“It’s more of a vibe I’m going for”: Designing Text-to-Music Generation Interfaces for Video CreatorsBackground music plays a crucial role in social media videos, yet finding the right music remains a challenge for video creators. These creators, often not music experts, struggle to describe their musical goals and compare options. AI text-to-music generation presents an opportunity to address these challenges by allowing users to generate music through text prompts; however, these models often require musical expertise and are difficult to control. In this paper, we explore how to incorporate music generation into video editing workflows. A formative study with video creators revealed challenges in articulating and iterating on musical preferences, as creators described music as "vibes" rather than with explicit musical vocabulary. Guided by these insights, we developed a creative assistant for music generation using editable vibe-based recommendations and structured refinement of music output. A user study showed that the assistant supports exploration, while direct prompting is more effective for precise goals. Our findings offer design recommendations for AI music tools for video creators.2025NHNoor Hammad et al.Generative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Music Composition & Sound Design ToolsVideo Production & EditingDIS
Diving into the Abyss: Exploring Deep Sea Connection and Curiosity through Virtual Reality This paper presents an investigation of the potential of virtual reality (VR) to bridge the gap between humans and the largely unexplored deep sea, using the immersive, playful experience of "Echo of the Abyss" (EotA). Built around the structure of a deep-sea dive experience, EotA aims to enhance users' sense of interconnectedness with underwater environments and stimulate curiosity about marine life. The qualitative analysis reveals a heightened empathy, respect for aquatic life, and a newfound interest in real-world diving experiences. Quantitative results indicate a marginal increase in positive perceptions towards the sea. From these findings, we discuss VR as an effective transformational tool to foster a deeper ecological consciousness. Our contributions can benefit HCI researchers and game designers interested in designing ocean sustainability-driven experiences and games.2025BMBeatrice Maggipinto et al.Carnegie Mellon University, HCII; University of Lisbon, ITI/LARSyS, ISTImmersion & Presence ResearchHuman-Nature Relationships (More-than-Human Design)CHI
Eye into AI: Evaluating the Interpretability of Explainable AI Techniques through a Game With a PurposeRecent developments in explainable AI (XAI) aim to improve the transparency of black-box models. However, empirically evaluating the interpretability of these XAI techniques is still an open challenge. The most common evaluation method is algorithmic performance, but such an approach may not accurately represent how interpretable these techniques are to people. A less common but growing evaluation strategy is to leverage crowd-workers to provide feedback on multiple XAI techniques to compare them. However, these tasks often feel like work and may limit participation. We propose a novel, playful, human-centered method for evaluating XAI techniques: a Game With a Purpose (GWAP), Eye into AI, that allows researchers to collect human evaluations of XAI at scale. We provide an empirical study demonstrating how our GWAP supports evaluating and comparing the agreement between three popular XAI techniques (LIME, Grad-CAM, and Feature Visualization) and humans, as well as evaluating and comparing the interpretability of those three XAI techniques on applied to a deep learning model for image classification. The data collected from Eye into AI offers convincing evidence that GWAPs can be used to evaluate and compare XAI techniques.2023KMKatelyn Morrison et al.XAI 1CSCW
The Potential of Diverse Youth as Stakeholders in Identifying and Mitigating Algorithmic Bias for a Future of Fairer AI"Youth regularly use artificial intelligence (AI) technology, but it is increasingly well-known that AI can have bias. In turn, this bias can cause harm on small and large scales, especially for those underrepresented in tech fields. Recently, users have played active roles in surfacing and mitigating harm from algorithmic bias. However, despite being frequent users of AI, youth have been under-explored as potential contributors to the future of ethical technology. We consider three notions that may be at the root of youth facing barriers to playing an active role in fair AI, which are youth (1) cannot understand the technical aspects of AI, (2) cannot understand the ethical issues around AI, and (3) need protection from serious topics related to bias and injustice. In this study, we worked with youth (N = 30) in first through twelfth grade and parents (N = 6) to explore how youth can be part of identifying algorithmic bias and designing future systems to address problematic technology behavior. We found that youth are capable of identifying and articulating algorithmic bias, often in great detail. Participants suggested different ways users could give feedback for AI that reflects their values of diversity and inclusion. Youth who may have less experience with computing or exposure to societal structures can be supported by peers or adults with more of this knowledge, leading to critical conversations about fair AI. This work illustrates youths' insights, suggesting that they should be integrated in building a future of fair and accountable AI.2023JSJaemarie Solyst et al.Youth PerspectivesCSCW
