper we present Videos of Things: videos that portray the mediated, lived world of computational artifacts informed by postphenomenology. In a post-phenomenological understanding, things and us are interdependent in that they mutually shape each other. And as a whole, technology or designed things mediate the relations between our world and us. This can be a challenge for designers. Through the making of design videos, we explored narrative strategies for creating stories featuring technological mediation. These include humanness, patterns in time, and non-human ensembles. We reflect on how the videos at different stages of the design process have helped to a) speculate on technological mediated relationships, b) synthesize and reflect on qualitative data on technological mediation and c) anticipate technological mediation. The paper contributes different narrative strategies for design videos and the role these videos can play within a design process aimed at elaborating the mediated qualities of technologies.

In this pictorial, we propose an alternative approach to investigating human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers' epistemological commitments in research on the home. While researchers' commitments can be discussed through textual aspects of their research, in this pictorial we conduct a pattern analysis of visual elements as a productive way to further inquire into such kinds of commitments. By analyzing visual elements from 121 works in HCI research on the home, we identify seven types of observers, which can be associated with epistemological commitments in research. We also propose two new complementary observers: the absent observer and the protagonist observer.

In this paper we discuss the low-volume production of an interaction design research product known as the tilting bowl. The form of the tilting bowl was designed with 3D modeling tools and utilized digital fabrication for rapid prototyping. The final form was produced in a small number of glazed ceramic forms with embedded electronics and actuators. We focus on the lessons we learned from the challenges and design opportunities that arose in moving from digital processes to ceramic processes. We reflected on these lessons and developed thematic notions we refer to as frictions. These include shifting constraints, naïve expertise, manual automation, and dynamic materiality. The contributions of this paper are new design insights into the combination of digital and material processes for studio based prototyping and low-volume production and adds to the emerging relevance of digital fabrication, physical fabrication, and physical materials to interaction design and HCI research.

In this paper, we present a twenty-three months autobiographical design project of converting a Mercedes Sprinter van into a camper van. This project allows us to investigate the complexities and nuances of a case where people engage in a process of making, transforming and adapting a space they live in. This example opens a radically different and productive context for revisiting concepts that are currently at the center of human-computer interaction (HCI) research: ubiquitous computing, home automation, smart homes, and the Internet of Things. We offer six qualities characterizing the evolving relationship between the makers and the lived-in environment: the van. We conclude with a discussion on the two themes of living in a reconfigured home and prototype qualities in a reconfigured space, and a critical reflection around the theme of the invariably unfinished home.

Prototypes and prototyping have had a long and important history in the HCI community and have played a highly significant role in creating technology that is easier and more fulfilling to use. Yet, as focus in HCI is expanding to investigate complex matters of human relationships with technology over time in the intimate and contested contexts of everyday life, the notion of a 'prototype' may not be fully sufficient to support these kinds of inquiries. We propose the research product as an extension and evolution of the research prototype to support generative inquiries in this emerging research area. We articulate four interrelated qualities of research products inquiry-driven, finish, fit, and independent and draw on these qualities to describe and analyze five different yet related design research cases we have collectively conducted over the past six years. We conclude with a discussion of challenges and opportunities for crafting research products and the implications they suggest for future design-oriented HCI research.

High-risk outdoor recreation allows its enthusiasts to reach unprecedented levels of adrenaline; it also contains risks and requires specific training (in part technological). In particular, its participants must be ready to react efficiently during an emergency or in response to an accident. Technological training grounds can simulate particular contexts and emergency situations as a place for recreationists to train and practice. In this paper, we use the practice of avalanche companion rescue as a case study to explore how technological training grounds support recreationist training. Our results offer insights into how avalanche beacon training parks support skill development and team coordination training. We also present strategies to orient the design of technological training grounds beyond avalanche companion rescue.

