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D.S. Murray-Rust

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Boundary objects and the plasticity of listening in collaborative design

Journal article (2026) - Stefano Delle Monache, Dave Murray-Rust, Elif Özcan, Nicolas Misdariis
Sound-driven design requires shared objects to bridge disciplinary divides and support collaboration between diverse expertise. Boundary Objects and Intermediary Objects typically fulfil this need, yet the ephemerality of sound is in apparent conflict with the stability needed for this boundary work. However, we argue for extending the object beyond the ephemeral sound wave to encompass tools, user interfaces, methods, and lexicons that provide material persistence. To support this we develop an analytical framework combining BO and IO properties and apply it to a selection of sound design tools in the literature. We argue that the required interpretive flexibility and perceived stability arises through the inherent plasticity of listening: different stakeholders actively construct stable, relevant meaning through situated interpretation. We propose the term "Soundary Objects" for artefacts and processes where listening's plasticity is the key mechanism enabling boundary work in sound-driven design, suggesting directions for designing effective socio-technical mediation tools. ...
Conference paper (2026) - Wilbert Tabone, Benedetta Lusi, Alessandro Ianniello, J. Micah Prendergast, Deborah Forster, Olger Siebinga, Dave Murray-Rust, Marco C. Rozendaal, David Abbink, More Authors
Building on two previous workshops on transdisciplinary practices for shaping worker-robot relations, this half-day workshop introduces participants to worldbuilding, a design-driven technique used to co-create and explore richly detailed futures, as a way to empower workers and scholars in reimagining plausible and preferable future worker-robot relations (WRRs). WRRs describe the interactions, collaborations, and shared practices between workers and robotic systems in organisational contexts. The workshop begins with an introduction to WRRs, and a keynote by a worldbuilding expert that will outline the method and its value for envisioning future WRRs. Groups of workshop participants will then investigate concrete case studies that demonstrate how robotic systems can support workers in their practice, with a focus on enhancing wellbeing. Through interactive activities in this workshop, participants will co-create imagined worlds of work, which will be analyzed systemically across multiple levels of complexity, from the individual worker and their immediate context to broader societal implications. The workshop ultimately aims to build a community committed to shaping sustainable futures of robot-assisted work. ...

Transdisciplinary Thinking around Robotic Work Futures

Robotic technologies are often proposed to relieve dull, dirty, or dangerous work, but may cause work to instead be experienced as boring, or dehumanized. Understanding the impact of robotics on the workfloor is complicated by the entanglement between emerging robotic capabilities, social dynamics, and organizational issues—which we call Worker–Robot Relations. Consequently, the impact of robotics on work is often studied in hindsight. Speculative design methodologies can facilitate alignment of robotic developments with a meaningful future of work, by creating boundary objects for communicating about current and future work practices. Making use of an unfolding artistic collaboration, we propose an experiential approach for speculating about future Worker–Robot Relations. We enabled speculative encounters between participants and robotic creatures that embody seven meta-behaviors. We abstracted these from observed behaviors in a current work context in baggage handling. We present the findings from focus groups responding to these encounters, including implications for HRI and speculative design. ...

Speculative Artifacts and Exegesis for Algorithmic Visibility

Conference paper (2026) - Mahan Mehrvarz, Dave Murray-Rust, Himanshu Verma
Algorithmic systems embedded in everyday collaboration platforms increasingly shape the way workers form impressions about each other. As they infer, evaluate, and act upon workers' traces, professional visibility becomes entangled with surveillance, recognition, and new forms of agency and reappropriation. This pictorial examines how such entanglements are materialized and negotiated when algorithmic systems and AI agents enter workplace visibility practices. We present a set of speculative artifacts situated within a shared regime of algorithmic workplace visibility, including organizational performance dashboards, predictive interfaces, Agentic AI, third-party optimization tools, and critical reactions around such socio-technical constellations. The pictorial pairs these artifacts with marginal annotations that operate as exegesis - critical, analytical, or elaborative commentary - positioning and interpreting the situated material work of design in relation to critical HCI scholarship. Our contribution lies in the insights about algorithmic visibility made possible through the indexical ties between speculative artifacts and exegetic annotation. ...

