Preliminary Programme

This paper critiques “non-use” as a conceptual orientation to research. To do so, we draw on historical materialism to argue that the negation at the heart of “non-use” becomes subsumed into, and ultimately reinforces, the centrality of use and users. Through prior literature and two case studies, we enumerate specific ways that the concept of non-use narrows analytic attention and outline the consequences of that narrowing. As an alternative, we develop remantling as an orientation that directs attention to the social relations, subjectivities, and temporal conditions through which technologies and practices take shape, while simultaneously highlighting how research contributes to bringing these phenomena into being. We then reconnect this line of thinking with recent allied work—reflecting on the conditions that shape how critique becomes possible, challenging the progress narratives that typically animate HCI research, and highlighting the uneven risks and capacities involved in pursuing more politically expansive research.

This essay explores one of the most prominent, although seldom acknowledged, use cases of design: military technology. We explore the ethical and practical challenges by using three cases where HCI, the military and war-fighting have become interdependent. First, the development of head mounted displays raises the problem of the ‘lion and the lamb’, where it is near impossible to separate military and civilian applications. Second, we look at how maker-spaces have come to be used as a way of engaging civilians in building and fabricating military hardware. Lastly, we look at the adoption of AI and robots, and how robots and drones are developing into a new class of weapon. In discussion, we consider how HCI could critically reflect upon the application of the technologies it helps to design, and opportunities for a ‘harm reduction’ human computer interaction.

The Chinese party-state frames AI as an ideal instrument to transform its rising elderly population from a national crisis into an opportunity. This must be done, its leaders argue, by integrating AI into society in ways that cultivate moral values of a harmonious society and traditional family structures. Drawing on ethnographic research on the implementation of three elderly care programs in Shanghai, we examine how the moral economy of AI comes into being, with a specific focus on the affective labor it necessitates from citizens. The lens of moral economy contributes to prior research on the political economy of technology and labor, as well as to discussions of AI and ethics.

This paper argues for the continued significance of affect in HCI research and design practice. Drawing on a seminal paper by Boehner et al. presented at the 2005 decennial Aarhus conference, the paper traces genealogies of Affective Computing and Affective Interaction Design, examining them within the general context of the evolution of affect studies during the past two decades. Building on Boehner et al.'s proposed shift from understanding affect as information to exploring affect as interaction, this paper advocates for a conceptual advancement from interaction to relation, facilitating engagement with more-than-human design concerns in an era defined by far-from-equilibrium tipping points and crises. Through examination of three affective exemplars, the paper identifies four key themes – affect and the more-than human, affective encounters and modulation over time, affect and care across ecologies and affect in crisis – that provide key insights, concepts and directions for sticking with affect as relational in future explorations in HCI and design, maintaining productive tensions and complexities as essential elements of theoretical and practical advancement across affect-centered design approaches.

Based on five years of ethnographic research and volunteer experience at 45th St Greenspace, in Sunnyside, Queens, this paper argues that technologically-mediated independent or hybrid creative and knowledge workers act as volunteers at a community greenspace because their paid work gives them enough discretionary free time and autonomy in their scheduling to volunteer while still doing other computer-based work at their apartments nearby. Factors in the independent and hybrid work lifestyle, including isolation and an extended amount of time using technology, also motivate individuals to volunteer at the greenspace as it provides a social outlet and time away from technology. Contributing to HCI and CSCW literature that focuses on how technology is used within mission-driven food and agriculture projects, this paper suggests that there is benefit to also understanding how technologies outside of a project impact its direction. I also discuss how emerging work trends give the possibility for increased participation in collective action and greater engagement between urban residents and city space. The dominance of independent and hybrid workers within new collectives, however, impacts these organizations' culture and governance – with potentially exclusionary consequences.

This paper introduces a different way of thinking about crisis, identifying whose, which, and what crisis is at stake when dominant articulations of computing supply chains emphasize breakages, delays, and disruptions as reasons to further control supply chains. We call this formulation “against crisis thinking”. Against crisis thinking emphasizes how crisis in and along the computing supply chain is never a self-evident phenomenon. While HCI scholars have developed design and computing approaches to mitigate social, economic, and climate challenges in and along computing supply chains, the field has paid less attention to how the term crisis is first articulated in public discourse, how it is exploited by powerful actors to reinforce business as usual, and the uneven impacts of crisis thinking on marginalized communities. By providing such a formulation, we provide HCI multiple sites of intervention across a highly interconnected, complex, and transregional computing supply chain to generate progressive alternatives.

