Design research and HCI increasingly explore techno-spirituality. We investigated Sufi practices of group zikr, a ritual practice of remembrance of God. We focus on zikr groups that offer online or hybrid participation. We conducted a qualitative study using interviews with practitioners and collaborative autoethnography as researchers/practitioners. Our findings surface themes of (i) shared spiritual energy, (ii) sensory experiences’ role in spiritual energy, (iii) impact of technological mediation on sensory and spiritual experiences, and the (iv) importance of community. Our discussion contributes design considerations for techno-spirituality around (1) attunement, (2) practical audiovisual suggestions, and (3) ‘sensational forms’. Overall, we offer detailed experiential accounts of entanglements of sensory perception, spirituality, and attunement, and present generative design reflections suggesting avenues of further design research in supporting religious, faith-based, and/or spiritual practices in HCI.

Public libraries in the U.S. and around the world are rapidly changing due to expanding technological and social needs of their communities. Furthermore, in recent years, public spaces, including libraries, have faced budgetary and other pressures, putting a strain on the resources available to librarians. As such, public libraries are a compelling cite for uncovering socio-technical entanglements between government services, technology use, public space, and civic participation. In this paper, we report on a qualitative study of librarians in a U.S. urban public library system undergoing substantial renovations and transformations. We frame the work of librarians as a range of infrastructuring practices, which help uncover insights about the socio-material and political conditions of public service in libraries. Using the metaphor of cracking public space open, we contribute a set of design provocations to support an increasingly complex work of public librarians.

Design futuring approaches, such as speculative design, design fiction and others, seek to (re)envision futures and explore alternatives. As design futuring becomes established in HCI design research, there is an opportunity to expand and develop these approaches. To that end, by reflecting on our own research and examining related work, we contribute five modes of reflection. These modes concern formgiving, temporality, researcher positionality, real-world engagement, and knowledge production. We illustrate the value of each mode through careful analysis of selected design exemplars and provide questions to interrogate the practice of design futuring. Each reflective mode offers productive resources for design practitioners and researchers to articulate their work, generate new directions for their work, and analyze their own and others' work.

Smart home technologies are beginning to become more widespread and common, even as their deployment and implementation remain complex and spread across different competing commercial ecosystems. Looking beyond the middle-class, single-family home often at the center of the smart home narrative, we report on a series of participatory design workshops held with residents and building managers to better understand the role of smart home technologies in the context of public housing in the U.S. The design workshops enabled us to gather insight into the specific challenges and opportunities of deploying smart home technologies in a setting where issues of privacy, data collection and ownership, and autonomy collide with diverse living arrangements, where income, age, and the consequences of monitoring and data aggregation setup an expanding collection of design implications in the ecosystems of smart home technologies.