DIS2024

Attending Workshops

Workshops at DIS include one and two day workshops over Monday and Tuesday July 1-2, 2024. You can find more details below and how to participate via the individual workshop organisers and related individual workshop pages.

The workshop chairs for 2024 are Erik Grönvall, IT University of Copenhagen and Kening Zhu, City University of Hong Kong. workshops@dis2024.acm.org

You can see the whole DIS24 program, paper tracks, panels and special events and even organise your own schedule using the online program

See the DIS’24 Online Program
Register now for DIS’24

Workshops at a glance

One day workshops:
Monday 1 July

One day workshops:
Tuesday 2 July

Two day workshops:
Monday and Tuesday 1-2 July

One Day workshops:

Day 1: Monday 1 July

Advancing Creative Physical Computing Education: Designing, Sharing, and Taxonomizing Instructional Interventions

Physical computing is a materially rich practice that connects across skills in STEM, design, arts, and creativity. It also offers learners a means of making personally meaningful, computational artifacts that support creative development, resonate with personal identities, and access a history of craft and culture. Yet, physical computing instruction remains a complex instructional practice that requires navigating computation and reasoning, engineering and mechanisms, and creativity and problem-solving between physical and virtual spaces. Spurred by the pandemic, the shift to remote instruction fostered a wave of creativity in physical computing instruction and new lines of inquiry around access and inclusion, resilient learning, and the creativity, craft, and culture found in physical computing. This one-day workshop will convene a network of researchers, educators, and designers to uncover, share and reflect on our creative instructional responses. We will develop a set of agendas for continued innovation and inquiry in creative physical computing education in post-secondary contexts. Our aim is to cross-pollinate research agendas and strengthen educational approaches in critical STEM and design practices.

A Danish Blend: The Copenhagen Walkshop

This full-day two-part walkshop intends to help participants rethink and reimagine their relationship with themselves, with society, and with the environments they live in by introducing them to the concept of blended spaces. The facilitators first take participants on a 3 hours, 4 kilometers walkshop to learn what being immersed in the urban space of Copenhagen can tell us about the relationship between the human body, architectural space, and digital space. Participants engage in activities meant to make them observe, reflect, and discuss how human space in the 21st century is a blend of the physical and the digital. In the afternoon, a mapping and reflection session transforms morning notes into maps to trace how the experience of participants blended (or did not blend) digital and physical, what worked well or did not, where structures provided guidance or engendered confusion, where information was punctual, where it was missing, superabundant, misleading…

Designing [Im]Material Inventories of Nomadic Belongings

In response to this year’s conference theme of “why design” and the recognition of instability and uncertainty as factors influencing the future of the field, our workshop “Designing [Im]Material Inventories of Nomadic Belongings” revolves around the experiences of being a nomad in our [im]material world of various entanglements. In this space, we will share our stories through the belongings and technologies we carry and discard, problematising nomadism and impermanence as possibilities for resilience and growth. Through the use of various design methods -including collaborative inventorying, somatic noticing and material fabulations- we will unpack together our experiences of mobility in academia, speaking about the objects and affects we embrace and leave behind, the role of technology in the construction of our changing identities, and possible futures we envision for nomadism.

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Data of/by/for the People: Designing Participatory Approaches to Data Governance

Current frameworks of data governance often fail to account for the plurality of the publics they are required to safeguard. Several alternative structures are emerging to democratise and rethink data governance to involve and protect people and their fundamental rights. This 1-day workshop will bring together HCI researchers, practitioners and designers working in areas of privacy, law, policy, social science and community practice to solidify the role of design in engaging communities with deliberate data practices which embed varied lived experiences into new technological developments. Critically addressing issues of care and meaningful representation, we aim to reflect on the impact of collective action and participation in datafied socio-technical infrastructures. To consolidate this research community, the intended workshop outcome is a visual map of the emerging landscape of alternative, community-led governance models, and a set of critically informed guidelines on best practices for design in this field.

