Seemingly simple smart home sensor data, such as temperature or humidity, can lead to conflicts between involved stakeholders, such as users, their partners, or landlords. To understand potential mitigation strategies in product design, we conducted seven scenario-based workshops with 38 tech practitioners and academics. We asked them to prototype smart home device packages that showcase how conflicts caused by simple sensor data could be minimized in product design. The strategies they employed are: 1) reducing data granularity on the visual layer; 2) minimizing data storage; 3) offering more sensor data explainability; 4) increasing trust through strict data regulations. We contribute applicable design strategies for mitigating tensions for simple sensor systems developed by tech experts illustrated with examples.

Smart homes are often dominated by workplace values such as productivity and efficiency, despite design research efforts. Inspired by Exquisite Corpse and the children's Telephone Game (Flüsterpost), Flüsterfutures expands smart home design imaginaries through co-design and speculative design. Linearly, we document this design process: 1) members of the public created smart home visions using the Tiles IoT Toolkit; 2) speculative designers re-interpreted these into artifacts defined by productive mismatches, friction, and ambiguity; and 3) a writer and an artist synthesized the resulting discussions into stories and visuals. Layered atop this documentation, we I) analyze how misunderstandings enhance the initial visions and unpack the promise of technology; II) reflect on the collective struggle of speculative co-design to initiate actual change; and III) pro-pose what future researchers may learn from this to create more actionable interfaces between speculation and the real world, particularly for the age of generative design.

This series of photographic vignettes shows multiple instances of more-than-human, mapping out the diversity of approaches in this emergent field. More-than-human means embracing entangled, relational agencies and emphasizing pluralistic, situated, and non-anthropocentric ways of being in the world. Using a method of walking interviews, I invited researchers from diverse contexts to show me their more-than-human. This pictorial contributes a deliberately diverse inventory of encountering frontiers and boundaries; entities that are hidden, forbidden, spark curiosity; noticing kinship and hybrids: For becoming together in relational entanglements, to spark reflection and debate on what »more-than-human design« may be.

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.

Self-tracking has the potential to help users gain self-knowledge and achieve goals, yet the rigidity of many personal informatics (PI) systems limits users' autonomy in defining personal tracking scenarios. This can lead to imposing normative views or reinforcing existing inequalities. To address these concerns, design scholars have suggested more open-ended solutions, but the operationalization of open-endedness in sensor-based tracking is still underexplored. This pictorial illustrates our research-through-design process, exploring the design space between closed-ended and open-ended sensor-designs. We contribute 1) a triadic framework of our conceptualisation of open-endedness in sensor-based PI systems, 2) insights from users interacting with 28 paper sensor prototypes to track aspects of collaboration, 3) design exemplars illustrating how designers could open-up closed-ended self-tracking designs or add guidance in open-ended ones. This more nuanced view could eventually support users in appropriating self-tracking technologies and reduce some of the negative societal implications brought by PI systems.

Soft toys foster strong and enduring early childhood attachments, with positive effects extending into adulthood. Smart toys are vulnerable to exploits and can harm users. Bridging this contrast, pairs of smart objects, equipped with only simple sensors and actuators, may support peripheral and emotional awareness. At the same time, how exactly such pairs should negotiate the soft/smart spectrum to yield positive long-term impacts for people connecting through them is a design challenge. We engage this with the Wheel of Plush co-design toolkit. It enables 8x8 different sensor-actuator combinations in plush for co-designers to explore multimodal interactions for smart soft toy pairs connected over distance. We detail our design process and offer insights on designing a toolkit that combines artisanal plush material with simple sensors and actuators. With the Wheel of Plush, we contribute a toolkit for exploring smart soft toy materiality, data-frugal multimodal interaction, and opportunities for smart soft toy pair co-design.

Sound is a preferred and dominant medium that people with blindness use to capture, share and reflect on meaningful moments in their lives. Within the timeframe of 12 months, we worked with seven people with blindness and two of their sighted loved ones to engage in a multi-stage co-creative design process involving multiple steps building toward the final co-design workshop. We report three types of sonic mementos, designed together with the participants, that Encapsulate, Augment and Re-imagine personal audio recordings into more interesting and meaningful sonic memories. Building on these sonic mementos, we critically reflect and describe insights into designing sound that supports personal and social experiences of reminiscence for people with blindness through sound. We propose design opportunities to promote collective remembering between people with blindness and their sighted loved ones and design recommendations for remembering through sound.

