As cities worldwide adopt data-driven approaches to optimize urban forests, computational tools like agent-based models (ABMs) are increasingly popular to simulate forest growth and inform planting decisions. However, ABMs often focus on individual metrics, neglecting forests as interdependent ecosystems. Rooted in anthropocentric ideals, these models risk reducing forests to infrastructures for human benefit, undermining their long-term resilience. This pictorial challenges these limitations by exploring how interface design can transcend reductive, agent-centric representations to foster relational understandings of forest ecosystems as more-than-human bodies. Drawing on feminist theorist Karen Barad's concepts of “diffraction” and “agential cuts,” we craft a repertoire of diffractive interfaces that engage with forest simulation data, revealing how more-than-human bodies can be encountered across diverse temporal, spatial, and agential scales. Through this design exploration, we operationalize more-than- human perspectives in data practices, deepening our understanding of the performative dimensions of interfaces and advancing nuanced, practical approaches to more-than-human design.

In a world characterized by rapid change and uncertainty, I’ve come to realize that our instinct for control only exacerbates complexity. Amidst our urge to corral the vast intricacies of our world, only to find that we’ve magnified the challenge, I choose a different story about design and technology. One where design is not a tool to be wielded according to our intentions, but humble and adaptive attunement. And one where technology doesn’t just serve human needs, but helps us connect to other-than-human scales and sensibilities, opening up new possibilities for our collective survival.

By 2027 more than 530 M homes will likely adopt at least one type of automated system. This means that a growing number of residents will be living with automated technology in the home, everyday. But living with smart homes is full of conflicts between what residents find appropriate and what technology does instead. Previous research, centering end-user needs, has often focused on smooth living experiences through graphical user interfaces and improved predictions. In this research, we take the more-than-human lens of co-performance to put crises in everyday practices in view, and to conceptualize a new notion of interface. Based on ethnographic data from 11 households, our findings illustrate how crises reveal conflicting ideas of appropriateness, how residents reconfigure their co-performances with technology in response to everyday crises, and how new interfaces are enacted as a result. We conclude by illuminating how researchers and designers should not look at the conflicts and crises emerging in the more-than-human home as something of which to get rid. Instead, they are opportunities for residents and buildings to respond to one another in the context of everyday life and to enact interfaces that were not pre-designed into the building.

Human activities have drastically altered the planet, with design playing a significant role. While design may intend to do good, its consequences are not always positive: from climate change to resource depletion to unforeseen social dynamics. These transformations also include ourselves, as our relationships with new technologies blur and complicate previous human and machine agency distinctions. Increasingly, design has become a matter of defining what it means to be human. This special issue explores the proposition that conventional human-centered design approaches may not adequately address the complex challenges we face, and that there is instead a need to ground design in more-than-human perspectives. This introduction outlines the evolving landscape of more-than-human design in the context of HCI. Articulating a series of emerging research trajectories, we aim to illuminate the transformative potential of more-than-human orientations to design, including how they both extend and depart from familiar lines of inquiry in HCI – for example, how designers are redefining data, interfaces, and responsibility, and reshaping posthuman knowledge through design. Ultimately, this special issue aims to explore new pathways for designing in the era of the more-than-human, challenging the perceived divide between practice and theory to imagine alternative futures for HCI.

Materiality of artefacts holds the potential to intricately and dynamically shape our daily practices. We posit this capacity can be harnessed in fostering creative unfolding of everyday care practices towards living artefacts. To explore this premise, we designed a cyanobacterial living artefact with air purifying capacity, and invited eight participants to live with and care for it for two weeks. The artefact can be situated in diverse locations within domestic spaces, wherever the participant would consider air purification necessary and certain lighting conditions beneficial for the artefact’s vitality. This versatility is supported by the artefact’s colour-changing, pliable, adhesive, and suspendable nature. We analysed visual documentation and semi-structured interviews of participants’ experiences of the artefact. Our findings suggest distinct roles of materiality for care regarding labour, knowledge, and exploration. We further highlight the intricate design space encompassing openness, temporalities and semantic fitness towards nurturing mutualistic care in human-microbe interactions.

This article presents findings from a Research through Design investigation focusing on a reflexive approach to data curation and the use of generative AI in design and creative practices. Using binary gender categories manifested in children’s toys as a context, we examine three design experiments aimed at probing how designers can cultivate a reflexive human-AI practice to confront and challenge their internalized biases. Our goal is to underscore the intricate interplay between the designer, AI technology, and publicly held imaginaries and to offer an initial set of tactics for how personal biases and societal norms can be illuminated through interactions with AI. We conclude by proposing that designers not only bear the responsibility of grappling critically with the complexities of AI but also possess the opportunity to creatively harness the limitations of technology to craft a reflexive data curation that encourages profound reflections and awareness within design processes.

