Self-centered research

As the world is falling apart, I’m busy knitting bras for myself, spying on my husband, and searching for frog eggs with my children and their neighborhood friends. I call this self-centered research, and claim to do it in the broader pursuit of interaction design otherwise, or rather, how I argue interaction design should change amid a world in crisis. In this talk, I present a series of case studies that differently engage with first-person approaches in design research, and through their difference, challenge the self as centered and offer conceptual pathways for an ongoing questioning of what it means to be human.

Karey Helms is an associate professor of design at Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden. She holds a PhD in human-computer interaction from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and was a Digital Futures postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm University. Her research draws upon care ethics and posthuman feminism to design for situations where technology is often considered out of place, such as in outdoor environments or intimate settings of care. Most recent publication: “The Ethics of an Aesthetics of Wonder for Planetary Care” (with Meike Schalk and Airi Lampinen; Diseña, (28), Article.5, 2026).