There is an expanding vocabulary in academia addressing the struggles surrounding what constitutes knowledge in design research. However, most approaches overlook the role of researchers themselves, along with their lived experiences and theoretical commitments. Building on Redström’s work on design programs, we retell stories of our architectural education and practice as a constructed ‘we’ and suggest design sensibilities as a way of knowing that allows for a less aseptic approach to the epistemological assumptions in interaction design research. We portray sensibilities as a skin rather than a lens, and propose that design relies strongly on breaching the theory/practice divide as situated, poetic, positional, relational, and corporeal; while still constituting transferable and collective knowledge. We propose the articulation of sensibilities as intermediate level knowledge in order to account for a view of theory as the skin through which we shape and are shaped by our work.

Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) research is starting to engage with sustainability, yet the field remains tied to economic models that assume continual growth, rapid technological development, and market expansion. This economic growth orientation raises questions about whether HRI can genuinely support ecological responsibility, given the resource intensity of robotics research, production, and deployment. In this contribution, we introduce a post-growth perspective to reframe the relationship between robotics, sustainability, and society. We argue that rather than striving for `green growth' within existing economic structures, HRI should engage critically with concepts such as degrowth and post-capitalism. By shifting attention from growth to development, we invite the community to consider what robotic futures are worth pursuing and for whom.

Daily interactions with things are becoming increasingly virtual and hidden, tucked away in minimalist UI's or dependent on clear voice commands. Motivated by a love for physical interactions, this work uses keys, a mundane, everyday technology, as our object of study, identifying what is being ‘designed away’ in the process of digitalization. This is achieved through a collection of found objects, material samples, and design probes. We present a visual exhibition in pictorial format, where each piece represents material qualities of physical, interactive artefacts. We conclude by discussing how the embodied qualities of these artifacts can be extended to the broader landscape of everyday physical things. Our work contributes to the TEI community through both the tangible artifacts and the identified qualities for designing future physical, everyday, interactive things.

Feminist research highlights the urgent need to challenge the oppressive design of commercial intimate technologies, particularly how the FemTech industry restricts access to intimate bodily knowledge through paywalls and proprietary systems. Yet, for decades, women and marginalized communities have turned to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) or ‘hacking’ practices to reclaim control over their own gynecology and intimate health, addressing gaps often ignored by medical research and healthcare. Inspired by visual themes from these movements, this pictorial critically explores how designers and HCI researchers might advance DIY approaches to intimate technologies. We exemplify this with reflections from a series of workshops on handmade intimate sensors, and draw out the joyful potential of collaborative making—building alliances, destigmatizing intimate health, and using craft to subvert gender stereotypes. We discuss matters of safety when making together and contribute to ongoing work on building feminist makerspaces.

Designing technologies that clothe, adorn, or are otherwise placed on the body raises questions concerning the role they will play in dressing ourselves. We situate self-fashioning - or the process through which we stylise and present our bodies - as a complex practice where a series of social, material, and contextual factors shape how we present ourselves. Informed by reflective discussions and projective design tools, we contribute three critical points of departure for self-fashioning technologies: (i) Purposeful examining discomfort as an ongoing phenomenon, (ii) Supporting mimesis and visibility as qualities to be negotiated, and (iii) Envisioning the multiplicity of the body. We call for the design community to help devise fashionable technologies that are sensitive, caring, and responsive to the complexities of fashioning our bodies.

Movement-based design foregrounds the moving and sentient body, fostering holistic engagement with the surrounding physical, material, and sociospatial contexts. Over the years, this approach has yielded multiple methodologies, tools, and exemplars to support body-based ideation. In this studio, we explore tools that facilitate embodied thinking and the creative processes of designing with, through, and for the body. In particular, we focus on: i) embodied ideation tools, kits, and technology probes to prompt ideation; ii) sketching and other documentation techniques to materialize ephemeral embodied action during ideation. We will bring tools and techniques to engage with both aspects, and we will invite participants to bring their own, which can be physical or technological, low or high-fidelity. This hands-on studio will provide a space to collectively engage in embodied ideation and sketching; exploring, analysing, and engaging deeply with the available objects and methods. The studio will culminate in a rich set of visual material and an annotated portfolio, which will be shared with the broader community, fostering connections among designers interested in movement-based and tangible design.

