This research explores the materialization of hormonally influenced sensations related to intimate health through interactive design. Drawing on critical menstruation studies, it reacts to how menstruation has been historically silenced, stigmatized, and framed as dysfunction, leading to disembodiment and emotional disconnection. We propose an introspection and translation of hormonal sensations into tangible, visible, and audible material expressions, namely that are, interactive felt-sensation pillows enhanced with embedded technologies such as heating elements, vibration modules, and sound. These multisensory artefacts externalize intimate experiences, encouraging selfreflection, and bodily awareness. By making the invisible perceptible, the project challenges dominant narratives of shame and introduces new ways of learning and relating to the hormonal body. This work contributes to the feminist design discourse by proposing a re-embodied, empowered approach to menstruation and hormonal life through material and sensory expression.

In HCI, material engagement is often conceptualised as an ongoing dialogue between designer and material. However, how such dialogues are situated in time remains underexplored, which is particularly relevant in educational contexts where time is a limited resource. This paper examines e-textile crafting processes through a temporal lens in a two-phase study: Phase I involved three exploratory workshops varying in duration, participants’ skills, and materials; Phase II comprised a synthesising workshop with 17 interaction design students. Our findings show how time constraints actively shape negotiations between skills and materials, and conclude by proposing three strategies for attending to temporality in dialogues with materials: (1) Navigating Temporal Flows, (2) Allying With Time Constraints, and (3) Attending to Pacing through Material Complexity. These strategies offer insights and strategies educators can adopt to embrace time constraints and integrate time-aware approaches when planning and facilitating e-textile workshops.

Recently, design research has embraced more-than-human perspectives to explore the complex entanglements of our world, decentering the human subject and eliminating dualistic thinking.Despite these advances, further progress is needed to develop a future that equally considers all beings.This paper examines the impact of body comportment on the design of embodied, interactive technologies.Drawing on Iris Marion Young's essay, we argue that the assumption of a universal body standard can lead to a disconnect between a person's intentions and their interactions with technology.We relate three modalities of body comportment-ambiguous transcendence, inhibited intentionality, and discontinuous unity-to embodied interaction.These modalities offer a perspective on how embodied being-in-the-world extends beyond physical capabilities, facilitating a pluralist view of the human body.We discuss the implications of Young's essay for research and design, reflecting on how the designer's own 'feminine existence' may influence the spatial scope of embodied interactions.

In this article, we locate and trace responsibility from a posthuman standpoint. We start by reviewing philosophical origins of responsibility and depict views of responsibility in HCI and Interaction Design. Arguing that prevalent notions of responsibility fall short in covering the complexity of realities that are not least a consequence of entanglements of humans with emerging technologies, we make use of posthumanist perspectives (in particular actor-network theory, agential realism and postphenomenology) to rethink where responsibilities sit or are enacted within hybrid assemblages of relations. Considering responsibility as "being done" within such assemblages allows to understand it as something fluid, rooted in relations rather than entities, and being temporally dispersed, responsibility starts within different milieus of innovation, is found in design practice as well as in use and appropriation. We discuss how the notion of doing responsibilities can serve different purposes, such as looking at how change is induced within an assemblage, and conclude by sketching methodological, theoretical, and designerly consequences.

Being together virtually has become an alternative for many people, who cannot meet physically. In relationships among grandparents and grandchildren, for instance, online meetings have become an appreciated means to connect when meeting face-to-face is not, or not often enough, an option. However, although a variety of technologies exist to do so, they rarely take into account the physical space that they are situated within, i.e., the physical surroundings of the conversation partners. In the work presented in this paper we experimented with bridging distant physical spaces in playful ways. We designed four instances of intergenerational online meetings, and explored their experiential qualities in a workshop with grandparents and grandchildren. We found that the surrounding space indeed provided rich opportunities to facilitate joint tangible activities and experiences rather than being an unnoticed background. In this work in progress, we discuss how these spaces might be considered heterotopia, which invite free play and immersing together in the activities alike, and which seem to be promising to be explored further.

Abstract This paper presents the results of a 5-month diary study into the practices and routines that develop around technological making in the home, particularly focused on the experiences of women, as they continue to be an underrepresented group in the maker community. In this study, we provided participants with an entry-level electronics making kit. Over the course of twenty weeks, the participants documented their making activities via photos, videos, text messages and taking part in interviews. By means of interpretative phenomenological analysis, we identified six core themes related to women’s experiences with technological making in the home. These experiences ranged from positive—feeling challenged, proud of accomplishments, inspired; to negative—feeling frustrated, guilty due to lack of progress or confused and overwhelmed. These experiences are discussed and contextualized by aspects related to hurdles experienced by the participants, and success factors that contribute to proactive engagement with making in the home. Research Highlights Twenty-week photo diary study and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Identification of six core themes based on empirical data on experiences with technological making in the home context. Discourse around thresholds to engage women in technological making and the maker community. Design and research directions to reduce barriers in technological making.

