UNLOOP

Symposium On Interaction and Computational Media Design

26 June, 2026 | Porto, Portugal + Online

Unloop symposium explores the friction, inconvenience, and playfulness in the interaction with computational media as inducers of meaning, reflectiveness and higher-order thinking.

Unloop aims to question the dominant paradigms of Human-Centred Design, that centre on flow and user satisfaction and that, despite having been contributing to the production of usable artefacts, have also been leading users into hedonistic loops that reinforce automatic, familiar, and repetitive behaviours.

Unloop takes place in the context of the Break the Loop research project, explores how friction, inconvenience, and other playful strategies can be used to promote meaning-making and reflectiveness in users, and to develop tools for designers and other stakeholders to access this knowledge.

Programme

  • 09:30 - 10:00  Opening & Welcome
  • 10:00 - 11:00  Session 1
    • Deception By Design: Anti-Piracy Deception In Video Games
      Rita Malaquias, Pedro Cardoso, Pamela Teubig & Eva Oliveira
      In Person
    • Cozy Cracks: Involuntary Diegetic Friction and Reflective Play in Domestic Game Spaces
      Maddalena Grattarola
      Remote
    • The Subversion of User-Friendly Design: Engagement Algorithms and the Erosion of Agency in the Attention Economy
      Ana Luísa Ferreira & Andreia Pinto de Sousa
      In Person
    • Narrative Wandering: Infinite Hallways in Video Games as a Storytelling Trope
      Arthur Kuhn
      Remote
  • 11:30 - 12:30  Session 2
    • Otherworldly Encounters: Wild Anecdotes on Interspecies Care
      Rosemary Lee & Risk Hazekamp
      In Person
    • Oracular interfaces: Epistemic Mischief as a Method for Playful Friction to Subvert AI Systems through Divination and Magic metaphors
      Gaston Welisch
      Remote
    • Inside the Black Box: Situated Decision-Making and Automation in the Art Installation “EZ Quality Sorter”
      Verena Friedrich
      In Person
    • From Flow to Friction: Thinking Spaces in VR and AI
      Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss
      Remote
    • Companionship Mechanics in AI-Driven Character Platforms: Deceptive and Friction Design in Character.ai
      Henrique Miguel, Lara Portelinha & Pedro Cardoso
      In Person
  • 13:00 - 14:30  Lunch Break
  • 14:30 - 15:30  Session 3
    • Productive Friction for Explainable AI Visualisation: Facilitating Genuine Understanding for Non-Experts
      Marco Heleno
      In Person
    • Using Narrative to Identify Frictions: A process for Requirements Definition in Software Projects
      Caio Gonçalves, Berenice Gonçalves & Gilson Braviano
      Remote
    • FLOP: Failures Lead to Original Perspectives
      Matilde Fernandes & Joana Couto da Silva
      In Person
    • Not Everything Resolves: Rethinking Menopause Beyond User-Centred Design
      Tehreem Hassan
      Remote
    • Enraging the Loop: Rage as Aesthetic Friction in Play
      Hugo Ramos & Pedro Cardoso
      In Person
  • 15:45 - 16:45  Session 4
    • Paradoxical Temporalities of Computation: Critical and Speculative Practices
      Sara Orsi, Miguel Carvalhais & Nuno Correia
      In Person
    • Underdetermined Fingerpainting as Playful Friction
      Deanna Gelosi
      Remote
    • Designing Ecocentric AI: Rethinking Ecosystem Representation in Large Language Models
      Joana Pestana, Diogo Silva, Miguel Carvalhais & Nuno Jardim Nunes
      In Person
    • The Poetic Image of the Machine: Dark Cartographies, Machinic Desire, and the Disruption of Flow
      Umut Gunduz
      Remote
    • Ontology Design in the Age of Climate Collapse
      Catherine Griffiths
      In Person
  • 17:00 - 18:00  Keynote Address
    Chickens and Bones: from Fossils to Algorithms
    Laura Beloff
    In Person
    Laura Beloff