From prompts to practices

Book chapter (2026) - Elisa Giaccardi, Joseph Lindley, Maria Luce Lupetti, Giulia Jiangxian Zhu, Dave Murray-Rust
This paper presents a vocabulary for co-speculation with AI, developed through an experimental design studio with 55 postgraduate students who used generative AI tools to explore more-than-human design practices of decentering. The vocabulary spans multiple scales of interaction—from individual prompting acts to extended collaborative sessions—serving descriptive, analytic, and generative functions. Whilst it was developed through the specific context of decentering practices, we argue that this vocabulary is transferable to diverse design domains. It offers designers and researchers a framework for more reflective and intentional engagements with AI, contributing to emerging discussions on how design practice evolves when speculation becomes a shared activity between humans and machines. ...

A degrowth imaginary for designing with/for artificial intelligence

Book chapter (2026) - Roy Bendor, Dave Murray-Rust, Rainer Rehak
This paper presents Small AI as a conceptual lever for designers to resist the ‘bigger is better’ trend in the discourse and development of Generative AI. We explore different types of Small AI: initially in relation to the size of models, as smaller models require less computational resources for both training and inference, thus implying a smaller ecological footprint. However, we extend the meaning of smallness to apply to political, epistemic and cultural domains as well. In this vein, the paper posits Small AI as an imaginary-in-the-making, and a rallying concept for an alternative innovation agenda that holds, in the spirit of E.F. Schumacher’s famous dictum, that it is small (AI) and not big (AI) that is beautiful. The paper draws conclusions for those designing with/for AI, positing Small AI as a form of ‘unmaking’ with which designers may re-articulate the entangled relations between users, computation, and worlds. ...
Conference paper (2026) - Samangi Wadinambiarachchi, Heekyoung Jung, Maria Luce Lupetti, Tilman Dingler, Dave Murray-Rust, Graham Dove, Abdallah El Ali
Artificial intelligence is increasingly diffusing into design and creative education, reshaping how students ideate, iterate, and produce work. While these tools offer clear benefits in terms of speed and experimentation, they also challenge long-standing pedagogical assumptions regarding the importance of process, authorship, and studio-based learning. Educators are therefore faced with a dual task: mitigating the risks AI poses to reflective, process-oriented design while simultaneously exploring ways to meaningfully integrate these technologies into curricula. Through working group activities, this workshop examines these tensions to identify emerging strategies for the critical and transparent use of AI. Ultimately, we aim to address current knowledge gaps, establish a collaborative research agenda, and build a network to support AI collaboration in design and creative education. ...

Five Parables for Interface Thinking

Journal article (2026) - Dave Murray-Rust, Elisa Giaccardi
What happens to interfaces as generative AI disrupts the conditions of mediation, legibility, and control we have come to expect? This essay traces three fractures: a collapse of visibility, where interfaces obscure as much as they reveal; a collapse of form, where interfaces dissolve into language and prediction; and a collapse of positionality, where it becomes unclear who is thinking or speaking. In response, we offer five parables, five metaphors of physical transformation, from which to reconsider what interfaces might become. ...

Exploring the AI Act in the Near Future of Agentic AI

AI systems are increasingly embedded in workplace platforms, where they infer performance, attention, and affect from everyday traces. The EU AI Act regulates such systems through risk categories and governance concepts, yet it remains unclear how these concepts operationalize when AI becomes an agentic infrastructure. We present a near-future performance review fiction accompanied by short legal annotations. Rather than assessing compliance, the annotations function as legal exegesis: They mark where oversight, contestability, and sensitive inference shift meaning when enacted through interfaces, procedures, and cross-referencing agents. The provocation foregrounds three dynamics: The chameleonic aspects of risk categories, oversight collapsing into recursive system input, and sensitive domains becoming inferable through proxy data traces. We argue that "fiction and exegesis"offers a situated method for interrogating legal governance before such systems stabilize in practice. ...
Victims of sexual assault who turn to the criminal justice system for help often end up with negative experiences or even secondary trauma. While previous research has highlighted the challenges victims face, it tends to focus on individual interactions and rarely takes a holistic, victim-centred view of the process. Furthermore, it often highlights the actions of other stakeholders, rather than exploring the victim's ability to act. This means that systemic structures that influence the victim's experience and their ability to shape that experience can go unnoticed.
Using a human-centred design approach, journey mapping, we map the victim's experience, looking at the case of the Dutch criminal justice system. The journey map shows what interactions and non-interactions the victim encounters. We then analyse the map using a feminist theory of power, the Matrix of Domination, to explore how power impacts the victim's experience, both on an interpersonal and structural level.
In our study, we find that victims initially hold power, but that they lose it almost entirely when a case is filed. This lack of power results in the victim not having control of their journey in the criminal justice system, and results in different types of harm. We argue that if we want to improve victims' experiences, mapping power allows us to move beyond individual interactions and focus on systemic, structural changes. ...
Conference paper (2025) - S. Delle Monache, T. Deltrap, Nicolas Misdariis, D.S. Murray-Rust, E. Ozcan Vieira
This paper addresses the integration of sound into product design and engineering. Recognizing a gap in design education, the study focuses on introducing product design and engineering students to the principles of product sound design (PSD). By means of interviews with experts and literature research, a three-level framework is developed, addressing product features, object composition, and environmental context. This framework can assist students in understanding how engineering decisions influence sound perception at the product level, how material and structural choices affect sound at the object level, and how environmental factors shape the overall auditory experience. The framework served as the foundation for conceptualizing Les Sons, an educational software tool that mirrors these levels in its architecture. Les Sons supports students in exploring and modifying product acoustics through component and material selection. The paper stresses the role of tools like Les Sons for product sound design education, in order to practice and enhance collaboration and shared understanding in multidisciplinary contexts. ...