Seen both as a resource and an obstacle to clarity, uncertainty is a concept that permeates many areas of design. As the concept gains prominence in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), this special issue specifically explores the interplay between uncertainty and prototyping in Research through Design (RtD). We first outline three histories of uncertainty in design, in relation to its philosophical significance, its role in statistical and algorithmic processes, and its importance in prototyping. The convergence of these aspects is crucial as design evolves toward more agentive and entangled systems, introducing challenges such as Design as a Probabilistic Outcome. We then investigate the design spaces for engaging with “being uncertain” that emerge from the papers: from nuancing the relationship between designers and quantitative data to blurring the line between humans, fungi, and algorithms. Finally, we illuminate some preliminary threads for how RtD can navigate and engage with these shifting technological and design landscapes thoughtfully.

This article explores the intersections and resonances between unmaking and more-than-human design. We begin by aligning unmaking with decentering, a fundamental practice in more-than-human design, through their shared movement and materiality. Using Lindström and Ståhl’s notion of the double movement in un/making, we analyze a series of workshops focused on designing with AI, annotating what was un/made and de/centered during the workshops’ activities. Through this analysis, we introduce two key contributions that highlight some opportunities in the diffractive alignment between unmaking and more-than-human design: firstly, the notion of “unmaking-with” as an emergent concept to describe a posthumanist unmaking practice, and secondly, three decentering tactics—situating, materializing, and enacting—that instantiate this practice through design. Finally, we discuss how unmaking can enrich more-than-human design and, conversely, how more-than-human design can help define the epistemological scope of unmaking.

Microbes offer designers opportunities to endow artefacts with environmental sensing and adapting abilities, and unique expressions. However, microbe-embedded artefacts present a challenge of temporal dissonance, reflected by a “time lag” typically experienced by humans in noticing the gradual and minute shifts in microbial metabolism. This could compromise fluency of interactions and may hinder timely noticing and attending to microbes in living artefacts. In addressing this challenge, we introduce Cyano-chromic Interface, in which photosynthetic activity of cyanobacteria (Synechocystis sp. PCC6803) is timely surfaced by an electrochromic (EC) material through its monochromatic display. Grounded through interface performance characterization and design primitives, we developed application concepts through which we instantiate how the interface can be tuned for diverse functional and experiential outcomes in living artefacts. We further discuss the potential of aligning human-microbe temporalities for enriched interactions and reciprocal relationships with microbes, and beyond.

This paper describes ObjectResponder --- a tool that allows designers to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to rapidly prototype concepts for context-aware intelligent interaction in the wild. To our knowledge, there are currently no available tools for designing and prototyping with AI within the actual context of use. Our application uses Google Cloud Vision to allow designers assigning chat bot-like responses to objects recognized by the smart-phone camera. This enables designers to use object recognition labels as a means to diverge on possible interpretations of the context and start generating ideas that can then be immediately tested and iterated. Initial results suggest that looking at the world from the perspective of the AI may enable designers to balance human and nonhuman biases, enrich a designer's understanding of the context, and open up unexpected directions for idea generation.

In this pictorial, we illustrate steps towards a novel approach that situates connected technologies for older people as resources. In contrast to mainstream approaches in gerontechnology that consider elderly as frail and passive, we aim to complement older people's vital competences by designing technologies that can be used in less prescriptive, and broader ways. The pictorial describes our design process in which resourceful strategies were identified through thing ethnography and used as inspiration to create a series of new connected objects conceived as resources.

As the material becomes active in disclosing the fullness of its capabilities, the boundaries between human and nonhuman performances are destabilized in productive practices that take their departure from materials. This paper illuminates the embodied crafting of action possibilities in material-driven design (MDD) practices with electroluminescent materials. The paper describes and discusses aspects of the making process of electroluminescent materials in which matter, structure, form, and computation are manipulated to deliberately disrupt the affordance of the material, with the goal to explore unanticipated action possibilities and materialize the performative qualities of the sample. In light of this account, the paper concludes by urging the HCI community to performatively rupture the material, so to be able to act upon it as if it was always unfinished or underdeveloped. This, it is shown, can help open up the design space of smart material composites and reveal their latent affordances.

