We invite a visual exploration and critique of imagery that can be (re)produced through open-source models available in Civitai — a repository where creators share and monetize custom text-to-image models. The proliferation of these models contributes to the creation and distribution of Non-Consensual Synthetic Intimate Imagery (NCSII), a digitally-mediated form of image-based sexual abuse that primarily affects women and girls, commonly referred to as “deepfake porn.” We examine the practices surrounding the creation and sharing of custom open-source models designed to produce photorealistic content. Through a qualitative content analysis of 510 models and 3800 images, we illustrate the imaginaries about sex, bodies, and gender expressions that models embody and perpetuate, as well as how model creators understand their practices in relation to potential harms and misuse. We discuss pathways for feminist intervention and the care practices we embedded into our research process, and the design of this pictorial.

How should we design for consent? Consent is commonly integrated into products and interactions as binary, static, transactional, and something that should be recorded rather than discussed. Through a Research through Design process, we respond to a call to translate conceptual framings of consent into concrete artifacts and interactions in the context of digital contraception. We contribute with the Consentful Lights, a set of artifacts that enable partners to access intimate fertility data in a co-located setting through play and touch; inviting them to participate in a consentful interaction that is embodied, dynamic, explicit, and shared. Through an in-the-lab exploration of the Consentful Lights, we find that they have the potential to nurture a consentful moment and allow for deterring non-consensual access to intimate data. We conclude with a discussion on the need to pluralize the design of consentful interactions and a reflection on embedding feminist values into design artifacts.

Menstrual experiences are shaped by many different stakeholders, entities, and the broader socio-cultural context, or in other words, the ecological systems surrounding a menstruator. We explore what it means to take an ecological approach in studying and designing menstrual technologies. We translated and adapted Ecological Systems Theory (EST) for menstrual wellbeing and packaged the outcome in the form of a socio-ecological Canvas, accompanied by written examples and a set of prompts to facilitate engagement. We invited ten experts to engage with the Canvas in reflective workshops, which informed its further refinement. These sessions highlighted the Canvas' generative value, fostering critical reflection on how design choices are shaped by and ripple across layers of influence. With this translational research, we invite HCI researchers and practitioners to critically reflect on the ecologies they study and design for, envisioning both aspired versions of existing realities and realities that do not exist yet.

Methods for understanding the felt and situated experience of controlling autonomous systems are crucial for designing systems that are adjusted to the complexity of human interaction. Prior work has tended to overlook the bodily and experiential dimensions of monitoring systems at a distance, particularly in moments of losing control. We combined two approaches, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and soma design, to explore a case where a semi-autonomous system crashed when controlled by an inexperienced operator, captured in video ethnographic fieldwork. We report on our methodological approach, combining sequential video analysis of the unfolding sequence and interviews inspired by microphenomenology to unpack the operator’s experience of losing control. We contribute methodological considerations for interaction designers seeking to explore the felt experience of having and losing control of autonomous systems and discuss how insights gained through this combination of methods, rooted in phenomenology, support a designerly appreciation of safety operators’ work.

We present a content analysis of the privacy policy documentation and product descriptions from 146 smart sex toys across fourteen brands. We examine marketing narratives, policy accessibility, and disclosure completeness. We contribute an empirical illustration of a disregard for data privacy considerations in product descriptions and vague references to data privacy in privacy policy documentation. Among available privacy policy documentation, critical data storage and transmission details were frequently omitted or ambiguous, leading to misalignment with privacy claims in marketing materials. Our findings highlight inadequate transparency in the industry, paralleling issues in broader IoT systems and FemTech products and services. We underscore the need for HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners to address the structural inefficiency of policy compliance, the need to elevate privacy as an essential feature in products that collect and store sensitive and intimate data, and the stakes of privacy in the context of digital intimacy.

CONTENT WARNING: This paper discusses image-based sexual abuse. Technological advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have made it easy to generate and distribute Non-Consensual Synthetic Intimate Imagery (NCSII); images and videos that depict people’s voices, faces, or bodies in intimate or sexually explicit scenarios. The creation and distribution of NCSII is a form of image-based sexual abuse that primarily affects marginalized people. We present Photo BOO-th, an interactive installation that invites attendees to encounter NCSII of themselves, resulting in a creepy, visceral, and affective experience. We designed Photo BOO-th to critique, raise awareness, and foster societal discussions around consent, image-based sexual abuse, and the role of technology in enabling harm. Following a Research through Design approach, we unpack design events that reveal some of the tensions and considerations in designing Photo BOO-th. We conclude with a discussion around designing creepy interactions in sensitive contexts, designing with and against the uncertainties in generative AI, and a reflection on vulnerability when designing creepy interactions.

We explore rewilding human life as a deliberate engagement with the environments people care about to cultivate wonder. This is through an annotated portfolio of seasonal crafts completed by the first author in her home and local outdoor places with family, friends, and neighbors. The crafts are based upon monthly activities from a Swedish children’s book on experimenting with nature. We present the process and outcomes of forty activities, and annotate encounters with wildness and wonder. From this visual calendar, we reflect upon tensions within seasonal crafts as a regenerative design practice that bridges nature-entangled design with social sustainability. This includes the role of technology in rewilding human life, the frivolity of everyday crafts, and the inclusion of children in ecological care. We contribute practice-based examples of rewilding human life and call for a diversity of ages in designing more-than-human relations differently.

In design, the expression of values through form and experience is often referred to as aesthetics. In response to the ecological crisis, we explore wonder as a design aesthetics for planetary care. This exploration occurs through the presentation and critique of three seasonal activities with children in Sweden, aimed at inspiring local ecological curiosity: Appreciating the Wind, Looking for Frog Eggs, and Making Natural Perfumes. From these activities, we reflect upon the ethics of an aesthetics of wonder. This includes addressing the prioritization of human experience and the commodification of nature in design. We offer three contributions: defining and positioning wonder as a possible design aesthetics for planetary care, presenting three seasonal activities that situate wonder as an aesthetics in practice, and offering reflections on the ethics of wonder based on a critique of the activities.

We present a qualitative interview study that examines what happens when things do not go as planned with digital contraception. Through an analysis of 27 interviews with ongoing users of digital contraception at the time of the study, we convey participants' accounts of their experiences regarding unplanned pregnancies or use of emergency contraception to avoid an unplanned pregnancy. Our analysis considers participants' sense-making processes, and notably how they attended to questions of risk and responsibility. Finally, we depict how these participants came to continue using digital contraception after these experiences. Our study connects to ongoing conversations on technological failures in personal informatics and safety-critical systems. We emphasise that failure and success should not be used as a binary classification of long-term users' relationships with self-tracking technology, which are intimate and critical. Rather, the sustained relation with an intimate technology is composed by several failures' which are interpreted, acted upon, and, ultimately, overcome.

Navigating complex indoor spaces is one of the challenges for individuals with blindness or visual impairments. Smartphone-based solutions offer a promising approach to addressing these challenges due to their affordability, availability, adaptability, and acceptability. This study systematically reviewed the literature on smartphone-based indoor navigation systems for blind and visually impaired individuals, focusing on technologies, techniques, and evaluation methods. Our review highlights that computer vision is an evolving technology in this domain, with Radio Frequency Identification and Internet of Things technologies serving as valuable complements. The findings underscore the potential of smartphones to enhance accessibility and inclusion, while also emphasizing the importance of a user-centered design approach in development efforts. By identifying trends and gaps, this study provides valuable insights for advancing smartphone-based assistive technologies for indoor navigation.