The body plays an important role in building and maintaining emotional relationships. When a loved one dies, it is inevitable that their body will decease, meaning that physical closeness can no longer be experienced. In this paper, we engage with material ways to extend experiences of physical and emotional nearness beyond death. We explore the design space of ‘bodily heirlooms’: crafted, precious, interactive objects designed to pass on bodily impressions beyond lifespan. We review cultural practices that intend to bequeath the body, and related work that addresses death, bereavement and digital heirlooms. After that, we describe the design and making process of three bodily heirlooms, reflections in and on action, and reactions of visitors who inspected the heirlooms during an exhibition. We conclude by discussing notions of heirlooms’ preciousness, the emotional bond between heirlooms and their maker and how the process can be understood as a feminist practice.

Grandparents and grandchildren, who cannot meet face-to-face (e.g., due to dislocation or physical distancing induced by a pandemic), often use audio-visual communication tools in order to maintain their relationship online. In a qualitative online survey (n = 85), we inquired into the various ways that grandparents and grandchildren came up with when being physically distant; many of them are tangible in nature as they include “things” or incorporate “spaces”. In this paper, we illustrate related temporal and spatial trajectories and unpack how online meetings are characterized by constant negotiations of agency. We discuss how online meetings could complement face-to-face meetings, instead of mimicking or replacing them. We finally articulate a collection of design sensitivities with the aim to both inspire and question designing for intergenerational online meetings.

Humans frequently discontinue to use certain technologies, services, or platforms: they deactivate accounts, block content, or find workarounds for un-using functionalities or devices. This is noticeable in contemporary trends, such as digital detox, where an entire market emerged to support users in discontinuing their use. In this essayistic paper, we reflect on a collection of examples where humans disengage with technology by applying Vardouli’s concept of ‘making use’ to the context of discontinued use. We propose making un-use as an epistemological perspective to ‘human-artefact engagements’; one that emphasises un-users as enactors of open-ended, temporarily evolving, and creative activities. We depict making un-use as transformational acts, and discuss epistemological and designerly consequences of making un-use to shed light on a not yet explored site of inquiry and a design space that is about to evolve: a design space for making and makers of un-use.

Living dislocated from family, friends or partners can result in negative emotions and a lack of physical, bodily closeness. We focus on materialising the negative consequences associated with living far apart in a textile form, and manifest those in two pairs of wearable artefacts: first, WARMTH, which simulates the bodily distance between remote people through a decrease in felt temperature, and second, BREATH, which embodies the bodily absence of a remote other through a decline in mechanical movement of textiles. The wearables are ‘discussion artefacts’ that enable conversation about, reflection on and exchange of personal, negative, vulnerable and challenging emotions connected to living far apart. The stance taken in this pictorial emphasises the necessity to focus not only on overcoming and bridging the distance between remote people through interactive artefacts; but also, to consider and manifest melancholic and possibly negative personal experiences.

This Pictorial discusses the outcomes of a distributed embodied ideation workshop. In this workshop, students of a Bachelor program on Management by Design explained their thesis by visualizing and externalizing the problem space using everyday objects. The use of objects to represent and understand complex design problems is well documented in the fields of Design and Human-Computer Interaction, but is often researched in collocated settings. What happens when the design tools used to externalize and represent complex design problems are everyday household objects, and the discussion happens in a distributed, asynchronous manner? How is shared meaning negotiated and established? In this Pictorial, we discuss six pictures that were taken of the visual representations that the students constructed, and reflect upon the distributed, asynchronous process that was employed to create, develop, and agree upon meaning.

Abstract In the past few years, the materials of which objects are made of have increasingly gained attention, particularly in relation to the design and usage of computational objects. Different kinds of materialities have been investigated, discussed, and attentively designed. In order to contribute knowledge on how the materiality of things influences how individuals experience (im-)material artefacts, this paper presents an inquiry into two independent debates on Twitter about whether or not consuming alternative material representations of books (audiobooks or ebooks) “count as” reading. Our findings indicate that experiential aspects of the material instantiations of books are of high relevance and that individuals show strong emotional and reflective responses about them. We discuss several aspects of materialized reading and conclude by detailing how the findings may influence (research on) the design of future books.

