We share a speculative fabulation that imagines alternative relations to an increasingly polluted landscape, drawing from environmental illness narratives. The fabulation is brought to life through Ray-Flats, shoes that glow in proximity to toxic sites listed in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s publicly available database, and an accompanying navigational guide. The storied designs seek to make the extent of chemical pollution in our everyday landscapes perceptible while foregrounding environmental illness experiences as a resource for living in and navigating a toxic world. Bringing together crip and posthuman perspectives, we contribute: 1) an example of designing to stay with environmental precarity, 2) the concept of “felt space" for making diffuse and ongoing environmental problems affectively perceptible through embodied interaction design, and 3) critical reflections on using fabulations with material speculations to foreground marginal perspectives in design.

Craft has a long history of being an embodied and tangible way to explore various forms of data in HCI and design. In this paper, I trace the impetus and process of hand embroidering seven GIS-generated maps over the course of 18 months. The maps represent a seven-day autoethnographic bike tour down the Mississippi River to explore more-than-human entanglements with a large river. Through vignettes on making the maps, I offer critical reflection on Cartesian representations of rivers using GIS and GPS data, and the epistemological possibilities of embroidery practice for understanding data and More-than-Human (MTH) entanglements. The work ultimately reflects on reflective embroidery as a feminist epistemology, which reframes conceptual norms around technical objects like data and Cartesian representations, toward MTH readings and temporalities.

Entangled Histories Radio is a tangible interface that investigates the connection between local ecologies and the voices of the American Civil Rights Movement. The system senses real-time ecological data from the base of a tree and maps these inputs onto a curated archive of speeches and music from the movement. These sounds are played through a speculative object: a vintage radio. We position the urban forest as a "living archive" that interlocks with a historical human archive. In doing so, we explore how tangible, embodied experiences can bridge environmental and civil rights justice. This work-in-progress contributes a speculative approach for designing with living archives and offers a material response to critiques that more-than-human (MTH) design can overlook layered socio-political issues if not carefully attended to.

The more-than-human turn in HCI has explored entanglements with non-human others that include animals, plants, and technologies. Building on this agenda, this work constructs more-than-human (MTH) entanglements through the lens of queer non-binary, human/non-human entanglements of land and body. By fabulating an autofiction (fiction based on personal experience) titled Bog Girl – this work explores the way non-binary lands of wetlands, and non-binary bodies, share similar experiences of being cut (literally and metaphorically) by bifurcating logics in medical and agricultural settings. However, these experiences allow for new human/land animations, entanglements, grieving, and healing, ultimately, imagining non-binary grounds for design. The work contributes 1) new considerations of the generative and designerly potential storytelling and fiction in more-than-human research 2) queer embodied approaches to MTH work in HCI 3) and discuss non-binary ethics for MTH design that imagine pluriversal bodily consent and paths to entangled healing.

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.

Craft has a long history of being an embodied and tangible way to explore various forms of data in HCI and design. In this art project, will showcase seven hand embroidered, GIS- and GPS-generated maps which I made over the course of 18 months. These maps are supplemented with a zine-like CD where soundscapes correspond to each map. The maps represent the paths I took over seven days of an autoethnographic bike tour down the Mississippi River. The trip was designed to offer an embodied way to meet with the Mississippi River's posthuman character and explore how the history of floods and land use shape futures with climate change. Translating this experience into embroidered maps led to embodied and closeup views of GIS map layers and lived experience of GPS data via textile and soundscape.

While decentering the human has been a key approach in posthumanist HCI, there are still questions and tensions around it.To address them, we outline emergent notions of decentering, tracing it back from HCI to critical posthumanism and connecting epistemological developments in the humanities to design scholarship.Then, reviewing how decentering is understood and practiced in HCI, we distill five emerging dimensions for articulating more-thanhuman practices.We conclude by unpacking "decentering through design" as an ongoing material practice through which more-than-human designers not only materialize (apply) posthuman theory but also "make" posthuman knowledge in their own unique ways.

We introduce the concept of disorientation as an emerging critical methodological strategy for design research in HCI. Disorientation is a phenomenological concept developed by queer feminist theorist Sarah Ahmed that acknowledges the spatio-embodied ‘orientations’ of societal and cultural norms and the queering potential of ‘disorientations’. We use humanistic close reading to analyze three examples from queer, feminist, and more-than-human work in HCI. Our interpretation focuses on how HCI researchers utilize disorientation as a methodological strategy for questioning norms of technologies as well as generatively, toward alternatives. We discuss the tenets of disorientation and several tactics we saw emerge in practice for other practitioners to build upon. Finally, we reflect on implications for the field, as disorientation requires vulnerability and willingness to undergo change, acknowledges embodied knowledge that emerges before interpretation, and suggests the possibility of generative and alternative orientations stemming from those epistemological commitments.