In this article, we present unselfconscious interaction, a conceptual construct that describes a form of interaction with computational artifacts animated by incremental intersections that lead to improvements in the relationships among artifacts, environments and people. We draw on Christopher Alexander's notion of goodness of fit and unselfconscious culture, and utilize Erik Stolterman and Mikael Wiberg's concept-driven interaction research to analyze three interaction design concept artifacts to develop the construct of unselfconscious interaction for human–computer interaction. The resulting construct is comprised of the motivation of goodness of fit that is supported by two design qualities we name open-endedness and lived-with. We describe tensions within the construct, the notion of purposeful purposelessness in design and discuss the features that derive from Alexander's unselfconscious culture and are to be considered when designing for goodness of fit: resources, adaptation, ensembles, time and anonymity. Our main contribution in this article lies in the articulation of the construct of unselfconscious interaction.

We adopt a design-oriented approach aimed at motivating and expanding the notion of everyday creativity beyond explicit interactions or purposed manipulations to also include the implicit, incremental and, at times even, unknowing encounters that emerge among people, technologies, and artifacts over time. Specifically, we explore these ideas through the design and investigation of two interaction design research artifacts: the Photobox and table-non-table. Through analyzing and synthesizing insights that emerged across our studies, we describe a related set of concepts in support of a more implicit form of everyday creativity, which include: unaware objects, intersections and ensembles. We conclude by interpreting findings in context of prior implications for everyday creativity and outline considerations for future work.

The home and domestic experiences have been studied from multiple points of view and disciplines, with an array of methodologies in the past twenty-five years in HCI. Given the attention to the home and the volume of research, what further areas of research might there be? Based on a critical analysis of 121 works on the topic, we present seven genres of domestic technology research in HCI: social routines in the home, ongoing domestic practices, the home as a testing ground, smart homes, contested values of a home, the home as a site for interpretation, and speculative visions of the home. We articulate dominant research perspectives in HCI, and we offer two complementary perspectives about how to investigate the domestic experience in future research: the material perspective and the first person perspective.

Tutorials are critical to the success and vitality of DIY practices. In this paper, we elevate the importance of tutorial authorship as one way to maintain and improve the quality of tutorials in DIY. We discuss the role interaction designers can play as hybrid designers, mediating between author and audience to contribute to the improvement of practices of tutorial authorship in DIY. We examine the quality of tutorials through the building and analysis of ten DIY projects and tutorials. We analyze key issues across three categories: 1) competences, components and tools, 2) sequencing, 3) and communication. We offer findings that are both practical guidelines for detailed improvements of tutorials and structural themes for improving tutorial authorship including the themes of accurate information, competences and tools, and tutorial format. In conclusion, we discuss the potential for interaction designers to simultaneously mediate and shape tutorials and tools in a form of hybrid design.

The visually impaired have been a longstanding and well-recognized user group addressed in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Recently, the study of sighted dog owners and their pets has gained interest in HCI. Despite this, there is a noticeable gap in the field with regards to research on visually impaired owners and their dogs (guide dog teams). This paper presents a study that explores the interactions of guide dog teams revealing a rich, holistic understanding of their everyday lives and needs, across both work and leisure activities. Our findings inform and inspire future research and practices suggesting three opportunity areas: supporting working guide dog teams, enhancing play-interaction through accessible dog toys utilizing sensor technologies, and speculative and exploratory opportunities. This work contributes to the growing research on designing for human-canine teams and motivates future research with guide dog teams.

In this Pictorial we explain and describe Eclipse, a method aimed at eliciting subjective qualities of people's experiences of and relationships with public places. Our method guides participants to sequentially explore their memories, sensations, sense of place, and stories related to a public place. Our goal is to present this method in a pictorial form to make it more concise and more easily usable by other interaction designers; in this, we want to depict the richness and qualities of the elicitations, and ultimately the subjective qualities of a public place.

Using designers' personal experiences in interaction design practice is often questioned in a predominantly rationalist practice like HCI and professional interaction design. Perhaps for this reason, little work has been conducted to investigate how designers' personal experiences can contribute to technology design. Yet it's undeniable designers have applied their personal experiences to their design practice and also benefited from such experiences. This paper reports on a multiple case study that looks at how interaction designers worked with their personal experiences in three industrial interaction design projects, thus calling for the need to explicitly recognize the legitimacy of using and better support of the use of designers' personal experiences in interaction design practice. In this study, a designer's personal experiences refer to the collections of his/her individual experiences derived from his/her direct observation or past real-life events and activities, as well as his/her interaction with design artifacts and systems whether digital or not.

