The home is a place of shelter, a place for family, and for separation from other parts of life, such as work. Global challenges, the most pressing of which are currently the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change has forced extra roles into many homes and will continue to do so in the future. Biodesign integrates living organisms into designed solutions and can offer opportunities for new kinds of technologies to facilitate a transition to the home of the future. Many families have had to learn to work alongside each other, and technology has mediated a transition from standard models of operation for industries.
These are the challenges of the 21st century that mandate careful thinking around interactive systems and innovations that support new ways of living and working at home. In this workshop, we will explore opportunities for biodesign interactive systems in the future home. We will bring together a broad group of researchers in HCI, design, and biosciences to build the biodesign community and discuss speculative design futures. The outcome will generate an understanding of the role of interactive biodesign systems at home, as a place with extended functionalities.
The workshop is held as part of the ACM CHI conference, and will bring together participants to build a community around biodesign and HCI. We invite participants from research, practice and industry, who are interested in speculative futures of interactive biodesign systems, to participate in our workshop. We are interested in hearing diverse voices of those who combine knowledge in areas of biological science, HCI, speculative and design fiction. This conference is led by academics from the Design Lab and Affective Interaction Lab at The University of Sydney and the MIT Media Lab.
About the workshop
This workshop is part of a series of workshops on speculating the future of biodesign in HCI. The first workshop was held as part of ACM DIS2020 conference titled “The Nature of Biodesigned Systems: Directions for HCI“. We examined a key question in biodesign “what will interactive systems look like in a guided and grown environment, rather than a built environment?” In that workshop, we explored technologies that rely on symbiotic relationships between the user and organisms that participate in interactive systems. Through exploring new aspects of designing for living computational systems in the ACM DIS2020 workshop, we identified three research themes and questions related to: (1) the need for system thinkingto consider biodesign ecologies and their complex inter-relationship and impact on human life (rather than just one component or product); (2) identifying stakeholders who lead biodesign research in different contexts, and; (3) questions of values and ethics.
In this workshop, we explore how previous work may be extended as home and workplaces overlap. The outcomes will deepen our understanding of interactive biodesign systems with meanings attributed to home and work.
We invite participants to explore the following themes and questions with us: Understanding the context: how may the future home be different, due to global challenges and advances in technology? Opportunities for intervention: can biodesign be a non-speculative intervention in this context, and with the current state of biodesign? Speculating on future interventions: What do they look like? What will they accomplish? How can speculative interventions be mapped to coexist and relate to each other?
Date
May 7th & 8th, 2021
Time
6am JST (7am AEST, Sydney; 5pm EST, Boston)
Duration
3 hours
EOI Process
Please complete the EOI form. We will contact accepted participants with links to online tools and meeting. Please see the Participation section below for more details.
EOI Due
Please upload position papers by 21st February 2021 (anywhere in the world)
Notification
Accepted participants will be notified on 28th Februrary 2021
Tools
The workshop will be hosted using miro.com and zoom.
Participating
Participants are expected to submit short position papers (2-4 pages, in ACM extended abstract format). The position papers are submitted through the workshop EOI. The position papers may provide contributions and critical thinking perspectives aligned with the workshop theme. Research on interactive biodesign systems is a growing area of research and innovation and we invite participants to share their thoughts, reflections and experiences in this area relevant to home and work. Submissions will be juried by the organizers based on relevance.
We aim to build new collaborations through this workshop. Findings and a summary of opportunities identified for this field will be communicated through subsequent publications and participants will be invited to contribute to these. A summary of the discussions will be posted onthe workshop website.