ACM Designing Interactive Systems 2026

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Attending Workshops

Workshops at DIS 2026 will take place over one or two days on Saturday and Sunday, 13–14 June 2026. Further details, including how to participate, can be found below via the individual workshop pages and by contacting the respective workshop organisers.

Workshop Chairs

  • Naseem Ahmadpour, University of Sydney.
  • Pin Sym Foong, National University of Singapore.
  • Xin Tong, HKUST Guangzhou.
  • Dajung Kim, UNIST.

workshops@dis2026.acm.org

One Day Workshops: Saturday 13 June

  • WS01. Nurture Robotic Things: Speculating Future of Human Robot Interaction through Creative Designs with Everyday Objects
  • WS02. Beyond Interaction toward Cooperation and Commoning (half-day)
  • WS03. Moving and Crafting Data Together: Critical and Feminist Perspectives on Technologies for Movement through Movement
  • WS04. Patchwork Knowledge: Documenting Material Learning in Human-Computer Interaction
  • WS05. Relating otherwise: Pluriversal Pathways for Reworlding More-than-Human Design
  • WS06. Embodied Vulnerability in Design Research: Methods, Ethics, and Care
  • WS07. From Home to Housing: Designing Smart Home Care Ecologies
  • WS08. Chasing Play Potentials in Place for Innovative Mobile Crowdsensing

One day workshops: Sunday 14 June

  • WS10. Stories and Artifacts: Exploring Narrative and Material Practices in Design Research (half-day)
  • WS11. Designing for Dissensus: Arts-Based Methods for Generative Friction in Design
  • WS12. Multipecies Response-ability in More-than-human Design Practice: Fabulation with Tides
  • WS13. Sorting of Many Sorts: Avenues Toward Formalising Approaches for Multi-Modal Artifacts in Participatory Design and Research
  • WS14. Carrier Bag Narratives for More-than-Human Care: Rethinking Design, Maintenance, and Worldmaking in HCI
  • WS15. AI, Sensemaking, and Decision-Making in Crisis Contexts
  • WS16. Beyond Interfaces: The Future of Edible Interactions
  • WS17. AI as Social Catalyst: Exploring AI’s Growing Impact on Human Social Connections
  • WS18. Human-Centred AI for Expressive Arts Therapy: Designing for Mental Well-Being and Creativity

Two Day workshops: 13 – 14 June

  • WS09. Meeting the AI Moment with Afrofuturism and Technowomanism Together as Technological Practice

One Day Workshops: Saturday 13 June

WS01. Nurture Robotic Things: Speculating Future of Human Robot Interaction through Creative Designs with Everyday Objects

Humans form relationships with objects through time. A childhood toy, mended so many times that it bears more repair than original fabric, holds a relationship built through years of care and loss. A bedside lamp, switched off in grief and back on in hope, becomes a

quiet witness to the emotional textures of a life. Psychologists describe our tendency to imbue nonhuman things with humanlike qualities as anthropomorphism, but what matters here is not just that we project humanity onto objects — it is that our emotional relationships with them evolve: affection deepens, habits form, and meaning accumulates.

These slow, temporally rich bonds, are built not through designed social cues but through the sheer density of shared time and daily interaction. Yet in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), research has made significant strides in understanding how people form relationships with robots, but has often focused on interactions that are bounded in time and context — capturing how relationships begin, rather than how they grow and change through years of cohabitation.

This workshop takes everyday objects — already model a di]erent kind of relational dynamic — as a generative lens to reimagine HRI. We are here to invite participants to explores how creatively robotizing everyday objects can challenge anthropocentric paradigms in HRI and inspire new long-term relational models. Through hands-on prototyping, design fiction, and reflection, participants will investigate how personal attachments to mundane objects might translate into richer, evolving relationships with robotic things. By treating human-object ties as a lens to rethink robot lifecycles and social ecologies, this workshop aims to provoke novel inquiries into how we might nurture roboticentities that learn, adapt, and creating bond over time. By reimagining HRI through the lens of human-object bonds, we aim to foster richer, reciprocal engagements, moving beyond utilitarian and anthropomorphic constraints toward dynamic, meaningful cohabitation.

