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Chewing It Over: Revealing Tensions and New Directions for More-Than-Human Relational Ethics Through Speculative Design

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Abstract

HCI research increasingly engages with relational notions of ethics, such as care, felt and transcorporeal ethics, as new paradigms for design. Here, we discuss these relational notions in the context of multispecies design, extending it to incorporate Acampora's concept of Corporal Compassion, which grounds ethics on a shared sense of livingness and vulnerabilities across beings. In order to elicit corporal compassion towards microorganisms, we designed a dining-theatre intervention, which invited participants to ingest and assign moral values to dishes prepared with speculative human-microbial hybrid cells originated from beings exposed to similar levels of bodily distress. Tried with 47 participants in 7 sessions, the work surfaced the idiosyncrasies behind participants' moral frameworks, and how socialised prescriptive frameworks of ethics sometimes acted as closure towards relational approaches. We discuss how HCI could rethink traditional frameworks of ethics in ways that support relationality, while calling for researchers to make space for moral hesitation.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCHI 2026 - Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
EditorsNuria Oliver, David A. Shamma, Heloisa Candello, Pablo Cesar, Pedro Lopes, Alessandro Bozzon, Thomas Kosch, Vera Liao, Xiaojuan Ma, Valentino Artizzu, Fiona Draxler, Gustavo Lopez, Anke V. Reinschluessel, Xin Tong, Phoebe O. Toups Dugas
Place of PublicationBarcelona
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Number of pages17
ISBN (Electronic)9798400722783
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 Apr 2026
Event2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2026 - Barcelona, Spain
Duration: 13 Apr 202617 Apr 2026

Publication series

NameConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

Conference

Conference2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2026
Country/TerritorySpain
CityBarcelona
Period13/04/2617/04/26

Keywords

  • Biodesign
  • Corporal Compassion
  • Felt Ethics
  • Human-Food Interaction
  • Moral Deliberation
  • More-than-Human
  • Multispecies Design
  • Relational Ethics
  • Speculative Design
  • Transcorporeality

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Software

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