Towards Robot and Technologies that Touch Well – Shaping an Experience-driven Design Paradigm

Touch plays a vital role in social communication, bonding, and maintaining physical and emotional well-being. Advances in robotics alongside novel haptic technologies provide opportunities for tactile technology design that supports care, social bonding, and novel sensory experiences. However, the key to unlocking these potentials depends on whether a technology can ‘touch well’- whether the felt quality, or experiential affordance matches the expectation for the intended use cases. Current haptic devices are still very limited in the range and nuances of sensations that they can deliver, and there lacks the knowledge for developing richer and finer-grained sensations that encompass those of human social touch. To develop knowledge in this area requires cross-disciplinary collaborations. These challenges call for a formulation of a novel experience-driven design paradigm that brings together parameters from the expressive, affective, experiential and soma-aesthetic qualities of touch, as well as technical realisations and ethical dimensions. This workshop invites participants from diversified fields including but not limited to: design, material and bodily practices, social sciences, healthcare and artistic practices whose research interests and practices intersect with touch or haptics, touch interaction from robots and haptic devices to shape such a paradigm.

Design Methods for Accessing the Pluriverse

In recent years, Design and human-computer interaction (HCI) research has expanded to include nonhuman perspectives. However, these explorations often remain largely theoretical or small-scale and local. We advocate for more diverse experimentation to foster pluralistic viewpoints in design processes. Our one-day workshop aims to develop methods for pluriversal art and design practice, emphasizing intuitive and systematic perspective-building in social contexts. We strive to explore, share and map emerging design methods to think through multiple perspectives. We will invite designers who embrace heightened sensitivity towards entities beyond the human realm and support relational approaches in design. This workshop will explore how design interventions, visual mapping, and other-than-human HCI can become ‘enabling methods’ that contribute to understanding others’ perspectives and relations. Through experience with a case of temporalities in human-plant interaction, we will discuss how these methods can contribute to broader goals of developing relationality and endorsing eco-centric approaches in design practice.

Fostering Feminist Community-Led Ethics: Building Tools and Connections

The workshop aims to explore the intersection of community-led ethics, feminist HCI, and digital civics, with a focus on fostering collaborative research practices grounded in ethical principles. Participants will engage in discussions, activities, and hands-on ideation sessions to develop a meta-toolkit for community-led feminist ethics for HCI projects. We encourage all who wish to join us in building this meta-toolkit to apply, especially those with relevant personal or professional experience with embedded research and/or feminist research practices.

Participants will be asked to submit a 1-2 page experience report (in a pdf format), or a 2 minute video recording (in mp4 format) that describes relevant personal, professional, and/or research practice. Please include a reflection on what community-led ethics means to you. We invite participants to use the formats creatively and encourage submissions in alternative formats. All accepted papers, with the permission of the authors, will be shared among the participants and hosted here on our website. If at any point anyone wishes to remove their paper or withdraw from participation, we will promptly take it down.

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Design for the Long Now: Temporal Tools for Navigating Ethics in HCI

Design for the Long Now is a project inspired by the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit promoting long-term thinking and responsibility in the face of rapidly accelerating technology and culture. This one-day workshop will provide a space for HCI researchers and technology designers to reflect on the timelines that govern their work and explore where and how ethical issues emerge. In drawing on real-world ethical dilemmas that participants have experienced, we hope to better understand how power dynamics and hierarchies can constrain or accelerate ethical decision making and consider the wider context and systems surrounding these processes. Through playful, creative experimentation, community building, and the use of non-violent communication and systems thinking tools, this workshop aims to build participants’ agency and inspire collective action. We also hope to promote change in the design practices and norms that perpetuate harm.

Teaching for More-than-human Perspectives in Design – A Pedagogical Pattern Mining Workshop

In this workshop, we invite participants to challenge the dominating human-centred paradigm of teaching design and work together to mine a collection of pedagogical patterns for teaching more-than-human perspectives in design and HCI. The participants are invited to bring activities and materials from their own teaching and research for more-than-human perspectives in design (if you have no experience, you are also welcome). Through structured and facilitated reflection, these activities and materials will be analysed and mapped to build an overview of existing practices, explore similarities between them, and articulate challenges that come with teaching more-than-human perspectives in design. The participants will be invited to continue sharing teaching practices after the workshop, to sustain the network and keep working towards a future curriculum for more-than-human in design.

Human Building Interaction and Designing for Climate Change

Climate change poses unique challenges and opportunities for the design of human-centered smart buildings. Developments in innovative programmable materials can address some of the challenges of creating passive buildings whilst cultivating more responsible human-climate relationships. Yet, their potential in the context of climate change remains relatively underexplored by the Human-Computer Interaction and Human Building Interaction research communities. This workshop invites proposals that rethink the design of physical human-data interactions in our built environment in the increasingly urgent context of climate change. The workshop will include opportunities to present and discuss participants’ research and design work, followed by a ‘mapping the research landscape’ exercise, and a video design-fiction prototyping session. The anticipated outcome of the workshop will be a new design agenda for HCI/HBI research in response to climate change, which will be of critical relevance to people designing and developing smart buildings, cities and urban infrastructures.

