Design research is inherently both social and political. We are living and working in times of great unrest and upheaval, and we feel that our work must increasingly reflect this. We propose this workshop to engage with the material practices of protest. These range from long-held traditions of banners and badges to more emergent forms of zines, stickers, tattoos, and visible repairs.We propose a day of making and exchange to engage these practices. We will explore the materiality of the protest banner as a surface of collective expression, while also emphasizing care, repair, and feminist practices of collective knowledge-making in design research. Practically, we will be making banners, stickers, and temporary tattoos, using a speculative trade union as a unifying structure for discussions around care and justice in design.

Sample making and documentation are well established practices in digital craftsmanship. However, we rarely discuss how we return to these collections to look for starting points and new understandings. In this provocation, we propose diffraction as a way to describe how we revisit and reconsider samples in different times and contexts. In doing so, we can imagine what other knowledge might be present in them and interpret what else they might do. We use the example of the development of a filtering textile, based on a set of woven samples developed for other purposes and projects. Through this, we show how a relatively simple strategy can support us to investigate material samples and collections through a kind of makers’ science, in which both inspiration and proof may lie in the material samples themselves.

We present a vision for conversational user interfaces (CUIs) as probes for speculating with, rather than as objects to speculate about. Popular CUIs, e.g., Alexa, are changing the way we converse, narrate, and imagine the world(s) to come. Yet, current conversational interactions normatively may promote non-desirable ends, delivering a restricted range of request-response interactions with sexist and digital colonialist tendencies. Our critical design approach envisions alternatives by considering how future voices can reside in CUIs as enabling probes. We present novel explorations that illustrate the potential of CUIs as critical design material, by critiquing present norms and conversing with imaginary species. As micro-level interventions, we show that conversations with diverse futures through CUIs can persuade us to critically shape our discourse on macro-scale concerns of the present, e.g., sustainability. We refect on how conversational interactions with pluralistic, imagined futures can contribute to how being human stands to change.