While engaging with four different wearable systems, we unexpectedly encountered felt experiences that resisted articulation and defied conventional classification. They were neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and yet both; neither comforting nor frightening, and yet both; neither recognizably human-like nor machinic, and yet both. Such ambiguous experiences might have gone unnoticed had we not attended to their somatic, felt dimensions. Existing user experience frameworks offered little guidance in making sense of these phenomena. However, through the lens of monster theory, these paradoxical experiences began to reveal their structure and significance. Drawing on concepts such as fusion, fission, massification, and incompleteness, we analyze and interpret the unexpected monstrous experiences arising from interacting with wearable systems. We argue that such experiences deserve a place in interaction design: not only for the enduring fascination of the monster, but also for its power to disrupt simplistic schemas, enrich design possibilities, and illuminate cultural shifts.
Cancer treatment leaves survivors with sexual difficulties that extend beyond physical symptoms and permeate many aspects of life, yet these concerns remain neglected in current cancer care. This paper responds to this gap by exploring how bespoke co-designed care technologies can support survivors when grounded in their lived sexual experiences. We conducted trauma-informed, generative workshops with two cancer survivors. The workshops surfaced four themes: gaps in anticipatory care, shifts from lovers to carers, unsettled bodies and selfhood, and navigating fragmented support. Through co-designing, we created Lived Experiences Archive (a ‘zine series of anonymous survivor stories) and BodyTalk (a sensory couple game for rebuilding emotional and physical intimacy). Beyond the artefacts, we contribute a methodological account of co-designing as care and empirical insights into post-cancer sexuality. We demonstrate the epistemic potential of bespoke intimate health technologies to generate situated forms of care and knowledge often overlooked in conventional health technology design.
We share a speculative fabulation that imagines alternative relations to an increasingly polluted landscape, drawing from environmental illness narratives. The fabulation is brought to life through Ray-Flats, shoes that glow in proximity to toxic sites listed in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s publicly available database, and an accompanying navigational guide. The storied designs seek to make the extent of chemical pollution in our everyday landscapes perceptible while foregrounding environmental illness experiences as a resource for living in and navigating a toxic world. Bringing together crip and posthuman perspectives, we contribute: 1) an example of designing to stay with environmental precarity, 2) the concept of “felt space" for making diffuse and ongoing environmental problems affectively perceptible through embodied interaction design, and 3) critical reflections on using fabulations with material speculations to foreground marginal perspectives in design.
Reminiscence therapy (RT) is a common non-pharmacological intervention in dementia care. Recent technology-mediated interventions have largely focused on people with dementia through solutions that replace human facilitators with conversational agents. However, the relational work of facilitation is critical in the effectiveness of RT. Hence, we developed Rememo, a therapist-oriented tool that integrates Generative AI to support and enrich human facilitation in RT. Our tool aims to support the infrastructural and cultural challenges that therapists in Singapore face. In this research, we contribute the Rememo system as a therapist’s tool for personalized RT developed through sociotechnically-aware research-through-design. Through studying this system in-situ, our research extends our understanding of human-AI collaboration for care work. We discuss the implications of designing AI-enabled systems that respect the relational dynamics in care contexts, and argue for a rethinking of synthetic imagery as a therapeutic support for memory rather than a record of truth.
Flexible work is increasingly pursued as a means of achieving work-life balance, particularly as growing caregiving responsibilities for children and aging family members shape workers’ lives. Yet most HCI research has examined flexibility primarily through productivity and organizational perspectives, with less attention to how it intersects with workers’ personal and family responsibilities. To address this gap, we conducted a qualitative study with 20 workers in Singapore engaging in flexible arrangements to manage paid work and care responsibilities. Using an asset-based lens, we show that flexibility is not a static benefit but a continual practice of rhythm-making. Participants maintained rhythms by drawing on temporal and spatial assets, negotiated them through relational and institutional dynamics, and sustained them through intrapersonal assets such as self-care and positive reframing. Our study reframes blurred boundaries as resources rather than disruptions and offers design implications for technologies that support flexible workers’ everyday rhythm-making practices.
Urban HCI investigates how digital technologies shape human behaviour within the social, spatial, temporal dynamics of public space. Meanwhile, robotic furniture research demonstrates how the purposeful animation of mundane utilitarian elements can influence human behaviour in everyday contexts. Taken together, these strands highlight an untapped opportunity to investigate how animated public furniture could mediate social interaction in urban environments. In this paper, we present the design process and in-the-wild study of mobile robotic benches that reconfigure with a semi-outdoor public space. Our findings show that the gestural performance of the benches manifested three affordances perceived by passersby, they activated engagement as robots, redistributed engagement as spatial elements, and settled engagement as infrastructure. We proposed an Affordance Transition Model (ATM) describing how robotic furniture could proactively facilitate transition between these affordances to engage passersby. Our study bridges robotic furniture and urban HCI to activate human experience with the built environment purposefully.
Environmental crises demand HCI to shift from human-centered design to more-than-human (MTH) care. Current MTH care often focuses on singular species, overlooking the role of the place in which these care relations are situated. To address this, we turn to mycoremediation—bioremediation of soil and water with fungi. We present findings from a two-week living probe study where participants (N=12) placed and cared for a living mycelium composite in a place of their choosing. Our findings show that engaging with mycoremediation fostered stewardship, extended noticing of multispecies ecologies, and made distant places proximate. Participants’ relationships evolved from expecting feedback from the fungi (a dyadic model) towards attending to their relations with the broader place (a place-based ecological model). We contribute to Bio-HCI and MTH HCI with: 1) an empirical account of mycoremediation as a situated MTH care practice, and 2) design implications for living artifacts that foster affective, ecological connections in place.