Illustrating Creative Applications of Data and Technology: A Visual VocabularyContemporary technologies and data-driven methods have much potential to support innovation in the creative industries - from design and craft, to film and music. However, discussing and understanding the applied potential of data and technology can be especially difficult for creative practitioners who have limited previous experience with data-driven research and development. In this pictorial, we address this challenge through the design, and initial evaluation, of a ‘Visual Vocabulary’ of illustrations aimed to scaffold creative practitioners’ thinking about how they might employ a diverse range of data and technology to address their creative and business challenges. The illustrations serve as a resource for subverting common imageries of technologies and computational methods in popular media - which often fail to showcase their many creative affordances. Moreover, as an ideation card deck, they also serve to support discussion and exploration of new data-driven projects for creative practitioners.2025SLSusan Lechelt et al.Interactive Data VisualizationVisualization Perception & CognitionGraphic Design & Typography ToolsC&C
Content Authenticities: A Discussion on the Values of Provenance Data for Creatives and Their AudiencesThe proliferation of AI-generated digital content has intensified the user demand for accurate provenance information to ensure content authenticity. Technical advancements now provide tools to make the digital media content supply chain more transparent through the use of provenance data. This paper foregrounds the importance of understanding how the situated nature of user-content engagement influences perceptions and uses of this data. Insights from a workshop with experts in the creative media sector suggest that, as the adoption of provenance data becomes more common, users need richer and more nuanced information. We suggest that analyzing the increasing demand for content authenticity through the lens of multiple “authenticities”, each reflecting different user needs and contexts, can help identify and address the needs for, and uses of, provenance data by creators and audiences alike.2025CMCaterina Moruzzi et al.Explainable AI (XAI)Algorithmic Transparency & AuditabilityPrivacy by Design & User ControlC&C
A Token Gesture: Non-Transferable NFTs, Digital Possessions and Ownership DesignThis paper presents the design, deployment and qualitative study of a large-scale, public, generative art exhibition, through which passers-by could create artworks, and mint a non-fungible-token (NFT). Following the month-long exhibition, during which 229 anonymous participants produced artworks, 69 non-transferable NFTs were minted, we surveyed (33) and interviewed (14) expert and novice participants about their experiences. We explored contemporary challenges of owning digital things, and the extent to which NFTs, and `Web3' technologies offer meaningful forms of ownership. Our findings describe how the inability to trade this NFT, and its unique circumstances of acquisition, made it meaningful in ways that extended beyond its immediate (limited) utility and offered participants something through which to construct identity. Reflecting on the aspirations, contradictions, and misconceptions of forms of ownership enabled by NFTs, we conclude with proposals for renewed attention in HCI to the nature of digital possessions, and the potential for �ownership design�.2024CEChris Elsden et al.Session 3c: Speculative Design and Emerging TechnologiesCSCW
Baking An Institutional Doughnut: A Systemic Design Journey for Diverse Stakeholder Engagement Doughnut Economics offers a contemporary compass for navigating the complexities of creating a safe and just space where humanity can flourish while respecting ecological boundaries. This pictorial reports on how the Doughnut Economics model can be applied as a tool for facilitating complex stakeholder engagement. We present a novel visual framework and facilitation method to enable systemic and values-led thinking in the context of establishing a new interdisciplinary academic institution. Using a participatory design process, 115 stakeholders from academic, research, and administrative backgrounds explored this model over two studio sessions, co-creating an institutional compass to navigate the socio-ethical challenges of their professional practices. We leverage the pictorial format to (i) demonstrate the application of the Doughnut Economics model as an effective visual framework for fostering structured dialogue to surface shared and contesting values and boundaries and (ii) facilitate complex stakeholder engagement through a systemic design journey that encourages emergent dialogue.2024PBPushpi Bagchi et al.Universal & Inclusive DesignParticipatory DesignSustainable HCIDIS
Designing with Transactional Data: FTML and Money/Data LaunderingIn a digital, and cashless economy, transactional data has become ubiquitous, telling and highly valuable. Yet, this data is rarely considered critically as a material for design. This pictorial presents two successive Research through Design projects exploring practically how we might design with transactional data. The first, ‘FTML: Financial Transaction Mark-up Language’ is a speculative design project and short film, which explores how value-laden ‘mark up’ of specific transactional data could underpin new services and digital applications. The second, ‘Money / Data Laundering’ adopted an approach of ‘designerly hacking’, with Point of Sale (PoS) payment card readers, to develop a web application to digitally ‘wash’ or launder specific values into an indivdual’s bank account via a symbolic transaction. Reflecting on both interventions, we demonstrate the need, and opportunities, for designers to engage critically with transactional data and financial infrastructures, to enable new forms of value(s) exchange.2024CEChris Elsden et al.Algorithmic Fairness & BiasEcological Design & Green ComputingDIS
