The Power of 8: Encouraging Collaborative DIY Futures

"The Power of 8" was an experimental futures project, collaboratively driven by an ad hoc team of eight people from different walks of life. The aim was to explore new pathways for creating democratic futures by building a public discourse around the aspirations of ordinary people. The team of eight comprised a Designer/Speculator, an Educator, an Interaction Designer, a Permaculturist, a Policy Researcher, an Urbanist, a retired Civil Servant, and a Biomedical Scientist. Through a series of three intensive workshops, and later a wider public engagement phase, we adopted a narrative approach to building a collective view, representing possible futures of Brentford in London, England. This paper describes the strategies we used – including maps, montage and storytelling – to develop concepts, visualise proposals and materialise ‘future artefacts’ during the project

Peer review and design fiction:"Great Scott! The quotes are redacted"

In the 10 years since the term was coined 'design fiction' has become an increasingly common approach in HCI research. The practice involves working with 'diegetic prototypes', that is prototypes that need not exist in reality, but instead exist from within a 'story world'. Although fictional aspects are not unusual in HCI prototyping methods (e.g. storyboards, personas, Wizard-of-Oz), the breadth and flexibility of design fiction poses new challenges. This paper originally featured quotes from peer reviews of design fiction orientated papers that have previously been submitted to ACM SIGCHI conferences in order to highlight inherent challenges when reviewing research that may be based upon or include elements of fiction. In response to the SIGCHI Executive Committee's request to not directly quote reviewers the quotes have now been redacted. This somewhat changes the paper's tone and also makes very clear that publishing discussions relating to peer reviews (or the reviews themselves) is extremely challenging

Our Friends Electric:Reflections on Advocacy and Design Research for the Voice Enabled Internet

Emerging technologies---such as the voice enabled internet---present many opportunities and challenges for HCI research and society as a whole. Advocating for better, healthier implementations of these technologies will require us to communicate abstract values, such as trust, to an audience that ranges from the general public to technologists and even policymakers. In this paper, we show how a combination of film-making and product design can help to illustrate these abstract values. Working as part of a wider international advocacy campaign, Our Friends Electric focuses on the voice enabled internet, translating abstract notions of Internet Health into comprehensible digital futures for the relationship between our voice and the internet. We conclude with a call for designers of physical things to be more involved with the development of trust, privacy and security in this powerful emerging technological landscape

9 Dimensions for evaluating how art and creative practice stimulate societal transformations

There is an urgent need to engage with deep leverage points in sustainability transformations—fundamental myths, paradigms, and systems of meaning making—to open new collective horizons for action. Art and creative practice are uniquely suited to help facilitate change in these deeper transformational leverage points. However, understandings of how creative practices contribute to sustainability transformations are lacking in practice and fragmented across theory and research. This lack of understanding shapes how creative practices are evaluated and therefore funded and supported, limiting their potential for transformative impact. This paper presents the 9 Dimensions tool, created to support reflective and evaluative dialogues about links between creative practice and sustainability transformations. It was developed in a transdisciplinary process between the potential users of this tool: researchers, creative practitioners, policy makers, and funders. It also brings disciplinary perspectives on societal change from evaluation theory, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and more in connection with each other and with sustainability transformations, opening new possibilities for research. The framework consists of three categories of change, and nine dimensions: changing meanings (embodying, learning, and imagining); changing connections (caring, organizing, and inspiring); and changing power (co-creating, empowering, and subverting). We describe how the 9 Dimensions tool was developed, and describe each dimension and the structure of the tool. We report on an application of the 9 Dimensions tool to 20 creative practice projects across the European project Creative Practices for Transformational Futures (CreaTures). We discuss user reflections on the potential and challenges of the tool, and discuss insights gained from the analysis of the 20 projects. Finally, we discuss how the 9 Dimensions can effectively act as a transdisciplinary research agenda bringing creative practice further in contact with transformation research

Our Friends Electric:reflections on advocacy and design research for the voice enabled internet

Emerging technologies-such as the voice enabled internet-present many opportunities and challenges for HCI research and society as a whole. Advocating for better, healthier implementations of these technologies will require us to communicate abstract values, such as trust, to an audience that ranges from the general public to technologists and even policymakers. In this paper, we show how a combination of film-making and product design can help to illustrate these abstract values. Working as part of a wider international advocacy campaign, Our Friends Electric focuses on the voice enabled internet, translating abstract notions of Internet Health into comprehensible digital futures for the relationship between our voice and the internet. We conclude with a call for designers of physical things to be more involved with the development of trust, privacy and security in this powerful emerging technological landscape.</p