The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and its progressively wider impact on many sectors requires an assessment of its effect on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Using a consensus-based expert elicitation process, we find that AI can enable the accomplishment of 134 targets across all the goals, but it may also inhibit 59 targets. However, current research foci overlook important aspects. The fast development of AI needs to be supported by the necessary regulatory insight and oversight for AI-based technologies to enable sustainable development. Failure to do so could result in gaps in transparency, safety, and ethical standards.

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and its progressively wider impact on many sectors requires an assessment of its effect on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Using a consensus-based expert elicitation process, we find that AI can enable the accomplishment of 134 targets across all the goals, but it may also inhibit 59 targets. However, current research foci overlook important aspects. The fast development of AI needs to be supported by the necessary regulatory insight and oversight for AI-based technologies to enable sustainable development. Failure to do so could result in gaps in transparency, safety, and ethical standards.

We describe a Research through Design project—Curious Cycles—a collection of objects and interactions which encourage people to be in close contact with their menstruating body. Throughout a full menstrual cycle, five participants used Curious Cycles to look at their bodies in unfamiliar ways and to touch their bodily fluids, specifically, menstrual blood, saliva, and cervical mucus. The act of touching and looking led to the construction of new knowledge about the self and to a nurturing appreciation for the changing body. Yet, participants encountered and reflected upon frictions within themselves, their home, and their social surroundings, which stem from societal stigma and preconceptions about menstruation and bodily fluids. We call for and show how interaction design can engage with technologies that mediate self-touch as a first step towards reconfiguring the way menstruating bodies are treated in society.

Increasingly, technologies are being designed to support refugees. While HCI research has explored several aspects of refugee experiences, the importance of embedding the principle of dignity within technological designs is yet to be explored. In this paper we focus on the theme of dignity that was a prominent theme across three research projects we conducted with Syrian refugee communities in Lebanon. We show that the experiences of refugee participants are characterised by a loss of dignity, as well as by attempts to maintain dignity that may be mediated by technology. By highlighting the value given to dignity by our participants we emphasise the need for designers and HCI researchers to consider how technologies may create a space in which dignity is maintained and dignified interaction may take place.

We report on a design-led study in the UK that aimed to understand barriers to children (aged 5 to 14 years) 'playing out' in their neighbourhood and explore the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) for supporting children's free play that extends outdoors. The study forms a design ethnography, combining observational fieldwork with design prototyping and co-creative activities across four linked workshops, where we used BBC micro:bit devices to co-create new IoT designs with the participating children. Our collective account contributes new insights about the physical and interactive features of micro:bits that shaped play, gameplay, and social interaction in the workshops, illuminating an emerging design space for supporting 'digital playing out' that is grounded in empirical instances. We highlight opportunities for designing for digital playing out in ways that promote social negotiation, supports varying participation, allows for integrating cultural influences, and accounts for the weaving together of placemaking and play.

Experience Centred Design (ECD) implores us to develop empathic relationships and understanding of participants, to actively work with our senses and emotions within the design process. However, theories of experience-centred design do little to account for emotion work undertaken by design researchers when doing this. As a consequence, how a design researcher’s emotions are experienced, navigated and used as part of an ECD process are rarely published. So, while emotion is clearly a tool that we use, we don’t share with one another how, why and when it gets used. This has a limiting effect on how we understand design processes, and opportunities for training. Here, we share some of our experiences of working with ECD. We analyse these using Hochschild’s framework of emotion work to show how and where this work occurs. We use our analysis to question current ECD practices and provoke debate.

Collaborative learning in class-based teaching presents a challenge for a tutor to ensure every group and individual student has the best learning experience. We present Group Tagging, a web application that supports reflection on collaborative, group-based classroom activities. Group Tagging provides students with an opportunity to record important moments within the class-based group work and enables reflection on and promotion of professional skills such as communication, collaboration and critical thinking. After class, students use the tagged clips to create short videos showcasing their group work activities, which can later be reviewed by the teacher. We report on a deployment of Group Tagging in an undergraduate Computing Science class with 48 students over a semester. Through our analysis of interviews and log data, we show that Group Tagging helped the students remain attentive and on-task during group work, and encouraged them to participate more during group activities.

With the Syrian crisis entering its 8th year, refugees have become the focus of research across multiple disciplines, including design and HCI research. While some researchers have reflected upon designing with refugees, these accounts have been limited to conducting design workshops in formal spaces. Through reflecting on our experiences of conducting design research in informal refugee settlements in Lebanon we unpack lessons learnt, design practices and research approaches that facilitate design engagements with refugees. We highlight the value in participants configuring the design space, using a dialogical approach as well as creating a safe space for both participants and the researcher. We also reflect on the roles that researchers may take on when conducting similar research. By doing so we contribute specific design practices that may be transferrable to other similar contexts.

The Soma Bits are a prototyping toolkit that facilitates Soma Design. Acting as an accessible ‘sociodigital material’ Soma Bits allow designers to pair digital technologies, with their whole body and senses, as part of an iterative soma design process.The Soma Bits addresses the difficulty we experienced in past Soma Design processes — that articulating ofsensations we want to evoke to others, and thenmaintaining these experiences in memory throughout a design process. Thus, the Soma Bits enable designers to know and experience what a designmight ‘feel like’ and to share that with others.

The Soma Bits relate to three experiential qualities:‘feeling connected’, ‘feeling embraced’, and ‘being in correspondence’ with the interactive materials. The Soma Bits have a form factor and materiality thatallow actuators (heat, vibration, and shape-changing) to be placed on and around the body; they are easily configurable to enable quick and controllable creations of soma experiences which can be both part of a first-person approach as well as shared withothers. The Soma Bits are a living, growing library ofshapes and actuators. We use them in our own designpractices, as well as when engaging others in soma design processes.