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In an increasingly technology-mediated world, agonistic design seeks to support agency over convenience in an attempt to give the user more determination over the technologies which may adversely affect them. This paper explores the experimental integration of agonistic design principles into an Interaction Design Masters course to address the emerging harms of algorithmic decision systems (ADS). Conducted with Interaction Design Master’s students at a Swedish University, the intervention introduced agonistic design through a seminar, tutorials, and projects which move from ideation, to prototyping, ending with public exhibition and reflection exercise. Drawing on frameworks supporting democratic design and constructive disagreement, the course challenged students to balance critical perspectives with practical design considerations. While challenges in adoption persisted, the experiment demonstrated its potential to foster critical engagement with emerging technologies. The findings inform future efforts to develop toolkits and promote sustainable socio-technical practices in design education and beyond.

As new technologies enter everyday life, designs have to address new interactions between ethics and aesthetics as new possibilities also come with new consequences. A current example concerns Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the issues of bias that seem to come with its predictive and generative capacities. To explore bias further, we start with the question that if bias is present (and perhaps cannot be completely eliminated), what could it be like to instead work with its expressions? And could exploring an ‘aesthetics of bias’ allow us to come closer to where bias comes from in the first place, in how people relate to others? By practice-based research, this paper investigates how bias can be creatively expressed in technology design. We describe the interactive installation, “Poetic Layers”, consisting of a window, a sugar jar, a coffee pot, and a table, trained and acted by AI and Machine Learning (ML). Through these design experiments, we introduce four interactions to mirror and amplify biases in human relationships - dominance, exclusion, hostility, and fractured balance

Given the current ecological crisis, the HCI and design community is showing a growing interest in the adoption of more-than-human perspectives, challenging human-centric approaches. While this has sparked numerous research initiatives, many of them are still a far cry from providing practical solutions or transforming the industry. This also presents a hurdle for teaching more-than-human perspectives to design students, as they may feel powerless to practice those teachings in real-life industrial settings. To bring forth concrete examples of how more-than-human design practice can matter, we believe that it is now time to move beyond theorising about and advocating for the adoption of such perspectives and start a more-than-human design practice that transforms the industry. This workshop therefore aims to bring together educators, researchers, and designers to discuss and co-develop strategies for transitioning more-than-human perspectives from niche/speculation to mainstream/practice in HCI and design. The workshop also aims to develop ways to empower students to work with these perspectives to bring about this transformation of the industry.

Human activities have drastically altered the planet, with design playing a significant role. While design may intend to do good, its consequences are not always positive: from climate change to resource depletion to unforeseen social dynamics. These transformations also include ourselves, as our relationships with new technologies blur and complicate previous human and machine agency distinctions. Increasingly, design has become a matter of defining what it means to be human. This special issue explores the proposition that conventional human-centered design approaches may not adequately address the complex challenges we face, and that there is instead a need to ground design in more-than-human perspectives. This introduction outlines the evolving landscape of more-than-human design in the context of HCI. Articulating a series of emerging research trajectories, we aim to illuminate the transformative potential of more-than-human orientations to design, including how they both extend and depart from familiar lines of inquiry in HCI–for example, how designers are redefining data, interfaces, and responsibility, and reshaping posthuman knowledge through design. Ultimately, this special issue aims to explore new pathways for designing in the era of the more-than-human, challenging the perceived divide between practice and theory to imagine alternative futures for HCI.

Acts of interfacing describe the dynamic and performative ways people connect with vast digital ecosystems, departing from traditional views of interfaces as static entities to be interpreted.

 Digital interfaces are becoming increasingly simple and intuitive. However, beneath the surface, the technological infrastructures underlying these interfaces are growing more complex and elusive. This paper draws on theories from human-computer interaction, software studies, and social practice to revisit the notion of the interface as a site of representation and control. By briefly tracing the historical development of digital interfaces, we propose to shift from ideas of representation and control towards a notion of co-performance and negotiation. Through this lens, we reconceptualize the interface as acts of interfacing—a new concept that captures the contested, constructive, and performative character of interaction within large-scale digital systems.

Hauntology as applied in decolonial AI practices, involves understanding and mobilising contentious pasts to shape more inclusive digital futures.

This is a critique of how designers deal with temporality in design to speculate about socio-technical futures. The paper unpacks how embedded definitions and assumptions of temporality in current design tools contribute to coloniality in designed futures. Based on this critique, we reject the notion that it is only AI that needs fixing, as design practice becomes implicated in how oppression extends from physical systems to global digital platforms. To make these issues visible, we dissect the Futures Cone model used in speculative design. As an alternative, the paper then presents hauntology as a vocabulary that can aid designers in accommodating pluriversal histories in anticipatory futures and reorienting their speculative tools. To illustrate the benefits of the proposed metaphors, the paper highlights examples of coloniality in digital spaces and emphasizes the failure of speculative design to decolonize future imaginaries. Using points of reference from hauntology, ones that engage with states of lingering or spectrality, and notions of nostalgia, absence, and anticipation, the paper contributes to rethinking the role that design tools play in colonizing future imaginaries, especially those pertaining to potentially disruptive technologies.

While design is turning to more-than-human (MTH) approaches, integrating posthumanist theory into design practices remains challenging. We argue that making MTH thinking “actionable” demands moving beyond the idea that there is a gap to bridge. Instead, we propose that the space between theory and practice could offer an interesting starting point for experimentation. Exploring that liminal space, we designed two generative AI tools – Oblique and MoTH. Using ChatGPT-4, these tools create design strategies based on diverse MTH texts. Reflecting on the process of making and using these tools, we offer two contributions: First, we explain how designers can use the tools (and create their own variants) to walk through design concepts from multiple perspectives. Then, we provide a critical discussion on the opportunities and limitations of using AI for MTH design, including how to situate MTH knowledge(s) and avoid extractivist relations.