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Day 2: Tuesday 2 July

Making Trouble: Techniques for Queering Data and AI Systems

This one day workshop will explore queering as a design technique for troubling data and AI systems, ranging from quotidian personal data to recent Generative AI tools. By surfacing numerous instances of queering data or AI, we will come together to develop an archive of techniques for queering or artful subversion. From this archive, participants will select a technique and develop a speculative prototype or artifact via critical making. In doing so, we resist techno-determinism and conventional narratives of AI harms and benefits by tracing queer possibilities outside these categories.

More Samples of One: Weaving First-Person Perspectives into Mainstream HCI Research

Interactive systems have become an integral part of our daily lives, influencing how we communicate, work, and play. Understanding the intricate relationship between humans and technology is at the core of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research and design. Amid the array of methodological tools available, first-person research methods have emerged as powerful instruments that enable researchers to delve deeply into the human-technology experience. Five years after the first edition of the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) workshop on first-person methods, this full day workshop invites HCI researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts to embark on a journey of discovery of their sample of one. Drawing inspiration from the rich tradition of autoethnography, autobiographical design, embodied ideation, and more, we aim to explore the omnipresence of technology in our everyday lives while acknowledging our own subjectivity and positionality in research and design.

Physicalization from Theory to Practice: Exploring Contemporary Challenges for Physicalization Design

This workshop aims to delve into the evolving challenges of physicalization, drawing on prior research and workshops to explore overarching grand challenges in the field. Initially formalized within Human-Computer Interaction in 2015, `physicalization’ involves encoding data into tangible forms. Despite significant progress in addressing initial challenges, new complexities emerge from the dynamic interplay of technology and human interaction. Building on insights from a prior CHI 2023 workshop, which focused on exemplar domain applications, our workshop aims to facilitate in-depth discussions on overarching grand challenges. Specifically, we focus on four key challenges: privacy, temporality, collaborative sensemaking, and sustainability of physicalization design. These focal points acknowledge the susceptibility of physicalizations to privacy concerns, collaborative interpretation, temporal usage, and sustainability considerations. Through interactive and collaborative activities, the workshop seeks to advance understanding and strategies for addressing these emerging challenges in the realm of physicalization, ultimately contributing to the advancement of the field.

Creating Sustainable Internet of Things Futures:  Aligning Legal and Design Research Agendas

The way consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices are built is leading to electronic waste (eWaste) growth. This arises from planned obsolescence, bundling of ‘smartness’ creating more routes to device failure, and lacking hardware modularity and repairability. Understanding how to best to tackle these issues requires an interdisciplinary perspective bridging design, law, and the social science research. The legal landscape is shifting, encouraging design of repairable and longlasting IoT, and reducing routes to redundancy. This one-day workshop explores the interface between design and legal research to address the socio-technical challenges around designing sustainable consumer IoT devices. The workshop will: map out the societal, legal, and environmental implications of IoT; envision the opportunities and barriers to designing more sustainable IoT; and share best practice and tools how to move towards more sustainable IoT futures.

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Ecological data for manifesting the entanglement of more-than-human livingness

Data in Design and HCI research is often associated with something captured from the world in digital form and transferred to a database. However, the assumption of digitalisation, as well as the intentions and values underlying it, can obscure more nuanced approaches to data, and is becoming increasingly criticised (e.g., through notions of data colonialism, data extractivism, etc.). In this workshop, we invite participants to critically review data concepts and practices that sustain Western industrialised socio-economic systems, considering their ethical, environmental, and ecological implications. In contrast, we will explore data in the entangled ecologies of organisms, matter, and environments, focusing on ‘livingness’ as a way to reveal embodied, relational, and situated aspects of data. Through wandering and foraging, we will discuss how these aspects of data might help us regain our attentiveness, appreciation, and responsibility towards more-than-human ecologies, and ultimately reframe concepts of data in the world.

