The kitchen is one of the busiest and messiest hubs of a home, where the hands are usually spoiled with food. In this setting, gestural interaction can offer several advantages: efficient, intuitive, and touch-free orchestration of interactive devices. Yet, research scarcely investigates the user's perspective on gesture-based systems in the kitchen and lacks designs developed through a user-centred process. With the contribution of 234 participants, we conducted formative studies that investigated users' expectations, perceived benefits, and concerns of gesture-based control in the kitchen. These studies guided our conceptual design ‘2HandTouch’, an information display controlled by Hand Specific On-Skin Gestures (HSoS). Then, we evaluated the user experience of this design through a summative user study. We introduced four perceived benefits of HSoS use in the kitchen that has not been visible in such detail. These are i) hygiene, (ii) time management, (iii) imminent control, and (iv) an uninterrupted cooking practice. We also provided broader implications of our work for designing gesture-controlled devices in the kitchen context.

What for and how will we design children's technologies in the transhumanism age, and what stance will we take as designers? This paper aims to answer this question with 13 fictional abstracts from sixteen authors of different countries, institutions and disciplines. Transhumanist thinking envisions enhancing human body and mind by blending human biology with technological augmentations. Fundamentally, it seeks to improve the human species, yet the impacts of such movement are unknown and the implications on children's lives and technologies were not explored deeply. In an age, where technologies such as under-skin chips or brain-machine interfaces can clearly be defined as transhumanist, our aim is to reveal probable pitfalls and benefits of those technologies on children's lives by using the power of design fiction. Thus, main contribution of this paper is to create diverse presentation of provocative research ideas that will foster the discussion on the transhumanist technologies impacting the lives of children in the future.