Human activities have drastically altered the planet, with design playing a significant role. While design may intend to do good, its consequences are not always positive: from climate change to resource depletion to unforeseen social dynamics. These transformations also include ourselves, as our relationships with new technologies blur and complicate previous human and machine agency distinctions. Increasingly, design has become a matter of defining what it means to be human. This special issue explores the proposition that conventional human-centered design approaches may not adequately address the complex challenges we face, and that there is instead a need to ground design in more-than-human perspectives. This introduction outlines the evolving landscape of more-than-human design in the context of HCI. Articulating a series of emerging research trajectories, we aim to illuminate the transformative potential of more-than-human orientations to design, including how they both extend and depart from familiar lines of inquiry in HCI – for example, how designers are redefining data, interfaces, and responsibility, and reshaping posthuman knowledge through design. Ultimately, this special issue aims to explore new pathways for designing in the era of the more-than-human, challenging the perceived divide between practice and theory to imagine alternative futures for HCI.@en

Seen both as a resource and an obstacle to clarity, uncertainty is a concept that permeates many areas of design. As the concept gains prominence in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), this special issue specifically explores the interplay between uncertainty and prototyping in Research through Design (RtD). We first outline three histories of uncertainty in design, in relation to its philosophical significance, its role in statistical and algorithmic processes, and its importance in prototyping. The convergence of these aspects is crucial as design evolves toward more agentive and entangled systems, introducing challenges such as Design as a Probabilistic Outcome. We then investigate the design spaces for engaging with “being uncertain” that emerge from the papers: from nuancing the relationship between designers and quantitative data to blurring the line between humans, fungi, and algorithms. Finally, we illuminate some preliminary threads for how RtD can navigate and engage with these shifting technological and design landscapes thoughtfully.@en

This article explores the intersections and resonances between unmaking and more-than-human design. We begin by aligning unmaking with decentering, a fundamental practice in more-than-human design, through their shared movement and materiality. Using Lindström and Ståhl’s notion of the double movement in un/making, we analyze a series of workshops focused on designing with AI, annotating what was un/made and de/centered during the workshops’ activities. Through this analysis, we introduce two key contributions that highlight some opportunities in the diffractive alignment between unmaking and more-than-human design: firstly, the notion of “unmaking-with” as an emergent concept to describe a posthumanist unmaking practice, and secondly, three decentering tactics—situating, materializing, and enacting—that instantiate this practice through design. Finally, we discuss how unmaking can enrich more-than-human design and, conversely, how more-than-human design can help define the epistemological scope of unmaking.@en

This paper looks at how contestation in the context of algorithmic decision systems is essentially the progeny of repair for our more decentralized and abstracted digital world. The act of repair has often been a way for users to contest with bad design, substandard products, and disappointing outcomes—not to mention often being a necessary aspect of ensuring effective use over time. As algorithmic systems continue to make more decisions about our lives and futures, we need to look for new ways to contest their outcomes and repair potentially broken systems. Through looking at examples of contemporary repair and contestation and tracing the history of electronics repair from discrete components into the decentralized systems of today, we look at how the shared values of repair and contestation help surface ways to approach contestation using tactics of the Right to Repair movement and the instincts of the Fixer. Finally, we speculate on roles, communities, and a move towards an agonistic interaction space where response-ability rests more equally across user, designer, and system.@en

This is a critique of how designers deal with temporality in design to speculate about socio-technical futures. The paper unpacks how embedded definitions and assumptions of temporality in current design tools contribute to coloniality in designed futures. Based on this critique, we reject the notion that it is only AI that needs fixing, as design practice becomes implicated in how oppression extends from physical systems to global digital platforms. To make these issues visible, we dissect the Futures Cone model used in speculative design. As an alternative, the paper then presents hauntology as a vocabulary that can aid designers in accommodating pluriversal histories in anticipatory futures and reorienting their speculative tools. To illustrate the benefits of the proposed metaphors, the paper highlights examples of coloniality in digital spaces and emphasizes the failure of speculative design to decolonize future imaginaries. Using points of reference from hauntology, ones that engage with states of lingering or spectrality, and notions of nostalgia, absence, and anticipation, the paper contributes to rethinking the role that design tools play in colonizing future imaginaries, especially those pertaining to potentially disruptive technologies.

