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.

Sensor networks are increasingly commonplace in visions of smart cities and future healthcare systems, promising greater efficiency and increased wellbeing. However, the design of these technologies remains focused on specific users and fragmented by context, overlooking the diversity of needs, wants and values present when technologies, people, and lived realities interact within instrumented spaces. In this paper we present a workshop method – Sensing Care – that can help researchers, interdisciplinary design and development teams, and potentially affected users, to explore what it takes to design for living with sensor technologies that intersect and interact across private and public spaces, through speculative scenarios and role play. Drawing from three deployments of the workshop, we discuss how this approach supports the design of future care-oriented sensor networks, and helps designers understand what it means to live with complex technologies as people traverse diverse contexts.