This workshop explores cases where stories and artifacts become closely intertwined, showing how each can shape and extend the other. Artifacts embed narratives of labor, skill, and collaboration, while stories are grounded in encounters with materials and practices. Building on the CHI 2025 workshop How do design stories work?, we now turn attention to the entanglement of stories and material things: samples, prototypes, swatches, machines. What happens when we consider stories and things of design research together? How do stories shift when told with or through a material? What vocabularies emerge when narrative and material accounts are brought into relation?

We invite participants to submit a 2–4 page position story accompanied by a thing or representation of a thing: a photo, sketch, sample, swatch, prototype, or artifact. These thing–story pairs will form the basis of the workshop’s activities.

We welcome participants from across HCI and related fields, including research through design, biodesign, textile and material practices, material science, first-person methodologies, and interdisciplinary design–science collaborations. The workshop aims to bring together people who work with tangible materials, systems, or prototypes and are curious about how these things can be narrated.

The main outcome will be a collaboratively produced Glossary of Design Stories, shared as a tangible zine and open-access PDF on this website, alongside a gallery of artifact–story pairs.