"I recall the past": Exploring How People Collaborate with Generative AI to Create Cultural Heritage NarrativesVisitors to cultural heritage sites often encounter official information, while local people's unofficial stories remain invisible. To explore generative AI's potential in assisting individuals to access local narratives, we conducted a workshop with 20 participants, asking them to use Stable Diffusion to create images of familiar cultural heritage sites, as well as images of unfamiliar ones for comparison. The results revealed three narrative strategies and highlighted generative AI's strengths in illuminating, amplifying, and reinterpreting personal narratives. However, the AI showed limitations in meeting detailed requirements, portraying cultural features, and avoiding bias, which were particularly pronounced with unfamiliar sites due to participants' lack of local knowledge. To address these challenges, we recommend providing detailed explanations, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning AI models to reduce uncertainties, using objective references to mitigate inaccuracies from participants' inability to recognize errors or misconceptions, and curating datasets to train AI models capable of accurately portraying cultural features.2025ZHZhiting He et al.Games, Entertainment, & CultureCSCW
A Constructed Response: Designing and Choreographing Robot Arm Movements in Collaborative Dance ImprovisationIn dance, dancers improvise and choreograph with each other, prototyping movement designs with each other. These interactions extend into collaboration with technology to enhance the creative process. We want to understand how dancers design and improvise movements together in the case of working with a robotic arm, which serves as an instrument in the stage space capable of non-humanoid movements. We engaged and observed dancers in a workshop to co-create movements with robots in one-human-to-one-robot and three-human-to-one-robot settings. We found that dancers produced more fluid movements in one-to-one scenarios, experiencing a stronger sense of connection and presence with the robot as a co-dancer. Conversely, in three-to-one scenarios, the dancers divided their attention between the human dancers and the robot, resulting in increased perceived use of space and more stop-and-go movements, perceiving the robot as part of the stage background. This work highlights how technologies can drive creativity in movement artists as they adapt to new ways of working with instruments, extending prior research on dancing with inanimate objects by exploring how robotic arms influence creative collaboration. We contribute insights into designing systems that support improvisational processes and artistic collaborations with non-humanoid agents.2025XCXiaoyu CHANG et al.Games, Entertainment, & CultureCSCW
"Salt is the Soul of Hakka Baked Chicken": Reimagining Traditional Chinese Culinary ICH for Modern Contexts Without Losing TraditionIntangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) like traditional culinary practices face increasing pressure to adapt to globalization while maintaining their cultural authenticity. Centuries-old traditions in Chinese cuisine are subject to rapid changes for adaptation to contemporary tastes and dietary preferences. The preservation of these cultural practices requires approaches that can enable ICH practitioners to reimagine and recreate ICH for modern contexts. To address this, we created workshops where experienced practitioners of traditional Chinese cuisine co-created recipes using GenAI tools and realized the dishes. We found that GenAI inspired ICH practitioners to innovate recipes based on traditional workflows for broader audiences and adapt to modern dining contexts. However, GenAI-inspired co-creation posed challenges in maintaining the accuracy of original ICH workflows and preserving traditional flavors in the culinary outcomes. This study offers implications for designing human-AI collaborative processes for safeguarding and enhancing culinary ICH.2025SLSijia Liu et al.Generative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Participatory DesignFood Culture & Food InteractionC&C
RetroChat: Designing for the Preservation of Past Chinese Online Social ExperiencesRapid changes in social networks have transformed the way people express themselves, turning past neologisms, values, and mindsets embedded in these expressions into online heritage. How can we preserve these expressions as cultural heritage? Instead of traditional archiving methods for static material, we designed an interactive and experiential form of archiving for Chinese social networks. Using dialogue data from 2000-2010 on early Chinese social media, we developed a GPT-driven agent within a retro chat interface, emulating the language and expression style of the period for interaction. Results from a qualitative study with 18 participants show that the design captures the past chatting experience and evokes memory flashbacks and nostalgia feeling through conversation. Participants, particularly those familiar with the era, adapted their language to match the agent's chatting style. This study explores how the design of preservation methods for digital experiences can be informed by experiential representations supported by generative tools.2025SZSuifang Zhou et al.Identity & Avatars in XRMuseum & Cultural Heritage DigitizationInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingC&C
