Beyond Claiming Sovereign AI: Motivations, Challenges, and Contradictions in Developing and Deploying Local Foundation Models in South KoreaFoundation models are predominantly trained on English-language and Western-centric data, often marginalizing non-English contexts. While recent scholarship calls for more localized models, there remains limited empirical research on how such models are developed and deployed. This paper examines the sociotechnical dynamics of local model development and deployment in South Korea, where efforts to build “sovereign AI” reflect aspirations for greater autonomy over data, infrastructure, and cultural alignment. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 15 Korean AI practitioners, we surface key motivations, such as linguistic and cultural specificity, regulatory compliance, and reduced dependence on foreign technologies, that are entangled with broader imaginaries of sovereignty. At the same time, these efforts face constraints including limited GPU access, scarcity of Korean-language data, and reliance on global infrastructures. We argue that AI sovereignty should be understood not as an abstract political principle but as situated practices shaped by opportunities and constraints of local sociotechnical and regulatory contexts.2026ICInha Cha et al.Georgia Institute of TechnologyHuman-LLM CollaborationAI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityLow-Resource Languages & Digital InclusionCHI
Reflections Towards an Ecology of Internet Connectivity: Three Speculative Scenarios Involving Foot PedalsHCI's dominant assumptions of always-on and relatively ubiquitous internet connectivity often overlook other potential configurations of connectivity, which may embody alternative social values and politics, or promote alternative types of technology practices. Building on research exploring alternate configurations of connectivity, we develop and present three speculative scenarios in a North American context that configure internet connectivity differently than these assumptions. Each scenario features a "foot pedal" that mediates internet connectivity. Through the scenarios, we conceptualize connectivity as a multi-dimensional ecology. The scenarios explore how alternative configurations of connectivity implicate concerns related to dimensions of: social norms and rituals; maintenance, repair and governance; interests and decision-making beyond individual choice; and broader inequalities and systems of power. These suggest possible alternative ends and goals of internet connectivity. Finally, we offer reflections from our experience developing these scenarios for HCI scholars working with speculative practices.2026RWRichmond Y. Wong et al.Georgia Institute of TechnologyDesign FictionParticipatory DesignTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
Tooling Justice: Articulating Equity Work Through Design ToolkitsDesign equity toolkits are increasingly being invoked to address the ethical and political consequences of technology design, yet they are criticized for being either too generic or too narrow to address the complex realities of equity in design. To examine the intended purpose of these toolkits from creators' perspectives and explore how designers envision using them in practice, we conducted a two-phase study: interviews with toolkit creators and a walkthrough demonstration workshop with early-career UX designers. Our findings highlight divergent values around toolkit functionality: while creators emphasize flexibility and reflection, early-career designers express a need for actionable pathways to help mediate design equity work within corporate hierarchies. We show how toolkits act as supports for articulation work in design equity, their role as boundary objects for values translation, and conclude by framing how design equity toolkits can be re-conceptualized as legitimacy-building artefacts with capacites to help early-designers advocate for more equitable futures.2026APAdrian Petterson et al.University of TorontoInclusive DesignTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIParticipatory DesignCHI
Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social MediaDecentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in context. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We propose designing for inter-community governance: mechanisms that support relationships between communities toward coordinating on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas discussed in workshops. These ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources and tools that highlight three key principles for design: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how workshop ideas might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing more broadly.2026SHSohyeon Hwang et al.Princeton UniversityContent Moderation & Platform GovernanceCommunity Collaboration & WikipediaCHI
The Values of Value in AI Adoption: Rethinking Efficiency in UX Designers' WorkplacesAlthough organizations increasingly position AI adoption as a pathway to competitiveness and innovation, organizations' perspectives on productivity and efficiency often clash with workers' perspectives on AI's economic and social value. Through design workshops with 15 UX designers, we examine how AI adoption unfolds across individual, team, and organizational scales. At the individual level, designers weighed efficiency, skill development, and professional worth. At the team level, they negotiated collaboration, responsibility, and rigor. At the organizational level, adoption was shaped by compliance requirements and organizational norms. Across these scales, discourses of efficiency carried social and ethical dimensions of responsibility, trust, and autonomy. We view adoption as a site where roles, relationships, and power are reconfigured. We argue that AI adoption should be understood as a process of negotiating values, and call for future work examining how AI systems redistribute responsibility among team members, while understanding how such shifts could strengthen worker agency.2026ICInha Cha et al.Georgia Institute of TechnologyAI-Assisted Decision-Making & AutomationAI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityInclusive DesignCHI