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.

An ongoing mystery of HCI is how do well-intentioned designers consistently enable products with unintentionally evil consequences. Using “questionable values” as a lens, we retell and analyze four design scenarios for smart homes that were created by participants with an IoT toolkit we designed. The selected design scenarios reveal practices that violate principles of responsible smart home design. Through our analysis we show (1) how participants explore sensor-driven objectification of the home then leverage data for surveillance, nudging, and control over others; (2) how the dominant technosolutionist narratives of efficiency and productivity ground such questionable values; (3) and how the materiality of mass-produced sensors pre-mediates questionable design scenarios. We discuss how to attend to and utilize questionable values in design: Making space for questionable values will empower design researchers to better “look around corners”, anticipating tomorrow's concerns and forestalling the worst of their harms.

Participatory design means building reciprocal relationships with research participants and opening up conversations with larger communities. We describe and reflect on our design-led research of creating an hour-long audio documentary. Participants’ desires to better understand the experiences of others within our study is our key motivation. We see the creation of the documentary as an important reciprocal step to invite further participation within a longer-term, multi-year project. Rooted in a decolonial perspective on translating academic knowledge to the general public, our work builds on our own prior fieldwork with 9 people with blindness on their reminiscence experiences. The audio documentary aims to deliver insights from research findings and inquiries, inspired by participants' stories through their voices in the interview recordings. The documentary serves as a gift for participation and a genuine invitation for future research. We conclude with opportunities for future HCI research and practice.

Co-design methods and toolkits are commonly used to involve people from diverse backgrounds and disciplines in design processes, promoting collaboration, design thinking, shared decision making, and creativity. These methods and toolkits are generally tailored to in-person workshops supported by different physical artifacts (e.g. card-sets) in a shared physical location. Physical co-location and artifacts allow participants to interact in seamless ways, relying on everyday modalities of interaction. The CoViD-19 pandemic has forced many of such workshops online. This required transforming location, methods, toolkits and to rethink interaction among participants. With this workshop we aim to look back at these experiences of transformation and to reflect on the affordances of the physical and the virtual in co-design workshops. What are the challenges of transforming location, methods, and toolkits that are designed for in-person workshops into the digital? In which ways can in-person and virtual workshops co-exist and complement each other? We invite participants to share their experiences and reflect on how to bring together virtual and in-person co-design workshops.

Design research is important for understanding and interrogating how emerging technologies shape human experience. However, design research with Machine Learning (ML) is relatively underdeveloped. Crucially, designers have not found a grasp on ML uncertainty as a design opportunity rather than an obstacle. The technical literature points to data and model uncertainties as two main properties of ML. Through post-phenomenology, we position uncertainty as one defining material attribute of ML processes which mediate human experience. To understand ML uncertainty as a design material, we investigate four design research case studies involving ML. We derive three provocative concepts: thingly uncertainty: ML-driven artefacts have uncertain, variable relations to their environments; pattern leakage: ML uncertainty can lead to patterns shaping the world they are meant to represent; and futures creep: ML technologies texture human relations to time with uncertainty. Finally, we outline design research trajectories and sketch a post-phenomenological approach to human-ML relations.

There is growing attention in the HCI community on how technology could be designed to support experiences of reminiscence on past life experiences. Yet, this research has largely overlooked people with blindness. We present a study that aims to understand everyday experiences of reminiscence for people with blindness. We conducted a qualitative study with 9 participants with blindness to understand their personal routines, wishes and desires, and challenges and tensions regarding the experience of reminiscence. Findings are interpreted to discuss new possibilities that offer starting points for future design initiatives and openings for collaboration aimed at creating technology to better support the practices of capturing, sharing, and reflecting on significant memories of the past.

This pictorial uses imagery of human-robot collaboration, or cobots, as a site to examine the potential of queer use within design research. Through close documentation of our process, we reflect on acts of teaching a commercially available robot to knit with us-a messy and seemingly unproductive process. However, this uselessness of the chosen task allows us to re-consider the idealization of robotic collaboration. We question the optimization of a largely human labor force and the associated drive to increase efficiency within a range of sectors, from the service industry to industrial production. Building on non-use literatures examining technological limits, and drawing on performative explorations and critique, we show how knitting enlarges our capacity to visualize what might be a suitable use case for cobots.