Eliciting (Immersive) Intangibles: GenAI-Supported Collaborative Visual Narration in a Physically Immersive SpaceThis qualitative paper examines the needs of residents to remember a local cultural heritage site collaboratively. The study observes and then designs for intangible affordances supporting this memory recall using the photo-elicitation method with generative artificial intelligence imagery. Specifically, collaboration was observed when editing a panoramic photograph using generative artificial intelligence. These instances were rare, and were analyzed to highlight intangible affordances aiding collaborative memory recall and content creation. Afterward, five examples were correlated to influence the design of an immersive and responsive 360° theatre system using specific combinations of artificial intelligence models to aid subjective recall. In this immersive space, storyteller preferences for edited content are finally made available for new users, thereby affording new collaborative storytelling about a cultural heritage site. As a contribution, this study aids the work of designers and sociologists by showing the photo-elicitation method’s crossdisciplinary relevance to designing for collaborative, yet intangible storytelling affordances.2025MMMarty Miller et al.360° Video & Panoramic ContentGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Interactive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingDIS
From Temporal to Spatial: Designing Spatialized Interactions with Segmented-audios in Immersive Environments for Active Engagement with Performing Arts Intangible Cultural HeritagePerformance artforms like Peking opera face transmission challenges due to the extensive passive listening required to understand their nuance. To create engaging forms of experiencing auditory Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), we designed a spatial interaction-based segmented-audio (SISA) Virtual Reality system that transforms passive ICH experiences into active ones. We undertook: (1) a co-design workshop with seven stakeholders to establish design requirements, (2) prototyping with five participants to validate design elements, and (3) user testing with 16 participants exploring Peking Opera. We designed transformations of temporal music into spatial interactions by cutting sounds into short audio segments, applying t-SNE algorithm to cluster audio segments spatially. Users navigate through these sounds by their similarity in audio property. Analysis revealed two distinct interaction patterns (Progressive and Adaptive), and demonstrated SISA's efficacy in facilitating active auditory ICH engagement. Our work illuminates the design process for enriching traditional performance artform using spatially-tuned forms of listening.2025YWYuqi Wang et al.Immersion & Presence ResearchIdentity & Avatars in XRInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingDIS
"If I were in Space": Understanding and Adapting to Social Isolation through Designing Collaborative StorytellingSocial isolation can lead to pervasive health issues like anxiety and loneliness. Previous work focused on physical interventions like exercise and teleconferencing, but overlooked the narrative potential of adaptive strategies. To address this, we designed a collaborative online storytelling experience in social VR, enabling participants in isolation to design an imaginary space journey as a metaphor for quarantine, in order to learn about their isolation adaptation strategies in the process. Eighteen individuals participated during real quarantine undertaken a virtual role-play experience, designing their own spaceship rooms and engaging in collaborative activities that revealed creative adaptative strategies. Qualitative analyses of participant designs, transcripts, and interactions revealed how they coped with isolation, and how the engagement unexpectedly influenced their adaptation process. This study shows how designing playful narrative experiences, rather than solution-driven approaches, can serve as probes to surface how people navigate social isolation.2025QGQi Gong et al.Social & Collaborative VRIdentity & Avatars in XRSTEM Education & Science CommunicationDIS
Cracking Aegis: An Adversarial LLM-based Game for Raising Awareness of Vulnerabilities in Privacy ProtectionTraditional methods for raising awareness of privacy protection often fail to engage users or provide hands-on insights into how privacy vulnerabilities are exploited. To address this, we incorporate an adversarial mechanic in the design of the dialogue-based serious game Cracking Aegis. Leveraging LLMs to simulate natural interactions, the game challenges players to impersonate characters and extract sensitive information from an AI agent, Aegis. A user study (n=22) revealed that players employed diverse deceptive linguistic strategies, including storytelling and emotional rapport, to manipulate Aegis. After playing, players reported connecting in-game scenarios with real-world privacy vulnerabilities, such as phishing and impersonation, and expressed intentions to strengthen privacy control, such as avoiding oversharing personal information with AI systems. This work highlights the potential of LLMs to simulate complex relational interactions in serious games, while demonstrating how an adversarial strategy provides a unique perspective in designing for social good, particularly in privacy protection.2025JFJiaying Fu et al.Serious & Functional GamesPrivacy Perception & Decision-MakingDark Patterns RecognitionDIS