“I Would Like to Design”: Black Girls Analyzing and Ideating Fair and Accountable AIArtificial intelligence (AI) literacy is especially important for those who may not be well-represented in technology design. We worked with ten Black girls in fifth and sixth grade from a predominantly Black school to understand their perceptions around fair and accountable AI and how they can have an empowered role in the creation of AI. Thematic analysis of discussions and activity artifacts from a summer camp and after-school session revealed a number of findings around how Black girls: perceive AI, primarily consider fairness as niceness and equality (but may need support considering other notions, such as equity), consider accountability, and envision a just future. We also discuss how the learners can be positioned as decision-making designers in creating AI technology, as well as how AI literacy learning experiences can be empowering.2023JSJaemarie Solyst et al.Carnegie Mellon UniversitySTEM Education & Science CommunicationAlgorithmic Fairness & BiasEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsCHI
Interactive Fiction Provotypes for Coping with Interpersonal RacismReducing uncertainty around the nature of racist interactions is one of the key motivations driving individual behaviors for coping with those incidents. However, there are few appropriate technologies to support BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) in engaging in social uncertainty reduction around this vulnerable, sensitive topic. This paper reports on an exploratory design study investigating how social technology might facilitate uncertainty reduction through three ``provotypes'' - provocative prototypes of user-generated speculative design concepts. U.S.-based participants engaged with the provotypes through an interactive fiction to explore their usefulness in the context of a racist microaggression. Results showed that engaging the provotypes through interactive fiction facilitated complex and productive interactions and critiques. This work contributes a novel method for conducting exploratory design, remote user studies using interactive fiction as well as priorities, tensions, and further information what role, if any, technology might play in managing racist interactions.2022ATAlexandra To et al.Northeastern UniversityInclusive DesignEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingCHI
Leveraging the Twitch Platform and Gamification to Generate Home Audio DatasetsTraining AI systems requires large datasets. While there are a range of existing methods for collecting such data, such as paid work on crowdsourcing platforms, the strengths and weaknesses of each method leads us to believe that new, complementary methods are needed. The Polyphonic project contributes a novel method for collecting real-world data by piggybacking on game streaming communities such as Twitch, which capture over a trillion minutes of viewer attention a year. By embedding activities within the sociotechnical context of the stream, we can leverage some of this attention for data collection and processing. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a proof-of-concept system for collecting home audio data. We conducted a field study in four live streams and found that our proof-of-concept effectively supports data capture. We also contribute further design insights about stream-based data collection systems.2021NMNikolas Martelaro et al.Live Streaming & Spectating ExperienceOpen-Source Collaboration & Code ReviewCitizen Science & Crowdsourced DataDIS
Fostering Equitable Help-Seeking for K-3 Students in Low Income and Rural ContextsAdaptive Collaborative Learning Support (ACLS) systems improve collaboration and learning for students over individual work or collaboration with non-adaptive support. However, many ACLS systems are ill-suited for rural contexts where students often need multiple kinds of support to complete tasks, may speak languages unsupported by the system, and require more than pre-assigned tutor-tutee student pairs for more equitable learning. We designed an intervention that fosters more equitable help-seeking by automatically detecting student struggles and prompts them to seek help from specific peers that can help. We conducted a mixed-methods experimental study with 98 K-3 students in a rural village in Tanzania over a one-month period, evaluating how the system affects student interactions, system engagement, and student learning. Our intervention increased student interactions by almost 4 times compared to the control condition, increased domain knowledge interactions, and propelled students to engage in more cognitively challenging activities.2021JUJudith Odili Uchidiuno et al.Carnegie Mellon UniversityK-12 Digital Education ToolsCollaborative Learning & Peer TeachingDeveloping Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)CHI
Homecoming: Exploring Returns to Long-Term Single Player GamesWe present an autobiographical design journey exploring the experience of returning to long-term single player games. Continuing progress from a previously saved game, particularly when substantial time has passed, is an understudied area in games research. To begin our exploration in this domain, we investigated what the return experience is like first-hand. By returning to four long-term single player games played extensively in the past, we revealed a phenomenon we call The Pivot Point, a ‘eureka’ moment in return gameplay. The pivot point anchors our design explorations, where we created prototypes to leverage the pivot point in reconnecting with the experience. These return experiences and subsequent prototyping iterations inform our understanding of how to design better returns to gameplay, which can benefit both producers and consumers of long-term single player games.2021NHNoor Hammad et al.University of Calgary, Carnegie Mellon UniversityGame UX & Player BehaviorRole-Playing & Narrative GamesCHI
Mapping Design Spaces for Teaching Audience Participation in Game Live StreamingLive streaming sites such as Twitch offer new ways for remote audiences to engage with and affect gameplay. While research has considered how audiences interact with games, HCI lacks clear demarcations of the potential design spaces for audience participation. This paper introduces and validates a theme map of audience participation in game live streaming for student designers. This map is a lens that reveals relationships among themes and sub-themes of Agency, Pacing, and Community---to explore, reflect upon, describe, and make sense of emerging, complex design spaces. We are the first to articulate such a lens, and to provide a reflective tool to support future research and education. To create the map, we perform a thematic analysis of design process documents of a course on audience participation for Twitch, using this analysis to visually coordinate relationships between important themes. To help student designers analyze and reflect on existing experiences, we supplement the theme map with a set of mapping procedures. We validate the applicability of our map with a second set of student designers, who found the map useful as a comparative and reflective tool.2021ASAlina Striner et al.Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)Multiplayer & Social GamesLive Streaming & Spectating ExperienceCHI
Reducing Uncertainty and Offering Comfort: Designing Technology for Coping with Interpersonal RacismRanging from subtle to overt, unintentional to systemic, navigating racism is additional everyday work for many people. Yet the needs of people who experience racism have been overlooked as a fertile ground for better technology. Through a series of workshops we call Foundational Fiction, we engaged BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) in participatory design to identify qualities of technology that can support people coping before, during, and after a racist interaction. Participants developed storyboards for digital tools that offer advice, predict consequences, identify racist remarks and intervene, educate both targets and perpetrators about interpersonal and systemic racism, and more. In the paper we present our workshop method utilizing interactive fiction, participants' design concepts, prevalent themes (reducing uncertainty and offering comfort), and we provide critical analysis of the complexity of technology in these contexts. This work identifies specific opportunities for exploring anti-racist social tools.2021ATAlexandra To et al.Northeastern UniversityEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
"They Just Don't Get It": Towards Social Technologies for Coping with Interpersonal RacismOver 35% of Americans belong to racial minority groups. Racism targeting these individuals results in a range of harmful physical, psychological, and practical consequences. The present work aims to shed light on the current sense-making and support-seeking practices exhibited by targets of racism, as well as to identify the core needs and barriers that future socio-technical interventions could potentially address. The long-term goal of this work is to understand how CSCW researchers and designers could best support members of marginalized groups to make sense of and to seek support for experiences with racism. Narrative episode interviews with targets of racism revealed a number of key entry points for intervention. For example, participants’ personal stories confirmed that uncertainty, both about the nature and consequences of the experience of racism, is a key motivator for support-seeking. In addition, despite the need for support, participants largely do not trust public forms of social media for support-seeking. We discuss how participants’ accounts of the complex labor involved in determining who "gets it" in identifying potential supporters, and in navigating the complexities of trust and agency in sharing their experiences, present clear implications for the design of new socio-technical platforms for members of racial minority groups.2020ATAlexandra To et al.Understanding and Fighting Toxicity / ModerationCSCW
Exploring Hybrid Virtual-Physical HomesThere has been a great deal of research regarding the ways that people conceptualize and interact with places they call "home." This work has been extended to virtual reality primarily in the context of design tools. Here, we explore the idea of a hybrid virtual-physical home that uses virtual space to supplement an existing physical home. We identify variation in the spatial context of place attachment to homes. A user study (N = 25) revealed the expectations and needs these groups have for virtual home spaces, including security, familiarity, and community. We prototyped and playtested three virtual rooms, and identified design features that supported feelings of home. Finally, we present challenges to designing home-like VR environments that can shape future research in this area. As virtual reality grows increasingly accessible, these findings will inform the design of virtual spaces.2020LHLauren Herckis et al.Social & Collaborative VRMixed Reality WorkspacesSmart Home Interaction DesignDIS
Designing Interactive Scaffolds to Encourage Reflection on Peer FeedbackFeedback is a key element of project-based learning, but only if students reflect on and learn from the feedback they receive. Students often struggle to deeply engage with feedback, whether due to lack of confidence, time, or skill. This work seeks to identify challenges that make reflecting on feedback difficult for students, and to design possible solutions for supporting reflection. Through observing two university game design courses, our research found that without concrete reflection strategies, students tended to be attracted to feedback that looks useful, but does not necessarily them move forward. When we introduced three different reflection scaffolds to support students, we found that the most effective approach promoted interactive learning by allowing time for self-reflection before team reflection, offering time limits, providing activities for feedback prioritization, helping teams align their goals, and equalizing team member participation. We present design guidelines for future systems to support reflection on feedback.2020ACAmy Cook et al.Collaborative Learning & Peer TeachingDIS
Hacked Time: Design and Evaluation of a Self-Efficacy Based Cybersecurity GameA major reason why people don't use security tools online is that they perceive them as difficult and challenging, resulting in the lack of self-efficacy. Previous research has looked at improving user security attitude and practices through a variety of interventions, including transformational games. These games, targeted at improving security attitude and promoting change through gameplay, offer a new perspective on cybersecurity education. In this research we present the design and evaluation of Hacked Time, a desktop game that uses an integrative approach that incorporates Bandura's self-efficacy design framework to improve player self-efficacy. Using a randomized control trial (n=178), we demonstrate that our game is effective in improving player's security attitude and self-efficacy for using cybersecurity tools. We discuss how our design pattern can serve as an exemplar to enhance player self-efficacy in other fields.2020TCTianying Chen et al.Serious & Functional GamesCybersecurity Training & AwarenessDIS
Moving for the Movement: Applying Viewpoints and Composition Techniques to the Design of Online Social Justice CampaignsBy leveraging approaches from other disciplines, designers can expand the boundaries of interaction design to tackle complex socio-technical problems. To address the challenges of networked social justice movements, we developed a workshop for designers and social justice activists based in Viewpoints and Composition, a philosophy and set of techniques for the theatre. Building on other experience prototyping and somatic methods, the workshop leads participants through the design of a hypothetical internet-enabled social justice campaign, encouraging them to imagine the felt-experience of networked social justice movement building in a socio-spatial context. We conclude with insights from the workshop and plans to further develop these techniques.2020JCJudeth Oden Choi et al.Activism & Political ParticipationDesign FictionDIS
The Upcycled Home: Removing Barriers to Lightweight Modification of the Home's Everyday ObjectsThe Internet-of-things (IoT) embeds computing in everyday objects, but has largely focused on new devices while ignoring the home's many existing possessions. We present a field study with 10 American families to understand how these possessions could be included in the smart home through upcycling. We describe three patterns for how families collaborate around home responsibilities; we explore families' mental models of home that may be in tension with existing IoT systems; and we identify ways that families can more easily imagine a smart home that includes their existing possessions. These insights can help us design an upcycled approach to IoT that supports users in reconfiguring objects (and social roles as mediated by objects) in a way that is sensitive to what will be displaced, discarded, or made obsolete. Our findings inform the design of future lightweight systems for the upcycled home.2020KWKristin Williams et al.Carnegie Mellon UniversitySmart Home Interaction DesignChildren & Family IoTCHI
Designing Games for Healthy SleepA sleep deficit has far-reaching consequences, but for many people, healthy sleep is not a priority or a possibility. We explore the potential for "sleepy games" as a genre of transformational games. To explore this design space, we prototyped nine games through an iterative design process. Based on analysis of design decisions and the games as artifacts, we identify seven design challenges for sleepy games: agency and control; physiological and mental arousal; intervention timing; social embeddedness; multisensory experience; vulnerability; and identity and values. We expand on three games with playtesting to show how these design challenges unfold for players in practice, show the impact on players' lives, and discuss sleepy games as creative, social, and situated practices.2020JPJuliet Pusateri et al.Carnegie Mellon UniversitySerious & Functional GamesSleep & Stress MonitoringCHI
Proximate Social Factors in First-Time Contribution to Online CommunitiesIn the course of every member's integration into an online community, a decision must be made to participate for the first time. The challenges of effective recruitment, management, and retention of new users have been extensively explored in social computing research. However, little work has looked at in-the-moment factors that lead users to decide to participate instead of "lurk", conditions which can be shaped to draw new users in at crucial moments. In this work we analyze 183 million messages scraped from chatrooms on the livestreaming platform Twitch in order to understand differences between first-time participants' and regulars' behaviors and to identify conditions that encourage first-time participation. We find that presence of diverse types of users increases likelihood of new participation, with effects depending on the size of the community. We also find that information-seeking behaviors in first-time participation are negatively associated with retention in the short and medium term.2020JSJoseph Seering et al.Carnegie Mellon UniversityCommunity Collaboration & WikipediaLive Streaming & Content CreatorsCHI
It Takes a Village: Integrating an Adaptive Chatbot into an Online Gaming CommunityWhile the majority of research in chatbot design has focused on creating chatbots that engage with users one-on-one, less work has focused on the design of conversational agents for online communities. In this paper we present results from a three week test of a social chatbot in an established online community. During this study, the chatbot "grew up" from "birth" through its teenage years, engaging with community members and "learning" vocabulary from their conversations. We discuss the design of this chatbot, how users' interactions with it evolved over the course of the study, and how it impacted the community as a whole. We discuss how we addressed challenges in developing a chatbot whose vocabulary could be shaped by users, and conclude with implications for the role of machine learning in social interactions in online communities and potential future directions for design of community-based chatbots.2020JSJoseph Seering et al.Carnegie Mellon UniversityConversational ChatbotsAgent Personality & AnthropomorphismCHI