Technologies designed to support reminiscence, defined as the practice of engaging with one’s personal past, have become a significant area of inquiry within HCI. Although this has generated a diverse range of creative systems, the field still lacks a systematic account of the design principles that guide them. In this paper, we review 60 studies to examine both the psychosocial functions these technologies target and the mechanisms through which they operate. Our analysis suggests a predominant emphasis on positive identity construction and social connection, with comparatively less focus on functions related to everyday problem solving. To synthesize the mechanisms identified, we propose a cue-centered framework that treats mnemonic cues (e.g., photographs) as the basic unit of design. The framework organizes design mechanisms into a four-stage lifecycle: cue generation, augmentation, interaction, and sharing. It provides a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing reminiscence technologies and highlights underexplored opportunities for future research and design.
Older adults are increasingly invited into speculative activities within HCI, yet little is known about how researchers facilitate these processes or how this population engages in shaping alternative presents and socio-technical futures. While speculative design methods often aim to support non-designers to contribute to design processes, engaging older adults poses unique challenges that complicate their involvement. To build a comprehensive understanding, we conducted a scoping review of 44 prior studies on speculative design involving older adults, focusing on the research objectives and methodological rationales, facilitation, and how older adults engage in speculation. Through this analysis, we identify persistent methodological tensions, opportunities to advance more inclusive speculative practices with aging populations, and suggest implications for future practice.
Animal behavior (ethology) has emerged as a promising source of inspiration for social robot design. However, existing efforts have commonly resulted in isolated design instances. Our high-level understanding of the design processes for integrating ethological insights into social robot design and evaluation remains limited. To address this gap, we conducted a two-step investigation. First, we developed a stage-based framework through a systematic review, identifying six core design stages along with their descriptive dimensions. Using this framework as an analytic lens, we then analyzed design cases drawn from academic, commercial, and public contexts, deriving stage-specific considerations and actionable strategies to support designers in navigating the process. Our findings provide a conceptual scaffold for operationalizing ethology as a design resource, enabling more systematic, reflective, and transferable practices, while also surfacing new opportunities for future social robot interaction design.
As persuasive technologies weave themselves deeper into the fabric of domestic life, the challenge of sustaining digital wellbeing grows increasingly entangled with the spaces and rhythms of everyday living. Conventional Digital Self-Control Tools (DSCTs), while offering momentary reprieve, often falter under sustained use, revealing a gap between device-centric interventions and the situated nature of technology habits. In resistance, we present Attention Nooks: a set of spatial interventions that deploy "situated frictions" within the home. Attention Nooks recast digital wellbeing as a lived negotiation of spatial boundaries in the home. Developed through an autobiographical design process, we surface design events that shaped our making and living with our prototypes. We discuss the teleological nature of interventions, implications for ubiquitous computing, and the subversion of ethically ambiguous technologies. Our contribution lies in reframing digital wellbeing as a design opportunity that calls for pluralistic situated encounters in the home.
Anticipating the ethical and societal risks of emerging technologies has become an urgent challenge as their rapid integration into everyday life can produce far-reaching social consequences. In response, Design Futures practices are gaining traction within HCI and design as approaches to critically examine and anticipate the implications of technology. Yet, systematic knowledge on how these practices are structured to foster ethical reflection remains limited. To address this gap, we conducted a scoping review of 32 case studies employing Design Futures to engage with ethical concerns. Drawing from this review, we present a \textit{Taxonomy of Design Futures Processes for Ethical Reflection}, which illustrates how different activities, actors’ involvement, and types of futures generated shape the scope of ethical discussion. This taxonomy provides researchers and practitioners with practical guidance for creating Design Futures activities that foster ethical reflection on technology.
This work investigates generative facial expression interfaces for intelligent agents from a meta-design perspective. We propose the Generative Personalized Facial Expression Interface (GPFEI) framework, which organizes rule-bounded spaces, character identity, and context--expression mapping to address challenges of control, coherence, and alignment in run-time facial expression generation. To operationalize this framework, we developed GenFaceUI, a proof-of-concept tool that enables designers to create templates, apply semantic tags, define rules, and iteratively test outcomes. We evaluated the tool through a qualitative study with twelve designers. The results show perceived gains in controllability and consistency, while revealing needs for structured visual mechanisms and lightweight explanations. These findings provide a conceptual framework, a proof-of-concept tool, and empirical insights that highlight both opportunities and challenges for advancing generative facial expression interfaces within a broader meta-design paradigm.
Scenario-based design (SBD) was developed in human-computer interaction (HCI) in the early 1990s. It recommended the use of scenarios (narratives that describe episodes of human activity) as a focal tool for describing, analyzing, designing, and developing new human-computer interactions. In this context, a scenario describes the appropriation of a design that has not yet been implemented. SBD argues that narratives can serve as powerful design tools for HCI professionals, facilitating evocative but low-fidelity envisioning of design ideas, encouraging critical and imaginative analysis throughout design, highlighting human values and perspectives to designers, and enabling diverse stakeholder participation in design activities. SBD was developed in the SIGCHI community and has been used for 35 years. We examine the role of SBD over time, focusing on the decade 2015-2025. SBD has continued to develop design and method themes as in previous decades, but has also incorporated new themes, including speculative design and ethics.