WS02. Beyond Interaction toward Cooperation and Commoning (half-day)

The rich traditions of cooperation and commoning o]er many ways to understand our shared relationships to land, ecosystems, and each other, while also providing frameworks for mutual response. This workshop explores how theory and practice regarding cooperatives and the commons can change our relationship to the designed world and address the exploitative systems of technology that surround us. By convening a broad community of HCI scholars and practitioners, we will co-create a zine to explore these themes and identify a prospective research agenda. This workshop brings together a nascent research community to learn about the relationship between cooperative practices and forms of commoning, explore how both can inform design, and map out equitable and community-driven approaches to governance and use of interactive technologies.

WS03. Moving and Crafting Data Together: Critical and Feminist Perspectives on Technologies for Movement through Movement

This workshop aims to bring together interaction designers, HCI researchers, and practitioners who engage in movement and physical activity to unpack, explore, and critique the entanglements between our bodies, our data, and the digital technologies we use and appropriate. Together, we will participate in a guided movement session, collect various forms of data, and craft representations of these data to foster reflection and critique. This workshop aims to contribute to developing a shared design agenda towards interrogating, challenging, and reshaping the future of digital technologies and data that foster engagement with movement and physical activity beyond quantification and static data representations.

WS04. Patchwork Knowledge: Documenting Material Learning in Human-Computer Interaction

This full-day, in-person workshop invites researchers, educators, designers, and practitioners to collectively examine how material knowledge is disseminated in Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) through hands-on enactment and comparison of pedagogical practices. The workshop will be of interest to those who work with and teach material and fabrication practices in HCI, including (but not limited to) wearables, tangible and embodied interaction, soft fabrication, electronics prototyping, bio design, soma design, and other material-led and embodied approaches.

Rather than treating documentation and teaching as secondary to making, the workshop foregrounds pedagogy as a central design practice. Participants will collaboratively create knowledge quilt that functions as both a metaphor and an analytic device for exploring how material knowledge is taught, learned, and shared.

Drawing on participants’ own experiences, small groups will each work with a distinct mode of dissemination—such as formal tutorials, oral instruction, mentorship, community-based collaborative design, or open-source documentation—and use that mode to both construct a quilt patch and create a corresponding pedagogical artefact. Groups will then rotate, using one another’s artifacts to make additional patches, enabling participants to learn material practices through different pedagogical forms.

Through collective layout and stitching, participants will compare how dissemination practices relate, overlap, or conflict, and reflect on what is easy or difficult to communicate when learning involves embodiment, care, temporality, or living and variable materials.

Across the day, the workshop will generate a shared set of exemplar documentation materials and collaboratively fabricate a quilt that supports reflection on pedagogical practice.

To apply, submit up to a 300-word statement describing your interest and (optionally) a pedagogical or documentation practice you would like to bring. Selection prioritises diversity of practices, contexts, and career stages over competitive evaluation.

WS05. Relating otherwise: Pluriversal Pathways for Reworlding More-than-Human Design

Amid growing environmental concerns, more-than-human (MtH) design has gained traction in HCI as a means of attending to relational entanglements between humans and the wider ecological world. This work is vitally important, but draws largely on (and is perhaps limited by) Western philosophical traditions. In this workshop, we seek to explore beyond Western ontologies in MtH design by engaging with longstanding practices and epistemologies such as Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Eastern philosophies like Daoism.

We invite designers, researchers, artists, and thinkers to participate in a full-day workshop at DIS 2026 in Singapore to explore diverse perspectives on relational entanglements that expand and/or challenge the MtH framing. Together, we aim to share stories and philosophies of multi-species entanglements, discuss the ethics of drawing from these knowledge systems in HCI, and imagine new ways these situated understandings can inform design. Activities will include storytelling, critical discussion, embodied practices and learning at the Singapore Botanic Gardens, and collaborative zine-making. The outcome will be a collective Atlas of the Pluriverse, a compilation of the “worlds” we build and designs we imaging from different ontological perspectives. To participate, please submit a short expression of interest by filling out our Google form. We especially welcome submissions that bring cultural, political, or personal perspectives to bear on MtH relations. Selection will prioritise a diversity of positionalities and ways of knowing.

WS06. Embodied Vulnerability in Design Research: Methods, Ethics, and Care

Join us for a deeply experiential workshop that brings embodied vulnerability to the forefront of design research. Through guided activities, embodied and sensory inquiry, and collective reflection, participants will explore how vulnerability is lived, felt, and negotiated in moments that often resist language. Together, we will examine how moments of uncertainty, attunement, and care shape our design practices for health and wellbeing in contexts such as life transitions, and sensitive design encounters. This workshop offers an ethically attentive, care-centered space where researchers and practitioners from diverse areas of HCI can examine how vulnerability unfolds in their own work, whether in contexts of care, life transitions, or sensitive field engagements. We aim to cultivate shared methodological sensibilities and foster a growing community committed to embodied, relational, and ethically grounded design inquiry.

