Un/making Data Imaginaries: The Data EpicsWith the increase of Internet of Things devices in home environments, data will become an even more dominant part of people’s everyday lives. The invisibility of data leads us to rely on our imagination to make sense of them, yet this imagination is heavily shaped by a technocentric lens that views data as neutral and transparent. In response, in this article, we present the Data Epics project, where we commissioned seven fiction writers to write short stories based on smart home device data provided by seven households. We offer an analysis of the writers and households’ experiences with the project, presenting seven ways in which data imaginaries are made and unmade. We contribute a reflection around how making new data imaginaries unmakes common ones, the friction in unmaking certain imaginaries, and how we might further disseminate alternative data imaginaries.2025ADAudrey Desjardins et al.Universal & Inclusive DesignDesign FictionDIS
Echoes of Care: Unveiling the Intertwined Tensions between Childcare Work and Voice AssistantsChildcare workers, particularly in-home childcare workers and nannies, navigate the unique complexities of a job that is both paid and intimate. As domestic technologies like smart home cameras and voice assistants (VAs) become increasingly prevalent, nannies may interact with and need to navigate these technologies in their care routines. Although prior research has examined the use of VAs in family settings, little attention has been paid to nannies' interactions with these emerging technologies. In this work, we present three scenarios -- speculative yet grounded -- to illustrate underlying tensions and issues that may unfold in nannies' interactions with voice assistant technologies. We found that while VAs could deepen existing tensions around autonomy, responsibilities, and surveillance, they also held potential as tools for reflection and self-advocacy, enabling workers to renegotiate their responsibilities and identities. We conclude by discussing intertwined tensions between in-home childcare work and VAs, offering insights for designing more equitable domestic technologies.2025MGMeghna Gupta et al.University of Washington, Human Centered Design and EngineeringUniversal & Inclusive DesignHome Voice Assistant ExperienceSocial Robot InteractionCHI
Translating HCI Research to Broader Audiences: Motivation, Inspiration, and Critical Factors on Alternative Research OutcomesAlternative Research Outcomes (AROs) go beyond traditional academic publications, taking diverse forms such as documentaries, DIY tutorials, or exhibitions. With growing recognition of the need for more inclusive and contextually appropriate research dissemination, AROs are particularly relevant in HCI and design research. Yet, little has been discussed on why it is important to work on AROs. What are key qualities of AROs? How can the HCI community benefit from learning more about creating AROs? By analyzing six case studies, we propose four qualities of AROs and demonstrate how they emerge in the timeline of a research project. We argue AROs can be adapted to diverse audience needs and share research insights that may extend beyond the original research goals. Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of how AROs can support inclusive research dissemination practices, enabling HCI researchers to engage broader audiences and extend the relevance of their work.2025MYMinYoung Yoo et al.Simon Fraser University, School of Interactive Arts and TechnologyParticipatory DesignInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingCHI
Stills from the Inner Ear Shorts: Collecting and Living with DataData collection and representation invariably involve interpretation with various layers of translation. We designed the Inner Ear—a porcelain device that both captures and represents home vibration data—to rethink the relationship between home dwellers and their data. In this paper, we report on the deployment of the Inner Ear with seven participants in Seattle, Washington, USA. We examine stills and quotes from the Inner Ear Shorts: short documentary films that capture participants’ experiences and reflections with the Inner Ear. Our findings outline nuanced relationships with data that foreground sensorial and conscious experiences to engage with objects, spaces, and infrastructure, and deemphasize legibility to give space to memory and broaden definitions of data. We discuss how more ambiguous relationships with data can be beneficial to reconfigure everyday lives with data. We conclude with a reflection on the use of documentary filmmaking as a complementary methodological approach to synthesizing and analyzing research data.2025WOWyatt Olson et al.University of Washington, School of Art + Art History + DesignField StudiesHuman-Nature Relationships (More-than-Human Design)CHI
Porous by Design: How Childcare Platforms Impact Worker Personhood, Safety, and ConnectionCare work is always already unequal. It involves looking after others’ physical, psychological, emotional, and developmental needs. Paid care work tends to be conducted in private spaces, lack regulation, and reproduce unequal dynamics between clients and workers. These conditions lead to porous boundaries, a permeability experienced by workers between care and work, professional and personal, and private and public (sectors and spheres). Drawing on interviews with 16 workers who find work using Care.com, we argue that the porous boundaries of care work are reified in new ways through the design and use of emerging digitally mediated matching platforms. This has particular impacts for ranking personhood, reducing worker safety, and increasing atomization. In contrast, we find benefits in the forum-like structure and visible, interactive conversations of other platforms used to access childcare work. We end with a discussion of porousness by design and the trouble of locating design within worker platforms.2024CLCaitlin Lustig et al.Inclusive DesignEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsParticipatory DesignDIS