This paper introduces the notion of co-performance, with the aim to offer Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers and practitioners a new perspective on the role of artificial agency in everyday life, from automated systems to autonomous devices. In contrast to 'smartness,' which focuses on a supposed autonomy of artifacts, co-performance considers artifacts as capable of learning and performing next to people. This shifts the locus of design from matters of distributions of agency at design time, to matters of embodied learning in everyday practice for both human and artificial performers. From this perspective, co-performance acknowledges the dynamic differences in capabilities between humans and artifacts, and highlights the fundamentally recursive relation between professional design and use. Implications for HCI design practice are unpacked through reflections on smart thermostat design in light of historic changes in roles between humans and heating systems, and changing ideas of appropriateness in everyday practices of domestic heating.

In the city, mobility is calling for new forms of smartness. To understand what is needed to design thoughtful forms of smart mobility, this paper combines thing ethnography and animistic research approaches to reveal the interwoven networks of personal and social relationships that develop around scooters in Taiwanese everyday life. To this end, a three-day study with six different types of scooterists was conducted in Taipei. Cameras and sensors were directly attached to the scooters themselves, to collect data from a 'thing' perspective. The data collected were then organized and offered to professional actors, who were invited to 'speak' on behalf of the scooters. Through the performance of the actors interpreting and empathizing with the scooter's everyday life, intents, expectations and relationships between scooters and scooterists were revealed and captured. We further discussed how the socio-material networks among scooters could provoke various creative and meaningful arrangements in everyday life.

This pictorial describes the process and rationale behind the design features of AscoltaMe (in Italian, "listen to me"). This is a computational object imbued with the intent to help families overcome the emotional barriers they may experience during a disruptive life event, as they attempt to maintain healthy communication. With a focus on the object's material qualities and temporal form, the pictorial introduces and visually outlines tactfulness as the fundamental characteristic that enables objects designed for sensitive settings to be intentful in ways that are appropriate and sensitive.

In research on health and wellbeing, resourcefulness is seen as an important skill that can improve quality of life. In design and HCI literature, it has long been acknowledged that resourcefulness is about more than human skills and involves the adaptation, modification and reinvention of technologies in everyday life. In this paper we argue how certain aspects of resourcefulness have so far remained under-theorized, and present a new design perspective on resourcefulness that is grounded in practice theory. In this view, resourcefulness is conceptualised as the dispersed practice of dealing with everyday crises of routine. By elaborating on the complex interplay between means and purpose, we tease out resourcefulness as a practice of reconfiguration. The paper closes by discussing implications of this conceptualisation by zooming in on ways of capturing and designing for resourcefulness.

Design-based inquiries into the networked products of the Internet of Things (IoT) lack a coherent understanding of the effect of such products on society. This paper proposes a new taxonomy for networked products, which would allow articulation on their current state and future, and provide insights to designers for creating meaningful and aesthetic products of IoT. Central to this framework is the proposition that our current product-scape should be understood as a distribution of material agencies and best analyzed through the metaphor of "agency". We identify three types of agencies, i.e., the Collector, the Actor, and the Creator, and discuss how this approach could create new design methodologies to create more meaningful networked products that would empower people in their everyday lives.

Drawing from a study of everyday home practices from a material objects' perspective, this paper examines the potential that a thing ethnography holds for both design and anthropology. In doing so, the paper challenges anthropocentric assumptions about the world, and opens up ways of understanding relationships among people, objects and use practices that would be difficult to elicit through traditional observations and interviews alone.

A growing number of scholars have started to look at materials as part of the unfolding of social and cultural practices. Yet, to date, relatively little is known about how to purposefully design for a particular practice in which materials, with their unique qualities, act as co-performers. This paper presents the journey of a designer who includes the explorations on the performative qualities of materials in design ideation. This journey aimed to explore how the material and the performance can "lead the way" in the potential unfolding of a social practice such as "tuning a radio".

A growing number of HCI scholars have started to take materiality as an entry point for acquiring a deeper understanding of the possibilities and constraints of design. Steadily moving beyond a distinction between the physical and the digital, a few have also started to look at materials as part of the unfolding of social and cultural practices. Yet, to date, relatively little is known about how these practices develop within the situated experience of materials, and how this situational whole can be supported by design. By contributing to both growing materiality scholarship and emerging practice-oriented approaches in HCI, this paper articulates a framework of materials experience that discusses how materials shape ways of doing and ultimately, practice, and how this is rooted in the experience of those materials.

This paper offers a product design perspective to emerging material-oriented design methods in HCI. It outlines a research process for facilitating the design of interactive media products that enable a patina of deliberate material traces to grow on objects of daily use. In doing so, the paper reports on initial findings on how materials are perceived to "mature" with use, discusses a design concept related to such findings, and offers a new direction for rich communication and interaction through and with objects.