WS07. From Home to Housing: Designing Smart Home Care Ecologies

Smart home technologies increasingly promise support for domestic care. But how is care coordinated and sustained when domestic ecologies shift, for example through changing relationships, dwelling constraints, or housing rules and service dependencies? This workshop reframes smart home technologies as infrastructures of care situated in changing domestic ecologies spanning home (relationships and care norms), house (dwelling materialities and spatial thresholds), and housing (tenure, governance, and service dependencies). Over a full day, we bring together researchers, designers, and practitioners to move beyond device-centric interaction and examine how care arrangements become feasible or fragile across these layers. Together, we will explore: (1) coordination across actors and care infrastructures; (2) temporality and care continuity in evolving environments; and (3) interdisciplinary dialogue that bridges HCI, design, human geography and housing studies, design anthropology, and STS. We welcome submissions that:

  • Study smart home and IoT systems in domestic life
  • Engage care practices, including ageing, disability, childcare, self-care, and more-than-human care
  • Bring perspectives from the disciplines above

WS08. Chasing Play Potentials in Place for Innovative Mobile Crowdsensing

We would like to invite researchers, students, and practitioners of all experience levels to join us in a full-day workshop on the union of situated play design (SPD) and mobile crowdsensing (MCS). SPD creates playful everyday experiences by identifying and enhancing existing “play potentials” in context. MCS involves multiple individuals crowdsourcing data collection through mobile devices. Together, these practices create an interesting space for engaging, collaborative work. This workshop will consider themes at the intersection of SPD and MCS, including (1) play as a mechanism for sustaining crowdsensing, (2) geographical and cultural perspectives towards place-based play, and (3) feminist care ethics as a lens for designing (and troubling) embodied play and data collection. Prior experience with SPD or MCS is not required, as this workshop is open to people of all skill and experience levels. This workshop may be interesting to those in serious games, computer supported collaborative work, play-space research, and crowdsourcing research. We will engage in place-based play, ideating and discussing design concepts for creating playful MCS experiences. Participants will conceptualise and design engaging play potentials through bodystorming, object theatre, and storyboarding.

This experience will support participants in considering how they could integrate SPD and MCS into their own work. Following this workshop, participants will be invited to co-author a pictorial, reflecting on themes derived from fruitful design sessions and group discussions. To apply for this workshop, those interested must complete the worksheet included in our website, reflecting on their own lived playful experiences.

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Two Day Workshops: 13 – 14 June

WS09. Meeting the AI Moment with Afrofuturism and Technowomanism Together as Technological Practice

We call on students, educators, designers, researchers, speculative designers, and AI leaders to join us for a two-day workshop focused on understanding how Afrofuturist and Technowomanist practices can enable us to question the aims of AI and explore who gets to guide its future and address its current burdens. Day 1 will focus on decentering contemporary futuring methods, such as speculative design and other Western-Eastern colonialist futuring practices. Will also look into deconstructing mindsets about futuring in technology and what it looks like to center care grounded in Indigenous and Black Feminist scholarship. On Day 2, participants and organisers will collaborate on a toolkit that leverages art, literature, and session materials to build an Afrofuturist perspective on designing equitable AI tools. Interested participants should read Harrington et al.’s paper, “All that You Touch, You Change…” and submit a 2-page position paper, using DIS ACM citation practices, that answers the question, “How can Afrofuturist, Technowomanist, and Afrofuturist feminism inform an actionable critique of AI’s present shortcomings while equipping a technology design process that utilises an equitable design canon?

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One day workshops: Sunday 14 June

WS10. Stories and Artifacts: Exploring Narrative and Material Practices in Design Research (half-day)

This workshop explores how stories and artifacts become entangled in design research, shaping and extending one another in the process. Artifacts carry narratives of labor, skill, collaboration, and material transformation, while stories emerge through encounters with samples, swatches, prototypes, tools, and machines. Building on the CHI 2025 workshop ‘How do design stories work?’, this workshop turns attention to the relation between narrative and material accounts, asking what happens when stories are told with or through things, and what new vocabularies emerge when stories and materials are considered together.