Exploring the Potentials of Prompting for Tangible Artifacts

Conference paper (2025) - Mahan Mehrvarz, Dave Murray-Rust, Himanshu Verma
Designing meaningful tangible and embodied interactions remains challenging due to their situated nature, complex user needs, and the limited programming skills of many users as well as designers. We developed an interaction model where users and LLMs co-perform tangible actions through prompt engineering beyond deterministic logic of commercial smart systems. In this model AI systems interpret natural language descriptions of environmental context, internalize technical functionalities and spatial cues, and translate these into tangible actions. We encapsulated the interaction model within a LLM-enabled tangible artifact as a HCI provotype and conducted an initial exploratory study around it. Our preliminary findings point to opportunities in refinement and reappropriation of such systems over the use period as well as challenges in adapting deictic spatial references. ...
Conference paper (2025) - Maria Luce Lupetti, Alessandro Ianniello, Willem Van Der Maden, Juri Sanni, Eric Tron Gianet, Minoru Matsui, Dave Murray-Rust
Data is central to AI performance, yet its curation remains an invisible and labour-intensive process, often leading to biases and reliability issues. While HCI has explored methods to improve data work, a growing body of research embraces data imperfections in an artistic vein to provoke reflection on human-AI relations. This workshop examines "Data Craft"- practices that creatively manipulate data to challenge conventional AI narratives and lower barriers to public engagement. By framing data craft as a boundary practice, we explore its potential to foster dialogue on AI capabilities, limitations, and societal impact. The workshop will investigate how data craft can be systematically integrated into participatory AI efforts, moving beyond artistic spaces to inform public debate. Through hands-on exploration, we aim to uncover strategies for leveraging data craft to engage diverse communities in shaping AI discourse. ...
Conference paper (2025) - Maria Luce Lupetti, Willem Van Der Maden, Juri Sanni, Lenny Martinez, Elena Cavallin, Serena Cangiano, Alice Mela, Dave Murray-Rust
As Artificial Intelligence continues to permeate everyday life, concerns over its societal consequences are becoming increasingly pressing. Anticipatory practices have emerged as central to responsible AI development, offering ways to envision and mitigate potential harms. While policymakers engage with anticipation through forecasting and risk assessment, speculative design offers an alternative, more experiential approach to also fosters public engagement and critical reflection. However, most speculative explorations focus on future possibilities, often neglecting the continuum between these and past phenomena. In this pictorial, we argue for integrating historical perspectives into speculative design to enrich anticipatory work on AI. Through a week-long international summer school, we engaged with the legacy of phrenology and the work of Cesare Lombroso. Using this as a springboard for speculation, we illustrate that incorporating historical trajectories into speculative design can deepen understanding of current dilemmas around AI, but dedicated methodological resources are still needed to achieve this value. ...
Journal article (2025) - Maria Luce Lupetti, Dave Murray-Rust, Serena Cangiano, Alice Mela
In this section, we feature reports from conferences, symposia, workshops, and similar events, focusing on discussions where the boundaries of HCI and UX are being challenged and where debate is lively and ongoing. ...

