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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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

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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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

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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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

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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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

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

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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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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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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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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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

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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Over the last half century, design education has diversified and developed considerably, in part in the arts academies, and increasingly in universities and vocational technical education. The TU Delft design program was founded in 1969, and has since grown quickly into a large, university-based, technology-aligned set of programs presently housing 2000 students and 100 academic staff. In the 50 years the Delft program changed due to: (1) changes in societal demand (from products, via services, to the systemic level of societal challenges), (2) the maturing of design as an academic discipline between science and engineering, and (3) international developments of the educational system (e.g., the Bologna agreement). In this paper we describe the development of this program within the broader disciplinary context of TU Delft, and how it brought together engineering, social sciences, and business studies in project-based education. We draw lessons from a unique position, made possible by this large scale and positioning next to engineering sciences. This position supported a large pool of in-house expertise; it fostered an intertwining of education, research, and practices in the industrial and wider societal context. And it also posed challenges of making design education work at a large scale.

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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