Green-think Beyond the Screen: Sustainable Interaction Design Pedagogy for a New Era of Eco-Innovation cancelled

Seventeen years after its inception, Sustainable Interaction Design (SID) research has evolved from its original focus on environmental sustainability through the adoption of more holistic frameworks and more inclusive exploration of alternative facets of sustainability. But has the past decade of SID research been consistently integrated into the educational context? Could interdisciplinary collaboration help address sustainability challenges? Which are the new perspectives of SID that scholars and educators are pursuing? The workshop aims to foster critical discussions and shape future agendas for SID education, focusing on building blocks such as transdisciplinary design practices, pluralistic contextual understanding, and educational community building.

Creative Robotics Theatre: Designing Creative Interactions with tangible and embodied interfaces

In the intersection of robotics, theatre, and societal discourse, our workshop introduces Creative Robotics Theatre as a medium to reimagine techno-social narratives and confront contemporary issues around design, care and wellbeing. We aim to harness the expressive power of creative robotics alongside theatrical elements to enhance storytelling, foster interdisciplinary collaborations, and innovate pedagogy. Through participatory design and engagement with posthuman philosophies and new materialisms, we will delve into the nuances of embodied intelligence—movement, gaze, gesture, and more—within the performative realm. This workshop combines theatre and performance techniques with participatory methodologies to cultivate a creative dialogue between participants, technology, and performance. Our objective is to develop hybrid design toolkits and co-design methodologies that address the nuanced relationship between humans, technology, and society, particularly focusing on vulnerability, failure, and disobedience as catalysts for innovation in creative robotic theatre. The outcomes will contribute to defining creative robotic theatre’s scope, influencing both academic discourse and practical applications in wellbeing, care, and beyond.

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Understanding and Shaping Human-Technology Assemblages in the Age of Generative AI 

Generative AI capabilities are rapidly transforming how we perceive, interact with, and relate to machines. This one-day hybrid workshop invites HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners to imaginatively inhabit and explore the possible futures that might emerge from humans combining generative AI capabilities into everyday technologies at massive scale. Workshop participants will craft stories, visualisations, and prototypes through scenario-based design to investigate these possible futures, resulting in the production of an open-annotated scenario library and a journal or interactions article to disseminate the findings. We aim to gather the DIS community knowledge to explore, understand and shape the relations this new interaction paradigm is forging between humans, their technologies and the environment in safe, sustainable, enriching, and responsible ways.

RoboCare Design Workshop: Understanding, Translating, Operationalizing, and Scaling Up Design Knowledge Regarding Robotic Systems for Care Assistance

Robots and other autonomous agents are well-positioned in the research discourse to support caring for people with challenges such as physical and/or cognitive disabilities. However, key difficulties lie in understanding how to involve various factors, stakeholders, and contexts, as well as how to create generalizable guidelines for other designers. This one-day workshop aims to facilitate a conversation among designers, roboticists, and human-computer interaction experts to address these challenges. This workshop aims to identify best practices for generating and applying design knowledge in developing robotic systems tailored for care settings. 

Designing Blended Experiences Workshop: The Pedagogies across the digital and physical spaces

Digital transformation is increasingly blurring the line between what software is and what the physical world can be. This requires designers to harmoniously blend digital and physical products, services, and spaces to orchestrate meaningful experiences specifically aimed at the interweaving relationships between people, places, and things. As technologies and subsequent experiences rapidly become increasingly ubiquitous, it is essential to design pedagogy for these technologies at a human scale. The Pedagogies of Designing Blended Experiences Workshop will discuss, present, ideate, and propose novel methods and techniques to develop pedagogies toward this need. The full-day workshop’s outcomes mainly revolve around a) identifying key pedagogical problems and obstacles when designing across digital and physical spaces, b) early ideation techniques for novel pedagogical approaches, and c) a three-phased speculative roadmap to incorporate workshop outcomes in higher education learning.

Aesthetics of Connectivity for Empowerment – Considerations and Challenges

In our interconnected world, connectivity aesthetics deeply influence our interactions with data, AI, and associated products and services. This workshop aims to explore innovative approaches, methodologies, and technologies that integrate connectivity into design considerations to further empower individuals through aesthetics. By delving into the aesthetic aspects of connectivity, we aim to foster discussions and collaborations among researchers, practitioners, designers, artists, and industry professionals. This workshop serves as a platform for sharing insights, exchanging ideas, and exploring emerging trends in this dynamic field. We invite research papers on various topics related to this workshop, including discussions on aesthetics of connectivity for empowerment in HCI, sharing practical cases, and identifying potential research directions and methodologies. Workshop participants are invited to submit a full research paper for a peer-review process. All accepted papers will be published via the ACM digital library or Ceur-ws.org, and authors will be invited to submit extended versions for a special issue on Aesthetics and Empowerment in the International Journal of Arts and Technology.