Simple smart home sensors, e.g. for temperature or light, increasingly collect seemingly inconspicuous data. Prior work has shown that human sensemaking of such sensor data can reveal domestic activities. Such sensemaking presents an opportunity to empower people to understand the implications of simple smart home sensors. To investigate, we developed and field-tested the Guess the Data method, which enabled people to use and make sense of live data from their homes and to collectively interpret and reflect on anonymized data from the homes in our study. Our findings show how participants reconstruct behavior, both individually and collectively, expose the sensitive personal data of others, and use sensor data as evidence and for lateral surveillance within the household. We discuss the potential of our method as a participatory HCI method for investigating design of the IoT and implications created by doing data work on home sensors.

Stories on the home materialize in many different ways. Simple design scenarios of more efficient smart homes exist alongside more articulated design fictions narrating complex domestic futures. IoT toolkits can be used in co-design to narrate design stories together with people. However, there is little attention on the stories captured in the co-creation process. This paper presents a framework describing, comparing, and assessing design stories. We illustrate the framework through the comparison of the design stories captured from three divergent IoT toolkits in co-design workshops. Three dimensions characterize the design stories emerging from our inquiry: complexity (resolution and scope), likeliness (conceivability and feasibility), and implications (acceptability and consequentiality). This framework contributes towards understanding which properties of IoT toolkits support the emergence of what kind of design story. Our findings help designers to frame expectations when using IoT toolkits and to conceive IoT toolkits that support underexplored qualities of design stories.

We present Sensorstation, a research product to explore the effect of smart sensors and services on the communal life within a shared apartment. Sensorstation utilizes wireless sensors and a shared output device displaying a steady data stream of sensor based notifications. It was deployed on the kitchen table in a shared apartment for 19 days to enable communal residents to co-design and to co-speculate on smart sensors and services in the context of their shared apartment. We synthesize and interpret findings to illustrate how residents created positive connections between each other, while simultaneously exercising self-monitoring, control over others, and contemplating reward systems and penalties. Our work contributes to a nuanced understanding of smart technology for shared apartments. We argue that design has an obligation to consider smart technology that acknowledges boundaries and to provide negotiation spaces to configure agency.

Research on product experience has a history in investigating the sensory and emotional qualities of interacting with objects. However, this notion has not been fully expanded to the design space of co-designing smart objects. In this paper, we report on findings from a series of co-design workshops where we used the toolkit Loaded Dice in conjunction with a card set that aimed to support participants in reflecting the sensory qualities of domestic smart objects. We synthesize and interpret findings from our study to help illustrate how the workshops supported co-designers in creatively ideating concepts for emotionally valuable smart objects that better connect personal inputs with the output of smart objects. Our work contributes a case example of how a co-design approach that emphasizes situated sensory exploration can be effective in enabling co-designers to ideate concepts of idiosyncratic smart objects that closely relate to the characteristics of their domestic living situations.

Cubic shapes play an astonishing role in the design of tangible interactive devices. Due to our curiosity for this widespread design preference lasting over thirty years, we constituted a literature survey of papers, books and products since the late 1970s. Out of a corpus of fourty-seven papers, books and products that propose cubic shapes for tangible interactive devices we trace the origins of cubicle tangibles and highlight the rationale for their application. Through a comparative study, we analyze the properties of this shape for tangible interaction design and classify these along the themes of: Manipulation as Input, Placement in Space as Input, Arrangement, Multifunctionality, Randomness, Togetherness & Variations, Physical Qualities, Container, and Pedestal for Output. We propose a taxonomy for cubic shaped tangible interactive devices based on the reviewed contributions, in order to support researchers and designers in their future work of designing cubic shaped tangible interactive devices.

An interface for filtering large video repositories for generating personalized playlists via navigation and selection of moods and emotion on a mobile device.

We present a user interface that combines the requirements needed for information search in a professional environment with the possibilities for multimedial queries based on automatically generated fuzzy high level metadata.