In this paper, we discuss challenges emerging in connection to teaching for and with more-than-human values and stakeholder perspectives in human-computer interaction (HCI) curriculum. Recently, we have experienced a rise in interest in more-than-human perspectives in various HCI venues. However, there is still a lack of published work on how to teach such perspectives, as well as practical educational resources for supporting the more-than-human HCI in education.

In this special interest group (SIG) we invite researchers, practitioners, and educators to share their perspectives and experiences on the expansion of human-centred perspective to more-than-human design orientation in human-computer interaction (HCI). This design for and with more-than-human perspectives and values cover a range of fields and topics, and comes with unique design opportunities and challenges. In this SIG, we propose a forum for exchange of concrete experiences and a range of perspectives, and to facilitate reflective discussions and the identification of possible future paths.

Decolonization is a situated effort as it relates to the relations of privilege, power, politics, and access (3P-A, in Albarrán González’s terms) between the people involved in design in relation to wider societies. This complexity creates certain challenges for how we can understand, learn about, and nurture decolonization in design towards pluriversality, since such decolonizing effort is based on the relationship between specific individuals and the collective. In this paper, we present and discuss the ‘River project’, a participatory space for decolonizing design, created for designers and practitioners to reflect on their own 3P-A as a way to create awareness of their own oppressive potential in design work. These joint reflections challenged ideas of participation and shaped learning processes between the participants, bringing to the foreground the importance of seeing and allowing for a plurality of life and work worlds to be brought together. We build on the learnings from this project to propose the notions of pluriversal participation, pluriversal presence, and pluriversal directionality, which can help nurture decolonizing designs towards pluriversality. We conclude by arguing that, for nurturing pluriversality through Participatory Design, participation, presence, and direction must be equally pluriversal.

This position paper presents the initial steps towards the development of a pedagogical framework on teaching for more-than-human perspectives in design targeting teachers at technology design programmes and courses in higher education. We build on the methodology applied in the [ref anonymised for blind review] project [ref anonymised] and the resulting [ref anonymised] OER (Open Educational Resource). The continuation of the project focuses on developing teaching activities that address more-than-human perspectives when teaching the next generation of responsible technology designers. In recent years there has been a growing awareness towards designing for more complex and holistic systems that include perspectives of nature and the more-than-human. As stated in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, to achieve sustainable development we need to address the three levels: people (society), profit (economy), and planet (biosphere) since they are all intertwined. Still, most of the design methods both professionally practiced and taught at technology design education are geared towards humans with particular focus on users through, for example, human-centred design and user experience design. Thus, there is a gap between methods taught to designers and what methods are needed to solve problems related to environmental and social sustainability by also addressing planetary perspectives. This paper puts forward the importance of challenging the dominating paradigm of technology design practices primarily focusing on people and profit, by also including planetary and more-than-human perspectives. Examples of existing practices and approaches for including and listening to more-than-human perspectives are presented. By building on the experiences gained from the [ref anonymised] project, we present a path towards a pedagogical approach for how practices of designing for more-than-human perspectives can be turned into teaching activities in technology design educations. In doing so, teachers become agents of change by creating conditions for students to grow into responsible designers of future technologies and play a role in driving adaptation towards a more sustainable future.

There is an increasing awareness of the importance of considering values in the design of technology. There are several research approaches focused on this, such as e.g., value-sensitive design, value-centred human–computer interaction (HCI), and value-led participatory design, just to mention a few. However, less attention has been given to developing educational materials for the role that values play in HCI, why hands-on teaching activities are insufficient, and especially teaching activities that cover the full design process. In this article, we claim that teaching for ethics and values in HCI is not only important in some parts of the design and development process, but equally important all through. We will demonstrate this by a unique collection of 28 challenges identified throughout the design process, accompanied by inspirational suggestions for teaching activities to tackle these challenges. The article is based on results from applying a modified pedagogical design pattern approach in the iterative development of an open educational resource containing teaching and assessment activities and pedagogical framework, and from pilot testing. Preliminary results from pilots of parts of the teaching activities indicate that student participants experience achieving knowledge about how to understand and act ethically on human values in design, and teachers experience an increased capacity to teach for values in design in relevant and innovative ways. Hopefully, this overview of challenges and inspirational teaching activities focused on values in the design of technology can be one way to provide teachers with inspiration to sensitize their students and make them better prepared to become responsible designers by learning how to address and work with values in HCI.

