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.

Regenerative thinking is gaining momentum in HCI, shifting the focus from merely mitigating environmental harm to actively fostering cohabitation within more-than-human ecosystems. This shift challenges HCI researchers to develop new methodologies that engage with both material and cultural regeneration—harnessing the regenerative capacities of ecologies while preserving valuable knowledge systems. It also underscores the need for a fundamental onto-epistemological shift beyond anthropocentric notions of sustainability. To support HCI researchers in adopting regenerative approaches while addressing these challenges, this panel brings together a diverse group of design researchers working hands-on with materials ranging from biological to algorithmic. Through concrete examples and actionable insights, the panelists provide practical guidance on engaging with regenerative material ecologies. By interweaving multiple perspectives through a diffractive approach, the panel also explores the opportunities this emerging perspective offers for HCI, particularly at the intersection of sustainability, posthumanism, and decoloniality.

This dissertation explores the shift from human-centered to more-than-human design within the context of artificial intelligence (AI). Through a series of design research experiments—spanning performance art, podcasting, kite-making, and designing interactive prototypes—it highlights anthropocentric biases in conversational AI and proposes more inclusive designs that can listen to and respond to more-than-human voices. Grounded in the critical posthumanities and developing a practice of designing-with, this research offers practical tools for designers and HCI researchers who aim to decenter the human in AI: It develops tactics and techniques for situating AI interactions, exposing entanglements within AI systems, and enacting alternative relations with AI agents. Additionally, the dissertation introduces emergent concepts to assist more-than-human designers in articulating their practices. Ultimately, it emphasizes the unique role of designers in generating posthuman knowledge rather than merely translating theory into practice.

This workshop explores the transformative potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in design research. GenAI, capable of creating new content such as images, text, music, video, and code, raises important questions about authorship, agency, and design practice. Inspired by Roland Barthes’ "The Death of the Author," this workshop examines how GenAI reshapes design research roles and methods. Key topics include best practices, ethical considerations, knowledge generation, and collaboration patterns between human and AI creatives.

Building on themes identified in the successful DIS 2023 workshop, this 2-day event invites designers and researchers to present completed projects, works-in-progress, and theoretical provocations. The structure allows time for both presentations and in-depth discussions, aiming to develop an online resource library and a collaborative publication. The workshop seeks to advance the discourse on GenAI, addressing its challenges and opportunities in design research.

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 one day workshop will explore the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in design research and practice. Generative technologies are developing rapidly and many designers are using them. Yet, there remains little published work on the use of GenAI in design. Our goal is to not only showcase the potential of GenAI for design, but to engage in discussions of its shortcomings and opportunities as they have been already articulated by scholars. By synthesizing both published and unpublished works, we will develop best practices, ethical considerations, and future research directions for the use of GenAI in design. We will explore a range of topics and themes, including leveraging the characteristics of GenAI for design, mapping the diverse applications of GenAI in design, envisioning a framework for design, and guiding future work on GenAI in design research. Ultimately, we hope to provide a roadmap for the integration of GenAI into the design research process and to encourage designers and researchers to explore the potential of GenAI in a thoughtful and deliberate way.

While decentering the human has been a key approach in posthumanist HCI, there are still questions and tensions around it. To address them, we outline emergent notions of decentering, tracing it back from HCI to critical posthumanism and connecting epistemological developments in the humanities to design scholarship. Then, reviewing how decentering is understood and practiced in HCI, we distill five emerging dimensions for articulating more-than-human practices. We conclude by unpacking “decentering through design” as an ongoing material practice through which more-than-human designers not only materialize (apply) posthuman theory but also “make” posthuman knowledge in their own unique ways.

In the HCI community, there is more openness and interest toward different forms of research outcomes beyond written academic publications. These include pictorial papers, video/audio documentaries, public exhibitions, posters and brochures, design fiction, comics, podcasts and many more. These alternative research outcomes play a critical role in explaining, disseminating, and translating valuable insights and knowledge from HCI research to people outside academic communities. We propose this workshop to initiate the conversation among researchers in the DIS community in generating alternative forms of research outcomes. What inspirations, motivations and critical factors influence the creation of alternative research outcomes? Who is the main audience, and what are the barriers and limitations of making them? The outcome of the workshop will be an enhanced understanding related to how HCI knowledge can be translated to or created for different audiences outside of academia, and a guide for HCI researchers towards creating alternate research outcomes.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are increasingly integrated into the functioning of physical and digital products, creating unprecedented opportunities for interaction and functionality. However, there is a challenge for designers to ideate within this creative landscape, balancing the possibilities of technology with human interactional concerns. We investigate techniques for exploring and reflecting on the interactional affordances, the unique relational possibilities, and the wider social implications of AI systems. We introduced into an interaction design course (n = 100) nine ‘AI exercises’ that draw on more than human design, responsible AI, and speculative enactment to create experiential engagements around AI interaction design. We find that exercises around metaphors and enactments make questions of training and learning, privacy and consent, autonomy and agency more tangible, and thereby help students be more reflective and responsible on how to design with AI and its complex properties in both their design process and outcomes.

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.

