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The Relational Becoming of a Participatory Design Commoner
No full textThis research expands the understanding of the collective designer behind Scandinavian Participatory Design with the Latin American notion of relational ontology, which posits a worldview where everything and everyone are mutually constituted through evolving relationships. Drawing from three thematic workshops with design practitioners and scholars that explored intersections between commoning and designing, this research unveils the relational becoming of a participatory design commoner. This includes the production of a shared subjectivity—the collective designer—as integral to commoning design and designing commons. Specifically, we explore the role of participatory designers in commoning through their subjectivity in their infrastructuring actions and affective engagements with objective commons
From Dead-ends to Dialogue: Third Workshop on Design Research & GenAI
No full textIn this third installment of our GenAI workshop series at DIS, we focus on ‘stopsigns’—the blockages that impede progress in design research with GenAI. These stopsigns manifest as both semantic barriers (political, social, or mental frameworks) and pragmatic hurdles (technical limitations or implementation challenges) that persist despite the rapid advancements since the GenAI boom. Such stopsigns present a productive tension—they often contain partial truths worthy of consideration while simultaneously being shortsighted in ways that prevent progression. From blanket rejection to uncritical acceptance, these barriers affect how meaningfully we engage with GenAI’s potential. Our workshop welcomes both returning and first-time participants to share their experiences with these persistent challenges and work together to develop practical solutions. Through analysis of real cases and hands-on activities, we’ll build strategies for moving beyond these obstacles while acknowledging their legitimate concerns. Our goal is to foster more thoughtful integration of GenAI in design research and practice
History-grounded Design Speculation as a Method for AI Impact Anticipation
No full textAs Artificial Intelligence continues to permeate everyday life, concerns over its societal consequences are becoming increasingly pressing. Anticipatory practices have emerged as central to responsible AI development, offering ways to envision and mitigate potential harms. While policymakers engage with anticipation through forecasting and risk assessment, speculative design offers an alternative, more experiential approach to also fosters public engagement and critical reflection. However, most speculative explorations focus on future possibilities, often neglecting the continuum between these and past phenomena. In this pictorial, we argue for integrating historical perspectives into speculative design to enrich anticipatory work on AI. Through a week-long international summer school, we engaged with the legacy of phrenology and the work of Cesare Lombroso. Using this as a springboard for speculation, we illustrate that incorporating historical trajectories into speculative design can deepen understanding of current dilemmas around AI, but dedicated methodological resources are still needed to achieve this value
The Unseen Hand: How User Background Shapes AI Text-to-Image Generation
Get PDFText-To-Image (TTI) generators are becoming widely used and are often promoted as "democratizing" the making of images independently of the skill set of the user. But relatively little is known about whether people with different educations, skill sets and literacies use these tools differently, and how their backgrounds influence the quality of the results. In this article we investigate the impact of Visual Literacy (VL), AI Literacy (AIL) and Prompt Engineering Literacy (PEL) on prompt use. More precisely we are examining how they eachimpact prompt usage patterns, linguistic and semantic composition, and the structure and morphology of prompts. Additionally, we employed Process Analysis to investigate how participants with different literacyapproach the creative design process with TTI. Our results show that individuals scoring high on Visual Literacy (VL) tend to employ a larger vocabulary and more nuanced language, greater prompt variety and make more references to art genres, styles, and movements. In contrast, participants scoring high AI Literacy (AIL) demonstrated a deeper understanding of AI interaction, influencing their prompting strategies, and tended to adhere closely to the exact wording of the brief, treating it as precise specifications. The study's findings have the potential of significantly impacting educations, both by actively teaching students to experiment with prompt variations and deepen expressive visual vocabulary as well as designing curricula that incorporate structured exercises on iterative prompt refinement, explicitly teaching how to adjust prompts based on AIoutput to achieve desired visual outcomes
Movable optical sensor for automatic detection and monitoring of liquid-liquid interfaces
