Mark Blythe

Religion and spirituality (R/S) shape billions of lives, yet they remain marginal in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Prior literature reviews mapped fragments of this space but missed key contributions and the lived realities of its researchers. We extend this picture through a review of 206 ACM and IEEE publications and a survey of R/S scholars in HCI (n = 19). Our analysis shows a field in transition: Research on R/S is growing slightly in volume and diversity, with design-oriented work emerging as the dominant form of engagement. Yet the ACM and IEEE corpora remain largely separate, reflecting distinct epistemic traditions. Researchers report persistent challenges, including marginalization, exposing a deeper tension in HCI: While HCI claims to center the full range of human experience, R/S experience is still treated with suspicion. Our findings call for a reconsideration: If HCI is serious about human experience, it must take R/S experiences seriously as well.

Design is concerned with uncertain futures. There are a number of methodologies and toolkits for thinking about future possibilities and ways of dealing with uncertainty. Many of these approaches adapt diagrams that were developed in the nineteen fifties by military strategists and futurologists. This provocation critiques the scientistic rhetoric of such diagrams and explores alternate representations of uncertainty, drawing on absurdist art to present a more undisciplined and messier but possibly more realistic representation of uncertainty.

This paper considers the use of AI to generate material for design fiction. It takes climate change an example topic and briefly sketches related literature in climate fiction, sustainable HCI and design fiction. ChatGPT and text to image generators are then used to create critical and speculative pastiche scenarios drawing on existing styles and characters. The paper contrasts the AI pastiches with design fictions by academics and novelists. Although unedited AI output is likely to be formulaic it is argued that this material can be shaped into more interesting design fiction through critical prompting.

A cheque is a paper document that orders the transfer of money between bank accounts. Whilst an eighty-year-old in the UK is predicted on average to live at least another ten years, cheques may not. Despite many older peoples extensive use of cheques, UK banks are eager to abolish them and design electronic alternatives that are less costly to process and less vulnerable to fraud. This paper reports on two qualitative studies that explored the banking experiences of 23 people over eighty years old. Cheques support financial collaboration with others in ways that digital payment systems do not. We argue that whilst it might be possible to improve the design of digital payment systems to better support financial collaboration, the case for retaining and enhancing cheques is stronger. Rather than replace cheques, we must design ways of making them less costly to process and better linked to electronic payment methods.

This work draws on studies which explore resistance to the music industry's construal of copying music files as theft. Following a previous ethnography on participants."Technology Scruples" it considers the issue as a design challenge rather than a legal problem. Drawing on critical theory it considers how value might be added to digital music by embedding it in artifacts. Three product design students were briefed to create concept designs for.digital music boxes. that would contain and display particular back catalogues of music. The paper reflects on their sketches and models and argues that critical theory can inform new approaches to design work.