In the last decade, interaction design has found itself in a rather unique position. As an interdisciplinary field, drawing upon many domains such as Human Computer Interaction (HCI), product and graphic design, informatics, art, engineering and critical practice, it has grown the potential to situate itself in a critical position between emerging technologies and culture. Our take on interaction design draws on a purposefully broad range of contexts and approaches from HCI, product, graphic design and visualisation, media, communication and also from particular approaches to prototyping and crafting with electronics and software. In particular, we investigate emerging modes of doing exploratory design research that result from the newfound relations between product, interaction and communications design. Our communicative design research methods are aimed at exploring emerging technologies that work from a design informed position with distinct qualities of hands-on making and form-giving, where tangible materials and prototypes are formed alongside visualisation and other mediating processes.