July - August 2025 | ACM Interactions

VOLUME XXXII.4 July - August 2025

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WELCOME
- Sustaining, Changing, and Refining: HCI in Evolution
  
  Elizabeth F. Churchill, Mikael Wiberg
  
  Welcome to the July–August issue of Interactions! In this edition, we cover a lot of ground, bringing together a broad selection of articles. In our cover story, "Rethinking Human-Centered Design: From Automation to Sustainable Innovation," Michele Visciòla invites us to reconsider human-centered design, suggesting that its role has been…
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What are you reading?
- What Are You Reading?
  
  Huatong Sun
  
  During my sabbatical, I picked up Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, by Ming China historian Timothy Brook. The subtitle is intriguing for a specialist in global design like me: What made remote islands connect with large continents? And what made a common…
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Exhibit X
- Prompting Realities: Reappropriating Tangible Artifacts Through Conversation
  
  Mahan Mehrvarz
  
  The rapid development of generative AI, particularly since the advent of products such as ChatGPT, has underscored the importance of prompting. Large language models have transformed our interactions with computers through text, but their potential to control physical objects remains largely unexplored. This led me to ask: What if…
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Columns
- On Being Stuck in the Drive-Through
  
  Jonathan Bean
  
  One Sunday night, home alone and worn out from a weekend of mundane household tasks, I decided to pick up dinner. I started to regret that decision precisely 20 minutes later, when I found myself stuck in a drive-through line that showed no signs of moving. Hemmed in by…
- Feeling Obsolescence: In Memory of Jonathan Sterne
  
  Melissa Gregg
  
  Electronic waste is "the fastest growing waste stream in the world" and has been so for over a decade. The earliest reference I have for this claim is a 2014 International Labour Organization report [1], though it feels like I've been hearing it my whole life. Early awareness of…
- What Happens When Interaction Design Becomes a Commodity?
  
  Jon Kolko
  
  Over the past two decades, software development has evolved into a formalized, industrialized practice. Organizations have learned how to form large teams that churn out large amounts of software. While quality varies widely, the result is a structured development pipeline: Requirements go in one side and shipping code comes…
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Forums
- Effective Automation to Support the Human Infrastructure in AI Red Teaming
  
  Alice Qian Zhang, Jina Suh, Mary L. Gray, Hong Shen
  
  AI systems increasingly make high-stakes decisions, from healthcare diagnostics to financial transactions. Ensuring these technologies align with ethical principles and do not contribute to societal harm is a growing priority. One emerging solution is red teaming: a process that simulates adversarial attacks to uncover vulnerabilities before they can be…
- Shaping the Future of Games in Society: Insights from a Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop
  
  Lennart Nacke, Anders Drachen, Johanna Pirker
  
  In March 2025, a landmark gathering of leading games research experts took place at Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany, for the Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop: The Future of Games in Society (https://bit.ly/3H3ckxz). This workshop tackled a critical question: How can we tap into the immense potential of games to create a…
- Designing-With, in Company
  
  Johanna Mehl, Sven Quadflieg, Satu Samira Hamed, Sebastian Gatz
  
  The Design+Posthumanism Network was created by Swedish designers in 2018 and has since grown into an international, interdisciplinary exchange platform and a living archive. The network includes artists, educators, entrepreneurs, and scholars who critically interrogate the biases embedded in design, its entanglements with anthropocentric worldviews, and its complicity in…
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Features
- Multimorphic Material Thinking for Sustainable HCI
  
  Holly McQuillan, Elvin Karana
  
  Whether relating to aesthetics, cost, ease of production, the scale of the material, or the body and the time frame contained in interaction design, conventional design's critical zone [1] has been stubbornly human centered. While our desire for technological novelty has been challenged and the adoption of dynamic notions…
- Stop Hiding My Controls: Hidden Interface Controls Are Affecting Usability
  
