In this paper we discuss how interaction design experiments and interventions can play a role in sensitising humans to the more-than-human—specifically to plants and their significance to our lifeworld. Our work is rooted in two ideas (1) that deepening the understanding of human-plant relations is important for navigating the multiple planetary crises that we are currently facing, and (2) that interaction design allows for exploring the posthuman ontological model that rejects human exceptionalism and regards all entities as entangled and mutually constitutive. In discussing how design on several levels makes possible more-than-human reflections, the paper presents qualitative data gathered from interviews, diary entries, and observations from deploying two of our plant-electronics designs. Through identifying and organising surprises and recurring patterns in how people responded into three types of sensibilities (hermeneutic, existential, and socio-cultural), we discuss what happens when interaction design mediates entanglements between humans, plants, and other more-than-human actors.

The Plant Radio is an electronic device that makes it possible to perceive how (and that) a plant responds to its environment. The device works by artificially amplifying the EMG signals of a plant. Aesthetically, it builds on the metaphor of the radio broadcast receiver that allows for tuning in to intangible signals sent through the air. By drawing on mediation theory and making tangible the otherwise hidden signals of plants, the Plant Radio exploratively seeks to reconfigure the relationship between plants and humans by allowing new relations to form. In this pictorial, we present the design of the Plant Radio, and we discuss how the Plant Radio serves as a materialization of the posthuman theories that form the backdrop of this project. In doing so, we expand on the design process of the artifact, specifically unfolding the discussions when deciding not to include a power button.

In the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design, there has been an increasing exploration of technology in relation to the body and in particular around issues associated with "women's health."Much of the work so far has been about ways design and technology can play in supporting transitions to and experiences of motherhood and maternal health, menstruation, domestic violence, abortion, pregnancy loss, intimate anatomical awareness, fertility management, continence care, menopause, voice training for trans-women, gender stereotypes in voice assistants, and reimagining existing practices and technologies, among others.This Special Issue has been put together to bring together various voices and research strands from within this emerging community of researchers in order to discuss the core ideas, approaches, issues, and challenges that are currently pressing for this area of research.This ToCHI Special Issue is the product of two-and-a-half years of labour from the original proposal up to the final collection of articles you see before you now.It has involved multiple

While digital personal assistants (DPAs) are moving into our homes, managing our everyday lives and providing help in the household, we have barely begun to understand them. Design fiction can be a method for contextualizing the social and cultural implications for adoption of future technologies like DPAs. In this paper, we present an analytical perspective on gender issues arising when a DPA moves into our home. Through a critical and feminist design methodology, the design fiction project "Intimate Futures" focuses on how a DPA's character and functions are often gendered and what it means for the design and adoption of a DPA. We argue that the gender issues of DPAs are interwoven with our collective imaginings of DPAs, and that design fiction is a method to explore and "trouble" our collective imaginings of DPAs. The paper contributes with an analysis of gender issues of DPAs, and a methodological way of "staying with the trouble" of future technologies through design fiction.

The paper offers theoretical support for research through design (RtD) by arguing that in order to legitimize and make use of research through design as research, HCI researchers need to explore and clarify how RtD objects might contribute to knowledge. Leveraging the tradition of aesthetics in the arts and humanities, we argue that while the intentions of the object's designer are important and while annotations are a good mechanism to articulate them, the critical reception of objects is equally foundational to RtD's broader knowledge impacts within HCI. Such a scholarly critical reception is needed precisely because of the potential inexhaustibility of design objects' meanings; their inability to be paraphrased simply and adequately. Offering a multilevel analysis of the (critical) design fiction Menstruation Machine by Sputniko!, the paper explores how design objects co-produce knowledge, by working through complex design problem spaces in non-reductive ways, proposing new connections and distinctions, and embodying design ideas and processes across time and minds.

Interactive digital technologies pervade our shared spaces in personal, mobile, infrastructural and other embedded forms. These changes challenge the ways we understand and investigate the relationships between people, computing and settings. Responding to this situation—where ubiquitous computing is not only personal but also public, and where digital interactions may happen anywhere — this special issue explores how HCI research can use the strengths of an intersection of theory, practice and innovation in order to best address this conjunction of interactive technologies, public spaces and people interacting with or within both. \n \nWith this shift to interaction happening in public spaces, people can no longer be seen as just ‘users’ but have to be understood as acting assemblages of bodies and technologies in the space they inhabit. This shift highlights the need to understand users in every setting—including those at desks and at work—as socially and culturally situated humans with agency. While this is not a new research development, this special issue speculates on and discusses how the shift to ‘everywhere interactions’ makes it important for research in human–computer interaction to reach beyond existing conventions. With this work comes a need to understand the interacting human as a situated body that is at any moment also a possible spectacle: as a body, a human and a user who engages with technology in response to the situation while also being a ‘performance’ for others to witness. Understanding people as actors in their context allows us to regard every user as a ‘performing body’ and a ‘performing subject’, and it enables us to analyse the performative aspects of interaction in many other situations than those where we design for actually staged performances in a defined performance space or stage. In this sense, ‘performative interaction’ is both concerned with technologies for on-stage performers using technologies as part of artistic expression, and an analytical frame for understanding every situation in which people engage with technologies (in public space). The question becomes: where and in which situations is this analytical frame relevant and useful?

More and more interactive artifacts are used in public on an everyday basis, and metaphors from performance and theatre studies find their way into research on these interfaces, addressing how interaction with technology can be understood in a performative sense. Through theoretical discussions as well as practical design activities and building on the assumption that every human action in public space has a performative aspect, this workshop seeks to explore performative interaction as it occurs in real world public settings with interactive technologies. The purpose of the workshop is to make prototyping experiments that enable participants to explore select themes and questions relevant to everyday or staged performativity, e.g. the design of performative technologies, the evaluation of user experience, the importance of spectator and performer roles, and the social acceptability of performative actions in public spaces.

In interaction design for experience-oriented uses of technology, a central facet of aesthetics of interaction is rooted in the user's experience of herself “performing her perception.” By drawing on performance (theater) theory, phenomenology and sociology and with references to recent HCI-work on the relation between the system and the performer/user and the spectator's relation to this dynamic, we show how the user is simultaneously operator, performer and spectator when interacting. By engaging with the system, she continuously acts out these three roles and her awareness of them is crucial in her experience. We argue that this 3-in-1 is always already shaping the user's understanding and perception of her interaction as it is staged through her experience of the object's form and expression. Through examples ranging from everyday technologies utilizing performances of interaction to spatial contemporary artworks, digital as well as analogue, we address the notion of the performative spectator and the spectating performer. We demonstrate how perception is also performative and how focus on this aspect seems to be crucial when designing experience-oriented products, systems and services.