Care Layering: Complicating Design PatternsOver the past two decades, discussions of design patterns have turned from encouragement (what to do) toward discouragement (what to avoid). Termed dark, deceptive, or otherwise harmful, user experience (UX) patterns that serve to monetize engagement while reproducing and sedimenting structural inequities call for a shifting conversation around UX development and learning. This pictorial uses a visual case study of childcare worker platforms to help critically contextualize largely abstracted or universalizing UX patterns. Developing a form of critical documentation we call Care Layering, we show how approaching UX patterns as embodied and culturally-situated resources sheds light on both limitations and opportunities around gig work platform engagement. We end with a discussion of how Care Layering helps designers work towards greater accountability in UX design.2024MKMaya A Kaneko et al.Mental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesDark Patterns RecognitionEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsDIS
A temporal vocabulary of Design Events for Research through DesignMuch reporting on research-through-design (RtD) is vague about markers of time and temporal qualities. This lack of temporal attunement risks obscuring important contextual knowledge, hidden labour, material agencies and potential knowledge contributions. We turn to the notion of the event to articulate the granularities and nuances of RtD processes with an expanded vocabulary. We draw on prior calls from RtD practitioners, the philosophical roots of events, and our previous work with the term in our own research. We describe seven terms to expand the temporal vocabulary of RtD, which can be used to build narratives that emphasize knowledge created along the way, and relieve pressure from the ‘final’ artifact. Our contributions are 1) design events as an ontological shift and analytical tool and 2) a vocabulary that scaffolds design events as a sensitizing tool. We end with a call for more experimentation of non-chronological narratives of RtD.2024DODoenja Oogjes et al.Eindhoven University of TechnologyParticipatory DesignUser Research Methods (Interviews, Surveys, Observation)CHI
The Inner Ear: Capturing and Physicalizing Home Vibrations We present the Inner Ear: a porcelain device that both captures and represents data. In particular, we focus on sensing vibrations—for their hidden yet omnipresent qualities in domestic environments. We designed the Inner Ear in response and in contrast to a growing collection of ‘always on and recording’ smart home devices. With the Inner Ear, we purposefully let participants choose when to capture vibrations and which capture should be physicalized. In this pictorial, we describe the design and fabrication process of the capturing device as well as the data physicalization workflow. We contribute insights on (1) the design rationale and development of a double function artifact (to both capture and represent), as well as (2) design decisions involved in balancing legibility with leaving room for meaning making during the transcription of home vibration data.2023ADAudrey Desjardins et al.Data PhysicalizationSmart Home Privacy & SecurityDIS
A Notebook of Data ImaginariesThe processes of data collection and transformation are often opaque to users. This means they rely on their imagination to make sense of the data they produce. The images data conjure up, however, tend to be homogenous and flat: black screens, ones and zeros, big server farms in the desert. For designers and researchers who work with data as a material, this small repertoire can be stifling. For device users, it can lead to a removal of agency in how they make sense and engage with the data they produce. In this pictorial, we draw from a two-year data fictionalization project to start building an expanded repertoire of data imaginaries. We worked with seven households and seven writers to transform smart home data sets into fiction stories. Based on the interviews we conducted, we present the images participants shared with us as a step towards more expressive and varied imaginaries of data.2023GBGabrielle Benabdallah et al.Design FictionMuseum & Cultural Heritage DigitizationDIS
On the Making of Alternative Data Encounters: The Odd InterpretersWhile data are the backbone for home Internet of Things’ (IoT) functional and economic model, data remain elusive and abstract for home dwellers. In response, we present the Odd Interpreters (OIs): a collection of three artifacts that materialize alternative ways of engaging with IoT data in home environments. The OIs recast home data as imaginative sounds (Broadcast), fading fabric (Soft Fading), and cookie recipes (Data Bakery) with the intent to reveal the hidden human labor and material infrastructures of data and to critique data’s assumed objectivity. Following a Research-through-Design approach, we unpack design events that mark our process for making the Odd Interpreters. We conclude with a discussion around the need for pluralizing data encounters, the tactic of designing between illusion and precision, and a reflection on living with the prototypes while designing.2023ADAudrey Desjardins et al.University of WashingtonSmart Home Privacy & SecuritySustainable HCICHI
