In recent years, public discourse has blamed digital technologies for making people feel "alone together,'' distracting us from engaging with one another, even when we are interacting in-person. We argue that in order to design technologies that foster and augment co-located interactions, we need to first understand the context in which enjoyable co-located socialization takes place. We address this gap by surveying and interviewing over 1,000 U.S.-based participants to understand what, where, with whom, how, and why people enjoy spending time in-person. Our findings suggest that people enjoy engaging in everyday activities with individuals with whom they have strong social ties because it helps enable nonverbal cues, facilitate spontaneity, support authenticity, encourage undivided attention, and leverage the physicality of their bodies and the environment. We conclude by providing a set of recommendations for designers interested in creating co-located technologies that encourage social engagement and relationship building.

Air pollution causes several million deaths every year. Increasing public awareness through the deployment of devices that sense air quality may be a promising step in addressing the problem; however, these wholly objective device measurements may not capture the nuanced and lived experiences people have with the air, which are often colored by perceptions, histories, imaginations, and the sociopolitical context in which people live. The gap between objective environmental realities and individuals' subjective experiences of the environment may make it difficult to form meaning from data, hindering the positive policy outcomes that they are intended to produce. To bridge this gap, we conducted a two-phase design fieldwork to obtain an empirical understanding of the rich contours of experiences people have with the air and outline design strategies in making air quality data meaningful.

What makes a city meaningful to its residents? What attracts people to live in a city and to care for it? Today, we might see such questions as concerns for HCI, given the emerging agendas of smart and connected cities, IoT, and ubiquitous computing: city residents' perceptions of and attitudes towards smart city technologies will play a role in technology acceptance. Theories of "placemaking" from humanist geography and urban planning address themselves to such concerns, and they have been taken up in HCI and urban informatics research. This theory offers ideas for developing community attachment, heightening the legibility of the city, and intensifying lived experiences in the city. We add to this body of research with an analysis of several initiatives of City Yeast, a community-based design collective in Taiwan that proposes the metaphor of fermentation as an approach to placemaking. We unpack how this approach shapes their design practice and link its implications to urban informatics research in HCI. We suggest that smart cities can also be pursued by leveraging the knowledge of city residents and helping to facilitate their participation in acts of perceiving, envisioning, and improving their local communities, including but not limited to smart and connected technologies.

Recent sustainable HCI research has advocated "working with nature" as a potentially efficacious alternative to human efforts to control it: yet it is less clear how to do so. We contribute to the theoretical aspect of this research by presenting an ethnographic study on alternative farming practices, in which the farm is not so much a system but an assemblage characterized by multiple systems or rationalities always evolving and changing. In them, relationships among species alternate between mutually beneficial in one moment (or season), and harmful in the next. If HCI is to participate in and to support working with nature, we believe that it will have to situate itself within such assemblages and temporalities. In this work, we look into nontraditional users (e.g., nonhumans) and emerging forms of uses (e.g., interactions between human and other species) to help open a design space for technological interventions. We offer three ethnographic accounts in which farmers-and ourselves as researchers-learn to notice, respond, and engage in symbiotic encounters with companion species and the living soil itself.

HCI in recent years has shown an increasing interest in decentering humans in design. This decentering is a response to concerns about environmental sustainability, technology obsolescence, and consumerism. Scholars have introduced theoretical notions such as natureculture from feminist technoscience. Yet how such theories translate into material design practices remains an open question. This research seeks to broaden the repertoire of nonanthropocentric design practices in HCI. Specifically, it draws on the natural processes of decomposition as a creative approach to develop and test design tactics. To do so, we curate and critique hundreds of examples of decomposition in architecture, design, textile, crafting, and food making. We observe that decomposition often depends on what we call a "scaffold," and we further propose four variants of it as design tactics: fragmenting, aging, liberating, and tracing. We then tested the tactics over a period of four months in a ceramics studio using diverse materials, with a mixture of successes and failures. We conclude by reflecting on how the design tactics might be deployed in nonanthropocentric HCI/design.

We use photography as a research method to cultivate a designerly sensibility of the theoretical concept natureculture, a provocation to transgress the dichotomy of nature and culture. We investigate the visual language of natureculture through an iterative practice of creating, editing, organizing, and reflecting on images. Specifically, we explore natureculture as spatiotemporal movements, sediment-like layers, heterogeneous gatherings, formal homonyms, emotional experiences, and aestheticized expressions of style. Each of these has a materioformal concreteness and symbolic density that supports design ideation on topics such as environmental sustainability, agroecological systems, human-animal cohabitation, urban informatics, and more.

In HCI and CSCW, research in creativity support has focused on everyday creativity by individuals and teams. However, there has been little study on how nature as a non-human agency supports and informs the production of innovative works. This research presents my attempt to bridge such gap by proposing the notion of decomposition to help frame and theorize creativity support. This nonanthropocentric approach captures the un-replicability of creative works, the importance of incorporating nature to the creative process, and the possibility of generating effective novelty through deconstruction and reconfiguration.