How will people, other species, software and hardware live together in as yet unknown futures? How can we work towards trusted and safe futures where human values and the environment are supported by emerging technologies? Research demonstrates that human values and everyday life priorities, ethics, routines and activities will shape our possible futures. I will draw on ethnographic research to outline how people anticipate and imagine everyday life futures with emerging technologies in their homes and neighbourhoods, and how technology workers envisage futures in their professional lives. If, as social science research shows, technologies cannot solve human and societal problems, what roles should they play in future life? What are the implications for future software? What values should underpin its design? Where should it be developed? By and in collaboration with whom? What role can software play in generating the circumstances for trusted futures?

HCI research involving older adults has typically focused on improving technology skills, mobility and health outcomes. Technology for positive ageing emphasizing creativity, inquisitiveness and resourcefulness is less commonly explored. This article builds on this research to contribute an understanding of the importance of curiosity, play and experimentation in supporting positive wellbeing outcomes for older adults living with smart home devices. The research was conducted in regional Australia by an aged care provider and two universities. Twenty-three households participated in the interdisciplinary in-home ethnographic and technological smart device trial that included voice assistants, robotic vacuums, smart kettles and smart lights. The article discusses routines and interactions involving these devices, which resulted in wellbeing outcomes that built participants’ digital living skills. These findings inform concluding recommendations about how to design smart home devices, aged care programs and services involving emerging technologies, to support positive ageing.

As machines become increasingly intelligent, the HCI community is presented with new challenges regarding methods to capture and understand user experience (UX). In the case of autonomous driving (AD), this involves new scenarios where humans and intelligent vehicles need to act together in real-life traffic situations with other road users. This article responds to this context by 1) outlining a longitudinal design ethnography method whereby participants drove semiautonomous cars in their everyday environments to capture such human-machine relations in real-life settings, 2) demonstrating the complexities of the relations between humans and AD vehicles, 3) engaging theories of socio-materiality and entanglement to understand the human-machine relations of AD cars, and 4) identifying anticipatory experiences that emerge from these relations and their implications for informing UX design.

Abstract In this paper, we discuss how people’s user experience (UX) of autonomous driving (AD) cars can be understood as a shifting anticipatory experience, as people experience degrees of AD through evolving advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) in their everyday context. We draw on our ethnographic studies of five families, who had access to AD research cars with evolving ADAS features in their everyday lives for a duration of 1½ years. Our analysis shows that people gradually adopt AD cars, through a process that involves anticipating if they can trust them, what the ADAS features will do and what the longer-term technological possibilities will be. It also showed that this anticipatory UX occurs within specific socio-technical and environmental circumstances, which could not be captured easily in experimental settings. The implication is that studying anticipation offers us new insights into how people adopt AD in their everyday commute driving.

One of the enduring problems of researching and designing digital technologies for the home is that both media technologies and uses tend to be dispersed spatially and temporally throughout the environment and routines of home.This raises a number of methodologically challenging issues: how digital media technologies are situated amongst other technologies; how materialities and textures shape the experience of home; the ways in which practices of media use are entangled with the other activities and practices that are part of the routines of home; and how digital media content and communications create part of a wider ecology of communication and interaction in home environments.In this article, we outline a methodological and practical response to these questions and describe its application through the development of tailored interdisciplinary research methods. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS• This paper describes research undertaken within an interdisciplinary energy project that is seeking to explore domestic energy consumption and everyday digital media use through the individual and combined lenses of engineering, design, social and computer sciences.• The paper describes the interdisciplinary application of two methods that were enacted within participants' homes: the interactive floor plan method; and video ethnography tour and re-enactment methods.• The benefits of embedding design research in this way are discussed in relation to studying the use of technology in the home and recent research trends in ubiquitous computing.

Sociological appropriations of practice theory as applied to sustainable design have successfully problematized overly simplistic and individualistic models of consumer choice and behavior change. By taking everyday practices as the principal units of analysis, they move towards acknowledging the socially and materially structured nature of human activity. However, to inform sustainable HCI we also need to understand how practices are part of wider experiential environments and flows of practical activity. In this article, we develop an approach rooted in phenomenological anthropology and sensory ethnography. This approach builds on theories of place, perception and movement and enables us to situate practices, and understand practical activity, as emplaced within complex and shifting ecologies of things. Drawing on an interdisciplinary study of domestic energy consumption and digital media use, we discuss ethnographic and design practice examples. We demonstrate how this theoretical and methodological framework can be aligned with the 3rd paradigm of HCI.