This pictorial explores the processes and methods of designing for non-human animal users and human visitors through the example of Nature Scenes. Nature Scenes are a set of urban outdoor interspecies shelters and feeding stations designed by us, the Interaction Research Studio, commissioned by Jane Withers Studio for Brompton Design District 2019, as part of London Design Festival (LDF). In this pictorial we document the various steps of designing, prototyping and deploying the ‘scenes’, and examine the animal-human relationship in context of product and interaction design with the intention to advance the current discourse on interspecies and post-human practice-based design research. We unpick the complexities and contradictions that come with designing for animals as well as for humans, and introduce suggestions of how Post-Human Computer Interaction (PHCI) can be approached going forward.

Yo–Yo Machines are playful communication devices designed to help people feel socially connected while physically separated. We designed them to reach as many people as possible, both to make a positive impact during the COVID-19 pandemic and to assess a self-build approach to circulating research products and the appeal of peripheral and expressive communication devices. A portfolio of four distinct designs, based on over 30 years of research, were made available for people to make by following simple online instructions (yoyomachines.io). Each involves connecting a pair of identical devices over the internet to allow simple communication at a distance. This paper describes our motivation for the project, previous work in the area, the design of the devices, supporting website and publicity, and how users have made and used Yo-Yo Machines. Finally, we reflect on what we learned about peripheral and expressive communication devices and implications for the self-build approach.

My Naturewatch Camera is an inexpensive wildlife camera that we designed for people to make themselves as a way of promoting engagement with nature and digital making. We aligned its development to the interests of the BBC's Natural History Unit as part of an orchestrated engagement strategy also involving our project website and outreach to social media. Since June 2018, when the BBC featured the camera on one of their Springwatch 2018 broadcasts, over 1000 My Naturewatch Cameras have been constructed using instructions and software from our project website and commercially available components, without direct contact with our studio. In this paper, we describe the project and outcomes with a focus on its success in promoting engagement with nature, engagement with digital making, and the effectiveness of this strategy for sharing research products outside traditional commercial channels.

TaskCams are simple digital cameras intended to serve as a tool for Cultural Probe studies and made available by the Interaction Research Studio via open-source distribution. In conjunction with an associated website, instructions and videos, they represent a novel strategy for disseminating and facilitating a research methodology. At the same time, they provide a myriad of options for customisation and modification, allowing researchers to adopt and adapt them to their needs. In the first part of this paper, the design team describes the rationale and design of the TaskCams and the tactics developed to make them publicly available. In the second part, the story is taken up by designers from the Everyday Design Studio, who assembled their own TaskCams and customised them extensively for a Cultural Probe study they ran for an ongoing project. Rather than discussing the results of their study, we focus on how their experiences reveal some of the issues both in producing and using open-source products such as these. These suggest the potential of TaskCams to support design-led user studies more generally.

This paper reports the results of a field trial of 130 bespoke devices as well as our methodological approach to the undertaking. Datacatchers are custom-built, location-aware devices that stream messages about the area they are in. Derived from a large number of 'big data' sources, the messages simultaneously draw attention to the socio-political topology of the lived environment and to the nature of big data itself. We used a service design consultancy to deploy the devices, and two teams of documentary filmmakers to capture participants' experiences. Here we discuss the development of this approach and how people responded to the Datacatchers as products, as revealing sociopolitical issues, and as purveyors of big data that might be open to question.

The Energy Babble is a kind of automated talk-radio that is obsessed with energy and the environment. We developed it with, and deployed it to, a number of existing "energy communities" in the UK. The system gathers content from a variety of online sources, including Twitter? feeds from the communities, from governmental departments, and from the National Grid, and chats about it continually using a number of synthesised voices interspersed with a variety of jingles and sound effects. Designed to playfully reflect and comment on the existing state of discourse and reports of practice in the UK, the Babble can be considered both as a product and as a research tool, in which role it worked to highlight issues, understandings, practices and difficulties in the communities with whom we worked.