Agency Aspirations: Understanding Users’ Preferences And Perceptions Of Their Role In Personalised News CurationRecommender systems are increasingly employed by journalistic outlets to deliver personalised news, transforming news curation into a reciprocal yet insufficiently defined process influenced by editors, recommender systems, and individual user actions. To understand the tension in this dynamic and users’ preferences and perceptions of their role in personalised news curation, we conducted a study with UK participants aged 16-34. Building on a preliminary survey and interview study, which revealed a strong desire from participants for increased agency in personalisation, we designed an interactive news recommender provotype (provocative design artefact) which probed the role of agency in news curation with participants (n=16). Findings highlighted a behaviour-intention gap, indicating participants desire for agency yet reluctance to intervene actively in personalisation. Our research offers valuable insights into how users perceive their agency in personalised news curation, underscoring the importance for systems to be designed to support individuals becoming active agents in news personalisation.2024ARAnna Marie Rezk et al.University of EdinburghExplainable AI (XAI)Recommender System UXCHI
FestForward: Participatory Design Futuring and World-Building for Equitable Digital Futures in Performing Arts FestivalsFestForward is a fictional, local, cultural magazine, set in 2030, designed to stimulate conversations about equitable and sustainable digital futures in performing arts festivals. This extensive design fiction was developed through a series of participatory workshops, where creative and cultural practitioners responded to various ‘provotypes’ suggesting narrative content for the magazine. In this pictorial, we annotate and unpack the making of FestForward to reflect upon various formats and approaches to design futuring, and to offer a platform for further world-building, research and discussion on equitable digital futures in arts festivals.2023CEChris Elsden et al.Technology Ethics & Critical HCIDesign FictionInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingDIS
Zoom Obscura: Counterfunctional Design for Video-ConferencingThis paper reports on Zoom Obscura – an artist-based design research project, responding to the ubiquity of video-conferencing as a technical and cultural phenomenon throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. As enterprise software, such as Zoom, rapidly came to mediate even the most personal and intimate interactions, we supported and collaborated with seven independent artists to explore technical and creative interventions in video-conferencing. Our call for participation sought critical interventions that would help users counter, and regain agency in regard to the various ways in which personal data is captured, transmitted and processed in video-conferencing tools. In this design study, we analyse post-hoc how each of the seven projects employed aspects of counterfunctional design to achieve these aims. Each project reveals different avenues and strategies for counterfunctionality in video-conferencing software, as well as opportunities to design critically towards interactions and experiences that challenge existing norms and expectations around these platforms.2022CEChris Elsden et al.University of EdinburghRemote Work Tools & ExperienceTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
A Right Time to Give: Beyond Saving Time in Automated Conditional DonationsSmart Donations is a blockchain-based platform that offers users ‘contracts’ that donate funds to certain causes in response to real-world events e.g., whenever an earthquake is detected or an activist tweets about refugees. We designed Smart donations with Oxfam Australia, trialed it for 8-weeks with 86 people, recorded platform analytics and qualitatively analysed questionnaires and interviews about user experiences. Temporal qualities emerge when automation enforces conditions that contributed to participants’ awareness of events that are usually unconscious, and senses of immediacy in contributing to crisis response and ongoing involvement in situations far-away while awaiting conditions to be met. We suggest data-driven automation can reveal diverse temporal registers, in real-world phenomena, sociality, morality, and everyday life, which contributes to experiencing a ‘right time’ to donate that is not limited to productivity or efficiency. Thus, we recommend a sensitivity to right time in designing for multiple temporalities in FinTech more generally.2021NBNicola J Bidwell et al.International University of Management, Northumbria UniversityContext-Aware ComputingAlgorithmic Fairness & BiasSustainable HCICHI