This article addresses the need for teaching materials and systematized methods for teaching and assessing values-based design approaches. We do so by suggesting the teaching activity Envisioning future scenarios,which is based on utopian and dystopian scenarios in line with values-based design approaches such as speculative and critical design and related to design fiction practices. The teaching activity is presented with learning outcomes, instructions for how to implement it, corresponding assessment activities and criteria, and illustrated by a teaching case description. The article ends with a discussion on how the learning outcomes, the teaching activity, and the assessment are brought together in line with the principles of constructive alignment. Through this, we argue that the shortcoming of teaching materials and systematized methods for teaching and assessing values-based design approaches, such as speculative and critical design, can be addressed by aligning intended learning outcomes with teaching and assessment activities, and by applying a general structural framework such as e.g. the SOLO taxonomy, for defining and evaluating learning outcomes. The suggested teaching and assessment activities can be applied in educational domains as diverse as product and service design, engineering, architecture, media and communication, human-computer interaction, socio-technical studies and other creative fields.

Designers play an important role in shaping the society and should take responsibility for their actions and become responsible designers that can contribute to a sustainable and sound development of society on all levels. Thus, design education ought to create conditions for students to develop skills and competencies for designing with values in mind. This case study paper provides an example of how teaching activities made available via an online open educational resource that offers teaching resources for teaching for values in design, can be appropriated to a specific educational setting. A selection of teaching activities and how they were implemented in class are described. Results produced by the students were analysed to see in what way the teaching activities enabled the student to go from addressing values in their work, to actually designing with values in mind. The paper ends with a concluding discussion about the potentials of design teachers to become change agents through their pedagogical practices that enable students to go from knowledge to action.

This paper presents an initial study on how members of a 90-household large Danish permaculture community, Permatopia, would like an internal communication system to work regarding organization of work, distribution of natural and human resources, documentation of learning, and support for social sustainability. The study is informed by theory of permaculture: mainly the principle care for people and of theory from computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), in particular the phenomenon we-awareness. A combination of contextual inquiry and co-design methods were used to uncover community members’ needs, desires and concerns. Results show that a traditional app and profile-based communication system might not be beneficial to the social sustainability of the community. Instead, technologies and data should be handled with care: the benefits of structure and data visualization should be balanced with the need for privacy and respect for individual lifestyles, face-to-face communication and shared goals.

Currently, we see an increased focus on the social and environ-mental responsibilities of designers when designing technologies.There are however few academic examples describing how to teachstudents to become responsible designers and engineers who areattentive to values in design. We are therefore developing teach-ing activities as open educational resources for teaching valuesin design to students in different kinds of engineering and designcourses and programs. The activities address values in differentphases of the design process. This case study article reports on theappropriation of a teaching activity by two university teachers. Theaim is to provide the reader with an insight into how a teachingactivity that we have developed can be appropriated in differenteducational settings, what the teachers’ perceived effectiveness ofthis activity is, and what kind of adaptations individual teachersmay need to make to fit them into their particular course.

In the present paper, ToneInk, a prototype of a music-based play scenario that investigates player collaboration, is introduced. ToneInk is an explorative sound environment that differs from the majority of music-based games in that players can collaborate and be creative in the way they express themselves through melody and rhythm. The paper provides player interaction and navigation results and demonstrates how various affordances in the ToneInk design iterations make it hard or possible for players to engage with the system and with each other. From observations it was clear that players lost mutual awareness, and in general were more passive when they needed to monitor a screen interface that supported the sound environment. Player collaboration was strongest when players negotiated rhythm, while the negotiation of melody was temporally offset and consisted of long individual explorations.