As the internet is increasingly embedded in the everyday things in our homes, we notice a need for greater focus on the role care plays in those relationships-and therefore an opportunity to realize unseen potential in reimagining home Internet of Things (IoT).In this paper we report on our inquiry of home dwellers' relationships to caring for their everyday things and homes (referred to as thingcare). Findings from our design ethnography reveal four thematic qualities of their relationships to thingcare: Care Spectacle, Care Liminality, Ontological Braiding, and Care Condition. Using these themes as touchstones, we co-speculated to produce four speculative IoT concepts to explore what care as a design ethic might look like for IoT and refect on nascent opportunities and challenges for domestic IoT design. We conclude by considering structures of power and privilege embedded within care practices that critically open new design imaginaries for IoT.
CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing; • Human computer interaction (HCI);
As posthumanist or post-anthropocentric research in HCI and design proliferates and further commits to working with morethan-humans, design research practitioners are left with many open questions and uncertainties with how to productively engage with more-than-humans in their thinking and working. This paper present results from a workshop with 17 researchers working at the intersection of care ethics and posthumanism to highlight tensions in posthumanist engagement aimed at unpacking some of the challenges, obstacles, and questions encountered by researchers interested in more-than-human centered design. In foregrounding tensions with representation, legitimization, unseen labor, and material narratives we contribute to a design research agenda which seeks to explicate and challenge dominant anthropocentric forces from design. We conclude by discussing epistemological care and urge practitioners to take up new ways of imagining through truly messy methods which contribute to a feminist unsettling of HCI's methodological commitments, practices, and praxis.
CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); HCI theory, concepts and models.
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