HCI research applies ethnographic methods to understand and represent practices that involve the use of interactive systems. A subdomain of this work is interpretivist ethnography, which positions the researcher's perspectival view [37] as central to ethnographic research and its epistemic contribution. Given this we ask: How might ethnographic researchers in HCI surface the meaning-making role of their subjectivities in research? We reflect on our prior ethnographic fieldwork on small-scale sustainable farms in Indianapolis, Indiana to bring the ethnographic “I” into focus by articulating our reflections as “impressionist tales'' [64:101-124]. We ground this pursuit in sociologist Andrea Doucet's concept of “gossamer walls” to surface researcher's three reflexive relationships 1) with herself; 2) with participants; and 3) with her epistemic communities [34]. We build on and contribute to postmodern ethnography in HCI to clarify the epistemic virtues and methodological best practices of a more unapologetically subjective ethnographic practice in HCI.

Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Tatiana Chakravorti, Vipul Gupta, Heidi Biggs, Mukund Srinath, Koustava Goswami, Sarah Rajtmajer, Shomir Wilson. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

In this paper, we examine how an under-studied group in HCI, rural queer farmers, use the social media platform TikTok to perform rural queer utopias. Queer utopia, coined by queer theorist Jose Muñoz, is a way of using queer aesthetics and performance to expose heterosexual norms and imagine worlds of hopeful queer alternatives. Through close reading and interpretation of TikTok, we examine content made by rural queer farmers on TikTok and ask how it enacts queer utopias. We show these farmers perform queer identity in rural farming spaces which subverts stereotypes of both who is queer and who can farm, and their videos also enact queer political utopias by connecting farming to social justice and radical sustainability. We explore how TikTok offers a sociotechnical stage where queer rural farmers can perform queer utopias in ways that celebrate creative and generative uses of platforms by queer folks.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are widely deployed in smartphone photography; and prompt-based image synthesis models have rapidly become commonplace. In this paper, we describe a Research-through-Design (RtD) project which explores this shift in the means and modes of image production via the creation and use of the Entoptic Field Camera. Entoptic phenomena usually refer to perceptions of floaters or bright blue dots stemming from the physiological interplay of the eye and brain. We use the term entoptic as a metaphor to investigate how the material interplay of data and models in AI technologies shapes human experiences of reality. Through our case study using first-person design and a field study, we offer implications for critical, reflective, more-than-human and ludic design to engage AI technologies; the conceptualisation of an RtD research space which contributes to AI literacy discourses; and outline a research trajectory concerning materiality and design affordances of AI technologies.

We ask how historic redlining, a US government run, racially discriminatory practice of assessing and mapping property values for federally subsidized home loan eligibility in the 1930s, is tied to current issues of sustainability. We frame redlining as a historic data practice, tied to ongoing exposure to environmental harms and difficulty building generational wealth in African American communities in Indianapolis. To address this, we made maps to ground interdisciplinary discourse between the authors: two who research sustainable human computer interaction (SHCI) and one who researches sustainable food systems, including issues of food security. Our maps, which combine historical redlining maps and contemporary sustainability issues facing Indianapolis, helped us explore the ongoing impacts of redlining across our disciplines. We develop the term ‘sustainability’ for HCI across racial, socioeconomic, and environmental tensions and reflect on how SHCI's emerging posthuman emphasis on human/non-human relations are associated with human/human challenges like redlining.

Animated GIFs are often viewed as a nod to early internet culture or as tools for digital communication, but in this pictorial, we highlight a new use of GIFs, as tools for design research. We walk through four case studies from our own research that exemplify GIFs used throughout the design process as empirical probes, prototypes, communication tools, and finalized artifacts. By conducting a collaborative, reflexive analysis of these cases, we present an annotated portfolio of the goals, crafting and aesthetic choices of our GIFs and how creating GIFs added to our research. We conclude by noting that both the aesthetics of movement and the rich, concise, and contextualized nature of gifs added to our depth of thinking and ability to communicate speculative and imaginative concepts. Finally, we also suggest that research dissemination, especially for design research, would be enriched by supporting more diverse knowledge-production artifacts such as GIFs.

In recent years, Sustainable HCI researchers have begun to investigate “noticing” as a design research method useful in efforts to decenter the human in design. Through an autoethnographic bird watching practice combining field observation, journaling, and making practices, we examine how noticing affects us and our way of relating to birds. We found that bird watching surfaces a feeling of abjection, or a simultaneous repulsion and fascination with a part of oneself one rejects in pursuit of personal growth. Along the way, we honed a practice of attunement through deep listening and field recording, which enabled immersive "ecological" experiences. We offer (1) an account of our method and process, (2) the framework of abjection as an approach to designing amongst the complexity of human/non-human interaction, and (3) reflections on how to design for ecological thinking in the push towards a posthuman design.

