Plants are rarely positioned as active participants in digital games, serving as decorative elements or passive sensors. We present Plant.play(), a plant–digital game system that positions a living plant as the sole player in a pet-simulation game. Using bioelectrical signals, environmental data, and circadian rhythms, the plant autonomously performs caregiving actions while humans engage as observers. A workshop with five game experts informed the system's design, which was then implemented and deployed in a four-day exhibition. Observational fieldwork and interviews with twelve visitors revealed how people initially sought control, then gradually shifted toward interpreting the plant's slow, unpredictable, and impartial behaviors as meaningful play. Participants formed emotional connections with both the plant and the virtual pet, extending these reflections to their relationships with nonhuman beings. Our findings contribute empirical insights into interpretive engagement with nonhuman actors and offer design considerations for future plant–digital game systems that embrace materiality, perceived agency, and more-than-human perspectives.
HCI research increasingly engages with relational notions of ethics, such as care, felt and transcorporeal ethics, as new paradigms for design. Here, we discuss these relational notions in the context of multispecies design, extending it to incorporate Acampora’s concept of Corporal Compassion, which grounds ethics on a shared sense of livingness and vulnerabilities across beings. In order to elicit corporal compassion towards microorganisms, we designed a dining-theatre intervention, which invited participants to ingest and assign moral values to dishes prepared with speculative human-microbial hybrid cells originated from beings exposed to similar levels of bodily distress. Tried with 47 participants in 7 sessions, the work surfaced the idiosyncrasies behind participants’ moral frameworks, and how socialised prescriptive frameworks of ethics sometimes acted as closure towards relational approaches. We discuss how HCI could rethink traditional frameworks of ethics in ways that support relationality, while calling for researchers to make space for moral hesitation.
Pet ownership creates profound human-animal bonds, making pet loss significant. However, compared to human loss, Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) has given pet loss less attention. Addressing this, we conducted an exploratory mixed-methods study. The study began with a large-scale survey (N=611) revealing critical challenges: a strong desire to preserve memories but limited support for continuing bonds. Built upon these findings, our participatory design sessions(N=10) co-designed Bondi, a tangible prototype sup- porting continuing bonds through multimodal and customizable interactions (e.g. touch, sound, and light), evoking pets’ unique sounds, tail movements, and lighting effects. We then conducted a three-week field-deployment study with four participants to eval- uate how Bondi facilitated the maintenance of bonds with their deceased pets. Results showed that the customization and multi- modality evoked vivid recollections, lowering the social barrier for grief sharing. Bondi fostered comforting and non-intrusive connec- tions with pet memories. Furthermore, the study distilled design considerations for future pet bereavement support.
Parrots have shown the ability to interact with tablet-based speech boards to engage in parrot-human communication. However, the influence of speech boards’ interface design on avian usability and, thus, on speech boards’ potential to optimally support parrot-human communication, is yet to be explored. As a first step in this direction, we report on a longitudinal four-year in-the-wild study of a Goffin’s Cockatoo's interactions with three successive speech board interfaces. The study explored, for the first time, possible relations between interface design variables typically considered for human speech board users - type, granularity, repertoire and arrangement of speech board representations - and the bird's selections under different conditions and across different design iterations. Based on our findings, we contribute key considerations and hypotheses to inform further research into the relevance of interface design choices for the avian usability of speech boards and, thus, their potential to optimally support functional parrot-human communication.
\textit{What if future dining involved eating robots?} We explore this question through a playful and poetic experiential dinner theater: a tangible design fiction staged as a 2052 Paris restaurant where diners consume a biohybrid flying robot in place of the banned delicacy of ortolan bunting. Moving beyond textual or visual speculation, our “dinner-in-the-drama” combined performance, ritual, and multisensory immersion to provoke reflection on sustainability, ethics, and cultural identity. Six participants from creative industries engaged as diners and role-players, responding with curiosity, discomfort, and philosophical debate. They imagined biohybrids as both plausible and unsettling—raising questions of sentience, symbolism, and technology adoption that extend beyond conventional sustainability framings of synthetic meat. Our contributions to HCI are threefold: (i) a speculative artifact that stages robots as food, (ii) empirical insights into how people negotiate cultural and ethical boundaries in post-natural eating, and (iii) a methodological advance in embodied, multisensory design fiction.
Recent work in Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) argues that improving our relationship with nature demands designing for nature as plural and multiple. This means moving beyond approaches that impose one version of what nature is, toward sustaining its different enactments and relationships. This paper examines how such ontological multiplicity can be sustained through design. Drawing on Mol’s ontological multiplicity and Stengers’ scene-setting, we present the Toronto Water Atlas, a seven-month design project involving artists, scientists, and community members. Through workshops and coworking sessions, we experimented with various design choices that surfaced and sustained multiple enactments of water, in direct contrast with singular formulations of water prevalent in informatics used for policy and planning. Through this work, we draw attention to the infrastructural biases that restrict ontological multiplicity, and demonstrate how design can more deliberately sustain diverse water ontologies by staging conditions for partial, and relational enactments.
Opportunities for people to connect with everyday nature have diminished. In response, research efforts have introduced both direct and remote approaches to improve human–nature connections. However, most work has relied heavily on visual and auditory media as the main channels for remote human–nature interfaces. In this study, we investigate what experiential factors and forms of human–nature connection emerge from an interface without screens or audio. To inform design, we surveyed 55 respondents to understand expectations for remote nature engagement. Guided by these insights, we designed TreeB612, enabling one-on-one engagement with a distant living entity—a single tree. We conducted a 7-day deployment study with 10 participants, using diaries to explore how the interface shaped everyday engagement. Our findings suggest that the interface fostered coexistence and care, evoked the chosen tree through imagination and moments of respite, and encouraged subtle shifts in how people related to nature, advancing approaches to nature connection.