When facing an avalanche, backcountry skiers need to work effectively both individually and as a group to rescue buried victims. If they don't, death is likely. One of the tools used by each person is a digital beacon that transmits an electromagnetic signal. If buried, others use their beacons to locate victims by searching for their signals, and then dig them out. This study focuses on the collaborative practices of avalanche rescue and the interactions with beacons while backcountry skiing. We conducted interviews with backcountry recreationists and experts, and we observed avalanche rescue practice scenarios. Our results highlight aspects and challenges of mental representation, trust, distributed cognition, and practice. Implications include three considerations for the redesign of beacons: simplicity, visibility and practice.

This paper explores the relationship between goals, materials and competences in the practice of everyday design. Appropriations and creative uses of design artifacts are often reported in terms of outcomes and goals; however, we observe a gap in understanding how materials, tools, and competences are also involved in these processes. We conduct a multiple case study of three groups of everyday designers: families, hobbyist jewelers, and steampunk enthusiasts. We provide a description of the aspects of meaning, materials, and competences, as well as how they are interrelated, for each case. Our findings show that amongst these three aspects of the practice of everyday designers, it is the meaning of the practice that acts as the strongest motivator for practitioners. Materials, tools, and competences are hence largely determined accordingly. The implications of this study propose ways to design for practices with different types of meaning: foundational, aesthetic, and aspirational goals.

In this article, we argue that an approach informed by practice theory coupled with design fiction provides useful insights into the role of interaction design with respect to environmental sustainability. We argue that a practice-oriented approach can help interaction designers step away from models of individual behavior and studies of artifacts towards seeing sustainable behaviors as part of multidimensional and interrelated practices and practice elements. We analyze two previously conducted studies. The first study of everyday repair focuses on how people repair their broken objects. The second study of green-DIY examines how green enthusiasts facilitate their practices of making sustainable DIY (do-it-yourself) projects. We describe the practices of everyday repairers and green enthusiasts in terms of materials, competences, and meanings, and the interrelations among those elements, using the framework of Shove et al. [2012]. We argue that understanding the dynamics of practice and their unique configurations is a starting point to redefine the roles of sustainable interaction design (SID). We propose that designers design towards resources and tools in ways that reflect on the challenges of intelligibility of their design interventions in practices. In addition to considering SID in the light of practice theories, we reveal how design fictions are readily incorporated into green practices in ways that transform those practices and hold implications for transformations of design as well. We bring forward opportunities for designers to co-design with DIY enthusiasts, targeted as practitioners in their own right, designing toward or within a design fiction. As a result, we conclude with the possibility for sustainable interaction designers to become practice-oriented designers who design with transparent open strategies and accessible materials and competences.

In this paper, we describe memory-storming, a design technique that combines oral storytelling with sketching to externalize designers' personal experiences. The proposition behind developing this method is that designers' personal experiences are a potential design resource that can trigger new design insights and ideas. This paper provides a description of our use of this method, shows how it helped us in our design research, and presents lessons learned. We claim that memory-storming is a design technique that focuses on designers' personal experiences yet complements the user focus of user-centered design.

In this paper we look at the Steampunk movement and consider is relevance as a design strategy for HCI and interaction design. Based on a study of online practices of Steampunk, we consider how, as a design fiction, Steampunk provides an explicit model for how to physically realize an ideological and imagined world through design practice. We contend that the practices of DIY and appropriation that are evident in Steampunk design provide a useful set of design strategies and implications for HCI.

