Materiality of artefacts holds the potential to intricately and dynamically shape our daily practices. We posit this capacity can be harnessed in fostering creative unfolding of everyday care practices towards living artefacts. To explore this premise, we designed a cyanobacterial living artefact with air purifying capacity, and invited eight participants to live with and care for it for two weeks. The artefact can be situated in diverse locations within domestic spaces, wherever the participant would consider air purification necessary and certain lighting conditions beneficial for the artefact’s vitality. This versatility is supported by the artefact’s colour-changing, pliable, adhesive, and suspendable nature. We analysed visual documentation and semi-structured interviews of participants’ experiences of the artefact. Our findings suggest distinct roles of materiality for care regarding labour, knowledge, and exploration. We further highlight the intricate design space encompassing openness, temporalities and semantic fitness towards nurturing mutualistic care in human-microbe interactions.@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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Domestic heating systems need to change to meet climate targets. We draw on practice theoretical concepts to understand what is needed to integrate heat pumps in Dutch households. From a design orientation, we view households as creative actors integrating technologies into daily life. We report on an ethnographic study of the disruptions and resulting reconfigurations that occur when heat pumps are introduced in Dutch households. Our findings reveal a variety of practice reconfigurations around heat pumps. We also find that these reconfigurations are related to and may influence other practices, including professional practices. We discuss our findings in relation to policy, technology development, and design, and conclude that the required reconfigurations in Dutch household practices could be supported, and that innovative practice reconfigurations emerging from internal household dynamics could contribute to sustainability transitions.

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Microbes offer designers opportunities to endow artefacts with environmental sensing and adapting abilities, and unique expressions. However, microbe-embedded artefacts present a challenge of temporal dissonance, reflected by a “time lag” typically experienced by humans in noticing the gradual and minute shifts in microbial metabolism. This could compromise fluency of interactions and may hinder timely noticing and attending to microbes in living artefacts. In addressing this challenge, we introduce Cyano-chromic Interface, in which photosynthetic activity of cyanobacteria (Synechocystis sp. PCC6803) is timely surfaced by an electrochromic (EC) material through its monochromatic display. Grounded through interface performance characterization and design primitives, we developed application concepts through which we instantiate how the interface can be tuned for diverse functional and experiential outcomes in living artefacts. We further discuss the potential of aligning human-microbe temporalities for enriched interactions and reciprocal relationships with microbes, and beyond.@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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Introduced in 2020, the notion of living artefacts encompasses biodesign outcomes that maintain the vitality of organisms such as fungi, algae, bacteria, and plants in the use of everyday artefacts, enabling new functions, interactions, and expressions within our daily lives. This paper situates living artefacts at the intersection of the sustainability discourse and more-than-human ontologies, illuminating the unprecedented opportunities that living artefacts present for regenerative ecologies. These ecologies are characterized by a fundamental inclination toward mutualism, creativity, and coevolution. In regenerative ecologies, the human-nature relationship transcends the binary distinction and it manifests as a single autopoietic system in which the constituent members collaboratively engage in the creation, transformation, and evolution of shared habitats. The paper outlines five pillars, supplemented by guiding questions and two illustrative cases, to aid designers in unlocking, articulating, and critically evaluating the potential of living artefacts for regenerative ecologies.@en

In this special interest group (SIG) we invite researchers, practitioners, and educators to share their perspectives and experiences on the expansion of human-centred perspective to more-than-human design orientation in human-computer interaction (HCI). This design for and with more-than-human perspectives and values cover a range of fields and topics, and comes with unique design opportunities and challenges. In this SIG, we propose a forum for exchange of concrete experiences and a range of perspectives, and to facilitate reflective discussions and the identification of possible future paths.

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By 2027 more than 530 M homes will likely adopt at least one type of automated system. This means that a growing number of residents will be living with automated technology in the home, everyday. But living with smart homes is full of conflicts between what residents find appropriate and what technology does instead. Previous research, centering end-user needs, has often focused on smooth living experiences through graphical user interfaces and improved predictions. In this research, we take the more-than-human lens of co-performance to put crises in everyday practices in view, and to conceptualize a new notion of interface. Based on ethnographic data from 11 households, our findings illustrate how crises reveal conflicting ideas of appropriateness, how residents reconfigure their co-performances with technology in response to everyday crises, and how new interfaces are enacted as a result. We conclude by illuminating how researchers and designers should not look at the conflicts and crises emerging in the more-than-human home as something of which to get rid. Instead, they are opportunities for residents and buildings to respond to one another in the context of everyday life and to enact interfaces that were not pre-designed into the building.