In this paper we analyzed a case of designing for persuasive experiences. It concerns designing for the complex persuasive situation of helping parents of hospitalized children take better care of themselves. Our focus was on the experiences, on how these were designed to be persuasive, and on the design process needed to achieve that. We conclude that designing for complex persuasive experiences requires a design approach that allows for designers to gradually develop a rich understanding of the situation and develop empathy for the people they design for. We found that the persuasion should focus on a combination of starting a new practice, sustaining it, starting activities within the practice, and extending the duration of the activities. For such a complex persuasive situation a rich palette of experiences was needed. The design of those experiences was inspired by universal human needs and by gaining a deep and empathetic understanding of the situation.

This paper describes a framework that supports the physical prototyping of innovative interactive artifacts. Specifically, the framework allows designing, implementing, and testing "social products," that is, physical artifacts able to interact with social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others. Since the target users of the framework are not expert in software programming, an End-User Development (EUD) approach has been adopted, which aims at facilitating the ideation process and providing simple mechanisms for automatic code generation and testing. User tests have proved the usefulness and validity of the framework, and provided indications for how to expand it.

This paper describes a new co-design technique for early stages of the design process called Embodied Narratives. The technique leverages children's natural playfulness to inspire and motivate the design process, and it uses technology as a part of the process to encourage exploration and improvisation in familiar settings. Its outcome is not the final design but valuable material for further co-design activities. The paper expands the set of available techniques that can be used for co-designing with children, and contributes to growing research on the use of performances in design through empirical studies conducted with 36 children from age 10 to 11.

In non-formal settings, intrinsic motivation becomes a major issue to keep in mind when designing an educational game. To understand how to make motivating, entertaining and playful educational games, the Embodied Narratives technique has been used to co-design social games with children. This paper discusses the motivation of using this technique as well as some of the findings drawn from its application.

This two-day workshop brings together the interdisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners involved in the design of interactive systems and sharing a common interest in heritage matters. The workshop addresses heritage as a unique domain for the exploration of novel design inquiries into how we come together through separate understandings and attachments to artifacts, places, and events of the past as well as of the present. The workshop aims to explore how design research in the heritage domain can contribute to human-centered design, with a particular focus on everyday engagement.

Due to the increasing sophistication in web technologies, maps can easily be created, modified, and shared. This possibility has popularized the power of maps by enabling people to add and share cartographic content, giving rise to the geospatial web. People are increasingly using web maps to connect with each other and with the urban and natural environment in ways no one had predicted. As a result, web maps are growing into a venue in which knowledge and meanings can be traced and visualized. However, the cartographic semantics of current web mapping services are not designed to elicit and visualize what we call affective meaning. Contributing a new perspective for the geospatial web, the authors argue for affective geographies capable of allowing richer and multiple readings of the same territory. This paper illustrates the cartographic semantics developed by the authors and discusses it through a case study in natural heritage interpretation.

Creativity support tools is a research topic with high risk but potentially very high payoff. The goal is to develop improved software and user interfaces that empower users to be not only more productive but also more innovative. Potential users include software and other engineers, diverse scientists, product and graphic designers, architects, educators, students, and many others. Enhanced interfaces could enable more effective searching of intellectual resources, improved collaboration among teams, and more rapid discovery processes. These advanced interfaces should also provide potent support in hypothesis formation, speedier evaluation of alternatives, improved understanding through visualization, and better dissemination of results. For creative endeavors that require composition of novel artifacts (e.g., computer programs, scientific papers, engineering diagrams, symphonies, artwork), enhanced interfaces could facilitate exploration of alternatives, prevent unproductive choices, and enable easy backtracking. This U.S. National Science Foundation sponsored workshop brought together 25 research leaders and graduate students to share experiences, identify opportunities, and formulate research challenges. Two key outcomes emerged: (a) encouragement to evaluate creativity support tools through multidimensional in-depth longitudinal case studies and (b) formulation of 12 principles for design of creativity support tools.

Our approach to better understand the nature of collaboration in open-source software (OSS) development is to view it as a participative system, where people and artifacts are inter-connected via a computational infrastructure demonstrating a socio-technical system. This paper presents a framework we have developed to describe a participative system, and discusses our hypothesis that the framework is capable of characterizing the evolution of an OSS community through changing the participants' perceived value and types of engagement. We report a preliminary result of our case study on the GIMP development mailing list as an initial step to test this hypothesis.