"I see it, I scroll past it.": Exploring Perceptions of Social Media Political Discourse Among Gen Z Young Adult Women In The U.S.Social media platforms have been widely perceived as centers of political discourse, and have been shown to facilitate political participation among young adults (18-26 years). However, as the effects of online political discourse and behaviors have become pervasive offline, significantly affecting global political processes such as deterring women from public political office and influencing election outcomes, it raises questions regarding how young adult users engage in these online political spaces of discourse. In this paper, we focus on the perceptions and forms of engagement of Gen Z social media users, specifically those of Gen Z young adult women. In this paper we broadly ask, how do voting-age Generation (Gen) Z young adult women perceive spaces of political discourse on social media, and do these perceptions affect how they choose to engage in them? To explore this question, we conducted 17 interviews with voting-age Gen Z women across the United States. We found that our participants were largely critical of social media as spaces of political discourse. They were skeptical of the credibility of the political information shared on social media, questioned the usefulness of sharing political information through social media, and felt that social media was not conducive to having productive political discussions. We find that participant perceptions of social media political discourse led to them limiting their online engagement or disengaging entirely from online public political spaces, but expanding their offline private political engagement through in-person discussion. Our findings indicate that our participants were not politically disinterested, but rather did not partake in public forms of social media political engagement, leading us to question and reconsider widespread interpretations of ‘political participation’ that center and emphasize public forms of action and expression. Drawing on our findings, we propose that the practice of ‘disengagement’ from public spaces of online political discourse should be considered a dimension of political engagement and not separate from it. In proposing this, we also broadly question the efficacy of social media as a forum to promote and facilitate political discourse.2025PCPooja Casula et al.Partisan Discourse OnlineCSCW
Understanding Socio-technical Factors Configuring AI Non-Use in UX Work PracticesAI tools are often promoted as revolutionary for streamlining labor- and cost-intensive UX workflows. Although their actual adoption and usage are more complex and nuanced than often portrayed, instances, where AI may be unnecessary or even undesirable, are frequently overlooked. Therefore, we aim to gain deeper insights into technology non-use—viewed not merely as a binary opposite to use but as a spectrum of practices. Through semi-structured interviews with 15 UX practitioners, we identified factors influencing non-use across individual, professional, organizational, and societal dimensions. We use a sociotechnical assemblage lens to explore how multiple layers of an individual’s context interact within professional settings, how diverse politics intersect within individuals or organizations, and how these interactions evolve over time. We propose implications for rethinking AI application design and evaluation, for considering policy frameworks and AI design together, and deliberating about where AI should and should not be used.2025ICInha Cha et al.Georgia Institute of TechnologyHuman-LLM CollaborationAI-Assisted Decision-Making & AutomationAI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityCHI
Ethics Pathways: A Design Activity for Reflecting on Ethical Decision-making in HCI ResearchThis paper introduces Ethics Pathways, a design activity aimed at understanding HCI and design researchers' ethics engagements and flows during their research process. Despite a strong ethical commitment in these fields, challenges persist in grasping the complexity of researchers' engagement with ethics—practices conducted to operationalize ethics—in situated institutional contexts. Ethics Pathways, developed through six playtesting sessions, offers a design approach to understanding the complexities of researchers' past ethics engagements in their work. This activity involves four main tasks: recalling ethical incidents; describing stakeholders involved in the situation; recounting their actions or speculative alternatives; and reflection and emotional walk-through. The paper reflects on the role of design decisions and facilitation strategies in achieving these goals. The design activity contributes to the discourse on ethical HCI research by conceptualizing ethics engagement as a part of ongoing research processing, highlighting connections between individual affective experiences, social interactions across power differences, and institutional goals.2024ICInha Cha et al.AI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityResearch Ethics & Open ScienceDIS
The Future of HCI-Policy CollaborationPolicies significantly shape computation's societal impact, a crucial HCI concern. However, challenges persist when HCI professionals attempt to integrate policy into their work or affect policy outcomes. Prior research considered these challenges at the "border" of HCI and policy. This paper asks: What if HCI considers policy integral to its intellectual concerns, placing system-people-policy interaction not at the border but nearer the center of HCI research, practice, and education? What if HCI fosters a mosaic of methods and knowledge contributions that blend system, human, and policy expertise in various ways, just like HCI has done with blending system and human expertise? We present this re-imagined HCI-policy relationship as a provocation and highlight its usefulness: It spotlights previously overlooked system-people-policy interaction work in HCI. It unveils new opportunities for HCI's futuring, empirical, and design projects. It allows HCI to coordinate its diverse policy engagements, enhancing its collective impact on policy outcomes.2024QYQian Yang et al.Cornell UniversityAlgorithmic Fairness & BiasInclusive DesignTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