    Laura Beloff (Ph.D.) is an internationally acclaimed artist and researcher, who functions in-between artistic production and academic research with a core in artistic methods. Beloff’s concept- and practice-driven research is located in the cross-section of art, science and technology. The research engages with art, humans, environment in affiliation with science and technology, biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, human enhancement and their theories. Beloff’s interest in recent years has focused on investigating the diminishing gap between concepts and disciplines of biology and technology. Currently, she is Associate Professor and Vice-Dean for Artistic and Creative Practices at Aalto University – School of Art, Design and Architecture.

    realitydisfunctions.org @laurabeloff

    Digital technology and data science are largely built on the premise that data is what matters. In this worldview, unpredictability, disagreement, and the messiness of life appear as errors to be engineered away. This talk explores moments, both in everyday life and in art, where friction emerges and, in doing so, opens up alternative ways of seeing and knowing.

    Traditional museum collections can be understood as constructed systems for ordering time, knowledge, and matter. A cabinet of rocks and fossilized bones is often treated as a repository of specimen, data, and scientific heritage. But these collections also preserve and project a worldview - with labels, drawers, catalogues, storage structures, classification systems and institutional traditions. A collection can be seen as a technology for world-making - also when it carries the embedded legacies of colonialism. Consider a bone that spends millennia in soil, decades in a museum as a fossil, and then, today, it is packed away because space is costly and gained profit is unlikely. In such moments, friction surfaces among values, economies, and especially in shifting worldviews. One should also ask what remains out of sight, hidden or lost, when we choose what to keep or what to discard.

    Today, technology cannot be disentangled from the material, physical world – everything terrestrial is entangled together. Our contemporary lives unfold between algorithms, data-bases, AI-driven forms of governance, strata, fossils and biological life. Artists respond to this situation by developing strange and speculative tools as artworks hat do not simply represent the world but intervene critically in how it is organized, perceived, and valued. Occasionally these works also explore plausible futures with alternative trajectories.

Book of Abstracts

Book of Abstracts Cover

UNLOOP 2026: Book of Abstracts of the Symposium on Interaction and Computational Media Design.

Edited by Miguel Carvalhais, Pedro Cardoso, Eliana Santiago, Fabrício Fava.

ISBN: 978-989-9279-31-5

DOI: 10.34626/2026/9r94-sx78

151 pages


Download PDF

Registration

  • Authors must register before 17th of April 27th of April.
  • Co-authors and the general audience should register before 25th of June.
  • Registration is free. Please register via the Eventbrite page.

Venue

The symposium will take place at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (FBAUP), in the Aula Magna, where the Break the Loop project is based within the Research Institute in Art, Design and Society (i2ADS).

Call for Abstracts [CLOSED]

Unloop calls for extended abstracts by scholars, designers, artists, and students working within the expanded field of this theme. We invite you to submit theoretical, practice-based or experimental research work, considering, but not limited to:

  • User-Centered, Human-Centred, More-Than-Human Design;
  • Playful, Gameful, Emotional Design;
  • Critical, Speculative, Activist Design;
  • Pervasive, Persuasive, Deceptive, Seamless, Smooth Design;
  • Friction, Slow, (Dis)Engagement Design.
Submit extended abstracts of up to 1.500 words (excluding references), in English, following the formatting in the provided template. Reviews of submissions will be double-blind, so ensure the file is completely anonymised (i.e., omit author-related information and explicit self-citations). Accepted abstracts will be invited to hold a 10-minute presentation at Unloop and to submit a full paper for a Special Issue of the Journal of Digital Media and Interaction to be published later in 2026.

Submissions [Closed]

  • All works must be submitted via Microsoft CMT;
  • Submissions must be original and not previously published;
  • At least one author of each selected abstract must register and present at the symposium to be eligible for an invitation to submit a full paper to a Special Issue of the Journal of Digital Media and Interaction.
  • The symposium’s working language is English.

Important Dates

  • DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS
    16th of March 29th of March
  • Notification to Authors
    30th of March 13th of April
  • Registration
    Deadline for Authors
    17th of April 27th of April
  • Symposium
    26th of June

Team

Contact

For any questions, please contact pcardoso@fba.up.pt