This studio provides participants with an opportunity to engage in a hands-on exploration of the use of "design fictions" as a strategy for producing physical artifacts. The idea of design fictions blurs the boundaries between traditional design practices and narrative explorations of potential futures. If the goal of design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones, then the goal of design fiction is to use speculations, metaphors, and explorations of desired futurities to explicate and inform material design practices. Participants will have a chance to discuss these ideas, as well as to design and build their own "diegetic prototypes" out of materials sourced from local antique shops, thrift stores, and other nearby sources of inspiration. Through this hands-on exploration of the constraints and affordances of fictional scenarios and scavenged materials, we hope to collectively explore a compelling new design space for tangibles.

This paper describes an exploratory study about children's perspective on sustainability in the house through a drawing-telling method. Here, we describe the methodological framework used for interviewing children about issues related to sustainability using the drawing-telling technique as described by Susan Wright [26]. The participants (children from age 9 to 13) were asked to draw two houses and then describe their drawings in terms of sustainable actions and features. The results show how the participants understand sustainability and how they represent it in the context of a house. This pilot study is an initial step to investigate if there are opportunities to develop eco-visualizations (EVs) for children. The goal of this study is to inform the design of eco-visualizations for children based on their understanding of sustainability and their own visualization of their homes.

This paper presents the findings from an exploratory study that looks at how creativity plays a role in the repair and reuse of objects in the home. We are interested in a particular form of creativity that manifests in the everyday -- what John Dewey [8] describes as a constant doing and undergoing, as we actively adjust to everyday situations. The goal of this study is to show evidence of repair as not only an act of restoration, but also as an act of creativity that entails the repurposing and resourcing of objects. This study is part of a larger research initiative known as the Everyday Design, where it is believed that everyone is a designer and that design is an ongoing activity that includes the repair, modification, and appropriation of design objects and systems. Furthermore, this study serves as baseline research for future investigations in how to inform the design of technologies whose lifecycle can be extended for various contexts of use through repair.

There is an undesirable gap between HCI research aimed at influencing interaction design practice and the practitioners in question. To close this gap, we advocate a theoretical and methodological focus on the day-to-day, lived experience of designers. To date, this type of theory-generative, experientially oriented research has focused on the users of technologies, not the designers. In contrast, we propose that HCI researchers turn their attention to producing theories of interaction design practice that resonate with practitioners themselves. In part one of this paper, we describe the mismatch between HCI research and interaction design practices. Then we present vignettes from an observational study of commercial design practice to illustrate the issues at hand. In part two, we discuss methodological and theoretical changes in research practice that might support the goal of integrating HCI research with interaction design practices. We then discuss current research methods and theories to identify changes that might enlarge our view on practice. In part three, we elaborate on our theoretically minded agenda and a kind of ideal-type theory.

This exploratory study investigates the value of constructivist theory for the field of interaction design. In this paper we explore how designer intentions and outcomes can be expressed in constructivist terms, and how constructivism can describe the relationship of design intentions to outcomes. This study's findings point to the potential of an emerging constructivist framework. The authors present the findings of two case studies of designer intentions and outcomes from two museum design projects. The paper presents themes drawn from the analysis that include designing for personal experience, play, and social interaction.

In this paper we explore sustainability in interaction design by reframing concepts of user identity and use in a domestic setting. Building on our own work on everyday design and Blevis's Sustainable Interaction Design principles, we present examples from an ethnographic study of families in their homes which illustrate design-in-use: the creative and sustainable ways people appropriate and adapt designed artifacts. We claim that adopting a conception of the user as a creative everyday designer generates a new set of design principles that promote sustainable interaction design.

We discuss three design strategies for improving the quality of social interaction and learning with interactive museum guides: 1) embodied interaction; 2) game-learning; 3) a hybrid system. We used these strategies in our prototype Kurio, which is aimed at supporting families visiting museums. The results of our evaluation show positive implications of implementing the design strategies: closing the social gap, naturalizing technology, and supporting exploration and discovery in learning.

Historically, the ACM Multimedia Conference is split into a "technical" program and an "arts" program. These programs sometimes seem completely separate from one another, victims of a "semantic gap" between disciplines. The goal of this panel is to create a space in which scientists learn from artists, and arts from science. We need to discover new connections between modalities of research. In order to create the most exciting and powerful future forms of interactive multimedia systems, the ones that will create the most beneficial broader impact on humanity, we need to foster new collaborations between artists and scientists. This panel seeks to bridge the great divide of language and communities that has fragmented us, creating a new space for developing connections between the arts and sciences of multimedia research, as embodied through the artists and scientists of ACM Multimedia. The goal is to make this conference a premier site for catalyzing emergent connections.