We invite participants to submit a 2–4 page position story accompanied by a thing, or a representation of a thing, such as a photo, sketch, sample, swatch, prototype, or artefact. These thing–story pairs will form the basis of the workshop activities and discussions. We welcome participants from HCI and related fields, including research through design, biodesign, textile and material practices, material science, first-person methodologies, and interdisciplinary design–science collaborations. The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners who work with tangible materials, systems, or prototypes and want to explore how these things can be narrated and shared.

The main outcome will be a collaboratively produced Glossary of Design Stories, shared as a tangible zine and open-access PDF on the workshop website, alongside a gallery of artifact–story pairs.

WS11. Designing for Dissensus: Arts-Based Methods for Generative Friction in Design

We need more critical collaborative design practices in a world fraught with meta-crisis, both exacerbated and alleviated by design and technology. This one-day workshop explores how arts-based methods can support this criticality through exploring power and positionality, working to identify and challenge harmful consensus and encouraging a generative conflict in collaborative design settings.

Drawing on concepts of dissensus (disrupting social consensus), equality in difference (recognising differences as a prerequisite to establishing equality) and transformative praxis (Freirean position of action – reflection – (re)action as a basis for conscientization) we invite participants to examine how positionalities are configured, how conflict can be constructive, and how creative making exercises can open participation and advance diverse standpoints. Participants will engage in rapid, reflexive making activities to access and articulate experience and (re)configure positionalities to cultivate equality in difference and constructive, generative conflict.

The workshop will support those hoping to embed a more activist, change-making approach to participation in their practices, and those who are interested in how dynamics of making and generative conflict can support understanding complex experiences and social issues.

WS12. Multipecies Response-ability in More-than-human Design Practice: Fabulation with Tides

This workshop invites participants with diverse backgrounds to imagine stories with tides, to explore response-ability – a notion used by Donna Haraway to cultivate the capacity to respond with other species. As more HCI communities begin to engage with multispecies, we seek to move beyond “responsibility” as a solely human moral property towards relational and reciprocal ways of designing-with them. When the entities we “study” begin to respond to one another, their interactions evolve in ways we cannot fully predict, inviting design practice to stay open and caring for these shifting relations. Using tides as a spatial-temporal site of inquiry, we will use speculative fabulation to imagine what multispecies response-ability might look like in place and collectively develop practical guides for examining and incorporating it into design practice.

WS13. Sorting of Many Sorts: Avenues Toward Formalising Approaches for Multi-Modal Artifacts in Participatory Design and Research

There is growing interest in HCI for collecting multi-modal artifacts, specifically related to emerging approaches in participatory design and research. We define multi-modal artifacts

in two respects–design artifacts that hold multiple form factors and/or artifacts that are participant-created through physical or digital fabrication, or as documentation. Multi- modal artifacts provide greater depth for gaining participant knowledge and design insights; yet, research practices for these forms of data remain ambiguous, informal, and idiosyncratic to each study. Thus, this workshop seeks to open dialogue and lay the groundwork around formalizing methods in deploying and analysing multi-material and participant-created forms of data. The workshop structure and activities will center two main themes: 1) Artifacts as “participant-created”, shaping the relationships between participant, researcher, and artifact itself and 2) Different materialities of data, shaping analysis that forefronts embodied reflexivity. We will ask attendees to discuss their expertise, explorations, and interests in participatory practices, and bring examples of multi-modal artifacts they are currently working with, have past worked with, or are interested in exploring. Workshop activities will also involve making and analysing multi-modal artifacts that speculate on, contend with, and reflect on attendees’ participatory processes. Interested attendees will be invited to contribute to any full paper publications emerging from the results of this workshop.

We invite researchers, industry professionals, organizers, artists, and activists across disciplines who have experience, expertise, or interest in participatory design and research. Participants are invited to submit a 2–4 page position paper or pictorial in ACM Primary Article format in Word or LaTeX (page limit excludes references).

WS14. Carrier Bag Narratives for More-than-Human Care: Rethinking Design, Maintenance, and Worldmaking in HCI

Human–Computer Interaction has often been shaped by narratives of progress, innovation, and problem-solving. This workshop explores alternative narrative forms for HCI through the lens of care, maintenance, repair, and more-than-human relations. Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction and informed by feminist and posthuman scholarship, we ask how research and design narratives might shift when they foreground holding, sustaining, dependency, and relationality rather than breakthrough alone. Through collaborative storytelling, annotation, speculative rewriting, and material prompts, participants will work with their own ongoing projects, research questions, or conceptual frameworks to examine how narratives shape design practice. We welcome researchers, designers, artists, and practitioners from HCI, HBI, STS, architecture, XR, and the arts who are interested in narrative as a design method and care as a mode of worldmaking.

