AROs In The Homeware Lab

Alternative Research Outcomes (AROs) foreground knowledge that is embodied, situated, and relational, pursuing values that are “unaligned” with traditional academic dissemination, such as fluidity, community-focused values and objectives, responsibility, and shared authorship.

AROs can take many forms: audio documentaries, films, DIY tutorials, zines, exhibitions, brochures, design fiction, comics, podcasts, interactive artifacts, community workshops, and many more.

We, as a Homeware Lab, producing alternative outcomes has long been part of our previous and ongoing projects.

Table-Non-Table, DIY Tutorial

Table-non-table is a slowly moving stack of paper on a motorized aluminum chassis. It was designed to live in people's homes over time and be used however they saw fit, whether as a coffee table, a seat, or a curiosity for pets. Instead of documenting the design only in papers, we published a step-by-step DIY tutorial on Instructables. The tutorial openly shared the design process with the DIY community so that anyone could build their own.

Capra, Film & Zine

Capra is a system for capturing, storing, and revisiting personal hiking data over the long term. To show how it works and what living with it feels like, we made a short film. Our DIS 2024 pictorial describes how the filmmaking process exposed frictions between the theory behind Capra and what could be shown on screen. The film also showed how video can carry research artifacts to wider audiences.

In summer 2026, we produced an illustrated zine for Capra with Lydia (a MITACS intern) that shows how the Capra system works and how people use Capra, in a form readers can hold, flip through, and pass along.

QueuePlayer, Video & Zine

Queue Player is a network of four domestic music player, letting four close friends listen together in sync across distance, exploring their combined listening histories by tapping out a tempo. Alongside the CHI 2025 paper, we made a video that explains how the players look and work, using stop-motion and collage, …

… and a zine that shows how many songs are shared between four participants.

Beyond Looking Back, Public Exhibition

Beyond Looking Back: I Cannot See, But My Experience Is Rich is a public exhibition extends Min's seven-year co-design research with six collaborators (five blind people and a sighted partner): Johnny and Desi, Betty and Don, and Yuko and Thilo. The exhibition will bring together design fiction stories, an illustrated storybook, a five-minute short film, an audio documentary, sonic mementos, and tactile works, each offering a different way through sound, touch, and story, so that visitors can learn how our blind collaborators share memories and experience the world. (The exhibition is currently in development.)

Looking Forward

Together, these trajectories show how alternative ways of sharing HCI research have grown, and how Homeware Lab is working to recognize, value, and deliberately develop research outcomes beyond conventional academic dissemination.

Shaping The Concept Of AROs

The concept of ARO began with Min's doctoral research when he co-designed reminiscence technologies with blind collaborators. Wanting to share the findings with participants from the initial exploratory study, we spent 8 months producing an audio documentary. We restructured the academic writing for listening and translated jargon into plain language. Making and sharing the documentary showed us that non-traditional formats can carry research knowledge in ways that feel meaningful to both participants and wider audiences.

Building on this project, Min led a workshop on Alternative Research Outcomes at DIS 2023. The workshop brought together researchers and designers exploring how sound recordings, documentary films, zines, exhibitions, interactive artifacts, and community workshops can extend the outcomes of HCI research, showing how rich current practices are, and where they fall short.

This workshop also showed the need for a shared vocabulary and a community around these practices. We kept the conversation going with collaborators and several workshop attendees, refining the definition and values of AROs.

This work led to our CHI 2025 paper that analyzes six ARO case studies and identifies four qualities that distinguish AROs from other research outputs: translational, situational, transparent, and initiatory.

In April 2026, Min led a Meet-Up session at CHI 2026 in Barcelona with a group of co-organizers. The Meet-Up is a newly introduced format as a drop-in space open to all attendees. With several activity stations running at once, this session hosted more than 80 attendees, sharing what might come after their own research, and the value of producing their research outcomes in creative, alternative formats.

Find out more at https://alternativeresearchoutcomes.com/.