This paper offers new perspectives for More-Than-Human (MTH) design and Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) by rethinking technoscientific logics of temporality. To do this, we draw on alternative logics such as Hydrofeminism, interlocutor and autobiographical accounts, and Leaky Cups—a set of willfully dysfunctional data-enabled artefacts that leak in response to local water data. In doing so, it repositions more-than-human agency not as a passive conduit merely mediating human experiences but as a force capable of creating change and ethics through non-progressivist care labor. By engaging with these ideas, this work critiques and disrupts normative assumptions about progress, openness, fluidity, and objectivity in MTH research and design, and presents productive tensions that challenge dominant temporal frameworks.

As posthumanist or post-anthropocentric research in HCI and design proliferates and further commits to working with more-than-humans, design research practitioners are left with many open questions and uncertainties with how to productively engage with more-than-humans in their thinking and working. This paper present results from a workshop with 17 researchers working at the intersection of care ethics and posthumanism to highlight tensions in posthumanist engagement aimed at unpacking some of the challenges, obstacles, and questions encountered by researchers interested in more-than-human centered design. In foregrounding tensions with representation, legitimization, unseen labor, and material narratives we contribute to a design research agenda which seeks to explicate and challenge dominant anthropocentric forces from design. We conclude by discussing epistemological care and urge practitioners to take up new ways of imagining through truly messy methods which contribute to a feminist unsettling of HCI's methodological commitments, practices, and praxis.

Research through design (RTD) is commonly conceived as a material and discursive practice of articulating knowledge. This paper contributes to the understanding of RTD as a form of critical inquiry by considering how inarticulacy can also be a productive element of this process. We present two reflective accounts of critically-engaged RTD practices in which our attempts to articulate concerns or questions were met with resistance from technology that was both the subject and medium of our investigation. We argue that encountering inarticulacy is not a failure of RTD but instead points to how material exploration can sensitise us to how network technology resists articulating certain values or concerns. Encountering inarticulacy led us to formulate new problems and new lines of inquiry. We conclude by suggesting that the central role given to ambiguity in RTD prepares us to witness and respond to inarticulacy in our practices, design outcomes and critical understandings.

HCI is increasingly working with 'vulnerable' people, yet there is a danger that the label of vulnerability can alienate and stigmatize the people such work aims to support. We report our study investigating the application of interaction design to increase rates of hate crime reporting amongst Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender young people. During design-led workshops, participants expressed ambivalence towards reporting. While recognizing their exposure to hate crime, they simultaneously rejected being identified as victim as implied in the act of reporting. We used visual communication design to depict the young people's ambivalent identities and contribute insights into how these fail and succeed to account for the intersectional, fluid and emergent nature of LGBT identities through the design research process. We argue that by producing ambiguously designed texts alongside conventional outcomes, we 'trouble' our design research narratives as a tactic to disrupt static and reductive understandings of vulnerability within HCI.