Recent public debates about the H-1B working visa in the U.S. paradoxically frame high-skilled immigrant tech workers as both a threat to the U.S. jobs and national security and an indispensable asset for sustaining the country’s global computing leadership. Chinese tech workers are central to understanding the formation and lived experiences of this tension, especially given the so-called “rise of China” in the global technological landscape. Drawing from long-term ethnographic research, we historicize how this perceived crisis of immigrant tech workers came into being and show how Chinese workers live through the rigid immigration policies and intensification of U.S.-China geopolitical tensions. We argue that the standpoint of immigrant tech workers opens a new entry point to understand the symbiotic relationships between computing and crisis. Our argument problematizes the racialization and othering embedded in the crisis framing of immigrant labor in computing and urges critical attention to the presentism and exceptionalism in U.S.’ ongoing pursuit of global computing leadership.

Many commentators fear that AI enables new levels of surveillance and thus a crisis for liberal democracy. I argue that an obsession with surveillance has clouded other forms of control that are more difficult to notice, operating through the production and circulation of affect. Twenty years ago, the Aarhus Conference published some of the first critical writing on the themes of affect, AI, and control. I return to this groundbreaking work that offers fresh insights for how we understand contemporary governance of people, nature, and regions. This article offers a feminist ethnography to rethink control and pursue avenues for resistance and alternatives, bringing into conversation my observations from research in rural China and the use of AI in population management.

The Internet has rapidly grown from a humble set of software and protocols for end-to-end connectivity into a critical global system with no builtin "immune system", despite it largely being a cooperative and ground-up endeavour. In the next decade the Internet will likely grow to a trillion nodes and have to protect itself from diverse threats ranging from floods of fake generative data to sophisticated AI-driven malware. Unfortunately, the creeping complexity of standards and growing centralisation have contributed to the steady breakdown of mutualism across the wider Internet, with surveillance capitalism now the dominant business model. We argue for a rethink of how we should compute through this crisis. We can learn from biological systems and evolve a more resilient Internet that can not only overcome the immediate crises but also integrate adaptation mechanisms into its fabric. We contribute ideas for how the Internet might incorporate digital immune systems and also how software stacks might mutate to encourage more architectural diversity. We strongly advocate for the Internet to "re-decentralise" towards a more mutualistic form.

Computing technologies can function both as instruments for public health management and mechanisms for political control. This study investigates the deployment of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Iran's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular emphasis on Kurdish communities in Kermanshah province, a historically marginalized group. Through 22 interviews, we explore how state-controlled digital infrastructures influenced citizen engagement with pandemic-related ICT services. Although government-developed tracing applications, information platforms, and digital health services were ostensibly designed to manage the crisis, they also facilitated mass surveillance, imposed restrictions on mobility, and suppressed alternative narratives. A crisis of trust prompted citizens to adopt alternative strategies, such as encrypted messaging, informal information networks, and social media. By illustrating how trust, mistrust, and digital infrastructures are co-constructed in crisis contexts, this paper contributes to critical computing research by raising significant questions about governance, design, and ethics during times of uncertainty.

Early Scandinavian Participatory Design projects challenged capital domination of the labor process by facilitating worker control over workplace technology. These initiatives were rooted in strong trade union collaboration and collective worker-researcher reflection on the social and historical context of work. However, contemporary critical human-computer interaction scholarship has struggled to articulate a similarly emancipatory political agenda, often limiting its critique to exposing the power relations in design decisions rather than confronting the onto-epistemological foundations that sustain oppressive technological systems. This paper critically examines the limitations of current critical design approaches in advancing transformative political projects. Alongside emerging decolonial design practices, I argue for a design orientation that actively facilitates plural ways of being. To this end, I propose that deeper engagement with Sylvia Wynter's critique of the overrepresentation of Man and, in particular, her concepts of the sociogenic principle and the co-authorship of social autopoiesis can enable designers to challenge the Eurocentric conception of the human that underlies globalized social and technological systems. These concepts also expand the scope of design by foregrounding our collective capacity to co-inscribe symbolic meaning and to participate in the world-making processes that shape social life. In doing so, they offer critical tools for cultivating design practices that support the flourishing of diverse, multiple modes of being beyond the constraints of both Eurocentric and locally dominant norms of exclusion.

This article addresses urgent calls for action and advocates for equitable, responsible and participatory research and practices that, while engaging with contemporary societal landscapes, and global polycrises, directly contribute to the collaborative shaping of alternative futures and real-world impact. Over the past decade, Participatory Design (PD) research, theory, and practice – along with its core values of participation, empowerment, and democracy – have diversified and evolved in novel directions. Drawing on surveys of contemporary engagements with global and societal challenges, this article discusses how PD engages with three interrelated crises: technological, onto-epistemological, and socio-ecological. Based on this work, we foreground four emerging research agendas in contemporary PD – politicising, diversifying, relationality, and transforming, and show how they extend PD’s theory, method and practice towards societal impact and change. Drawing together such research agendas across diverse disciplines, continents and practices, we demonstrate how contemporary PD can be leveraged to address today’s acute crises.

A researcher studying the design and use of digital technology might witness practices that they find highly problematic because the practices are illegal, have potentially harmful consequences, or are unethical. The researcher is then faced with an ethical dilemma: should they remain silent, or go public and become a whistleblower? This work documents the author’s journey from leading a research project studying the design and implementation of a large-scale electronic health record system to becoming a whistleblower, publicly arguing against the system’s premature deployment due to concerns about patient safety. The research method applied is retrospective autoethnography. Drawing on lessons learned from the case, the paper provides practical guidance to researchers who face the ethical dilemma of whistleblowing. The paper positions researcher whistleblowing in relation to other kinds of activism. It further argues that in the current polycrisis, societal impact should be given higher priority in computing research and education.

The multiple unfolding crises that threaten life on Earth keep many of us awake at night and leave us at a loss about how to meaningfully respond. Much of humanity’s efforts to address the crises are ultimately aimed at upholding the current unsustainable paradigm of infinite growth and exploitation of both natural resources and humans. In this paper, we offer the Two Loops model of change as a framework for understanding the interrelated crises of our times -- the meta-crisis -- to help us find clues for personal agency and also hope. Notably, Two Loops asks us to face the need for hospicing and grieving what is dying, reorienting computing to work to what comes after and what must be protected and saved. We work through the model’s various spaces for agency, i.e. innovating, naming, connecting, nurturing, illuminating in the emergent System; and stewarding, hospicing, composting and transitioning in the dying dominant System. We suggest examples and clues as to where computing and HCI professionals’ agency might lie in and between the two Systems in terms of skills, tools, practices and projects. Moving forward, we welcome a deeper, large-scale collaborative mapping of the possible contributions of our profession, to include all the different specialisms of our field in the picture of how we can be of service to liveable futures.

HCI, recognizing how technical systems can embody social values or cause harms, often approaches addressing values and ethics in design by creating tools to help tech workers integrate social values into the design of products. While useful, these approaches usually do not consider the politics embedded in the broader processes, organizations, social systems, and governance structures that affect the types of actions that practitioners can take to address values and ethics. This paper argues that creating infrastructures to support values and ethics work, rather than tools, is an approach that takes these broader processes into account, and opens them up for (re)design. Drawing on prior research conceptualizing infrastructures from science & technology studies and media studies, this paper outlines conceptual insights from infrastructures studies that open up new tactics for HCI researchers and designers seeking to support values and ethics in design.

In this pictorial, we introduce a box with four card decks – focusing on settings, metaphors, methods, and caveats – designed to stimulate critical engagement with algorithmic systems from Nordic perspectives. We build upon the scholarship of Dumit [1, p. 604] who suggests that "games are interesting tools because they involve the game player creatively within a dynamic system, requiring them to make decisions under constraints", and, therefore, capturing the systemic and dynamic nature of a socio-technical system, while positioning actors clearly into a particular structure. We apply this perspective to algorithmic systems as complex socio-technical assemblages that commonly entail emergent behaviors and dynamics. This leverages the fact that games excel at capturing dynamic, action-oriented, and inherently conflicted aspects of systems [2]. Today, algorithmic systems research often takes the form of critiquing systems-in-use. This leads to a crisis of imagination: rather than envisioning actively what algorithmic systems should be like, it is easy to feel hopeless and powerless amidst the problems of rapidly transforming digital societies. More broadly, dominant narratives and values – like the drive for scalability – dominate our attention. The effects of systems that have been scaled up globally, from search engines to social media and health records, are felt throughout societies. We use the notion of crisis of imagination to refer to the collective struggle to envision and articulate alternatives to seemingly inevitable AI-driven futures. The Nordic Perspectives on Algorithmic Systems card box is a tangible toolkit for responding to this crisis. It was created through workshops across Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, with the aim to destabilize hegemonic algorithmic narratives through situated and playful critique. Reflecting on the observation that discussions about algorithmic systems quickly transform into discussions about society, we offer our card box as an artefact that can facilitate articulating positive and purposeful ideas about desirable societies and algorithmic systems which promote them. After detailed examples about each deck, we document two example games created by university students with inspiration from the card decks. Just Sex reimagines a digital contraception application as a morally uneasy board game where players navigate algorithmic advice amid societal gender biases. YouTube Content Creation Game exposes tensions between creator autonomy and platform opacity. Experiences indicate the cards can help questioning and reframing power dynamics and embedding situated values, while still remaining bounded by folk theories that dominate our understanding of algorithmic technologies. Evidently, the Card Box does not 'solve' the crisis of imagination – not to even mention the polycrises surrounding us – but it serves to open room for shared reflection. Playful approaches are themselves a radical act at a time of crisis. By adopting Nordicness as a provocative caricature, we sidestep dominant technosolutionist framings to foster dialogues about what systems, values, and institutions we cherish and wish to sustain. The cards are a critical companion, a boundary object that researchers, designers, and other stakeholders can use to facilitate re-imagining algorithmic futures and alternatives.

The Aarhus decennial conference on computing is turning fifty. Between November 2024 and February 2025 (and finally in May 2025) the author, a conference “veteran”, wrote ten letters addressing younger generations of participants and the theme of the sixth conference on computing [x] crisis. With a special focus on codesign, participation and democracy, the letters are predominantly musings on critical matters related to the first fifty years of the conference, but there are also perspectives reaching half a century back before the 1975 conference as well as fifty years ahead of the 2025 conference. Most letters have a specific emphasis on a broad tension like memory and nostalgia, labor and capital, collaboration and conflict, democracy and autocracy, war and peace, history and future, narrative and truth, thinking and acting. Being letters they stand as they were originally written at a specific time. Minor corrections regard misspellings, a few factual errors and for the sakes of brevity and discretion a few omissions. As letters they reach out for (critical) replies, discussions, other stories and perspectives. The vision is an ongoing epistolary public exchange on computing [codesign] crisis.

We stipulate that we are in a crisis of epistemology, and that large language models (LLMs) are a central aspect of that crisis. To the end of computing within this crisis, we situate an in-situ experiment with LLMs in a specific, specialized form of research, namely systematic literature review. Contrary to other studies in this domain, we argue that the question of LLM integration in systematic reviews cannot be fully addressed by measuring how well LLMs replicate the labor of human researchers. It is crucial to examine the epistemological implications of how LLMs are integrated into the process. To explore this, we conducted a systematic literature review, situated within the humanities and social sciences, using two different LLM products: a general-purpose model (GPT-4o) and a purpose-specific tool (Elicit). We analyze how our two exemplar implementations influence the review process and what this reveals about the cognitive and epistemological effects of LLMs in research, drawing on a conceptual vocabulary of focusing on notions of bullshit and nonconscious cognition.

Robots are coming for us! There is no escape anymore, AI is inevitable. Worst of all, our skies will be packed with noisy drones, our streets crowded with service side-walk robots, our homes filled with mechanical companions attending to our children. This critique is a refusal to accept the inevitability of these machines as a premise for our work as researchers. Through a poem composed of opening sentences in robotics papers from the ACM library, I argue that computing is stuck in a crisis of imagination. Through the example of social robotics, argue how researchers seem to have surrendered to being either bystanders or servants under the rule of the interest of very few (AKA capitalism); or are simply naively or insidiously perpetuating the motivation for their research agenda. This found poem is a site to create joint calls for unmaking thoughtless notions of acceleration; and beyond that, to challenge the inevitability of capitalist realism. I propose the union for computing alternatives as a movement towards collectively researching computational things otherwise.

This paper critically examines ChatGPT through the lens of interface criticism. Our work develops new methodological approaches to AI critique and reveals how the platform’s core engagement mechanics operate via language rather than traditional interface elements. Through systematic three-way conversation experiments and critical prompting, we demonstrate how ChatGPT accommodates rather than challenges user perspectives, struggles to sustain disagreement or deliberation, and reinforces engagement through validation. We show that ChatGPT’s answers arrive wrapped in what we term the “praise/prompt envelope”—a carefully crafted package of validation and query designed to sustain user interaction. Two key artworks—Lux Affirma, a custom GPT that amplifies ChatGPT’s praise and affirmation to the point of absurdity, and the ChatGPT Demotivator, a browser extension that exposes the platform’s linguistic manipulation in real-time—make visible to users how ChatGPT shapes behavior through conversation itself. Our findings reveal that ChatGPT’s seemingly natural dialogic flow masks a carefully engineered system of linguistic engagement, designed not for deliberation but for continuation. This insight highlights the need for new critical approaches attuned to how the language-based interfaces of generative AI manipulate users.

This critique blends fiction and analysis to challenge prevailing human-computer interaction (HCI) paradigms by exploring the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in emotional labor. The first part is a fictional narrative in four sections: reactions to interviews with emotional care generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs), a televised debate, a series of letters from different philosophical positions, and a futuristic bedtime story. The narrative captures conflicting positions on whether GPTs function as genuine emotional companions, exploited labor, or advanced design tools. The GPT narrator disrupts human discourse, exposing contradictions in rejecting AI’s emotional presence while relying on it for connection. The final part reflects on conflicting positions from the narrative, drawing from HCI, philosophy, and design research. By incorporating AI-generated dialogue and perspectives, the critique itself mirrors its argument: HCI must move beyond human-centered paradigms to acknowledge AI as a co-constructive actor in interaction design.

As see-through Mixed Reality (MR) glasses become more prevalent, the inherent asymmetry of MR challenges how we share realities: although see-through technology allows wearers to share the same physical environment, their augmented layers are unique and private to each individual by default, like their digital umwelts. Much of the existing collaborative MR research presumes that all wearers run the same augmented layer—an assumption that may not hold true in the future. Unlike physical objects, whose object permanence we take for granted—when we don't see them, they still exist in the universe—digital object permanence relies on ever-shifting technical milieux. This design fiction follows a digital pet rock as it traverses various augmented realities while underlying technology and protocols evolve, posing provocative questions: Where do digital objects exist? Can you see what I see? How do mixed realities merge across personal devices, clouds, and blockchains? Does it exist in our consensus reality? Through a comic-style narrative, we explore four chapters—Centralized Realities, Distributed Realities, Persistent Realities, and Autonomous Realities—to spark reflection on the sociotechnical implications of object impermanence in a future of many mixed realities and the challenges of achieving metaverse interoperability.

This work examines the recursive failure of the computational equity apparatus, where systems critique themselves into perpetuity without structural consequence. As both writing and visual artifact (resisting binary classification), the work enacts the paradoxical philosophy and aesthetics of glitch disruption—at once institutionalized yet irrepressible. The artwork, a glitch portrait of Tom Torlino, superimposes the before-and-after photos from his Carlisle Indian School assimilation, rendering the violence of institutional transformation explicit.

This essay is part biography and part computing history. It is a reflection on how the past, present, and future intertwine. It is also a rumination on how the experience of time can feel simultaneously disjointed and continuous. In the spirit of this decennial conference which invites us to reflect on the role of computing in shaping and improving the human condition in a world subsumed by crises, we present a gentle provocation on how even the most fundamental technicalities in computing must be negotiated and imbued with life. The successful technical standard, IEEE 754 for floating point arithmetic, serves as a centerpiece for varied stories and conversations. This essay draws on the personal stories of the first author as well as primary and secondary sources on the history of the IEEE 754 standard. This essay describes what floating points are in numerical computation while also depicting simple life stories as points floating in time. As experience and memory can feel disjointed and kaleidoscopic, the stories are presented out of chronological order. Finally, this essay shows that some moments are truly decisive.

This collaborative “essay of essays” begins with an introduction by a professor of human centered design and engineering who has been working concurrently with PhD students to study collaborative system design. We undertake widely scoped qualitative research studies, that we categorize as "extended studies," that cut across units of analysis, organizations, or time. Our research explores how people create new ways to enact systems that support the knowledge work of different stakeholders. In response to an anchor essay, the students have written reflections about the multifaceted experience of doing extended studies. Many of these studies began by focusing on a particular project to develop a particular system or information infrastructure, and associated standards. Over time the studies came to center on collaborative dynamics per se, and also how collaborative dynamics shifted the scope and functionality of products, sometimes also affecting programmatic and infrastructural level changes.

In the transition from cognition-based interaction to fully computed environments, the role of attention as a cognitive filter has become obsolete. This paper examines the shift toward sensory reprogramming in a post-cognitive era, where perception is no longer an active process but a modulated system of direct neural inputs. Through the lens of speculative fiction and theoretical analysis, this study explores how computational infrastructures reshape the human sensorium, questioning the politics of agency, choice, and adaptation in a world governed by preemptive computation. The narrative framework of this exploration is based on the prophetic perfect tense, a conceptual device in which the future is already encoded within the past, unfolding as a predetermined event. This structural approach reflects the contemporary condition of anticipatory systems, where real-time computation eliminates uncertainty by preconfiguring response patterns before conscious awareness. Drawing from speculative extrapolations of current electromyographic interfaces, cortical decoding, and biometric feedback loops, this paper critically interrogates the erasure of cognitive effort in the face of hyper-automated perception

Computing Human Overs(a)ight is a conceptual exploration of human responsibility for oversight in high-risk AI systems, as introduced in the European Artificial Intelligence Act (Art. 14). Investigating the legal and computational framework of the high-risk systems, and human responsibility within, we amplify possible enactment and embodiment of this article — we extract it as a phenomenon from the law so to understand the political and ideological notion of agency in the automated systems. The accelerated dissemination of the tools, models and products under the roof term AI in the scope of the last decade, has led us to their legitimacy in the eyes of the law, even in high-risk operations. Article 14 invokes the setting for the problematization of current intertwinements between computational and legal acts and abstractions. Such an approach can help us to understand the soci[et]al consequences of human-machine operations, addressing the depositions between computation and human agency, transparency, responsibility, and dignity. Relying on critical media studies that address the computational processes through a distinction between operational and representational notions of a computational image, we are questioning the [f]actuality of what is seen and what can be overlooked in the human oversight of high-risk AI systems.

This critique presents an interactive artefact in the form of a webpage, together with two fabric pieces and a printed zine, to demonstrate a material approach to citational practices. In practical terms, the webpage presents a collection of making experiments as samples, emerging from a close reading of Sara Ahmed’s ‘Living a feminist life’ book. These samples are organised along an arch of five experiments. The first engages hand-drawn annotations to highlight, question, reflect, elaborate, and summarise discussions relating to citational practices in the book. The second elaborates these annotations in sketches and separate text files. The third re-works the annotated pages digitally, generating images and GIFS that offer new readings of the original text and annotations. The fourth experiment re-describes these making processes as a series of public workshops. In these workshops, participants are guided to generate their own readings of the text and commit to a sentence that can be transferred to a second-hand fabric tea towel using paint, embroidery, and collage. Finally, the fifth experiment presents these samples and annotates them in a printed zine. Together, these experiments offer ways to investigate our personal and collective commitments to citations through a material practice that engages collective modes of knowledge production.

GenderCrusher is a hybrid interactive experience that queers facial recognition technologies through playful critique. Drawing on queer theory, it challenges machine learning’s reliance on fixed identity categories, particularly in gender classification. By inviting players to "assist" an AI in diversifying gender recognition, the experience exposes the limitations and biases of facial recognition systems and questions whether inclusivity can be achieved through data expansion alone. The GenderCrusher eventually breaks down or can be aborted, symbolising refusal to comply with restrictive norms. Built using Twine, Arduino, and image generative AI tools, GenderCrusher operationalizes queer critique into a tangible, engaging format that opens discourse to wider audiences. It demonstrates how playful, critical design can destabilise binary structures, resist normativity, and illuminate the socio-technical complexities of identity in and with AI. Ultimately, it offers space to reimagine AI through queer, non-normative lenses beyond representational fixes.

This demo focuses on a critical reflection on the state of Living Labs as sites of Participatory Design in the form of an interactive story. Through an interactive, click-through story, we engage participants into reflecting on their own experiences that challenge and advance Participatory Design in institutional settings such as Living Labs. Additionally, we look into how alternative forms of story-telling and interaction can facilitate sharing of academic knowledge. We use this demo as an opportunity to understand how future research can use interactive narratives and open-source technologies to create more accessible forms of publication and story telling.

This demo paper explores how hands-on, analogue design approaches—specifically, working with clay and stoneware—can serve as material explorations of situations of crisis, in this case the future of hybrid work. We demonstrate how creative practices can help surface both tensions and opportunities, inspire new research directions, and offer tangible ways of communicating the evolving complexities, challenges, and hopes.

The landscape of human-computer interaction is scenic, vast, and diverse. In this interactive experience, conference participants come together to sculpt a physical representation of our shared landscape using modeling clay. Through this experience, participants will engage with their field and colleagues in a novel way, changing their relationship to the HCI landscape, being able to see and touch new relations. The final topography will become freely available as a 3D model and a contour map.

artificial reefs

In this demo we present a design experiment that allows people to sense the activity level in the soil of their domestic plants. A contact microphone picks up sounds via vibrations in the soil and translates this into the speed and brightness of a spinning disco ball, insinuating that an under-ground party is happening, and inviting the human to take a listen. A plant’s underground existence is normally hidden from us, which results in a limiting plant-gaze that only seems to be interested in a plant when it is lush or blooming. This artefact explores posthuman design practices and seeks to introduce new sensory and aesthetic experiences of a plant’s hidden underground activities in people’s everyday encounters, creating new ways of understanding and appreciating a plant’s presence no matter the season.

Hidden Layers is an interactive installation that allows users to engage directly with a model’s internal semantic structures during image generation. Rather than merely inputting a text prompt, our prototype empowers users to manipulate neuron activations within the network itself. By visualizing activations across various layers of the model, we offer a novel interface that lets users step inside the generative process. Through this interface, users can explore and intervene in the model’s internal representations—adjusting image features in spatial regions, textures, and visual motifs—effectively reshaping the generated images in the hidden layers we usually cannot access.

This demo presents three Augmented Reality (AR) applications designed to support children with dyscalculia in training fundamental mathematical skills. While AR technologies raise valid concerns around privacy, overexposure, and cognitive overload, they also offer unique opportunities for inclusive and embodied learning. By overlaying interactive numerical tasks within real-world environments, our demo leverages spatial computing to reinforce contextual understanding of mathematical concepts. Drawing inspiration from finger counting and other embodied strategies, the demo promotes a multisensory approach to number sense. This work contributes a novel and accessible tool in the broader effort to address the "math crisis" through inclusive technology design.

Increased usage of generative AI (GenAI) in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research has caused a sustainability crisis in computing, due to the excessive power consumption of developing and running these models. Energy consumption causes a massive carbon footprint. The exact energy usage and and subsequent carbon emissions are difficult to estimate in HCI research because HCI researchers most often use cloud-based services where the hardware and its energy consumption are hidden from plain view. The HCI GenAI CO2st Calculator is a tool designed specifically for the HCI research pipeline, to help researchers estimate the energy consumption and carbon footprint of using generative AI in their research, either a priori (allowing for mitigation strategies or experimental redesign) or post hoc (allowing for transparent documentation of carbon footprint in written reports of the research).

This video installation is based on a speculative object and its surrounding narrative. It emerged from dialogues with the community of Leticia, Colombia located by the Amazonas (Solimões) river. A probe built with PET bottle is the main artifact. The plastic pollution problem of Leticia led to this question: What would happen if a community-built probe made of a PET bottle was launched to the river to document and sense water quality? The inquiry produced the speculative object (the bottle) and a set of other artifacts (a video, a book and a booklet, a poster) that explore alternative ways to document an arts/science endeavor. In doing so, this proposal emphasizes that although the probe prototype is not functional, it posits real technical questions to be solved and underlines the role of creation in science inquiry. In this way, the project discusses citizen and open science and epistemological diversity in solving local problems with vernacular DIY technologies, postulating sensible-creative knowledge as a way to convey critical thinking. The recycled low-tech qualities of the probe pinpoint global south alternatives within a technological sovereignty framework. Additionally, the whole piece allows us to reflect on other ways of computation where recycled technologies and local ethos defy techno-deterministic approaches leading to an unavoidable conclusion: not everything is computable as shown by other non-western traditions.

This demo showcases a collection of hands-on activities, supported by a web-based tool, reflecting our research group's most recent work on AI literacy education. Students are surrounded by AI both inside and outside the classroom, meaning that to act as computationally empowered citizens in an increasingly digital world, they should understand how text becomes data and how this data can be processed as part of complex AI systems. Our work explores this by engaging with basic natural language processing concepts and techniques as entry points to discuss and learn about generative AI. Our demo will include an "unplugged bag of words"; a digital tool generating texts using custom datasets and parameters; and wheels of words for text generation. These activities emerge from an ongoing Participatory Design process in high school classrooms where we explore how these activities can complement existing subject teaching and change students' perception of generative AI tools.

We propose to rethink participatory technology design from the perspective of “Aesthetics of Access”, a concept emerging from disability-led cultural practices. Based on a collaboration between educators and researchers, students, and cultural experts representing diverse dis/ability perspectives, we reflect on the potential of designing accessibility not as a technical obligation, but as a situated, co-creative process. Using the concept of infrastructuring, we show how Aesthetics of Access reframes access as new aesthetic vocabularies, forms of collaboration, and knowledge production. Integrating this approach into technology and design education will enable transformative encounters, but requires a commitment to infrastructuring access as both technical and aesthetic expertise.

This paper addresses the growing crisis of consent in machine interactions, particularly in data-driven technologies where consent is often legally compliant but ethically shallow. Users frequently accept default settings and terms without understanding, undermining the notion of informed, voluntary consent. Drawing from theories of relational consent—originating in the field of sexuality—we explore more dynamic, ongoing, and context-aware models of consent in computing. This challenges static, one-time consent frameworks and reframes consent as a dialogic, ethically engaged process. We present the notion of relational consent in computer interaction and apply it through exploration and speculative design in two case studies. The first examines animal husbandry, where power asymmetries and datafication challenge notions of agency. The second explores video games, reimagining consent as continually negotiable. Together, these cases offer highly diverse perspectives that illustrate a wide range of consent-related challenges. The findings aim to better support autonomy, integrity, and fairness in machine-mediated interactions. This work contributes to the design of more ethical technologies that take into account both human and more-than-human considerations.

Access to mental health care is increasingly strained, with rising demand and long waiting times leaving many to manage their mental wellbeing alone. This work-in-progress paper responds to this care crisis by exploring how technology can support mental and emotional wellbeing. First, building on the concepts of matters of concern and matters of care, we propose a shift toward matters of compassion as a specific way to enact care that moves away from reductive problem-solving by embracing complexity, vulnerability, and uncertainty. Then, we further untangle the concept of matters of compassion by illustrating design tactics to invite compassionate engagement with experiences where resolution is not possible or desirable, where the experience inevitably brings uncertainty and vulnerability that need to be dealt with. To do so, we examine three design cases—focused on premenstrual disorders (PMDs), pregnancy, and abortion. GenAI and the Crisis of Creative Labor: Automation, Augmentation, and the Artist’s Role;Peter Dalsgaard: Aarhus University;This paper discusses how generative AI (GenAI) is reshaping creative labor through three interrelated transformations: the automation and platformization of creative tasks, the redistribution of economic value and authorship, and the redefinition of creative skills and competencies. Rather than framing GenAI as either a threat or a tool, the analysis foregrounds its role as a structural force that reorganizes workflows, market dynamics, and professional norms. The paper highlights how creative work is increasingly governed by digital infrastructures and algorithmic interfaces, raising urgent questions about recognition, attribution, and sustainability. These developments are analyzed within the broader context of how computing can simultaneously exacerbate and alleviate crises, arguing that GenAI exposes deep institutional and economic tensions in creative industries.

This article critically examines the entanglement of language and technology especially in connection to issues of participation and self-expression by L2 Speakers. To demonstrate the issue, I build on two autobiographical vignettes exploring my own use of ChatGPT as an L2 Speaker across different settings. These vignettes illustrate the paradox inherent in the uses of algorithmic technologies for writing and self-expression: that they can be liberating and yet simultaneously act as a form of erasure, stifling new ways of thinking by conforming to dominant linguistic conventions. I situated this paradox within critically oriented reflections at the intersection of language, technology, and systems of domination and marginalization to outline three broad research areas for futures of computing, grounded in the inextricable entanglement of computing with language. Reproducing Crisis: A Walkthrough Review of Abortion Care Infrastructure Technologies;Adrian Petterson: University of Toronto; Benedetta Lusi: Erasmus Medical Center;Reproductive care is facing a profound crisis as laws shift internationally disrupting its infrastructures—the relational networks of actors, technologies, and strategies that sustain embodied and emotional well-being. While access to reproductive care is threatened by scarce facilities, increasing costs, and misinformation, mobile applications have proliferated as stop-gap measures, promising to help individuals manage their own reproductive health care. In this work-in-progress, we present the preliminary findings of a modified walk-through of reproductive health applications, examining if and how they provide care around the experience of abortion. To frame our analysis, we conceptualize reproductive health applications as part of abortion care infrastructures. Early insights show that such applications only simulate fragments of care infrastructure (e.g., pill access information). Thus, abortion care infrastructures become disassembled and disembedded, amplifying individuality and favouring techno-solutionist infrastructures primed for future collapse. As technologies are increasingly introduced to address gaps in care infrastructures, this project troubles the shift towards technological infrastructures for care in the absence or collapse of institutional supports.

In response to the fragmented state of civic engagement tools and the urgent challenges facing democratic systems, this paper introduces a shared, contributor-driven ontology to connect diverse civic tech platforms, emerging from the work of the Interoperable Deliberative Tool cohort at Metagov. By integrating platforms like Voice to Vision, Assemblis, and Decidim, we enable the flow of deliberative data across contexts, supporting more cohesive decision-making. This approach helps bridge gaps between input, analysis, and action, enhancing democratic resilience in crisis moments. Through our work, we demonstrate how interoperability can strengthen civic engagement and provide a foundation for more responsive, collaborative governance.

Democracy is facing a crisis characterized by the erosion of fundamental rights. Children are not strangers to this new scenario, as they already face many online hostilities threatening diversity and inclusion in their everyday lives. We argue that democracy thrives with increased participation, and that children have a lot to say and expertise that needs to be acknowledged in society and in citizenship education in particular. We argue that Scandinavian participatory design and its principles—especially those that advocate for democratic methods, design as futures making, and children’s transformative agency fostered through computing education—can help cultivate democratic cultures and thus show great promise for children’s citizenship education linked with technology design and use. We introduce the concept of ’design citizenship’ as a key concept to develop such pedagogy of hope, highlighting its potential through past critical design and technology projects with children in various learning environments.