Creative Transactions: Special Digital Monies in ‘Break Kickstarter’ Crowdfunding CampaignsThis paper conceptualizes ‘creative transactions’ – payment for creative work – as a rich site for the study, design and innovation of new financial technologies, and ‘special digital monies’. For most, creative labor remains highly precarious and underfunded and those working in the creative industries frequently rely on diverse forms of funding for their work. As a case study, we draw on a corpus of 87 ‘Break Kickstarter’ crowdfunding campaigns, where project creators were encouraged to break conventions and “rethink what a Kickstarter campaign can be”. By studying how these innovative projects broke fundraising conventions and experimented with the transactional attributes of a Kickstarter campaign, we show how they reconfigured the payment for creative work, and developed new relations between creators and their audiences. Drawing on these analyses, we derive new ideas and opportunities for the design of special digital monies to support novel creative transactions beyond crowdfunding campaigns.2021CEChris Elsden et al.University of EdinburghVisual Impairment Technologies (Screen Readers, Tactile Graphics, Braille)Algorithmic Fairness & BiasSustainable HCICHI
PizzaBlock: Designing Artefacts and Roleplay to Understand Decentralised Identity Management SystemsThis pictorial describes in detail the design, and multiple iterations, of PizzaBlock – a role-playing game and design workshop to introduce non-technical participants to decentralised identity management systems. We have so far played this game with six different audiences, with over one hundred participants – iterating the design of the artefacts and gameplay each time. In this pictorial, we reflect on this RtD project to unpack: a) How we designed artefacts and roleplay to explore decentralised technologies and networks; b) How we communicated the key challenges and parameters of a complex system, through the production of a playable, interactive, analogue representation of that technology; c) How we struck a balance between playful tangible gameplay and high-fidelity technical analogy; and d) How approaches like PizzaBlock invite engagement with complex infrastructures and can support more participatory approaches to their design.2020JRJonathan Rankin et al.Privacy by Design & User ControlParticipatory DesignDesign FictionDIS
Expanding Modes of Reflection in Design FuturingDesign futuring approaches, such as speculative design, design fiction and others, seek to (re)envision futures and explore alternatives. As design futuring becomes established in HCI design research, there is an opportunity to expand and develop these approaches. To that end, by reflecting on our own research and examining related work, we contribute five modes of reflection. These modes concern formgiving, temporality, researcher positionality, real-world engagement, and knowledge production. We illustrate the value of each mode through careful analysis of selected design exemplars and provide questions to interrogate the practice of design futuring. Each reflective mode offers productive resources for design practitioners and researchers to articulate their work, generate new directions for their work, and analyze their own and others' work.2020SKSandjar Kozubaev et al.Geogria Institute of TechnologyParticipatory DesignDesign FictionCHI
Understanding the Boundaries between Policymaking and HCIThere is a growing body of literature in HCI examining the intersection between policymaking and technology research. However, what it means to engage in policymaking in our field, or the ways in which evidence from HCI studies is translated into policy, is not well understood. We report on interviews with 11 participants working at the intersection of technology research and policymaking. Analysis of this data highlights how evidence is understood and made sense of in policymaking processes, what forms of evidence are privileged over others, and the work that researchers engage in to meaningfully communicate their work to policymaking audiences. We discuss how our findings pose challenges for certain traditions of research in HCI, yet also open up new policy opportunities for those engaging in more speculative research practices. We conclude by discussing three ways forward that the HCI community can explore to increase engagement with policymaking contexts.2019ASAnne Spaa et al.Northumbria UniversityAlgorithmic Fairness & BiasTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
Sorting Out Valuation in the Charity Shop: Designing for Data-Driven Innovation through Value TranslationRecent work within HCI and CSCW has become attentive to the politics of data and metrics in order to highlight the implications of what counts and how. In this paper, we relate these discussions to the longstanding distinctions made between value and values. We introduce literature on ‘Valuation Studies’ and argue for understanding the politics of data through valuation – an ongoing social practice that transforms socially embedded values into different forms of more abstract value. This theoretical work is developed through an ethnographic study of contemporary UK charity shops, as a site focused on the labour of valuation, but embedded in both local and global values. Through this study, we consider implications for the intervention and design of ‘data-driven innovation’, with a particular focus on distributed ledger technologies. We argue that these technologies inevitably engage in valuation, and require careful attention to the ongoing processes by which value is translated and performed by different stakeholders.2019CEChris Elsden et al.Economic encountersCSCW