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Automated and connected technologies are increasingly present in everyday life. The concept of co-performance offers a new perspective on artificial agency by understanding artifacts as capable of performing everyday practices next to people. In this pictorial we adopt a lens informed by co-performance, and propose the visual vocabulary of the screenplay as a novel way to represent and annotate co-performances. We highlight conflicts and how they are they are resolved through the enactment of new interfaces in-use. We visually represent and annotate scenes found in data from a study of households living with smart technologies. Using this visual vocabulary reveals the role of time, embodiment, character development and more, in the enactment of interfaces.@en

Nowadays, designers deal with increasingly complex and meaningful challenges. Because of that, design schools are required to deliver professional designers capable of handling what future decades might bring. Therefore, resilience, generally described as the process of adapting well in the presence of adversity, makes it a valuable quality future generations of designers could develop. As resilience is still an abstract concept within the education domain, this MSc graduation project aimed to explore how it could be built and enhanced in such context. The approach chosen to tackle that question was initially to analyse the literature regarding resilience. Then, to perform an in-depth autoethnographic study in a moment resilience was systematically present in the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering: the COVID19 lockdowns. Finally, the learnings from that period and previous literature research were synthesized into a theoretical framework that aims to assist educators in conceptualizing interventions to foster resilience in learning systems. This framework was implemented to design and evaluate My Rubric, a co-creative guide for adaptive assessment, which aims to offer a constructive and resilient alternative to the current rubric.

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Along with the increase in average life expectancy, the world’s elderly population is expected to grow to 2.1 billion by 2050. Aging marks a sensitive and vulnerable period of life, with loss of roles and functions and increased dependence on others, often reflected in a decline in quality of life. As everyone experiences ageing, the need to achieve a satisfactory old age for all in the future means that more research and a better systematic understanding of aging and elder well-being are needed. Especially as changing demographics put growing pressure on public health and finance and the provision of long-term care becomes increasingly inadequate. In this study, we have systematically scoped three streams of literature, design, social studies and digital technology, based on Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) methodological framework. We report on our ongoing work scoping our research on three core elements: Aging and elder well-being, Community services and AIoT. Our preliminary review revealed a cluster of ethnographic studies on ‘aging in place’ in which community services appeared to be of interest. Several survey studies confirm that most elders prefer to receive care from their families rather than in institutions. In a cluster with a systemic lens, community services have been studied to become an increasingly important model of long-term care, and a few have demonstrated that community services are more effective in supporting elders’ interests and care preferences. Within the digital technology stream, an emerging cluster of studies proposes Artificial intelligence and Internet of Things (AIoT) as potential solutions to the challenges associated with an aging society. AIoT integrated into elderly care expands the range of services and supports social well-being. Experimental studies with prototyped technologies are studied in relation to outcomes of improving the self-care experience of elders at home and how AIoT facilitates the development and sharing of their unique coping strategies, thereby maintaining their vitality and independence. However, only a few studies concentrate on AIoT as part of community services. Overall, our systemic review work in progress unpacks the relevant literature into different clusters and categories, including theoretical lenses, research methods, findings and outcomes. The initial charting of the studies indicates that despite the accumulation of previous research, the current body of knowledge on the interplay of aging and elder well-being, community services, and AIoT is underdeveloped, with unresolved issues at multiple levels of the community care model, including policy, organization, services and individuals. @en

The last decade has witnessed the expansion of design space to include the epistemologies and methodologies of more-than-human design (MTHD). Design researchers and practitioners have been increasingly studying, designing for, and designing with nonhumans. This panel will bring together HCI experts who work on MTHD with different nonhumans as their subjects. Panelists will engage the audience through discussion of their shared and diverging visions, perspectives, and experiences, and through suggestions for opportunities and challenges for the future of MTHD. The panel will provoke the audience into reflecting on how the emergence of MTHD signals a paradigm shift in HCI and human-centered design, what benefits this shift might bring and whether MTH should become the mainstream approach, as well as how to involve nonhumans in design and research.