What is ‘open design’ and who gets to say what it is? In the emerging body of literature on open design, there is a clear alignment to the values and practices of free culture and open source software and hardware. Yet this same literature includes multiple, sometimes even contradictory strands of technology practice and research. These different perspectives can be traced back to free culture advocates from the 1970s to the 1990s who formulated the ideal of the internet as inherently empowering, democratizing, and countercultural. However, more recent approaches include feminist and critical interventions into hacking and making as well as corporate strategies of “open innovation” that bring end-users and consumers into the design process. What remains today seems to fall into two schools of thought. On one hand, we have the celebratory endorsements of ‘openness’ as applied to technology and design. On the other hand, we have a continuous and expanding critique of these very ideals and questions, where that critique identifies persisting forms of racial, gender, age, and class-based exclusions, and questions about the relationship between open design, labor and power remain largely unanswered.

In production environments, the number of distributed, networked, and automated systems has grown rapidly and is expected to continue to grow in the future. This affects humans' work fundamentally, in terms of their tasks and routines. Increasing automation and digitalization leads to a substantial change of human-machine interactions on the shop floor, raising the question about humans' role in highly automated environments. In this paper, we shed light on how work in increasingly automated and digitalized factories is experienced, drawing on interviews with operators and maintenance engineers from three different industrial contexts. By reflecting on actual and anticipated developments in smart production environments, we point out how workers will experience those contexts. We finally discuss resulting challenges and leverage points for smart factories, i.e., areas where HCI and CSCW can contribute to positively influence workers' experiences in times of increasing automation and digitalization.

Design fiction provides us with a variety of ways to explore potential interactive futures. In order to reflect on the future of workplaces, we created fictional job postings for the context of production facilities. This context is characterized by many constraints, which are often hard to overcome when envisioning the future of interactive practices in such environments. With the fictional job postings, we triggered discussions with stakeholders from a production site and with the public -- which both resulted in highly controversial debates. In this note, we present the evolution of an exemplary job posting and the reactions it evoked. We then discuss our learnings (e.g., that the degree of fiction is essential) and conclude by reflecting on how this instrument facilitates the exploration of prospective interactive practices at work.

Crafting interactive artifacts is typically associated with synthesizing, making, constructing, putting things together. In this paper, we discuss how these activities can be contrasted with de-synthesizing activities that revolve around decomposition, dissection, and taking things apart. Based on framings that emphasize how related practices are valuable in engineering processes, we aim to unlock the potential of de-constructive engagements with interactive technologies as a material driven (design) practice. We propose un-crafting as a framework of four modes of taking interactive artifacts apart (i.e., un-crafting for material exposition, material inspiration, material inquiry, and material exploration) aiming to pinpoint de-constructive episodes inherent to design processes, as well as to encourage the refinement of respective techniques and methods.

A variety of concepts in contemporary Human-Computer Interaction and Interaction Design (research) are labeled by adding attributes, such as "slow", "unaware" or "counterfunctional", to "technology", "object" or "thing". However, what do these labels disclose about a technology or an interaction? What are they supposed to express, what do they conceal? In order to identify labelling mechanisms in our (research) community, we describe five cases and analyze their labels, concepts, and intentions. Among others, we argue that the labels and the expressed aims or intentions do not always correspond and explore alternative ways to articulate and label design concepts or philosophies. We conclude by calling for Interaction Design labels that are based on careful reflections of conceptual histories, inscriptions, and intentions.

We present active corners, a novel interaction approach for in-car collaboration that maps the spatial arrangement of a car with up to four people (i.e., driver, front seat passenger, and two rear seat passengers) to the form factor of a tablet (i.e., having 4 corners). We use this mental model to allow the driver and passengers to collaborate with each other. Interaction is done by dragging-and-dropping items into the according corners of individual tablets. We present the basic interaction design concept along with three application scenarios. In order to evaluate active corners, we have implemented a multiplayer card game that exploits the proposed interaction concept and fosters collaboration. We report on four field studies in which we evaluated different aspects of the active corners concept. Results show that the interaction approach is intuitive and provides a high usability even in driving conditions.

During conversational practices, such as a tablet-mediated sales conversation between a salesperson and a customer, tablets are often used by two users who prefer specific bodily formations in order to easily face each other and the surface of the touchscreen. In a series of studies, we investigated bodily formations that are preferred during tablet-mediated sales conversations, and explored the effect of these formations on performance in acquiring touch targets (e.g., buttons) on a tablet device. We found that bodily formations cause decreased viewing angles to the shared screen, which results in a decreased performance in target acquisition. In order to address this issue, a multi-modal design consideration is presented, which combines mid-air finger movement and touch into a unified input modality, allowing the design of proximity sensitive touch targets. We conclude that the proposed embodied interaction design not only has potential to improve targeting performance, but also adapts the ``agency' of touch targets for multi-user settings.