Wherever there is light, there is shadow — an inevitable immaterial material, with an undeniable presence in interaction gestalt. Inspired by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s book In Praise of Shadows, we report on our journey towards building a sensibility and somaesthetic appreciation for shadows physically, metaphorically, and poetically. To investigate the idea of cultivating attentiveness to shadows, we embarked on a “dérive”-inspired adventure, gathering first-person perceptions and photographs of tables. We analysed these examples of tables and their shadows in order to inform the development of a project on interactive tables. Along with the artifact collection, we present a set of concepts, an initial prototype, and reflections on our own experience in developing this sensibility. We discuss shadows as a design material and an example of a design sensibility: a skill that can be sparked, fostered, and ultimately embedded.

Tables are a ubiquitous piece of furniture, a familiar sight in most environments from intimate to public. The dimensions of social interplay surrounding every single table are profoundly complex. In our project, we lift the importance of the neglected space under the table through the playful development of a tangible prototype. We approached this by a design remake of the Mediated Body: a wearable prototype encouraging touch between strangers using the conductivity of the skin. Instead, we leverage the familiarity of tables as a means to encourage playful explorations of bare-skin touch. We report in visual and textual form on the emerging design knowledge throughout our design process, including first-person narratives by the designers. We contribute with (1) a series of counterfactual table artifacts inspired by the Mediated Body; (2) a sequence of participant studies analysed through reflexive thematic analysis and summarised into the notion of “an odd invitation” as a new lens for homo explorens; and (3) an appeal to the importance of design remakes for research-through-design.

Travel is an integral part of our lives, whether for work or leisure. Since the advent of photography, we have documented our journeys, often sharing the images with friends and family to reflect upon the experience, tell stories, or invite commentary. We often lose ourselves in digital media – film, documentary and games – particularly during times when physical travel is unavailable. In this pictorial, we explore the travels of a single player through hundreds of games, presenting annotated game screenshots as photo-documentary through gamescapes, and as a form of the New Games Journalism. We present a New Games Travelogue traversing and formulating the psychogeography of games as imaginary places, and through this process, we unveil transdisciplinary tensions in negotiating and perceiving the importance of visual knowledge in games research, encouraging other researchers to join us in this practice.

There are current methodological and epistemological gaps and struggles between Human-Drone Interaction research and the field of design. We highlight five HDI design considerations and suggest a non-exhaustive list of design methods to approach them. We present an appeal to a more diverse and inclusive study of drones where current research can be balanced with a deeply qualitative and critical understanding of these flying robots through embracing design knowledge.

I have been interested for many years in technology and its impact in everyday moments, I had not yet had the chance to critically and systematically find a coherent and self-contained experience to focus on. In March 2021, I bought a digital pregnancy test for the first time, and an autoethnographic journey started. It was the first year of my PhD and I was expecting my third child. In this pictorial, I offer an illustrated and annotated portfolio of my pregnancy, from test to birth, with an emphasis on the technology entangled in the stories. Framed by Agential Realism, I identify the agential cuts in the illustrations. I conclude with an appeal for annotated portfolios of intra-actions, and for other HCI researchers to share their own socio-technical assemblages around fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth. I use my account of this process as a step towards making the intra-actions in pregnancy and childbirth a matter of care for the TEI community.

The spectrum of applications for social drones is broadening as they become an increasingly accessible technology. In order to expand on the immensely rich but poorly researched field of Human-Drone Interaction (HDI), we present a minimal, explorative, and anti-solutionist design. We describe the first steps of a Research through Design (RtD) project focused on the concept-driven exploration of an unlikely pairing: drones and breathing. We present Wisp, a micro-drone probe controlled by a user’s breath. Informed by experts on breathing, drawing inspiration from soma design, Wisp is described as platform for the development of defamiliarising views towards intimate somatic interactions between humans and drones. In this paper we describe the initial studies in a RtD development process, including expert interviews, prototyping, and informal evaluations. We contribute to the field of HDI with a design composite framework combining soma design and slow technology for exploratory somatic slow interactions between humans and drones.

The conversational nature of sketches is a widespread topic of research. Understanding drawing as a cognitive activity is commonly accepted, and many of the most extensively used methods within Human-Computer Interaction recruit sketching as a technique for ideation, explanation, documentation, and conversation. To further develop the use of this illustration process as a tool of knowledge production, we suggest a novel sketching method. We present Conversational Composites: a flexible method grounded in the material and tangible qualities of sketching in different forms and media, creating physical and digital layers of conversation between participants. We present and reflect on the proposed method through an applied case of a conversation between a PhD student and her supervisor, and offer suggestions on how it may be adapted and appropriated by other researchers in the HCI community.

I was not born a designer – sometime this identity shift must have happened. I was unaware of it, and if asked, I would still not know how to define a “designer”. Drawing and sketching are activities intrinsic to the design discipline, and are widely understood as tools for communication, documentation, or artefact-driven reasoning. But are they also essential to the understanding of design knowledge? Or a symptom of a designer's identity rather than a tool for “designerly ways of knowing”? During a week-long design workshop I dealt with difficulties making sense of a panoply of embodied design methods in the absence of a sketchbook. In this pictorial I describe my self-diagnosis as a sketch-bound designer, unable to digest abstract knowledge without holding a pen. I advocate for sketching as focusing, and a primary activity in design epistemology that needs no other than a first-person reason to be performed.

The word “robot” frequently conjures unrealistic expectations of utilitarian perfection: tireless, efficient and flawless agents. However, real-world robots are far from perfect—they fail and make mistakes. Thus, roboticists should consider altering their current assumptions and cultivating new perspectives that account for a more complete range of robot roles, behaviors, and interactions. To encourage this, we explore the use of metaphors for generating novel ideas and reframing existing problems, eliciting new perspectives of human-robot interaction. Our work makes two contributions. We (1) surface current assumptions that accompany the term “robots,” and (2) present a collection of alternative perspectives of interaction with robots through metaphors. By identifying assumptions, we provide a comprehensible list of aspects to reconsider regarding robots’ physicality, roles, and behaviors. Through metaphors, we propose new ways of examining how we can use, relate to, and co-exist with the robots that will share our future.

We introduce Azalea: a design to enrich remote dialog by diminishing externalities, created through a process informed by somaesthetics. Azalea is a tactile cushion that envelops a smartphone running a bespoke app. A pair of Azaleas mediate an embodied co-experience between remote interlocutors via a motion-driven soundscape and audio-driven visuals. While most designs for enriching remote communication increase dimensionality and fidelity of modalities, Azalea diminishes distractions and serves an abstract medium for co-experiencing embodied information. We present the theoretical foundations and design tactics of Azalea, and characterize the experience through a qualitative empirical study. Our findings culminated in 12 qualities, supporting 5 themes with design implications that contribute to (1) a design ethos of diminished reality and (2) an expansion of somaesthetic HCI towards expression and communication.

Human-drone interaction is a growing topic of interest within HCI research. Researchers propose many innovative concepts for drone applications, but much of this research does not incorporate knowledge on existing applications already adopted by professionals. This limits the validity of said research. To address this limitation, we present our findings from an in-depth interview study with 10 professional drone pilots. Our participants were armed with significant experience and qualifications – pertinent to both drone operations and a set of applications covering diverse industries. Our findings have resulted in design recommendations that should inform both ends and means of human-drone interaction research. These include, but are not limited to: safety-related protocols, insights from domain-specific use cases, and relevant practices outside of hands-on flight.