Co-design Partners as Transformative Learners: Imagining Ideal Technology for Schools by Centering Speculative Relationships Emergent technologies like artificial intelligence have been proposed to address issues of inequity in schools, yet tend to ossify the status quo because they address needs within an already inequitable system. In this paper, we draw from speculative participatory approaches across HCI and the learning sciences, and present a novel approach to co-design that forefronts supporting historically minoritized youth in developing transformative agency to change their schools based on their valued hopes, practices, and concerns. We argue that when co-design spaces forefront relational development, expansive technological objects emerge as a byproduct. We present a case study of expansive dreaming with U.S. historically minoritized students about the use of artificial intelligence to support classroom collaboration. Methodologically, we demonstrate how physically visiting spaces of collective agency serves as a powerful perceptual bridge to imagining joyful, equitable possibilities for schooling. Our approach yields new visions for schooling and new metaphors for artificial intelligence.2024MCMichael Chang et al.UC BerkeleySpecial Education TechnologyDeveloping Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)Participatory DesignCHI
Broadening Privacy and Surveillance: Eliciting Interconnected Values with a Scenarios Workbook on Smart Home Cameras We use a design workbook of speculative scenarios as a values elicitation activity with 14 participants. The workbook depicts use case scenarios with smart home camera technologies that involve surveillance and uneven power relations. The scenarios were initially designed by the researchers to explore scenarios of privacy and surveillance within three social relationships involving “primary” and “non-primary” users: Parents-Children, Landlords-Tenants, and Residents-Domestic Workers. When the scenarios were utilized as part of a values elicitation activity with participants, we found that they reflected on a broader set of interconnected social values beyond privacy and surveillance, including autonomy and agency, physical safety, property rights, trust and accountability, and fairness. The paper suggests that future research about ethical issues in smart homes should conceptualize privacy as interconnected with a broader set of social values (which can align or be in tension with privacy), and reflects on considerations for doing research with non-primary users.2023RWRichmond Y. Wong et al.Privacy by Design & User ControlPrivacy Perception & Decision-MakingSmart Home Privacy & SecurityDIS
Why Johnny Can’t Prompt: How Non-AI Experts Try (and Fail) to Design LLM PromptsPre-trained large language models ("LLMs") like GPT-3 can engage in fluent, multi-turn instruction-taking out-of-the-box, making them attractive materials for designing natural language interactions. Using natural language to steer LLM outputs ("prompting") has emerged as an important design technique potentially accessible to non-AI-experts. Crafting effective prompts can be challenging, however, and prompt-based interactions are brittle. Here, we explore whether non-AI-experts can successfully engage in "end-user prompt engineering" using a design probe—a prototype LLM-based chatbot design tool supporting development and systematic evaluation of prompting strategies. Ultimately, our probe participants explored prompt designs opportunistically, not systematically, and struggled in ways echoing end-user programming systems and interactive machine learning systems. Expectations stemming from human-to-human instructional experiences, and a tendency to overgeneralize, were barriers to effective prompt design. These findings have implications for non-AI-expert-facing LLM-based tool design and for improving LLM-and-prompt literacy among programmers and the public, and present opportunities for further research.2023JZJ.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira et al.BerkeleyHuman-LLM CollaborationAI-Assisted Decision-Making & AutomationCHI
Accidentally Evil: On Questionable Values in Smart Home Co-DesignAn ongoing mystery of HCI is how do well-intentioned designers consistently enable products with unintentionally evil consequences. Using “questionable values” as a lens, we retell and analyze four design scenarios for smart homes that were created by participants with an IoT toolkit we designed. The selected design scenarios reveal practices that violate principles of responsible smart home design. Through our analysis we show (1) how participants explore sensor-driven objectification of the home then leverage data for surveillance, nudging, and control over others; (2) how the dominant technosolutionist narratives of efficiency and productivity ground such questionable values; (3) and how the materiality of mass-produced sensors pre-mediates questionable design scenarios. We discuss how to attend to and utilize questionable values in design: Making space for questionable values will empower design researchers to better “look around corners”, anticipating tomorrow’s concerns and forestalling the worst of their harms.2023ABArne Berger et al.Anhalt University of Applied SciencesSmart Home Interaction DesignSmart Home Privacy & SecurityTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI