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There is growing unease and a sense within the design community of the value placed on efficient, simplified, and seamless interactions, with a growing awareness and documentation of their unintended consequences across society. By prioritizing ‘frictionless’ finance, healthcare, education products, and services, there has been a consorted effort to reduce or eliminate our daily frictions in the pursuit of efficiency and ease of use. The role of friction, however, is more nuanced than this, with a growing appreciation for designing with frictions: leveraging features usually considered problematic or exploring the benefits, barriers, and complexity beyond hindering users. In seeking a more balanced understanding of friction in systems design, this workshop will offer ways of bringing friction to the fore of design and examining its role across the domains of care, privacy, security, repairability, and autonomous vehicles. Participants will contribute to an exhibition of frictions before taking part in sessions that will unpack digital systems, identify frictions, and examine the ethical ambiguities posed by the addition or removal of friction in particular contexts. In employing the concept of friction as a critical and constructive design lens, we seek to develop further a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) agenda for future discourse that inverts and provokes preconceptions and assumptions of a seamless digital landscape.

This paper looks at how contestation in the context of algorithmic decision systems is essentially the progeny of repair for our more decentralised and abstracted digital world. The act of repair has often been a way for users to contest with bad design, substandard products, and disappointing outcomes - not to mention often being a necessary aspect of ensuring effective use over time. As algorithmic systems continue to make more decisions about our lives and futures, we need to look for new ways to contest their outcomes and repair potentially broken systems. Through looking at examples of contemporary repair and contestation and tracing the history of electronics repair from discrete components into the decentralised systems of today, we look at how the shared values of repair and contestation helps surface ways to approach contestation using tactics of the Right to Repair movement and the instincts of the Fixer. Finally, we speculate on roles, communities and a move towards an agonistic interaction space where response-ability rests more equally across user, designer and system.

When thinking of arts in HCI, one might be tempted to keep one's eyes focused on prominent realms such as sketching for UX Design and design probes from participants. A closer look shows that practices go beyond this, involving a variety of arts-based expressions by researchers, the researched and third parties, e.g. graphic facilitators. Inspired by Toselli's Sketchnote Army Travelling Sketchbook, researchers and artists contributed to a 'Travelling Sketchbook for Arts in HCI', showcasing their arts-based practice in HCI. The resulting sketchbook explores the intersection between HCI and artistic expression, illuminating what it means to use art in HCI. It shows the breadth of Arts in HCI, illustrating the many fruitful possibilities for extending existing research and dissemination methods in HCI. It also calls into question current practices, which often do not recognise the significance of artist attribution, and, in turn, advocates for equal authorship between principal researchers and contributing artists.

The discriminatory effects of new technologies often only become apparent long after these technologies are already ingrained within society. This can be seen in recent cases where algorithmic decision systems automating the reclamation of taxes and childcare supports have unfairly targeted people from other countries and disadvantaged backgrounds. In addressing these systems’ failures, neither the designer or the user should have the sole responsibility for making technology fairer - instead it should be an agonistic, ongoing and participatory activity.

Agonistic design is an ethical approach which acknowledges the users’ right to agency and an acceptance that no design is a solution, rather a broken thing that is open to be repaired and reconfigured as needed. 

This project seeks to define a new design approach which facilitates a shared future of reconfiguration, contestation and design-after-design, as a bulwark against solutionism and emerging harms as we enter a new paradigm of HCI.

Sensor networks are increasingly commonplace in visions of smart cities and future healthcare systems, promising greater efficiency and increased wellbeing. However, the design of these technologies remains focused on specific users and fragmented by context, overlooking the diversity of needs, wants and values present when technologies, people, and lived realities interact within instrumented spaces. In this paper we present a workshop method – Sensing Care – that can help researchers, interdisciplinary design and development teams, and potentially affected users, to explore what it takes to design for living with sensor technologies that intersect and interact across private and public spaces, through speculative scenarios and role play. Drawing from three deployments of the workshop, we discuss how this approach supports the design of future care-oriented sensor networks, and helps designers understand what it means to live with complex technologies as people traverse diverse contexts.

This paper embraces broken world thinking and the ways that Steven Jackson (2014) sees that “the world is always breaking; it's in its nature to break. That breaking is generative and productive”. Accepting the brokenness of our systems is not a failure, but an opportunity to reimagine how we design these systems for a more agonistic and repairable future and as an antidote to solutionism and black boxing.

We explore how Jackson’s suggested role of The Fixer can be a beneficial new character with “special insight and knowledge” who might “know and see different things - indeed, different worlds - than the better-known figures of "designer" or "user"” in our entanglements with algorithmic decision systems and as a mediator for the frictions necessary to assume responsibility and response-ability in our socio-technical futures. Complimentary to the maintainer, the Fixer’s duty is to question and challenge broken systems, to suggest alternatives in the ethical interest of all stakeholders, and to facilitate a more respectful relationship between designer, user and algorithmic system. 

Taking inspiration from the successes of the Right to Repair movement, the community ethos of Repair Cafés and the author's own experiences with design, repair and use, the Fixer can be seen as the direct descendant of the hardware repair technician. A character who has been with us since the dawn of the artificial and can move with us into the more abstracted and entangled technological environment in which we find ourselves. 

The Contestation Manifesto and its associated paraphernalia are artefacts from a speculative, near-future community action known as the Contestation Café. Being one in a series of research through design projects on contestation, the Contestation Café is a critical, yet also practical, design intervention rooted in how the act of repair has moved through the physical into the digital, and the shared values therein. Tracing the history of electronic repair - from the early valve radios, the invention of the transistor, microchips, programmable devices and through to IoT, connected devices and the "fluid assemblages"that emerge - we can see the shared values of the physical act of repair with the more intangible act of contestation in the digital world of algorithmic systems. Overlaying the values and tactics of the Right to Repair movement with the emerging concerns around data-driven systems we find ourselves examining the Repair Café as a potential model for community contestation and the construction of publics. The Repair Café started in Amsterdam in 2009 and has since spread to 35 countries with over 1700 instances of these cafés. The Repair Café is not intended to be a place where you bring your broken appliances for someone else to repair - rather, it is a place where you learn how to repair and recycle your own products and devices, and - more importantly - a place where you simply learn that things can be fixed rather than thrown out. In a similar spirit, the Contestation Café would be a place for those who feel mistreated by automated decision systems, AIs and algorithms, to bring their broken interactions and their unfair decisions to learn how to contest, push back and reclaim their agency and autonomy. Rather than Repairers, the Contestation Café has a panel of Fixers - people who inhabit the space between designers and users, with a particular knowledge of these systems and how to map and navigate them - who are there to share their experience and knowledge, and to guide the user in the ways of contestation and to become Fixers of their own futures. Although the Contestation Café is a speculative concept based on research into the shared values of contestation and repair, it has developed a life of its own through the process of imagining how it would work and what it would look like. Through the act of writing a manifesto for contestation, the space has manifested itself in the present and is waiting only for the fixers and public to arrive. Plans are already in progress for its first real instance and all of the imagined artefacts presented here will inform this process. https://contestationcafe.org/