“More than 90% of global new settlement needs are unmet” according to UNHCR. Among those displaced are refugees and asylum seekers—seeking new life and opportunities in Australia. Despite challenges in reassimilating into foreign society, some strive to become successful entrepreneurs. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 such refugee and asylum seeker-entrepreneurs in Australia; documenting and mapping their journeys. This pictorial presents a novel annotation tool to present (1) the supporting role of organizations, community, and family in facilitating entrepreneurial success; and (2) the role of digital platforms in self-learning, professional skill development and, achieving business goals. The main contributions of this pictorial highlight emergent strategies that demonstrate the resilience of refugee and asylum seeker entrepreneurs overcoming and navigating extraordinary circumstances. We present a novel analytic mapping tool for researchers and designers to reformat, visualize, and analyse complex participant journeys.

Household energy use data may contain sensitive inferences into family life, yet its potential for surveillance is imperfectly understood. To explore this space, we developed Household Wattch, a speculative eco-feedback ‘provotype’ that profiles households according to their energy use data. Evaluated by 16 participants from Australian households engaged in an 18-month energy use monitoring trial, Household Wattch elicited users’ perceptions and expectations about a near future where energy use data is a useful yet potentially sensitive commodity when analysed. We highlight challenges and opportunities for energy use data across three scales: (1) Within the household, (2) Beyond the household (e.g., sharing energy data with third parties) and (3) Post-household (e.g., what happens to energy data when a household re-configures or disbands). Findings suggest users may require support in understanding the sensitivities of their energy use data, particularly when deciding whether to share it with third parties. Opportunities exist for accidental or deliberate surveillance via energy use data, and these need to be identified and managed. Provotypes represent a useful tool for navigating this space, and we provide considerations for how they can support users in speculating over possible energy futures.

Technology is becoming increasingly embedded within our material worlds, resulting in an exponential rise in the production and consumption of consumer electronics. Rapid innovations in technological systems reduce technology lifecycles, deprecating digital systems, rendering devices obsolete or incompatible with supporting infrastructure, resulting in the generation of electronic waste (e-waste). Sustainable unmaking practices are a promising avenue for harnessing and repurposing resources used in technology production, enabling us to move closer towards sustainable technology design. This paper presents an applied study investigating the pragmatics of sustainable unmaking, reporting on 12 semi-structured interviews conducted with domain experts engaged in unmaking with e-waste across diverse contexts in the consumer technology lifecycle. We present folk strategies — from rich first-hand accounts, revealing real, vivid, and current perspectives, as well as motivations, passions, and frustrations, of engaging with unmaking e-waste. These strategies inform five declarations as actionable provocations for unmaking in the HCI and design communities.

As participatory design approaches proliferate into mainstream industry practice, it becomes important for designers to consider how design tools, methods and practices can be made more accessible for non-designers — fostering participatory mindsets. We explore how materiality and familiarity of design tools impact participation, by investigating an off-the-shelf, familiar material — the Rubik's Cube, for application possibilities as an unconventional design tool. We report on a series of workshops with design practitioners and educators, that find disassociating design methods from traditional materials, opens new possibilities for methodological innovations, while revealing promising avenues to improve participation. We categorise findings into three themes: material properties, staging considerations, and emergent practices. This is supplemented by two Illustrative examples of emergent applications of using Rubik's Cubes to augment (1) de Bono's random input method; and (2) creating dynamic persona states. The emergent applications present new material possibilities enabling design methods to innovate and evolve.

Maker culture and DIY practices are central to democratizing the design of technology; enabling non-designers (future end-users) to actively participate in the design process. However, little is known about how individuals from under-resourced communities and low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds, can practically leverage maker practices to design technology, creating value for themselves or their communities. To investigate this, we collaborated with an e-waste recycling centre, involving 24 participants (staff and low-SES volunteers) in two participatory maker workshop activities. Participants were provided with a generative e-waste toolkit, through which they repurposed e-waste materials and developed novel technology prototypes that created value from their perspectives and agendas. Our findings unpack three factors that influenced their making: balancing personal and community needs; incorporating convenience and productivity; and re-thinking sustainability and connection; and discuss strategies for scaffolding participation and engagement of under-resourced communities in making using an e-waste generative toolkit to democratize technology design.

Although Augmented Reality (AR) has become increasingly common, the design of AR interfaces has predominantly relied on importing traditional 2D digital GUI interface elements. These do not always translate successfully to novel, three-dimensional, AR interfaces. To understand how users develop a folk understanding of AR interfaces, we conducted six workshops with participants to investigate their initial interactions with off-the-shelf puzzle interfaces, across three modes: tangible, handheld tablet, and head-mounted display (HMD) AR systems. We captured multiple points-of-view video data and co-analyzed it with participants. Our study (1) presents a catalogue of interactional gestures across the three modes; (2) highlights how errors are perceived as features in AR systems; (3) analyzes the evolution of gestures; and (4) identifies implications of occlusion and spatial judgement errors.

