Designing with the More-than-Human
Temporalities of Thinking with Care
DIS2023 Workshop
Background image credit:
Gizem Oktay, Yuta Ikeya and Yuning Chen (collaborators: Tom Hartley, Yishan Qin, and Lamp Lee)
Accepted Submissions
Timon Adriaanssen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Fiona Bell, University of New Mexico, USA
Carol Breen, Cardiff School of Art and Design, UK
Adriana Cabrera,
Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Amy Yo Sue Chen, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Bert de Roo & Giliam Ganzevles, Ghent University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Belgium
Yongrao Du, University of the Arts London, UK
Marta Ferreira, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
Yuhan Hu, Cornell University, USA
Sylvia Janicki, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Eldy Lazaro Vasquez, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Jasmine Lu, University of Chicago, USA
Georgia Mackenzie, University of Tokyo, Japan
Doenja Oogjes, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Veronica Ranner, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Buket Samanci, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
Semina Yi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Megan Young, Indiana University, USA
Call for Participation
The advent of the Anthropocene brought about an understanding of time that is associated with acceleration and fast-paced rhythms. Arguably, we need different and plural understandings of time that help us engage with living beings and the rates and ways in which they engage life, the space around them, and their relations with other entities. We believe more-than-human temporalities and their inclusion in the design process have never been more ‘timely’. Our workshop positions this timeliness in conjunction with the need to explore this emerging space with fellow researchers.
We will bring together HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners to engage with more-than-human temporalities in the context of designing with care. By using living and once-living media (e.g., fungi, plant and insect specimens, bio-designed artefacts) as starting points for investigating more-than-human temporalities, we will discuss how a pluralistic temporal approach can offer the discourse of designing-with nonhuman entities, and how this aligns with emerging HCI research trajectories and concerns.
We welcome submissions from various disciplines and topics, including but not limited to:
– Post-human, more-than-human, other-than-human design
– Bio and sustainable design (artefact, case study, method)
– Temporal design
– Care-based design
– Provocative, Speculative and Participatory design
We intend to further grow the more-than-human design (MTHD) community and scaffold this area at DIS. We position both temporality and care as essential sensibilities and conceptual frameworks that extend designers’ imaginaries on what it means to design for more-than-human centred worlds.
Submission requirements
The submission should describe the authors’ work related to the workshop themes (expanding notions of time, multi-species agency, and care-based imaginaries)
At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the workshop and at least one day of the conference and attend the workshop.
Submissions should be between 2 to 6 pages including references. Interested participants are invited to submit one or both of the following, using the ACM master template and/or in PDF format:
Positioning/pictorial paper
Images of design artefacts with short stories
Workshop Schedule
and Activities
Speakers & Presenters
Date: July 11th, 2023 (Tuesday)
We propose a one-day hybrid workshop structured in a series of presentations, activities and structured discussions to exchange ideas learned on addressing critical challenges in converging temporality and care perspectives in practices of designing-with.
Tentative Schedule
1. Introductions (9:00 – 9:45 EDT)
Brief introductions from organizers on the motivation of the workshop, agenda of the day.
2. Presentations (10:00 – 10:45 EDT)
3-minute-long presentations of accepted submissions.
Break (10:45 – 11:00)
3. Case Presentation (11:00 – 11:30) | Jiwei Zhou, Materials Experience Lab, TU Delft
Cyano-chromic Interface: Aligning Human-Microbe Temporalities Towards Noticing and Attending to Living Artefacts
Microbes offer designers opportunities to endow artefacts with environmental sensing and adapting abilities, and unique expressions. However, microbe-embedded artefacts present a challenge of temporal dissonance, reflected by a “time lag” typically experienced by humans in noticing the gradual and minute shifts in microbial metabolism. This could compromise fluency of interactions and may hinder timely noticing and attending to microbes in living artefacts. In addressing this challenge, we developed Cyano-chromic Interface, in which photosynthetic activity of cyanobacteria is timely surfaced by an electrochromic (EC) material through its monochromatic display. In the talk I will present the interface and discuss how aligning human-microbe temporalities could potentially enrich interactions and reciprocal relationships with microbes, and beyond.
Speaker and Q&A (11:30 – 12:00 EDT) | Jeanette Morren, Project Manager at Biomimicry Institute
4. Lunch Break (12:00 – 13:30 EDT)
5. Keynote Speaker & Trip to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History Herbarium (13:30 – 16:00 EDT) | Mason Heberling
Getting the timing right: Measuring and understanding plant phenology in a changing world
Phenology is the study of cyclic, seasonal events in nature. The seasonal timing of leaf out, flowering, and seed production is especially critical for forest wildflowers that depend on high light in the spring, before being shaded out by tree leaves. Combining natural history observations first initiated more than 160 years ago by Henry David Thoreau, insights from museum collections, community science observations, and ongoing field and laboratory experiments, this talk will provide an overview of the importance of phenology and highlight the impacts of climate change and non-native plants on the future of forest wildflowers.
Break (16:15 – 16:25)
6. Activity & presentation & discussion (16:30 – 17:30 EDT)
7. Wrap-up & takeaways (17:30 – 18:00)
Workshop Organisers
Gizem Oktay is a Ph.D. candidate within the Future Everyday cluster at the Industrial Design department in Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands. Her research lies at the intersection of bio-HCI and animal-computer interaction and is focused on temporalities of more-than-human care. She holds a Master of Arts in Illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD, USA and has participated in multiple disciplinary-transcending research projects including in the University of Texas at Dallas and Arizona State University in United States and Istanbul Design Biennale in Turkey.
Yuta Ikeya is a designer and an engineer. He has focused on more-than-human design practices at the Industrial Design master’s programme in Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. As a designer, he explores the cohabitation of humans and nonhumans through tangible design artefacts. He holds Master of Science degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden and Keio University in Japan.
Minha Lee is an assistant professor at the Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology. She researches on morally relevant interactions with CUIs, particularly on promotion of well-being through positive moral emotions like compassion. Her recent work finds that our well-being can be promoted through conversations with digital entities, which relates to how temporality of care with artificial agents can involve intra-personal change over time through technology.
Bahareh Barati is an assistant professor at the Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology. Her work explores the intersection of biological and digital capabilities and their mutually informed integrations in designing for sustainable and equitable futures. Her recent publications contribute to a conceptualization of “living artefacts”, a taxonomy of digital tools in designing “habitabilities”, and explorations of more-than-human care in biodesign. Bahareh received her PhD and MSc (cum laude) from TU Delft and was awarded the Best Graduate of Industrial Design Engineering in 2012.
Yuning Chen is a Ph.D. researcher in Design Informatics and a member of the Environmental Humanities Ph.D. Lab at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the morality of more-than-human organisms in the context of biotechnological research. With a background in environmental science and design engineering, her works have been recognised across major art and science venues such as ST+ARTS Festival, Venice Biennale, London Design Week, Falling Walls Science Festivals, BioSummit and iGEM.
Larissa Pschetz is a senior lecturer in Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Her research looks at the impacts of socio-technological narratives on ways of enacting time and relating to the natural world. She completed a Microsoft-funded PhD in 2014 where she coined the term Temporal Design and has been working in the area of Biodesign and Design Ecologies since 2017.
Carolina Ramirez Figueroa is a Senior Lecturer in Information Experience Design at the Royal College of Art. Her research explores the challenges and opportunities found when living systems are understood as a form of matter for design. Carolina has collaborated with several artists, designers, and scientists, and has exhibited, and participated in different art and design venues around the world including Helsinki, Edinburgh, Belgium, Canada, Taiwan, and Japan.
