Violet Owen

As the importance of minimising e-waste and increasing sustainability increase, exploring the design matters impacting the transience of digital technologies has become a key concern. In this workshop we will explore this through the metaphorical lens of the lives, deaths, and afterlives of electronic objects. The workshop creatively engages with this by participants creating obituaries for IoT objects and postcards from the afterlife that will help us question the emotional, ethical, aesthetic and ecological implications of objects reaching the end of their life. Drawing upon our work for the EPSRC Fixing the Future Project, we anticipate that the discussions and collaborations that emerge through the workshop will generate design themes that contribute to the wider agendas and communities advocating for the Right-to-Repair of IoT devices globally.

In design and social innovation as well as participatory design, infrastructuring refers to the idea that local initiatives might become self-sustaining over time by building a supporting ecosystem around it. Although it has been acknowledged that this process depends on establishing and preserving meaningful social relations, exactly how and which relational factors affect the infrastructuring process could be further investigated. The workshop aims to challenge the dominant perception of infrastructuring, which often emphasises scalability and replicability as indicators of success, by focusing on the richness and complexity of its social dimensions, and explore what a relational approach to design and social innovation could entail through shared discussions that reflect on participants’ own experiences and practices.

Electronic waste (e-waste) has become the fastest growing waste stream in the world. So called ‘smart’ Internet of Things (IoT) devices, now ubiquitous in our homes, are increasingly contributing to this waste stream, due to their lack of repairability and consumer cycles driven by planned obsolescence. However, other electronic household products, such as gaming devices, are often used and cared for by their owners for far longer than other IoT devices, whose protean lifecycles are driven by fast moving, profit-focussed consumer markets. This paper argues that by developing a deeper understanding of the relationship between gamers and their devices, and the communities they inhabit, design practitioners and researchers can learn to engender the design of IoT products that foster emotional durability and care, and support the development of more sustainable repair practices, to tangibly improve the lifespans of next generation IoT products.

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 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 long-lasting 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 to help move towards more sustainable IoT futures.

When thinking of arts in HCI, one might be tempted to keep one’s eyes focused on prominent realms such as sketching for UX Design and design probes from participants. A closer look shows that practices go beyond this, involving a variety of arts-based expressions by researchers, the researched and third parties, e.g. graphic facilitators. Inspired by Toselli’s Sketchnote Army Travelling Sketchbook, researchers and artists contributed to a ’Travelling Sketchbook for Arts in HCI’, showcasing their arts-based practice in HCI. The resulting sketchbook explores the intersection between HCI and artistic expression, illuminating what it means to use art in HCI. It shows the breadth of Arts in HCI, illustrating the many fruitful possibilities for extending existing research and dissemination methods in HCI. It also calls into question current practices, which often do not recognise the significance of artist attribution, and, in turn, advocates for equal authorship between principal researchers and contributing artists.

Background: Creative Evaluation (CE) is an unformed constellation of evaluation approaches that is based on varied understandings of creativity. Although creativity in evaluation has been consistently valued and needed by evaluation practitioners and researchers, the use of the term CE is currently limited in its applications as it has been developed inconsistently and often in isolation to the broader evaluation practice. The authors review examples where the term CE is being used, to present this constellation of approaches and group them under concepts and contexts, aiming at fostering an exploration into CE. Purpose: This paper examines the use of term Creative Evaluation by reviewing a set of examples from varied settings like educational programmes, cultural industries and social work and to present the reader with a better understanding about the contexts and concepts associated with CE. The authors discuss the transdiciplinary nature of evaluation along with a review of historical developments in evaluation theory and practice that help identify the emergence of responsive, flexible and problem-solving driven approaches to evaluation that can showcase a growing connection between creativity and evaluation. Setting: Not applicable. Intervention: Not applicable. Research Design: Desk review was utilised for the preparation of this paper. Findings: There are different conceptualisations of the term CE applied in a variety of disciplinary and practice contexts. The term CE is used to describe both the process of applying creative thinking and the process of employing creative methods in the evaluation process. Creative thinking indicates a broader application of creativity that shapes the evaluation process and often results in the development of novel methods while creative methods indicate a more targeted use of methods that employ creative practices to achieve a specific evaluation goal like increasing engagement in the evaluation process.