This paper illustrates how workers in a semiconductor factory experience working together with industrial robots. Applying a narrative interview approach, we evoked reports on workers' personal experiences of working together with these robots. This specific approach enabled us to gain knowledge of how daily work with these robots is experienced, including workers' attitudes and inherent meanings regarding the robots. Following a thematic analysis approach, we analyzed the collected interview data and identified rivalry with the robots, adaption towards the robot's behavior, perceived reasonability and knowledge acquisition as salient aspects regarding human-robot interaction in the factory. Our findings indicate how human-robot cooperation can be improved in terms of enhancing workers' everyday experiences with robots, for example, by providing a feeling of control or emphasizing human competences.

Theories of how the human mind works have inspired but also constrained negatively and positively - interaction design. Today's interfaces can potentially take any (physical and digital) form. Therefore, there is a need to prevent users from learning necessities for every single interface. To address the issue, interaction designers increasingly constrain their design decisions based on their conceptions of users' capacities and skills that already exist and are based on prior interactions with the real world. These skills, such as hand-eye coordination, are essential for tangible interfaces, and directly relate to cognition. In this one-day workshop, we will discuss the role of theories of mind in contemporary human-computer interaction research, as those might provide us with a substantial understanding of cognition and human skills. The focus will be on embodied and situated theories and possible consequences of adopting an embodied and situated perspective on the design and analysis of tangible and embedded interaction.

In this work in progress, we present a set of seven design sensitivities, which address time in interaction design. We exemplarily illustrate how time affects and is affected by tangible, embodied, or embedded artifacts. Thereby, we discuss slow versus fast technology, time as context of use, time as theme, time as content, ephemerality, historicality, and chronology. Those design sensitivities are an initial step towards a framing of the different notions and aspects in regards to time in interaction design.

In a multi-step assessment of a corporate social media platform, which has been implemented in a large company for internal collaboration, we identified three major challenges regarding acceptance and adoption of the platform: (1) diverging perspectives & uncertain top-down communication, (2) functionality jungle & high usage complexity, and (3) lacking collaboration & customization. Based on these challenges, we discuss potential implications for design and implementation of corporate social media. The challenges and implications were derived from data gathered in two rounds of polling employees of the company, where we found that the surveyed employees tended to initially accept the internally implemented social media platform. Nevertheless, by assessing their attitude one and a half years later, we came to understand that the employees have rarely adopted the platform into their daily work practices. This finding led us to analyze in detail the qualitative data gathered along with the survey, as it holds valuable examples and explanations to better understand this phenomenon. Besides presenting the results of the surveys, this paper focuses on the discussion of challenges and implications for enhancing collaboration and supporting adoption processes of social media in workplaces.

In HCI, and especially in interaction design, the material aspect of interactions is currently emphasized. Nevertheless, it is challenging to theoretically frame the variety of digital or immaterial, and physical materials. In order to contribute to this materiality discourse, we reflect on McLuhan's work on media analysis and on Latour's Actor-Network Theory in this paper. Both emphasize the active role of the material - be it media or any other kind of non-human actors - in the interplay with the human. Thus, we establish junctures between their findings and materials, as used in interaction design in HCI. We discuss McLuhan's claim to focus on new sensory effects and ways of interaction brought forth by new media. Furthermore, we illustrate how describing the connections between materials, designers, and users in terms of Latour's Actor-Networks can be beneficial for interaction design. Finally, we discuss the respective methodology and its relation to research through design.

In this paper we report a user study to investigate the effect of semantic weight in a touch-based drag and drop task. The study was motivated by our own interest in exploring potential factors that influence touch behavior and supported by results in related neuroscience research. The question we intended to answer is: "Do people drag the representation of a smaller and lighter real world object (e.g. an apple) different than the representation of a heavier and larger real world object (e.g. a car)?". Participants were asked to perform a drag and drop task repeatedly on a tablet device. Dragged objects were the same physical size on screen, but represented real world objects that were either heavy and large or light and small. We studied two representation modalities (i.e. image and text). In both representation modalities, semantically heavier objects were dragged significantly faster than semantically lighter objects.

Online learning activities between grandparents and grandchildren are a promising solution for those, who live geographically separated or cannot meet face-to-face. Up to now, little is known about the characteristics these activities should have. In order to find out about the challenges that arise when designing an intergenerational online learning activity we analyzed children's preferences and needs, as well as those of grandparents. Investigating both perspectives ensures that the children benefit best from the activity itself and their grandparents' support. As the identified challenges mainly refer to the general set-up of learning activities, we also discuss a design concept illustrating how to meet the challenges.

The school context provides a fruitful and at the same challenging environment to get children engaged in creative development activities. Within this paper we highlight the opportunities and challenges when involving children in the design and development process of interactive technologies with a special focus on this educational context. A summary of the contributions to this IDC 2011 workshop is provided pointing out the main highlights from the position papers. We conclude by discussing future research challenges and opportunities when working with children in the school context.