Autospeculation: Reflecting on the Intimate and Imaginative Capacities of Data AnalysisGiven decades of Human computer interaction (HCI) research focused on scientific empiricism, it can be hard for the field to acknowledge that data analysis is both an emotional and speculative process. But what does it mean for this process of data analysis to embrace its situated and speculative nature? In this paper, we explore this possibility by building on decades of HCI mixed methods that root data analysis in design. Drawing on an autoethnographic design inquiry, we examine how data analysis can work as an implicating process, one that is not only critically grounded in a designer’s own situation but also offers modes of imagining the world otherwise. In this analysis, we find that autobiographical design can help HCI scholars to respond to current critiques of speculative design by grounding and rendering more personal certain kinds of speculation, opening a space for diverse voices to emerge.2023BKBrian Kinnee et al.University of WashingtonTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIDesign FictionCHI
Monitoring Pets, Deterring Intruders, and Casually Spying on Neighbors: Everyday Uses of Smart Home CamerasThe increased adoption of smart home cameras (SHCs) foregrounds issues of surveillance, power, and privacy in homes and neighborhoods. However, questions remain about how people are currently using these devices to monitor and surveil, what the benefits and limitations are for users, and what privacy and security tensions arise between primary users and other stakeholders. We present an empirical study with 14 SHC users to understand how these devices are used and integrated within everyday life. Based on semi-structured qualitative interviews, we investigate users’ motivations, practices, privacy concerns, and social negotiations. Our findings highlight the SHC as a perceptually powerful and spatially sensitive device that enables a variety of surveillant uses outside of basic home security—from formally surveilling domestic workers, to casually spying on neighbors, to capturing memories. We categorize surveillant SHC uses, clarify distinctions between primary and non-primary users, and highlight under-considered design directions for addressing power imbalances among primary and non-primary users.2022NTNeilly H. Tan et al.University of WashingtonPrivacy by Design & User ControlSmart Home Interaction DesignSmart Home Privacy & SecurityCHI
Critical-Playful Speculations with Cameras in the HomeSmart home cameras present new challenges for understanding behaviors and relationships surrounding always-on, domestic recording systems. We designed a series of discursive activities involving 16 individuals from ten households for six weeks in their everyday settings. These activities functioned as speculative probes—prompting participants to reflect on themes of privacy and power through filming with cameras in their households. Our research design foregrounded critical-playful enactments that allowed participants to speculate potentials for relationships with cameras in the home beyond everyday use. We present four key dynamics with participants and home cameras by examining their relationships to: the camera's eye, filming, their data, and camera’s societal contexts. We contribute discussions about the mundane, information privacy, and post-hoc reflection with one’s camera footage. Overall, our findings reveal the camera as a strange, yet banal entity in the home—interrogating how participants compose and handle their own and others’ video data.2022NTNeilly H. Tan et al.University of WashingtonPrivacy by Design & User ControlSmart Home Interaction DesignSmart Home Privacy & SecurityCHI
Moving Design Research: GIFs as Research ToolsAnimated GIFs are often viewed as a nod to early internet culture or as tools for digital communication, but in this pictorial, we highlight a new use of GIFs, as tools for design research. We walk through four case studies from our own research that exemplify GIFs used throughout the design process as empirical probes, prototypes, communication tools, and finalized artifacts. By conducting a collaborative, reflexive analysis of these cases, we present an annotated portfolio of the goals, crafting and aesthetic choices of our GIFs and how creating GIFs added to our research. We conclude by noting that both the aesthetics of movement and the rich, concise, and contextualized nature of gifs added to our depth of thinking and ability to communicate speculative and imaginative concepts. Finally, we also suggest that research dissemination, especially for design research, would be enriched by supporting more diverse knowledge-production artifacts such as GIFs.2021HBHeidi R. Biggs et al.Design FictionInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingDIS
Investigating Opaque Infrastructures With The Desktop Odometer The information we access on the Internet appears immediately but usually lives far away. The Desktop Odometer is a device that shows users the distance they travel when browsing the web by tracking the total miles between their current location and the server from which they are requesting information. In this work, we investigated internet infrastructures by designing and producing Desktop Odometers, selling them on Amazon.com, and receiving customer reviews. We present our analysis of customer reviews which reveal how customers describe their understandings of internet infrastructures after using the device. We also recount our RtD approach to making the device; we describe frictions we encountered when navigating other opaque infrastructures in our fabrication process, such as the Google Play store. Finally, we reflect on our use of Amazon.com and customer reviews as a method to engage participants in discussion about internet infrastructure through the sale and review process.2021JVJeremy E. Viny et al.Geospatial & Map VisualizationPrototyping & User TestingDIS