Participants may submit a short project description in ACM article or pictorial format, up to 4 pages excluding references.

WS15. AI, Sensemaking, and Decision-Making in Crisis Contexts

Crisis situations increasingly involve the circulation and interpretation of complex information, including real-time data, scientific modelling, risk assessments, and community-based knowledge. Around the world, communities and institutions face a growing range of crises, from climate-related events to public health emergencies and geopolitical instability. Sensemaking is central in these contexts, as people across organisations, agencies, and communities interpret uncertain and sometimes conflicting information. AI systems are now being introduced to support crisis planning and response, including data analysis, forecasting, and information management. However, how they shape interpretation, uncertainty, and shared judgement remains under-examined from a design perspective.

This one-day workshop brings together HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners to examine how AI shapes crisis-related sensemaking and decision-making, focusing on how interactive systems influence interpretation, communication, and collective judgement in high-stakes contexts. Participants will engage with challenges such as designing for uncertainty, supporting interpretation rather than prediction, and understanding how AI- generated outputs shape situational awareness and decisions. Through discussions, presentations, and a speculative design activity, the workshop will examine how AI- supported systems can better enable sensemaking and collective decision-making. The workshop provides a forum for sharing current work, identifying design challenges, and outlining future directions for research at the intersection of AI, design, and crisis contexts.

WS16. Beyond Interfaces: The Future of Edible Interactions

Edible interactions are emerging as a growing area of HCI research that challenges conventional understandings of interfaces and interaction. Rooted in Human-Food Interaction (HFI) yet extending beyond it, this workshop explores how edible materials can function not merely as content, but as interface, material, and interactive medium. Across work in edible fabrication, multi-sensory and cross-modal design, perceptual science, and material-centred user experience, food is increasingly treated as something that can be sensed, actuated, transformed, and experienced through multiple sensory channels.

However, research in this area remains fragmented across disciplines, with limited shared vocabularies, methods, and conceptual foundations. This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to connect perspectives, align emerging concepts and practices, and collectively reframe how interactions can be designed through food within the future of interactive systems.

WS17. AI as Social Catalyst: Exploring AI’s Growing Impact on Human Social Connections

AI is increasingly shaping how people socially connect, from AI-mediated communication and coordination to artificial companions and relational agents. We invite researchers, designers, students, and practitioners to explore how AI influences human social connections through speculative and participatory design. This one-day workshop focuses on two key themes: AI-mediated human–human connection, and AI companionship.

Through hands-on design activities and discussion, participants will collaboratively examine how AI shapes trust, authenticity, care, and boundaries in social relationships. We welcome participants from HCI, interaction design, CSCW, social computing, AI ethics, speculative design, and related fields. Participants are invited to submit either a 1–4 page position paper, or a paragraph and a picture describing and depicting an imagined social AI future, or a demonstration of a relevant artefact (such as an AI companion). Submissions will be used to create design prompts for the workshop design activities. Participants will be invited to contribute to a collaborative publication that synthesises challenges and opportunities in this space towards building a research agenda on AI as a social catalyst.

WS18. Human-Centred AI for Expressive Arts Therapy: Designing for Mental Well-Being and Creativity

Expressive arts therapy supports creative expression through visual art, music, dance, and drama, fostering emotional awareness, regulation, and personal growth. Recent advances in generative AI, particularly multimodal models that produce images, music, text, and soundscapes, create new opportunities to scaffold creative exploration, provide adaptive prompts, and support reflective dialogue in therapeutic contexts. At the same time, integrating AI into expressive arts therapy raises important challenges around agency, authorship, emotional alignment, ethics, data privacy, and preserving therapeutic relationships.

This workshop brings together researchers, designers, therapists, and practitioners to explore how human-centred AI can support creativity in art and music therapy while respecting therapeutic values. We focus on insights from AI-enabled therapy systems, design approaches balancing creativity and emotional well-being, and evaluation methods that extend beyond usability and traditional clinical outcomes. Through interdisciplinary discussion, the workshop aims to surface open research questions and design considerations for AI use in expressive arts therapy.

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