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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.