Conference Agenda

In this paper, we report on fields of knowledge and experiences that are accessed through Human-Material Interaction. We describe the experiences of people who worked creatively, in a process-oriented, slowly observing and exploring practice with one material for four months, and who shared these experiences and their interpretations with us in interviews. Based on references to the realities of their lives, they shared individual narratives, which testify to an appreciative and caring approach to the respective material and, beyond that, to the environment, society, and the respective self. In our analysis, we identify Human-Material Interaction as access to learnings, interpretations, relationships, and feelings which leads us to argue that this way of relating to the environment is a practice for care. We further propose this practice as beneficial for education, sustainability, and future challenges, to promote diverse, interested, and involved perspectives.

This paper considers the semantic function and rhetorical roles the terms “empathy” and “care” carry through the context of user experience design. By considering feminist formulations of the ethics of care, we situate a compassionate moral orientation of “care” to better interrogate implementations of the concept of “empathy” in the design of information systems. We suggest the latter term borrows on the emotive connotations of the former, while not elucidating the same moral commitment to individual contexts, relationality, and personal well-being. Empathy thus is granted a more quantifiable legitimacy than care in professional design contexts, while simultaneously reducing agency of and potential benefits to product end-users. This ideological distinction highlights the ardent need for purposeful value sensitive design processes, and focuses on the seductive illusion that simple evocation of empathy means information systems can align with the interests of human beings.

Research in tangible and embodied interaction design highlights the critical role of the human body and its movement. Various studies have explored the importance of bodily awareness (Hummels, 2007) and have further encouraged de-signers to cultivate subjective bodily skills (Schiphorst, 2011) to support and enhance design practices. These bodily considerations have led to methodological approaches, such as body storming (Schleicher, 2010), to a more holistic approach like Soma Design (Höök, 2018), emphasising the importance of bodily understanding. This paper examines the characteristics of experienced bodily movers and their potential contributions to the design ideation process. We also explore how these characteristics can be integrated into design practice. A case study of a design ideation session with four designers and four experienced movers is presented, analysing their contributions and skills.

Several researchers have been studying how working with materials such as yarn can shift how we think and theorize relations to the body and others, by bringing together feminist values at the intersection of data, technology, and hands-on making. Extending such prior work, our research, anchored in craft-based knowledge production, aims to contribute with explorations on knotting as a feminist approach to data materialization. We present a year-long process consisting of 4 workshops we conducted with participants, in which we used differ-ent forms of knotting to materialize data about bodies being part of our academic institution and the Covid-19 pandemic. Presenting the workshops and their outcomes, we discuss how knotting as an approach to materializing data can: 1. put a focus on missing data, 2. surface corporeal and affective vulnerabilities, 3. contribute to making new relations with other (non-human) bodies, and 4. trouble notions of time.

Although contemporary technologies are inherently systemic, much design still focuses on individual interactions rather than on effects of collective action across space and time. Current imaginaries of the smart city, where massive assemblages of humans and nonhumans co-perform, have largely focused on the optimization and automation made possible by new technological advances. As we humans contend with our collective earthly survival, the question of how to design desirable futures has become imperative. In this paper, we explore both possibilities and problems associated with the construction of futurist visions. Departing from a story set in the present-day, we move to examine the historical work of Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon as a characteristically utopian imaginary. Looking at New Babylon’s key ideas through the lens of our contemporary conditions, we reflect on the issues of play, control, and totalization, as well as the challenges and opportunities for designing future living.

The advent of emerging technologies has introduced intelligent artifacts as distinctive moral agents. While care ethics has expanded to include animals, ecology, and public policy, it remains silent on the ethical dimensions of caring for intelligent artifacts. Intelligent artifacts and their digital remnants highlight uncertainties in the human-machine relationship and accentuate the "otherness" of objects. Given the inherent "otherness" of objects, there is a clear need to clarify this new ethical relationship between humans and objects. This paper advocates for otherness-centered design ethics, an extension of traditional care ethics to incorporate intelligent artifacts as non-human Others. Based on object-turn ethics, the paper proposes three strategies for caring for intelligent artifacts. This ethical approach goes beyond anthropocentrism by redefining the moral status of the object of care, expanding the "moral constituency" of human ethical responsibility.