"Becoming My Own Audience": How Dancers React to Avatars Unlike Themselves in Motion Capture-Supported Live Improvisational Performance.The use of motion capture in live dance performances has created an emerging discipline enabling dancers to play different avatars on the digital stage. Unlike classical workflows, avatars enable performers to act as different characters in customized narratives, but research has yet to address how movement, improvisation, and perception change when dancers act as avatars. We created five avatars representing differing genders, shapes, and body limitations, and invited 15 dancers to improvise with each in practice and performance settings. Results show that dancers used avatars to distance themselves from their own habitual movements, exploring new ways of moving through differing physical constraints. Dancers explored using gender-stereotyped movements like powerful or feminine actions, experimenting with gender identity. However, focusing on avatars can coincide with a lack of continuity in improvisation. This work shows how emerging practices with performance technology enable dancers to improvise with new constraints, stepping outside the classical stage.2025FZFan Zhang et al.City University of Hong Kong, School of Creative MediaIdentity & Avatars in XRDance & Body Movement ComputingCHI
"Ronaldo's a poser!": How the Use of Generative AI Shapes Debates in Online ForumsOnline debates can enhance critical thinking but may escalate into hostile attacks. As humans are increasingly reliant on Generative AI (GenAI) in writing tasks, we need to understand how people utilize GenAI in online debates. To examine the patterns of writing behavior while making arguments with GenAI, we created an online forum for soccer fans to engage in turn-based and free debates in a post format with the assistance of ChatGPT, arguing on the topic of "Messi vs Ronaldo". After 13 sessions of two-part study and semi-structured interviews with 39 participants, we conducted content and thematic analyses to integrate insights from interview transcripts, ChatGPT records, and forum posts. We found that participants prompted ChatGPT for aggressive responses, created posts with similar content and logical fallacies, and sacrificed the use of ChatGPT for better human-human communication. This work uncovers how polarized forum members work with GenAI to engage in debates online.2025YZYuhan Zeng et al.City University of Hong Kong, Department of Computer ScienceGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Social Platform Design & User BehaviorMisinformation & Fact-CheckingCHI
Can AI Prompt Humans? Multimodal Agents Prompt Players’ Game Actions and Show Consequences to Raise Sustainability AwarenessUnsustainable behaviors are challenging to prevent due to their long-term, often unclear consequences. Serious games offer a promising solution by creating artificial environments where players can immediately experience the outcomes of their actions. To explore this potential, we developed EcoEcho, a GenAI-powered game leveraging multimodal agents to raise sustainability awareness. These agents engage players in natural conversations, prompting them to take in-game actions that lead to visible environmental impacts. We evaluated EcoEcho using a mixed-methods approach with 23 participants. Results show a significant increase in intended sustainable behaviors post-game, although attitudes towards sustainability had only marginal effects, suggesting that in-game actions likely can motivate intended real world behaviors despite similar opinions on sustainability. This finding highlights multimodal agents and action-consequence mechanics to effectively raising sustainability awareness and the potential of motivating real-world behavioral change.2025QZQinshi Zhang et al.University of California, San Diego, University of California, San DiegoGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Serious & Functional GamesSustainable HCICHI
“It’s Like Being On Stage”: Conveying Dancers’ Expressiveness Through A Haptic-Installed Contemporary Dance PerformanceIn dance performances, choreography, music and lighting are combined to convey meaning to the audience. However, this communication typically relies on visual and auditory stimuli alone. While haptic technologies have been leveraged to enhance the perception of dancers’ movements, less focus has been placed on exploring their potential in enhancing dancers’ somatic expressiveness. Through co-design activities with 5 professional contemporary dancers, we crafted an interdisciplinary combination of choreography and haptics. In total, 128 audience members watched one of three live performances while wearing custom-made haptic wristbands. From an open-ended questionnaire and interviews with audience members, we explore how the introduction of haptics deepens their embodied sensations and helps to create a sense of resonance with the dancers. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for future directions in how haptic technologies could drive innovation in dance performances from the point of view of both dancers’ creativity and audience experiences.2025XSXiming Shen et al.Keio University Graduate School of Media DesignHaptic WearablesDance & Body Movement ComputingCHI