In this paper, we explore the use of metaphors for people working with artificial intelligence, in particular those that support designers in thinking about the creation of AI systems. Metaphors both illuminate and hide, simplifying and connecting to existing knowledge, centring particular ideas, marginalising others, and shaping fields of practice. The practices of machine learning and artificial intelligence draw heavily on metaphors, whether black boxes, or the idea of learn-ing and training, but at the edges of the field, as design engages with computational practices, it is not always apparent which terms are used metaphorically, and which associations can be safely drawn on. In this paper, we look at some of the ways metaphors are deployed around machine learning and ask about where they might lead us astray. We then develop some qualities of useful metaphors, and finally explore a small collection of helpful metaphors and practices that illuminate different aspects of machine learning in a way that can support design thinking.

The last decade has witnessed the expansion of design space to include the epistemologies and methodologies of more-than-human design (MTHD). Design researchers and practitioners have been increasingly studying, designing for, and designing with nonhumans. This panel will bring together HCI experts who work on MTHD with different nonhumans as their subjects. Panelists will engage the audience through discussion of their shared and diverging visions, perspectives, and experiences, and through suggestions for opportunities and challenges for the future of MTHD. The panel will provoke the audience into reflecting on how the emergence of MTHD signals a paradigm shift in HCI and human-centered design, what benefits this shift might bring and whether MTH should become the mainstream approach, as well as how to involve nonhumans in design and research.

What if things had a voice? What if we could talk directly to things instead of using a mediating voice interface such as an Alexa or a Google Assistant? In this paper, we share our insights from talking to a pair of boots, a tampon, a perfume bottle, and toilet paper among other everyday things to explore their conversational capabilities. We conducted Thing Interviews using a more-than-human design approach to discover a thing’s perspectives, worldviews and its relations to other humans and nonhumans. Based on our analysis of the speculative conversations, we identified some themes characterizing the emergent qualities of people’s relationships with everyday things. We believe the themes presented in the paper may inspire future research on designing everyday things with conversational capabilities at home.

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.

What if we began to speculate that intelligent things have an ethical agenda? Could we then imagine ways to move past the moral divide ‘human vs. nonhuman’ in those contexts, where things act on our behalf? Would this help us better address matters of agency and responsibility in the design and use of intelligent systems? In this article, we argue that if we fail to address intelligent things as objects that deserve moral consideration by their relations within a broad social context, we will lack a grip on the distinct ethical rules governing our interaction with intelligent things, and how to design for it. We report insights from a workshop, where we take seriously the perspectives offered by intelligent things, by allowing unforeseen ethical situations to emerge in an improvisatory manner. By giving intelligent things an active role in interaction, our participants seemed to be activated by the artifacts, provoked to act and respond to things beyond the artifact itself—its direct functionality and user experience. The workshop helped to consider autonomous behavior not as a simplistic exercise of anthropomorphization, but within the more significant ecosystems of relations, practices and values of which intelligent things are a part.

In this pictorial, we illustrate steps towards a novel approach that situates connected technologies for older people as resources. In contrast to mainstream approaches in gerontechnology that consider elderly as frail and passive, we aim to complement older people's vital competences by designing technologies that can be used in less prescriptive, and broader ways. The pictorial describes our design process in which resourceful strategies were identi-fed through thing ethnography and used as inspiration to create a series of new connected objects conceived as resources.

In the Internet of Things, not only people interact with objects, but also other objects; creating more complex material landscapes [2]. However, many thing-to-thing interactions are currently designed within a simple and linear paradigm: using mobile devices to remotely control connected objects. With these videos, we aim to explore more complex interrelationships, using a thing-centered design perspective in a speculative way. To this end, we position things within entanglements: fluid assemblages formed and dissolved in a situated way. This shows new possibilities for everyday objects to co-perform tasks, and 'carry' information that can be interpreted further as new perspectives are gained through interaction. Additionally, as entanglements implies a complicated relationship, we aim to provoke a reflection on the conflicts that may arise between things, and the implications of them (mis)interpreting our behavior.

In this paper, we describe three interactive prototypes of connected objects conceived as resources. Our aim with these prototypes is to demonstrate a new approach in designing connected technologies for elderly. This approach moves away from the stereotype of older people as frail and passive and addresses them as resourceful individuals. After presenting the design process and the prototypes, we discuss how to shift from the design of scripted products to the design of resources. This entails conceiving tools that can be used in various ways to support elderly’s existing competences of resourcefulness in activities they value.

In research on health and wellbeing, resourcefulness is seen as an important skill that can improve quality of life. In design and HCI literature, it has long been acknowledged that resourcefulness is about more than human skills and involves the adaptation, modification and reinvention of technologies in everyday life. In this paper we argue how certain aspects of resourcefulness have so far remained under-theorized, and present a new design perspective on resourcefulness that is grounded in practice theory. In this view, resourcefulness is conceptualised as the dispersed practice of dealing with everyday crises of routine. By elaborating on the complex interplay between means and purpose, we tease out resourcefulness as a practice of reconfiguration. The paper closes by discussing implications of this conceptualisation by zooming in on ways of capturing and designing for resourcefulness. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).