This dissertation is about the research program designing with care as a pathway towards interaction design otherwise amid a world in crisis. Considering how established ways of doing interaction design will change involves recognizing the role of digital materials in social injustice and systemic inequality. These concerns are inseparable from the material complexity of interactive experiences and their more-than-human entanglements in care. Through five design experiments, I explore everyday human care as wickedly attending to some care doings and not others, and an intimate and generous questioning of oneself as human.

I offer four contributions for interaction designers and design researchers. The first contribution is designing with care. This research program draws upon care ethics and posthumanism to establish four axioms: everyday, wickedness, intimacy, and generosity. Within this programmatic framework, the second contribution is definitions of wickedness and generosity as ethical stances that can be taken by designers and researchers. The third contribution is the synthesis of my four methodological approaches: auto-design, spatial orientations, leaky materials, and open speculations. Each is a generative and analytical pathway towards more sustainable and just futures. The fourth contribution is five careful designs as prototypes of what interaction design otherwise might be like: technologies of human waste, spying on loved ones, leaky breastfeeding bodies, scaling bodily fluids, and a speculative ethics. 

From my research program and contributions, I discuss disciplinary resistances to suggest three possibilities for how I argue interaction design should change: engaging with mundane yet unrecognized topics, doing design work where the consequences would be present, and reconsidering how the formats of research publications could better reflect positionality. I then reflect upon the relevancy of self-centered research in moving beyond oneself for more sustainable worlds.

Envisioning alternative futures and desirable worlds is a core element of design that must be cultivated, especially when a deep transition of practices, values, and power is necessary for vibrant and just future lifeworlds. In this paper, we contribute towards fabulation as an approach for design futuring that foregrounds feminist commitments and more-than-human concerns. Analyzing two fabulation case studies around biodata and bodily fuids, we ofer three themes based on our process of developing these fabulations: how they engage materials, how they work to trouble temporalities, and how they cultivate imagination. We argue for the emerging potential of fabulation as an approach for open-ended, joyful design futuring, mobilizing speculative storytelling to foreground absent or neglected relations when imagining alternative lifeworlds.

This essay performs a speculative ethics in designing with a researcher's own bodily fluids. This is through the creation of "performative texts", which are autoethnographic accounts of past experiences in which written words perform through visual and spatial compositions alongside verbal readings aloud. I present three performative texts about moments of discomfort in designing with milk from my own breastfeeding relationship. They are to reflect upon felt experiences of potential harm and to understand social and material relations of care. From these I offer three possibilities for how HCI might consider the ethics of first-person research in attending to more-than-human entanglements: unsafe spaces, situated escapes, and censored inclusion. These possibilities and the approach of performative texts contribute to research for more sustainable futures by exploring the decentering of humans through an intimate engagement with the self.

Recent design research has shown an interest in diffraction and agential realism, which promise to offer generative alternatives when designing with data that resist treating data as objective or neutral. We explore engaging diffractively with 'lived data' to surface felt and prospective aspects of data as it is entangled in everyday lives of designers. This paper presents five biodata-based case studies demonstrating how design researchers can create knowledge about human bodies and behaviors via strategies that allow them to engage data diffractively. These studies suggest that designers can find insights for designing with data as it is lived by working with it in a slow, open-ended fashion that leaves room for messiness and time for discovering difference. Finally, we discuss the role of ambiguous, open-ended data interpretations to help surface different meanings and entanglements of data in everyday lives.

Bodily transformations that attend breastfeeding include entanglements of more-than-human materials and agencies. These can be seen in exchanges of physical matter, such as bacteria, that blur bodily boundaries. I present three design explorations of my breastfeeding experiences as entangled: knitting bras for lopsided breasts, transforming milk into fiddling necklaces, and site-writing around breastfeeding. Through spatial and conceptual mappings of the explorations, I propose them as alternative narratives in designing for leaky breastfeeding bodies. I also offer two broader reflections on designing with, for, and among more-than-human bodily materials: generous absence and bodily mappings. The accompanying reading instructions to this bodily research open for further encounters and reflections between the three explorations.