In this paper, we use fiction as a method to complicate the commonplace narratives of data as intangible and objective, in the particular context of Internet of Things (IoT) in the home. We, a team of two design researchers, partnered with a fiction writer and a single IoT enthusiast, Susan, to create The Data Epics: four short stories based on Susan's monthly home IoT data logs. The Data Epics revealed new imaginaries for data, showing new world-views and lively data, but also surfaced data's entanglement in meshes and hierarchies, and concerns about control and power. Our work also examines the labor of tending to and interpreting data and a particular interest in anomalies. We conclude with discussions of how data imaginaries from fiction might be imperfect, but are uniquely generative, offering a path to get closer to IoT data by trying things on and zooming in and slowing down.

Sustainable HCI (SHCI) researchers have historically looked to small and urban farmers to help situate and extend notions of sustainability within economic, social, and political frameworks. In the face of climate change and the Anthropocene, however, we ask how designing like the alternative farming practices of small and urban farmers might open up new, ecological approaches to agricultural technology. We conducted ethnographic field work with small farmers and their community in Indiana and show how they are challenging "agrilogistics," defined by philosopher Timothy Morton as a strict separation of nature and culture in food production, a separation, he argues, which underlies the substantial agricultural contributions to climate change. Our ethnography led us to suggest new possibilities for design of agricultural technology that support ecological thinking and caring for more-than-human actors through visceral imaginaries, posthuman storytelling, and engaging curiosity, possibilities which may offer ways to disentangle agricultural technology from agrilogistic paradigms.?

In this pictorial, we show and discuss the prototyping process we undertook to craft the High Water Pants, a mechatronic pair of pants that make climate change tangible for everyday cyclists. We position the pants as an example of embodied speculation and discuss how our prototyping methods helped us craft a speculative artifact that bridged the gap between the embodied experience of cycling and speculative futures with climate change. The pictorial contributes an accounting of our prototyping methods and how they strove to connect the dual contexts of (1) how the pants felt in the present, and (2) how that in-situ feeling reflected climate change data in order to create space for cyclists' embodied speculation about possible futures with climate change.

In this paper, we present the High Water Pants: speculative wearable technology which makes climate change tangible for everyday cyclists. The pants work by mechanically shortening when a cyclist wearing the pants enters an area of Seattle, USA, which is projected to be impacted by sea-level rise in 30-80 years. This interaction 'bends time' by allowing cyclists to feel future climate change data in the present. First, we discuss the research through design process of creating the High Water Pants including foundational research, a description of the design concept and results of a preliminary study with the pants. Second, we discuss three implications of the pants for human-computer interaction (HCI): (1) they offer the concept of a 'present/future' paradigm for embodied speculation, (2) our research process demonstrates how to successfully involve more-than-human perspectives, and (3) we articulate how the High Water Pants respond to shifts in HCI's framing of sustainability.

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for the home are gaining in popularity, generating exponential data byproducts. Yet, everyday relationships between home dwellers and domestic IoT data often remain secondary interactions, preventing deeper understanding and awareness of data tracked in the home. Our paper offers a design ethnography and design inquiry which examine these human-data entanglements. Findings from working with 10 inhabitants who interact with their IoT data illustrate five characteristics of current data encounters: manifesting, inquiring, exposing, repositioning, and broadening. In response, we used speculative sketches to refine, refract and complicate these encounters. We argue that data do not have to be laborious, tidy or the byproduct of a service, but rather lively and affecting. We further suggest new modes of engagement with data which expand or step away from self-improvement and reflection: through diverse acts of noticing, by allowing data to remain invisible, and by embracing imaginative practices.

We present Bespoke Booklets: a design research method utilizing booklets of situated, imaginary, and personalized conceptual sketches to co-speculatively envision alternative futures (in our case for domestic Internet of Things). The Bespoke Booklets create a space where designers and participants can co-imagine alternative futures while also engaging each other at the level of embodied experiences. After refining our method, we discovered it had many qualities previously championed by feminist HCI and STS theorists. To this end, we draw out, analyze, and critique our method using feminist concepts as a lens to emphasize four specific qualities: collaborative, post-functional, situated, and partial. We found that the booklets, as material artifacts, were a productive tool to generate a physical record of our co-speculation and a fruitful catalyst for research that reflects feminist theory, offering an example of how it can be used as a heuristic for design methodologies.