Insights into Visibility Practices of Remote Knowledge Workers

Remote collaboration technologies shape how workers are perceived by colleagues and managers, influencing career progression, trust, and workplace dynamics. This study examines visibility practices—also known as self-presentation or impression management—by exploring interactions through which remote workers establish and maintain visibility. Through 16 semi-structured interviews with remote knowledge workers across various roles and regions, we identify key visibility practices: participating in meetings, leaving traceable links to quality work outputs, and reappropriating miscellaneous features to become visible for others. However, these practices are deeply intertwined with negative psycho-social externalities such as internal pressures, fears, mistrust, and privacy concerns that endanger workers’ overall well-being. Our contributions include (1) empirical insights into workplace visibility and its entangled psycho-social complexities, (2) visibility ecosystem as a socio-material frame, capturing human-technology interactions in when visibility is at stake, and (3) design implications for collaboration technologies that support visibility practices while mitigating associated psycho-social externalities. ...

Exploring Third-Person View for Error Handling in Telerobotic Planetary Infrastructure Maintenance

Conference paper (2024) - Liliane Filthaut, Dave Murray-Rust, Maria Luce Lupetti, Neal Y. Lii, Peter Schmaus, Daniel Leidner
This study investigates error handling intricacies in supervised autonomy orbit-to-ground teleoperation for space exploration robots, emphasizing scenarios with communication delays that render Earth-based ground control assistance unfeasible. In this setting, one major challenge lies in empowering the crew to independently mitigate robot errors that may occur as the robot plans its actions. To address this limitation of current supervised autonomy interfaces, we propose a third-person perspective and game design principles to improve environmental awareness in error situations. 16 experts with similar technical background as the target crew members tested the interface in a physical user study, while 42 people assessed it in an online study. We conclude that a third-person view brings significant improvements to mental workload, overall experience and the ability to identify and rectify planning errors. ...

From Interaction Primitives to a Design Space

Journal article (2024) - Konstantinos Tsiakas, Dave Murray-Rust
This article aims to develop a semi-formal representation for Human-AI (HAI) interactions, by building a set of interaction primitives which can specify the information exchanges between users and AI systems during their interaction. We show how these primitives can be combined into a set of interaction patterns which can capture common interactions between humans and AI/ML models. The motivation behind this is twofold: firstly, to provide a compact generalization of existing practices for the design and implementation of HAI interactions; and secondly, to support the creation of new interactions by extending the design space of HAI interactions. Taking into consideration frameworks, guidelines, and taxonomies related to human-centered design and implementation of AI systems, we define a vocabulary for describing information exchanges based on the model’s characteristics and interactional capabilities. Based on this vocabulary, a message passing model for interactions between humans and models is presented, which we demonstrate can account for existing HAI interaction systems and approaches. Finally, we build this into design patterns which can describe common interactions between users and models, and we discuss how this approach can be used toward a design space for HAI interactions that creates new possibilities for designs as well as keeping track of implementation issues and concerns. ...

A feminist approach to speculative design for policy making

There is a call for more use of future-oriented design methods like speculative de-sign in developing policies. While these methods offer potential benefits in helping future-proof policies, they also run the risk of solidifying existing structures of pow-er if not applied critically. In this paper, we describe a case study examining smart doorbells in Amsterdam, where we created a speculative design exhibition grounded in feminist theory in order to challenge the existing power structures in the public domain. We then discuss the insights from our design process and the reaction the exhibition received in light of how feminist theory can help ensure a critical application of future-oriented design methods in policy design. ...
Book chapter (2024) - Chris Elsden, Chris Speed, Dave Murray-Rust
While the past decade has seen cuts to public funding to the arts, it has also seen the development of online technologies which have the potential to reach increasingly diverse and global audiences. As a result, individuals and organisations across the creative industries and performing arts have experimented and embraced more diverse, innovative, and direct approaches to engage and monetise tangible support from their audiences and communities. Prior work has identified the evolution of crowdfunding in the arts as a form of ‘crowd patronage’ – where platforms such as Patreon and Kickstarter function as new intermediaries that can radically reconfigure how and why creative work is funded. The ‘pivot to digital’ – which brought audiences and creative workers together in new online spaces throughout the pandemic – further reinforced the potential for direct communication and financial support from audiences of creative work. This chapter will reflect on how contemporary data-driven, monetary technologies have begun to decentralise how creative work is valued, supported, and paid for, with a particular focus on the performing arts. ...