The global education landscape continues to be disrupted by COVID-19. The unique circumstances created by this crisis has led to unexpected opportunities to leverage innovative uses of technologies that can radically innovate education service delivery. We map out the context of Pakistan – a country where challenges pertaining to both access to education and quality learning predate the pandemic. A context largely under explored in design and HCI research. This paper presents insights from conversations with 21 stakeholders across 15 design activities, that were structured around speculative design proposals to collaboratively envision the future of education in Pakistan. The paper offers directions for the design of EdTech through a plural, and culturally rooted speculative discussion, highlighting (1) opportunities and considerations for localising design for education, and (2) reframing the value of education in Pakistan.

Smart energy technologies provide new opportunities for network demand management, while generating data that can provide inference into household activities and which is increasingly valuable for user profiling and targeted marketing. This paper explores the human values implicated by smart energy technologies as energy consumption emerges as a potentially sensitive and attributable data trail. Using a values-based approach involving semi-structured interviews with 39 Australians, we use speculative design to engage participants with the implications of high frequency household energy data and understand users’ values and attitudes towards curtailment, surveillance, accountability and consent. The principal contributions are (1) a nuanced understanding of user values around privacy, responsibility, trust, collectivism and curtailment in relation to interpersonal household energy use data and considerations for speculative designs in this space, and (2) reflections on the design of mechanisms for consumer participation in demand response for energy networks.

Mainstream communication technology today enables us to connect with loved ones across long distances. However, even with the proliferation of easy-to-use technology, there are reports on increasing loneliness and isolation amongst people. The technologies that enable these interactions are not necessarily designed to support meaningful emotional communication for users in long-distance relationships (LDRs). Furthermore, there is a lack of participatory tools that are designed with the focus of supporting end-user involvement in the design of LDR communication systems. We developed the Flexi Card Game (FCG), a card-based generative design toolkit to support designers and non-designers within participatory structures that can help develop unconventional communication systems to support LDRs. The FCG was developed using an iterative design process, involving end-users, designers, and researchers across five workshops with 56 participants. The paper makes three main contributions: (1) presents FCG—the novel card-based design toolkit itself, (2) describes the process of developing an LDR framework into a participatory toolkit, and (3) offers lessons and insights that can help researchers who are developing participatory tools in similar contexts.

Data collection from users' interactions with ubiquitous computing is a wicked problem for design. Despite legislation increasingly requiring "informed" consent, the apathy born from a constant bombardment of consent notifications means many users remain largely uninformed about the collection, manipulation and dissemination of their personal information. We explore existing semiotics as signposts that inform individual decisions, and report from a design activity where participants mapped out their daily personal data trails. Using these as inspiration we explore how to engage users with new or emergent data trails. This pictorial provides a visual argument for (1) engaging users with whole data trails, which may yield greater benefit than the optimisation of individual notifications, and (2) how a whole data trail perspective may be valuable in the development of semiotic conventions for acquainting users with emergent (future) data trails.

The role of design in organizations has risen in prominence since the turn of the century. Our collective understanding of this role, identification of designerly practices, and ability to trace their value and influence within an organizational landscape however remains problematic. Both industry and academia have made distinct efforts to study design in practice, acknowledging the importance of the value of design as a competitive instrument but with little agreement on how it is understood, communicated and operationalised. This paper takes a pragmatic orientation, exploring the contemporary challenges design practitioners face in terms of documenting, accounting for and communicating the value of designerly work. We adopt a bottom-up approach, conducting 11 semi-structured interviews with design practitioners, to study how practitioners in situ negotiate the design-value space. Our findings present design value communication strategies, how design knowledge is consumed, what documentation practices are used, and the organizational challenges encountered.

In this demo paper, we present the Flexi Card Game – a card-based generative design toolkit to support designers and non-designers with different backgrounds in participatory structures in the development of unconventional communication systems, with a particular focus on supporting couples in long-distance relationships.

This paper explores methodological considerations of using constructive assemblies as a participatory design tool in order to explore new conceptual and material possibilities in saturated product categories. Constructive assemblies are tangible, reconfigurable, modular physical sets that can be combined in multiple different ways. They are valuable as collaborative tools on account of how they facilitate social inclusion by having a low skill barrier to participation. They are also valuable as generative tools, as users are able to quickly build complex constructions with the constituent components in different configurations. In this paper, we present a study in which a series of eight Participatory Design (PD) workshops were conducted with these assemblies, in which stakeholders explored possibilities for re-designing the everyday use of soap. Participants were drawn from the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry and everyday soap users, and the workshops took three different configurations: video-conference and shared location, video conference and distributed location, and physical workshop and shared location. Our analysis highlights the consequentiality of the materiality of the assembly, the interplay between the specific workshop tasks, their setup and the physical constraints of the toolset, and emergent social behaviour from the experiments. We discuss these findings in relation to existing frameworks

This paper explores the connection established between people and their surrounding environment as depicted in the popular science fiction concept "Cerebro" from Marvel's The X-Men series. This is done through the development of The Sixth Sense, a wearable device that augments the sensory perception of human beings by manifesting the intangible concept of poverty in one's environment into a physical experience. The concept is designed to incite awareness and reflection in the wearer through dimensions of social justice-oriented and adversarial design. The Sixth Sense, situated within critical design, proposes that social injustices should be felt by all those who inhabit a space until the systems of oppression operating within that space are subverted.