This paper explores human bodily fluids for more-than-human collaborative survival. We present four utopian fabulations in which urine, menstrual blood, and human milk are designed with beyond the scale of a singular human body. Each fabulation illustrates queer scales and uses of bodily fluids through extended or improper uses as pathways towards caring multi-species relations within a damaged environment. From these narratives, we reflect on imagining generous collaborations for an openness towards unknowable possibilities and crafting different measures through the tensions of coinciding scales.

Tensions in designing for care are often positioned as conflicts to be resolved. We draw upon queer theories to investigate caring for loved ones as not "in-line" with normative expectations of care as positive and fulfilling. Through the critique of two autobiographical design projects designed for informal, everyday care of our families, we describe four troubling orientations of care: willful detours, selfish shortcuts, naughty invasions, and unhappy departures. From these, we argue that tensions in care may not always be designed against, but can also be desired and generative.We conclude by discussing a "wickedness" in caring for loved ones that problematizes in-home technologies as attractively naughty and potentially violent, and the four orientations as resources for interaction designers to spatially navigate tensions of domestic care.

As new materials become available for textile and interaction designers, it is crucial that we develop an understanding of the lived experiences of such materials and explore meaningful contexts for their development. In this paper, we engage with systems in which bodies as materials and materials as bodies constitute an assemblage of vitalities in constant flux with one another. In particular, we address how such systems in their interactions with (non)human bodies blur boundaries between inside and outside the body, and between human and machine, acting as soft systems. Drawing on our first-person, design-led research, we present three design explorations of soft systems that deeply engage with the body: Breathing Wings, Fiddling Necklaces and Menarche Bits. We analyze how the three projects contribute towards what we conceptualize as “vibrant wearables”: wearables that through their material vibrancy surface design qualities of leakiness, characterized by a multi-directionality of “spilling over,” ongoingness, which attends to non-linear temporalities and cycles of life and death, and mutuality that emphasizes the interdependency, and becoming, of vibrant encounters. These three design qualities all conceptually trouble boundaries of bodies and materials and are practical resources for designers and researchers working with the body in/as a soft system. Our work offers concrete examples of how to work with material vibrancy, which is particularly relevant to new materialist discourses in textile, fashion and interaction design. We argue for the generativity of these design qualities for other designers and researchers aiming to elevate materials and soft systems in interactions with bodies. Moreover, we contribute towards design research that conceptually and materially troubles the boundaries of the body, and we argue for attending to the material power of (non)human bodies as a soft system.

Data-driven technologies increasingly participate in everyday experiences as implicit interactions that are unseen and dynamically configured. My research explores the design and implications of implicit interactions by designing within social relations of care that are often considered taboo. These include caring for loved ones and technologies to manage human excretion: situations that are difficult to quantify and where an unintended consequence of implicit interactions can be devastating. To carefully challenge definitions of implicit interactions, I draw upon autobiographic and speculative design methods, as well as humor to unsettle others and implicate myself in care.

We present a study of long-term outdoor activities, based on altogether 34 interviews with 19 participants. Our goal was not only to explore these enjoyable experiences, but more broadly to examine how technology use was recontextualized ‘away’ from the everyday. Outdoor activities are commonly presented as an escape from our technology-infused world. In contrast, our interviews reveal experiences that are heavily dependent on technology, both digital and not. However, digital technology — and in particular the mobile phone — is reconfigured when taken out of its ordinary, often urban and indoor, context. We first present a diversity of ‘aways’ during outdoor activities by depicting cherished freedoms and interpersonal preferences. We then describe how participants managed connection and disconnection while away and upon coming back. To conclude, we discuss how constructions of away can support more purposeful engagements with digital technology, and how pointed (dis)connection can be useful for technology design also in non-outdoor settings.