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In the context of the designed-digital world, coming across instances of AI being discriminatory and biased in its implementation is a commonly discussed issue (Buolamwini, Gebru, 2018; Eubanks, 2019; O’Neil, 2017; Perez, 2021). However, to frame these instances as solely an AI issue to be fixed, addressed or explained (Alikhademi, 2021) discounts and ignores the underlying ‘real-world’ problems that are continually replicated, manifested and magnified into our digital lives, mediated by means of algorithms. AI, among other digital technologies, acts as a catalyst that expands these very real, human issues into the realm of the digital, moving from what used to be strictly physical and situated systems of oppression to ones that are global, now dealing with the geo-politics, cross-culture dynamics as well as contending histories of people, place and space in relation to each other. The paper is motivated by this impact of AI in amplifying and rendering more oppressive the effects of colonial design practices. With the intent to go to the bottom of the matter, the paper discards the idea that it is AI that needs fixing, and it offers instead an epistemological critique of how we speculate on the future and contend with uncertain outcomes in design. The paper articulates its critique by deconstructing how our designerly understanding and visualizations of temporality – such as the future cone and its contemporary iterations (Chou, 2021; Dunne & Raby, 2013; Hancock, T., & Bezold, C.,1994; Voros J, 2003) affects our ability to address historic pasts, contending present realities and imaginaries in speculative design models. In doing so, we identify the limitations that contribute to coloniality in designed futures. As an exploration of alternatives, we propose a hauntological framework and visualization to help designers accommodate and mobilize pluriversal histories into anticipatory futures. The paper begins with examples of how coloniality is encountered, reflected and perpetrated in and through our digital spaces is a designed manifestation of very real socio-political and economic systems of oppression in our physical lives. We focus on how the failure of speculative design to decolonize future imaginaries is due to a fundamental lack in understanding and engaging with temporality. The paper continues with an epistemological critique of the futures cone as one of the most popular and commonly co-opted and taught design tools to reimagine worlds and build imaginaries for digital futures through speculative design by designers and non-designers alike. Through this critique we identify and enunciate how the limitations contained within this model of speculation as well as the assumptions that it carries and reflects about temporality contribute to coloniality in designed futures. Based on this critical literature review of temporal reflection in contemporary speculative design, we then expand on the philosophical concept of hauntology (Derrida, 1994; Fischer, 2014) referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the matter of a ghost, and propose a hauntological framework as an alternative approach to: 1. Imagine and visualize temporality as the amorphous and mutating concept that it is, and 2. Introduce an expanded vocabulary that helps articulate the spectrality of events while providing some comfort through metaphors- a tool that is more familiar to designers. The paper concludes by proposing a hauntological understanding of temporality in speculative design- a temporality that is plural, political, situated and mutating.@en

Conversation Starters is a series of interactive prototypes that probe how to design explainable interactions with AI in everyday life. Taking a more-than-human approach, we explore how 'failures' could be transformed into opportunities for situated understandings of AI. We describe the process of designing fictional artifacts and scenarios about conversational agents that can grow at home. While overall the project suggests that misunderstandings could help people develop sensitivities for knowing when to trust AI systems, the metaphor of 'growing an AI' (which positions training as a matter of care), highlights that practices of sharing and experimenting could be valuable starting points for designing explainable and trustworthy interactions with of AI.

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The Contestation Manifesto and its associated paraphernalia are artefacts from a speculative, near-future community action known as the Contestation Café. Being one in a series of research through design projects on contestation, the Contestation Café is a critical, yet also practical, design intervention rooted in how the act of repair has moved through the physical into the digital, and the shared values therein. Tracing the history of electronic repair - from the early valve radios, the invention of the transistor, microchips, programmable devices and through to IoT, connected devices and the “fluid assemblages” that emerge - we can see the shared values of the physical act of repair with the more intangible act of contestation in the digital world of algorithmic systems. Overlaying the values and tactics of the Right to Repair movement with the emerging concerns around data-driven systems we find ourselves examining the Repair Café as a potential model for community contestation and the construction of publics. The Repair Café started in Amsterdam in 2009 and has since spread to 35 countries with over 1700 instances of these cafés. The Repair Café is not intended to be a place where you bring your broken appliances for someone else to repair - rather, it is a place where you learn how to repair and recycle your own products and devices, and - more importantly - a place where you simply learn that things can be fixed rather than thrown out. In a similar spirit, the Contestation Café would be a place for those who feel mistreated by automated decision systems, AIs and algorithms, to bring their broken interactions and their unfair decisions to learn how to contest, push back and reclaim their agency and autonomy. Rather than Repairers, the Contestation Café has a panel of Fixers - people who inhabit the space between designers and users, with a particular knowledge of these systems and how to map and navigate them - who are there to share their experience and knowledge, and to guide the user in the ways of contestation and to become Fixers of their own futures. Although the Contestation Café is a speculative concept based on research into the shared values of contestation and repair, it has developed a life of its own through the process of imagining how it would work and what it would look like. Through the act of writing a manifesto for contestation, the space has manifested itself in the present and is waiting only for the fixers and public to arrive. Plans are already in progress for its first real instance and all of the imagined artefacts presented here will inform this process. https://contestationcafe.org/@en

This one-day workshop brings together HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners to explore how to study and design (with) AI agents from a more-than-human design perspective. We invite participants to experiment with thing ethnography and material speculations, as a starting point to map and possibly integrate emergent frameworks and methodologies for more-than-human design. By using conversational agents as a case, participants will discuss what a more-than-human approach can offer to the understanding and design of AI systems, and how this aligns with third-wave HCI concerns of networks, infrastructures, and ecologies.

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Are we reaching the limits of what human-centered and user-centered design can cope with? Developing new design methodologies and tools to unlock the potentials of data technologies such as the Internet of Things, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for the everyday job of design is necessary but not sufficient. There is now a need to fundamentally question what happens when human-centered design is unable to effectively give form to technology, why this might be the case, and where we could look for alternatives.@en