"Being Eroded, Piece by Piece": Enhancing Engagement and Storytelling in Cultural Heritage Dissemination by Exhibiting GenAI Co-Creation ArtifactsCultural Heritage is not just about tangible artifacts; it also includes intangible elements such as personal memories, community ties, and envisioned futures. Traditional museums and archives often emphasize physical items like architectural pieces and photos, while overlooking people's personal and emotional connections to cultural heritage. To illustrate the personal connections people have with cultural heritage sites, we designed an exhibition that displayed images created by participants, which represent their perspectives and future visions of cultural heritage sites. The exhibition's images, generated through GenAI, helped participants narratively describe cultural heritage locations, allowing them to express their visions of future threats like over-tourism and climate change on these sites. Contrary to constraints, co-creating with Generative AI associates participants with personal memories of cultural heritage, stimulating personal narratives and promoting deep reflection on cultural heritage preservation. The dissemination strategies we designed illustrate the use of GenAI to empower the expression of matters of cultural value beyond the physical.2024KFKexue Fu et al.Generative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Museum & Cultural Heritage DigitizationDIS
StayFocused: Examining the Effects of Reflective Prompts and Chatbot Support on Compulsive Smartphone UseAmidst the increasingly prevalent smartphone addiction, we introduce StayFocused, a mobile app to help people focus on their tasks at hand by reducing compulsive smartphone use. Besides guiding people to set focus sessions for non-screen time, we incorporated reflective prompts probing individuals' phone-checking intentions whenever they check their phones and a chatbot to deliver these prompts. To examine the effects of the reflective prompts and the chatbot support, we designed three versions of StayFocused: baseline, reflection, and reflection-chatbot, and conducted a stage-based between-subjects study with 36 college students over five weeks. We found that participants who received the reflective prompts were able to focus longer and resist distractions, and those with chatbot support seemed to better maintain their smartphone use reduction. By highlighting how participants reflected on their focus session activities and their preferences for the chatbot, we discuss the implications of designing persuasive conversational interfaces to reduce unintended behaviors.2024ZLZhuoyang LI et al.City University of Hong Kong, City University of Hong KongIntelligent Voice Assistants (Alexa, Siri, etc.)Conversational ChatbotsNotification & Interruption ManagementCHI
When Teams Embrace AI: Human Collaboration Strategies in Generative Prompting in a Creative Design TaskStudies of Generative AI (GenAI)-assisted creative workflows have focused on individuals overcoming challenges of prompting to produce what they envisioned. When designers work in teams, how do collaboration and prompting influence each other, and how do users perceive generative AI and their collaborators during the co-prompting process? We engaged students with design or performance backgrounds, and little exposure to GenAI, to work in pairs with GenAI to create stage designs based on a creative theme. We found two patterns of collaborative prompting focused on generating story descriptions first, or visual imagery first. GenAI tools helped participants build consensus in the task, and allowed for discussion of the prompting strategies. Participants perceived GenAI as efficient tools rather than true collaborators, suggesting that human partners reduced the reliance on their use. This work highlights the importance of human-human collaboration when working with GenAI tools, suggesting systems that take advantage of shared human expertise in the prompting process.2024ZQZiyi Qiu et al.Southeast UniversityGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Creative Collaboration & Feedback SystemsCHI
Dances with Drones: Spatial Matching and Perceived Agency in Improvised Movements with Drone and Human PartnersAs drones become interwoven in human activities, increasingly taking on tasks interpreted as creative and performative, such as choreographed light shows, there is emerging interest in understanding how drones and humans can perform together. Humans have different habits when performing with partners as opposed to solo. How do people adapt their behaviors and perspectives when improvising with robotic partners? To explore these questions, we conducted a study investigating dancer-drone interactions using a system of micro aerial vehicles designed to facilitate improvised solo and partnered dances. Through solo and tandem dances with one or two robots, we analyzed the performers' perceived workflow from semi-structured interviews and quantified their movement patterns during the improvisation. We found that the dancers perceived drone movements through spatial metaphors like the ceiling and gravity, anthropomorphizing drones as props on a stage through position and generated sound. The dancers felt a greater connection in single-drone scenarios and showed heightened avoidance behavior in two-drone situations. Our work shows how a robotic system can energize human dancers to improvise individually and in pairs.2024KDKaixu Dong et al.Department of Biomedical Engineering, City University of Hong KongDrone Interaction & ControlDance & Body Movement ComputingCHI