Voices and Voids: Subverting Voice Assistant Systems through Performative ExperimentsResponding to concerns such as privacy, surveillance, and the commodification of personal data with regards to voice assistants, this artistic research focuses on creating performative artifacts and vignettes that challenge artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies. By allowing AI voice assistants to listen to our most private conversations, we become receptive to their mediated care, while forgetting or ignoring how much these automated interactions have been pre-scripted. With our project Voices and Voids, we reclaim, examine, and ultimately transcode these voice assistant data through interdisciplinary performance and Post-Internet Art. In this paper, we thematically describe 12 vignettes which represent embodied and sonic experiments using a combination of design, data-driven art, cyber crafts, found-object and traditional percussion instruments, spoken word, and movement. We conclude with a discussion of how the experiments worked as a multifaceted whole, and how we used interdisciplinary methods as a central approach.2021ADAudrey Desjardins et al.Intelligent Voice Assistants (Alexa, Siri, etc.)Technology Ethics & Critical HCIC&C
Data Epics: Embarking on Literary Journeys of Home Internet of Things DataIn this paper, we use fiction as a method to complicate the commonplace narratives of data as intangible and objective, in the particular context of Internet of Things (IoT) in the home. We, a team of two design researchers, partnered with a fiction writer and a single IoT enthusiast, Susan, to create The Data Epics: four short stories based on Susan’s monthly home IoT data logs. The Data Epics revealed new imaginaries for data, showing new world-views and lively data, but also surfaced data’s entanglement in meshes and hierarchies, and concerns about control and power. Our work also examines the labor of tending to and interpreting data and a particular interest in anomalies. We conclude with discussions of how data imaginaries from fiction might be imperfect, but are uniquely generative, offering a path to get closer to IoT data by trying things on and zooming in and slowing down.2021ADAudrey Desjardins et al.University of WashingtonContext-Aware ComputingChildren & Family IoTDesign FictionCHI
Crafting an Embodied Speculation: An Account of Prototyping MethodsIn this pictorial, we show and discuss the prototyping process we undertook to craft the High Water Pants, a mechatronic pair of pants that make climate change tangible for everyday cyclists. We position the pants as an example of embodied speculation and discuss how our prototyping methods helped us craft a speculative artifact that bridged the gap between the embodied experience of cycling and speculative futures with climate change. The pictorial contributes an accounting of our prototyping methods and how they strove to connect the dual contexts of (1) how the pants felt in the present, and (2) how that in-situ feeling reflected climate change data in order to create space for cyclists’ embodied speculation about possible futures with climate change.2020HBHeidi R. Biggs et al.Design FictionSustainable HCIHuman-Nature Relationships (More-than-Human Design)DIS
Parallels, Tangents, and Loops: Reflections on the ‘Through’ Part of RtDWhile attention in Research Through Design (RtD) is often on the findings, in this pictorial, we choose to attend to the ‘through’ part of RtD in order to reveal the messy stories of how those insights were arrived at—stories that are often untold, truncated, or streamlined. We use a yearlong RtD project on human-data entanglements in the home as a case study to explore the contours of this process. We detail how our messy lines of inquiry crossed, dead ended, wove together, and looped. Grounded in illustrations of lines, we offer practical reflections on experiences we encountered while navigating these scribbly lines.2020ADAudrey Desjardins et al.User Research Methods (Interviews, Surveys, Observation)Prototyping & User TestingResearch Ethics & Open ScienceDIS
IoT Data in the Home: Observing Entanglements and Drawing New EncountersInternet of Things (IoT) technologies for the home are gaining in popularity, generating exponential data byproducts. Yet, everyday relationships between home dwellers and domestic IoT data often remain secondary interactions, preventing deeper understanding and awareness of data tracked in the home. Our paper offers a design ethnography and design inquiry which examine these human-data entanglements. Findings from working with 10 inhabitants who interact with their IoT data illustrate five characteristics of current data encounters: manifesting, inquiring, exposing, repositioning, and broadening. In response, we used speculative sketches to refine, refract and complicate these encounters. We argue that data do not have to be laborious, tidy or the byproduct of a service, but rather lively and affecting. We further suggest new modes of engagement with data which expand or step away from self-improvement and reflection: through diverse acts of noticing, by allowing data to remain invisible, and by embracing imaginative practices.2020ADAudrey Desjardins et al.University of WashingtonContext-Aware ComputingSmart Home Privacy & SecurityCHI