This paper presents the results of a study on group interaction with a prototype known as socio-ec(h)o. socio-ec(h)o explores the design of sensing and display, user modeling, and interaction in an embedded interaction system utilizing a game structure. Our study involved the playing of our prototype system by thirty-six (36) participants grouped into teams of four (4). Our aim was to determine heuristics that we could use to further design the interaction and user model approaches for group and embodied interaction systems. We analyzed group interaction and performance based on factors of team cohesion and goal focus. We found that with our system, these factors alone could not explain performance. However, when transitions in the degrees of each factor, i.e. high, medium or low are considered, a clearer picture for performance emerges. The significance of the results is that they describe recognizable factors for positive group interaction. Author Keywords Groups, responsive environment, play, embodiment,

This article discusses how families appropriate artifacts and surroundings that lead to the design of everyday household systems, such as combining a chalkboard, a door frame, and a hanging basket with paper and sticky notes to manage lists and messages. Such systems continually evolve through the catalytic pressures of individual actions and design-in-use. The article reports on a study of four families in which the concept of everyday design in the home was being researched. In-depth descriptions and discussions of the observations and patterns are presented. The design implications of this study are also discussed. The research contributions are an explanation of everyday design as a novel way to understand interactions and routines in the home, descriptions of the key actions and process in everyday design, and the need to reconstruct the user in the sense of an everyday designer.

We discuss our study that looks at family members as everyday designers. We explain the design actions of family members to be creative, as evidenced by the resourceful appropriation of artifacts and surroundings, the ongoing adaptation of systems and routines through design-in-use that allows emergent properties to arise and addresses individual needs, and how implicit understanding and explicit tests occur for judging quality. We present a preliminary analysis of design implications in the area of interaction design in the home. Our findings are based on a five-month ethnographic study of three families.

This paper describes the theoretical framework, design, implementation and results from an exploratory informant workshop that examines an alternative approach to sound feedback in the design of responsive environments for children. This workshop offers preliminary directions and models for using intensity-based ambient sound display in the design of interactive learning environments for children that offer assistance in task-oriented activities. We see the value of this research in developing a more cohesive and ecological model for use of audio feedback in the design of embedded interactions for children. The approach presented here takes the design of multi-modal feedback beyond being experiential, to one that supports learning and problem solving.

In this paper we discuss an adaptive museum guide prototype in which playfulness is a key design goal for the interaction experience. The interface for our prototype is a combined tangible user interface and audio display. We discuss how we determined the specific requirements for play through an ethnographic study and analysis based on ecological concepts of Bell and Nardi & O'Day. We found that we could consider play in two main forms in regard to the interface: content and physical play. We also found that play is highly contextual. Designers need to consider the situated nature of play for two reasons: 1) to best serve the overall design purpose; 2) in order to understand the nature and degree of play required. We augmented traditional user experience evaluation methods of questionnaires and interviews with observational analysis based on Djajadiningrat's descriptions of aesthetic interaction.

This paper describes an ambient intelligent prototype known as socio-ec(h)o. socio-ec(h)o explores the design and implementation of a system for sensing and display, user modeling, and interaction models based on a game structure. The game structure includes, word puzzles, levels, body states, goals and game skills. Body states are body movements and positions that players must discover in order to complete a level and in turn represent a learned game skill. The paper provides an overview of background concepts and related research. We describe the prototype and game structure, provide a technical description of the prototype and discuss technical issues related to sensing, reasoning and display. The paper contributes by providing a method for constructing group parameters from individual parameters with real-time motion capture data; and a model for mapping the trajectory of participant's actions in order to determine an intensity level used to manage the experience flow of the game and its representation in audio and visual display. We conclude with a discussion of known and outstanding technical issues, and future research.