Memoirs for the Future, Imaginations of the Past: Crafting Samplers for Intent and Commitment

Research through Design is centered on making things, services and systems as a way to construct knowledge. At the same time, the act of making happens behind-the-scenes, often overlooked, outsourced or rushed through. We would like to propose a one-day workshop of making at DIS. Specifically, we propose the making of samplers as a site for constructing a shared space to contemplate the interplay of memory and imagination in design research, inspired by traditional needlework samplers as well as modern subversive stitchwork. By making together, we aim to take time to consider our personal and collective commitments and stance within and outside our roles as design researchers.

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Sensing Heritage: Exploring Creative Approaches for Capturing, Experiencing and Safeguarding the Sensorial Aspects of Cultural Heritage

Whilst there is increasing work investigating the role of digital documentation, interpretation, and augmentation of cultural heritage, such interventions have largely focused on visual and sometimes auditory modalities, neglecting the full spectrum of human senses. With this workshop we seek to bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers, designers, practitioners and community members to explore creative approaches for documenting and experiencing cultural heritage’s rich sensory dimensions extending beyond visual-based approaches to encompass sound, smell, taste, and touch. The workshop directly aligns with the conference’s exploration of “Why Design?” by utilising design as a powerful, empathetic, and participatory tool for safeguarding cultural heritage. Our goal is to extend our understanding of concepts, methods and technologies for capturing and experiencing sensory heritage, advocating for a holistic approach that celebrates and communicates the profound sensory diversity of human cultures, inspiring a shift in how we document, interpret and share cultural heritage.

Mapping Futures and Futuring in HCI/Design

This one-day workshop seeks to bring together design researchers that have different orientations and practices for futures and futuring to unpack the role of futuring across design, design artefacts, and designers. Our goal in this workshop is to use examples of established futures to engage with and reflect on questions around the role of futures in HCI/design. We believe that there is a common thread between work from many different researchers, but that the people doing that work are spread across different disciplines and geographical locations. To that end, this workshop will assemble researchers working with different methods and approaches to futures in design and will aim to identify core challenges and opportunities for futures in HCI.

Designing for and with the ‘Digital Citizen’

Longstanding practices of participatory co-design have sought to engage communities in the development of shared resources, services and technologies. However, approaches such as citizen-centered design and digital civics bring these design methods to bear on the development of digital technologies in support of civic and third sector organizations in particularly complex and rapidly changing socio-technical landscapes. Such endeavors frequently need to engage marginalized, under-served and hard to reach communities. In these design spaces, the ‘Digital Citizen’ becomes a contested concept, deserving of deeper exploration. In this one-day workshop we seek to bring together the DIS community, industry practitioners and third sector representatives to mutually explore the concept of the digital citizen, its boundaries and opportunities, and in response to a rapidly changing environment of smart digital services, the ways in which design methods might be evolved to better support designing for and with these digital citizens.

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2 Day Workshops:

Monday 1 July & Tuesday 2 July

Death of the Design Researcher? Creating Knowledge Resources for Designers Using Generative AI

Building on a successful workshop at DIS2023, this workshop explores the intersection of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and design research, focusing on GenAI’s impact on design methodologies, creativity, and human-computer interaction. It fosters critical examination of GenAI’s role in design, including ethical considerations, authorship, and the future of design research. Participants will engage in discussions about best practices, challenges, and opportunities presented by GenAI, aiming to contribute to a nuanced understanding of its application and potential to transform design research. The anticipated outcomes include the development of resources for designers and a collaborative publication to advance collective knowledge in the field.

Why Movement-Based Design!? Exploring Methods and Experiences in MBD

The rise of movement-based design (MBD) is fueled by the integration of computer technology into the movement of the everyday. Departing from traditional interface design, MBD prioritizes natural interaction, SportsHCI, and health promotion through physical activity. This paradigm shift has led to innovations in experimental applications and interaction techniques, including exergames, expressivity in interactions and soma-design. Various guidelines and frameworks have been proposed for specific purposes, from sports to virtual reality. This workshop explores participants’ experiences and perspectives on MBD, delving into MBD workshop design and reflect on MBD methods and the current move towards MBD methodologies.

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Workshops Chairs

  • Erik Grönvall, IT University of Copenhagen
  • Kening Zhu, City University of Hong Kong

workshops@dis2024.acm.org