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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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).