Seeking Soulmate via Voice: Understanding Promises and Challenges of Online Synchronized Voice-Based Mobile DatingOnline dating has become a popular way for individuals to connect with potential romantic partners. Many dating apps use personal profiles that include a headshot and self-description, allowing users to present themselves and search for compatible matches. However, this traditional model often has limitations. In this study, we explore a non-traditional voice-based dating app called “Soul”. Unlike traditional platforms that rely heavily on profile information, Soul facilitates user interactions through voice-based communication. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 dedicated Soul users to investigate how they engage with the platform and perceive themselves and others in this unique dating environment. Our findings indicate that the role of voice as a moderator influences impression management and shapes perceptions between the sender and the receiver of the voice. Additionally, the synchronous voice-based and community-based dating model offers benefits to users in the Chinese cultural context. Our study contributes to understanding the affordances introduced by voice-based interactions in online dating in China.2024CSChenxinran Shen et al.University of British ColumbiaVoice User Interface (VUI) DesignIntelligent Voice Assistants (Alexa, Siri, etc.)CHI
Eternagram: Probing Player Attitudes Towards Climate Change Using a ChatGPT-driven Text-based AdventureConventional methods of assessing attitudes towards climate change are limited in capturing authentic opinions, primarily stemming from a lack of context-specific assessment strategies and an overreliance on simplistic surveys. Game-based Assessments (GBA) have demonstrated the ability to overcome these issues by immersing participants in engaging gameplay within carefully crafted, scenario-based environments. Concurrently, advancements in AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) show promise in enhancing the gamified testing environment, achieving this by generating context-aware, human-like dialogues that contribute to a more natural and effective assessment. Our study introduces a new technique for probing climate change attitudes by actualizing a GPT-driven chatbot system in harmony with a game design depicting a futuristic climate scenario. The correlation analysis reveals an assimilation effect, where players' post-game climate awareness tends to align with their in-game perceptions. Key predictors of pro-climate attitudes are identified as traits like 'Openness' and 'Agreeableness', and a preference for democratic values.2024QZTianyi Zhang et al.University of California, IrvineGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Human-LLM CollaborationSerious & Functional GamesCHI
“Sorry to Keep You Waiting”: Recovering from Negative Consequences Resulting from Service Robot Unintended RejectionRobots are increasingly deployed in crowded, large-scale environments where the demands on their services can outweigh their ability to respond. When robots fail to respond, humans may interpret the unintended consequence negatively as forms of rejection, leading to lost of trust. How do service robots recover from such perceived rejection to recover human trust due to unintended rejection? We created a task mimicking shopping malls where the robot arm is asked to provide coffee, juice, or tea to participants. When the robot rendered service elsewhere, participants reported feeling excluded and less trusting of the robot. When the robot subsequently apologized or provided promise of future favor, participants regained trust in the robot, with favor rendering yielding significantly more trusting responses. This study highlights the importance of understanding inadvertently negative consequences of robot behaviors, and suggests design solutions for overcoming this negative perception through remediation strategies.2024XCXiaoyu CHANG et al.Social Robot InteractionKnowledge Worker Tools & WorkflowsHRI
Contradiction pushes me to improvise”: Performer Expressivity and Engagement in Distanced Movement Performance ParadigmsThe workflows of performing arts communities have been altered by the virtualization of typically in-person experiences, leading to shifts in performance venues and resulting in changes in expressivity and interaction. To investigate how virtualization processes affected the practice and conditions of performers and how they adapted to these changes, we interviewed 25 professional movement-based performers who have engaged in both live and online performances. We found that performers treated online performances akin to time-limited movie recordings without audience interaction. Instead of avoiding distanced venues, performers adapted to new limitations, inventing improvisation strategies in distraction-filled situations and using time and technical limitations as creative constraints. To examine how a distanced paradigm impacts dancers' live-action workflow, we conducted a performance involving a dancer interacting with a robot at a distant location. The case study showed that the performer altered her rehearsal strategies to work with distanced technology and adapted to the live interaction with a distanced audience by imagining unseen interactions. This work provides insights to guide the design of interactive technology for virtual performances to account for the adapting strategies performers are currently taking to overcome limitations in time, location, and lack of presence.2023RLRAY LC et al.Remote/Virtual WorkCSCW