  Philip Kortum
  
  In the early 1960s, Douglas Engelbart [1] first introduced the notion of "knowledge in the world" versus "knowledge in the head" for computer interfaces—an idea that was later formalized and popularized by Donald Norman in his seminal book The Psychology of Everyday Things. From an interface design standpoint, knowledge…
- First Interactions: Designing Artificial Wombs for Preterm Babies
  
  Juliette van Haren
  
  One of the greatest concerns parents of extremely premature babies have is ensuring that their child receives the care needed to survive and develop. For these families the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) becomes a vital space where specialized medical teams support their babies through the earliest and most…
- Unleashing the Smart Killjoy
  
  Karin Ehrnberger, Loove Broms, Cecilia Katzeff
  
  Just over 10 years ago, Yolande Strengers wrote "Smart Energy in Everyday Life: Are You Designing for Resource Man?" an Interactions' cover story [1]. She launched the persona Resource Man (from now on referred to as RM) as the expression of the energy industry's conception of householders as rational…
- Tangible Interaction Design for Cervical Spondylosis Prevention
  
  Yuqian Ji, Hemin Du, Junfeng Wang
  
  In today's rapidly advancing tech world, people are spending more time than ever interacting with screens. Studies show a steady increase in daily smartphone usage globally. But with this rise in screen time comes a downside—repetitive or prolonged neck flexion is one of the risk factors for pain in…
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Cover story
- Rethinking Human-Centered Design: From Automation to Sustainable Innovation
  
  Michele Visciòla
  
  The world of design that puts humans first is at a crossroads. What is happening to user-centered design (UCD) and its twin, human-centered design (HCD)? The signals aren't looking great. Just this January, user experience veterans Jeff Sauro and Jim Lewis shared some troubling news. Their survey, conducted through…
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Calendar
- Calendar
  
  INTR Staff
  
  July DIS '25: ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (Funchal, Madeira) July 5–9, 2025 https://dis.acm.org/2025/ CUI '25: ACM Conversational User Interfaces Conference (Waterloo, Canada) July 8–10, 2025 https://cui.acm.org/2025/ COMPASS '25 (Toronto, Canada) July 22–25, 2025 https://compass.acm.org/ August CI '25: ACM Collective Intelligence (La Jolla, CA, USA) August 4–6, 2025…
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Exit
- Strike a Pose: Decoding Vogue Ukraine
  
  Renato Verdugo, Scott Minneman
  
  Contributor: Yaakov Lyubetsky Curators: Renato Verdugo and Scott Minneman AI-generated editorial image in the style of Vogue Ukraine. What makes a Vogue image unmistakably Vogue? Flip through any issue, and you'll recognize that elusive quality—an essence that is singular yet defies easy definition. To explore this visual signature, Vogue…
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Voices
- David A. Shamma
  
  David A. Shamma
  
  What are you working on right now? I've been an industry research scientist and research science manager since graduating with my Ph.D. from Northwestern University. I spent 10 years at Yahoo doing research at the intersection of CS, AI, and HCI. For half my time there, I was chief…
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Waves
- Beyond Ethics: Shaping the Future of Responsible Computing
  
  Karla Badillo-Urquiola, Laura S. Gaytán-Lugo, Roció Maciel Arellano
  
  Most computer science departments across the globe don't have a mandatory course on ethics or social impact [1,2]. Computer scientists, though, are quickly developing and advancing new technologies that are shaping our world and society. This rapid advancement has sparked conversations around responsible computing—a field dedicated to ensuring that…
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Commentary
- Origins (and Future) of the Participatory Design Conference
  
  Jeff Johnson, Douglas Schuler
  
  It was gratifying to read in Interactions last fall (https://bit.ly/3S1z1Vh) that the Participatory Design Conference is still taking place and has become fairly mainstream. As the authors pointed out, however, the conference seems to be experiencing a bit of an existential crisis: Is it primarily an academic conference for…
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