No full textLiquid-liquid extraction (LLE) is an essential operation in many laboratory experiments. However, most automatic LLE devices concentrate on detecting the liquid-liquid interface at one moment in the process, usually at separation, and pay little attention to the state of the liquids as they settle. In this paper, we present an LLE device with a moving optical sensor and light source that move along a vessel instead of the mixture moving relative to the sensor. Analyzing the patterns of light intensity with explainable automatic detection algorithms, the interface can be detected at different positions in the vessel with an error below 2 mm and monitored during the settling process. The device is tested using a mixture of clear oil and water and two extraction steps in a battery interface material synthesis process. Results show that the setup is able to detect interfaces at different positions along the vessel, even with changes in diameter. By monitoring the settling process, we also found that the biggest change in the signal detected occurs around the liquid-liquid interface position, and we also use this information to corroborate it. The recording of sensor measurements at different positions over time can be used to detect different properties of the liquids, which improves control over the process and could also alleviate reproducibility problems in areas of chemistry in which it is costly to repeat procedures
The Uniqueness of IT Cost Risk: A Cross-Group Comparison of 23 Project Types
No full textThis article measures and explains cost risk for IT projects compared with 22 other project types. The null hypothesis is that IT projects are not different from other projects in terms of cost risk. The thesis is falsified. IT cost risk is found to be uniquely more risky than other project types. First, we review four extant explanations of high IT cost risk: immaturity, intangibility, goal ambiguity, and stakeholder resistance. Second, we describe data to measure cost risk across 23 project types, including IT. Third, we fit theoretical distributions to the data and test for median and tail risk, showing that tail risk dominates, with IT cost risk having a fatter tail than any other project type. Fourth, we develop a taxonomy of risk based on the Pareto 1 tail parameter α, documenting that IT is uniquely risky as the only project type with α ≤ 1, indicating infinite mean and variance and, thus, infinite and unpredictable risk. Fifth, we return to the four extant explanations and conclude that, although our data do not prove the explanations, they also do not falsify them. Based on our data, we suggest two further explanations of cost risk: Bespokeness and “think-fast” decision-making, which we argue drive extreme risk and are typical of IT, with modularity and “think slow” as antidotes. Finally, we identify areas for further research
Fifth Workshop on Recommender Systems for Human Resources (RecSys in HR 2025)
No full textProceedings of the 5th Workshop on Recommender Systems for Human Resources (RecSys-in-HR 2025) co-located with the 19th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2025
Extensibility in Programming Languages: An overview
No full textI here conduct an exploration of programming language extensibility, making an argument for an often overlooked component of conventional language design. Now, this is not a technical detailing of these components, rather, I attempt to provide an overview as I myself have lacked during my time investigating programming languages. Thus, read this as an introduction to the magical world of extensibility. Through a literature review, I identify key extensibility themes - Macros, Modules, Types, and Reflection - highlighting diverse strategies for fostering extensibility. The analysis extends to cross-theme properties such as Parametricism and First-class citizen behaviour, introducing layers of complexity by highlighting the importance of customizability and flexibility in programming language constructs. By outlining these facets of existing programming languages and research, I aim to inspire future language designers to assess and consider the extensibility of their creations critically
Apache Wayang in Action: Enabling Data Systems Integration via a Unified Data Analytics Framework.
No full textApache Wayang is an open-source framework, which provides a systematic and efficient solution for unifying data analytics over disparate data sources and via integrating multiple heterogeneous data systems. It achieves that by decoupling applications from the underlying systems. In addition, it provides an optimizer so that users do not have to specify the platforms on which their pipeline should run but the optimizer can determine the best way given a cost metric. In this demonstration, we showcase how the flexible architecture of Wayang enables seamless integration with multiple heterogeneous data systems and how the query optimizer can lead to better performance
Defining Matters of Compassion: Designing Care Technology within a Care Crisis
No full textAccess to mental health care is increasingly strained, with rising demand and long waiting times leaving many to manage their mental wellbeing alone. This work-in-progress paper responds to this care crisis by exploring how technology can support mental and emotional wellbeing. First, building on the concepts of matters of concern and matters of care, we propose a shift toward matters of compassion as a specific way to enact care that moves away from reductive problem-solving by embracing complexity, vulnerability, and uncertainty. Then, we further untangle the concept of matters of compassion by illustrating design tactics to invite compassionate engagement with experiences where resolution is not possible or desirable, where the experience inevitably brings uncertainty and vulnerability that need to be dealt with. To do so, we examine three design cases—focused on premenstrual disorders (PMDs), pregnancy, and abortion