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Over the past 40 years, human-centered design has driven technological development, seamlessly integrating technologies into our everyday lives. However, this “disappearing act” has led to these technologies’ environmental footprints becoming invisible. Building on three illustrative examples, we contribute to the current development of the more-than-human design approach by suggesting 1) this approach is a useful analytical lens to foreground the environmental footprint of today’s emerging profound technologies starting to “disappear”, and 2) instead of upholding a dichotomy between human vs. more-than-human, we can use the more-than-human approach to unify these two in efforts to establish a vision for the 22nd century that explores holistic approaches for more-than-human worlds.

As larger parts of our lives are determined in the digital realm, it is critical to reflect on how democratic values can be preserved and cultivated by technology. At the city-scale, this is studied in the field of 'digital civics'; however, there seems to be no corresponding focus at the level of buildings/building inhabitants. The majority of our lives are spent indoors and therefore the impact that 'indoor digital civics' may have, might exceed that of city-scale, digital civics. The digitization of building design and building management creates an opportunity to better identify, protect, and cultivate civic values that, until now, were centralized in the hands of building designers and building owners. By bringing together leading architecture/HCI academics and commercial stakeholders, this workshop builds on previous workshops at CHI. The workshop will provide a forum where a new agenda for research in 'HabiTech' can be defined and new research collaborations formed.

Interactive storytelling is gaining new possibilities with the rise of novel technology trends, such as extended reality (XR) and AI. In this interdisciplinary one-day workshop, we address the possibilities the interactive technologies and HCI can offer in interactive storytelling and sharing narratives for communities, cultural heritage, and for engaging larger user groups. The workshop also addresses how the future of interactive storytelling is shaped so that the human and more-than-human aspects are not forgotten and pluralism and different voices can be heard. In this workshop, researchers and practitioners will share their research and discuss the current trends and topics in interactive storytelling, where the possible application areas range from cultural heritage to education, entertainment, tourism, and wellness.

Interaction design/HCI seems to be at a crossroads. On the one hand, it is still about designing for engaging user experiences (UX). Still, on the other hand, it seems to be increasingly about reducing interaction and automating human–machine interaction through the use of AI and other new technologies. In this paper, we explore this seemingly unavoidable gap. First, we discuss the fundamental design rationality underpinning interaction and automation of interaction from the viewpoints of classic theoretical standpoints. We then illustrate how these two come together in interaction design practice. Here we examine four examples from already published research on automation of interaction, including how different levels of automation of interaction affect or enable new practices, including coffee making, self-tracking, automated driving, and conversations with AI-based chatbots. Through an interaction analysis of these four examples, we show (1) how interaction and automation are combined in the design, (2) how interaction is dependent on a certain level of automation, and vice versa, and (3) how each example illustrates a different balance between, and integration of interaction and automation. Based on this analysis, we propose a two-dimensional design space as a conceptual construct that takes these aspects into account to understand and analyze ways of combining interaction and automation in interaction design. We illustrate the use of the proposed two-dimensional design space, discuss its theoretical implications, and suggest it as a useful tool—when designing for engaging user experiences (UX), with interaction and automation as two design materials.

Self-driving buses will be part of the public transportation system of the future, and they must therefore be accessible to all. The study reported in this paper examines the user experiences of 16 children with mild intellectual disability riding a self-driving bus. The qualitative analysis, performed by iterative affinity diagramming, of interviews, observations, and a co-design session with five of the children, suggests that familiar situations were characterized by contemplation and curiosity, while unfamiliar ones were characterized by surprise or confusion. The temporal structure of past, present, and future situations in the field of attention played a significant role in the children's experiences. This leads to design considerations for an explainable interior of self-driving buses.