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This paper offers a taxonomy of digital tools for crafting habitabilities in biodesign practices. Over the past decade, interest has grown among design and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) scholars to explore the potentials of living organisms for novel responsive behavior and interaction possibilities. Yet, to date, it remains unexplored how digital technologies can support the design of living artefacts, that is, artefacts in which the organism is alive at the time of use. Our taxonomy bridges this gap by examining and reinterpreting the roles existing digital tools can play in the exploration of the abilities of things to provide a habitat for living artefacts both at design time and use time, i.e., crafting habitabilities in biodesign. The taxonomy is grounded in a systematic analysis of ten cases of living artefacts from art, design, and HCI, and it identifies three roles for digital tools: understanding, embodying, and perpetuating the habitat. Forwarding a relational perspective through the lens of habitability, this work promotes the mutual wellbeing of both humans and non-humans in biodesign.

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This personal Festschrift for Humberto Maturana spotlights his pioneering 1997 essay ‘Metadesign’. The author’s own PhD on metadesign was completed in 2003, and she uses Maturana’s essay as an aide-memoir for revisiting perennial questions about whether technology can catalyse a humane and creative society. In this personal and reflective essay, the author admires Maturana’s combination of scientific discipline and compassion. She also notes that, at a time when many saw metadesign as a way to design the technologies that would anticipate and meet human needs, Maturana was identifying its poetic, world-making capacity for human transformation. Today, designers can still learn from his respect for the vagaries and complexities of language, emotion and co-creativity when developing computational systems and infrastructures. The author concludes that Maturana’s vision of metadesign is convivial, rather than totalising. Ultimately, it is an appeal for imaginative and responsible action.@en

In this one-day workshop we are going to make access. We aim to counteract the phenomenon that access to making (e.g., in makerspaces, fablabs, etc.) is not equally distributed, with certain groups of people being underrepresented (e.g., women∗1). After brief introductions from participants and a set of three impulse keynotes, we will envision and "make"interventions together, such as speculative or provocative objects and actions. The workshop takes a constructive stance with the goal to not rest on empirical and theoretical findings or individual experiences, but to translate those into viable interventions. These serve as exemplars of findings with the clear goal of being deployed soon after.

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How can humans remain in control of artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems designed to perform tasks autonomously? Such systems are increasingly ubiquitous, creating benefits - but also undesirable situations where moral responsibility for their actions cannot be properly attributed to any particular person or group. The concept of meaningful human control has been proposed to address responsibility gaps and mitigate them by establishing conditions that enable a proper attribution of responsibility for humans; however, clear requirements for researchers, designers, and engineers are yet inexistent, making the development of AI-based systems that remain under meaningful human control challenging. In this paper, we address the gap between philosophical theory and engineering practice by identifying, through an iterative process of abductive thinking, four actionable properties for AI-based systems under meaningful human control, which we discuss making use of two applications scenarios: automated vehicles and AI-based hiring. First, a system in which humans and AI algorithms interact should have an explicitly defined domain of morally loaded situations within which the system ought to operate. Second, humans and AI agents within the system should have appropriate and mutually compatible representations. Third, responsibility attributed to a human should be commensurate with that human’s ability and authority to control the system. Fourth, there should be explicit links between the actions of the AI agents and actions of humans who are aware of their moral responsibility. We argue that these four properties will support practically minded professionals to take concrete steps toward designing and engineering for AI systems that facilitate meaningful human control.@en

What if things had a voice? What if we could talk directly to things instead of using a mediating voice interface such as an Alexa or a Google Assistant? In this paper, we share our insights from talking to a pair of boots, a tampon, a perfume bottle, and toilet paper among other everyday things to explore their conversational capabilities. We conducted Thing Interviews using a more-than-human design approach to discover a thing’s perspectives, worldviews and its relations to other humans and nonhumans. Based on our analysis of the speculative conversations, we identified some themes characterizing the emergent qualities of people’s relationships with everyday things. We believe the themes presented in the paper may inspire future research on designing everyday things with conversational capabilities at home.

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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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Elisa Giaccardi Understanding how we live with things, and in turn, how things come to live with us calls for methodologies that go beyond a focus on humans. As scholars, from material culture studies to object-oriented philosophies, we have come to appreciate the agency and social life of the things we make. Yet as designers, we fail to move past the blind spots of our intentions and give things a voice in doing design work. We still believe that the relationship between humans and things is unidirectional: only humans make things. In the face of such negligence, design is rapidly being widened and disrupted by the flood of data technologies under the name of Internet of Things, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. These technologies have a profound effect on the nature of products and services, enabling things to “make” things too through the exchange and processing of data (e. g.... @en