From Touch to Change: Understanding Public Engagement in Data Physicalization for Social GoodData physicalization, which encodes data in physical form, has been increasingly used to engage the public with issues of social good. While public engagement is often invoked as a motivation or expected outcome, it has not been systematically examined as a design objective. This gap raises two key challenges: what characterizes engagement in data physicalization for social good (Phys4Good), and how it can be effectively designed. In this work, we address these challenges by first curating a corpus of 45 Phys4Good projects and deriving a design space structured around a modified three-act framework comprising Stage, Encounter, and Impact. We then conducted semi-structured interviews with designers of eight projects to identify recurring challenges and strategies for fostering engagement. Finally, we demonstrated the effectiveness of our design space and strategies through a case study, which showed that they can guide designers in structuring engagement, anticipating barriers, and creating more impactful Phys4Good experiences.2026YPYechun Peng et al.Tongji UniversityData PhysicalizationCitizen Science & Crowdsourced DataCHI
Exploring the Privacy and Security Challenges Faced by Migrant Domestic Workers in Chinese Smart HomesThe growing use of smart home devices poses considerable privacy and security challenges, especially for individuals like migrant domestic workers (MDWs) who may be surveilled by their employers. This paper explores the privacy and security challenges experienced by MDWs in multi-user smart homes through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 26 MDWs and 5 staff members of agencies that recruit and/or train domestic workers in China. Our findings reveal power imbalances in the relationships between MDWs and their employers and agencies, influenced by Chinese cultural and social factors (such as Confucianism and collectivism) as well as legal ones. Furthermore, the widespread and normalized use of surveillance technologies in China, particularly in public spaces, exacerbates these power imbalances, reinforcing a sense of constant monitoring and control. Drawing on our findings, we provide recommendations for domestic worker agencies and policymakers to address the privacy and security challenges faced by MDWs in Chinese smart homes.2025SHShijing He et al.King's College LondonPrivacy by Design & User ControlPrivacy Perception & Decision-MakingSmart Home Privacy & SecurityCHI
mP-Gait: Fine-grained Parkinson's Disease Gait Impairment Assessment with Robust Feature AnalysisZhang 等人提出 mP-Gait 系统，采用鲁棒特征分析实现帕金森病步态障碍的精细化自动评估，提升诊断客观性。2024WZWenhao Zhang et al.Human Pose & Activity RecognitionUbiComp
Get Your Hands Dirty? A Comparative Study of Tool Usage and Perceptual Engagement in Physical and Digital SculptingThe creation of 3D content, crucial in various applications, is often challenging and time-intensive. While digital tools are prevalent for 3D content creation, traditional clay sculpting offers an embodied experience that fosters artists' perceptual engagement with physical space, enhancing their interactive and cognitive connection with the creation process. We conducted an eight-day live sculpting session at an art academy, systematically comparing the creative workflows of eight professional artists in both physical and digital mediums. Our qualitative and quantitative analysis include artists' differences in tool usage between physical and digital sculpting, variations in visual and tactile perceptual engagement, and the potential for future integration of the two modalities. Our study provides insights into the benefits of physical and digital sculpting and may inform future design of hybrid interfaces for 3D content creation.2024XMXinyu Ma et al.Shape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic Materials3D Modeling & AnimationC&C
ContextCam: Bridging Context Awareness with Creative Human-AI Image Co-CreationThe rapid advancement of AI-generated content (AIGC) promises to transform various aspects of human life significantly. This work particularly focuses on the potential of AIGC to revolutionize image creation, such as photography and self-expression. We introduce ContextCam, a novel human-AI image co-creation system that integrates context awareness with mainstream AIGC technologies like Stable Diffusion. ContextCam provides user's image creation process with inspiration by extracting relevant contextual data, and leverages Large Language Model-based (LLM) multi-agents to co-create images with the user. A study with 16 participants and 136 scenarios revealed that ContextCam was well-received, showcasing personalized and diverse outputs as well as interesting user behavior patterns. Participants provided positive feedback on their engagement and enjoyment when using ContextCam, and acknowledged its ability to inspire creativity.2024XFXianzhe Fan et al.Tsinghua UniversityGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Creative Collaboration & Feedback SystemsPhotography & Image ProcessingCHI
C2Ideas: Supporting Creative Interior Color Design Ideation with a Large Language ModelInterior color design is a creative process that endeavors to allocate colors to furniture and other elements within an interior space. While much research focuses on generating realistic interior designs, these automated approaches often misalign with user intention and disregard design rationales. Informed by a need-finding preliminary study, we develop C2Ideas, an innovative system for designers to creatively ideate color schemes enabled by an intent-aligned and domain-oriented large language model. C2Ideas integrates a three-stage process: Idea Prompting stage distills user intentions into color linguistic prompts; Word-Color Association stage transforms the prompts into semantically and stylistically coherent color schemes; and Interior Coloring stage assigns colors to interior elements complying with design principles. We also develop an interactive interface that enables flexible user refinement and interpretable reasoning. C2Ideas has undergone a series of indoor cases and user studies, demonstrating its effectiveness and high recognition of interactive functionality by designers.2024YHYihan Hou et al.The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, GuangzhouHuman-LLM CollaborationGraphic Design & Typography ToolsCustomizable & Personalized ObjectsCHI
LoEar: Push the Range Limit of Acoustic Sensing for Vital Sign Monitoring"Acoustic sensing has been explored in numerous applications leveraging the wide deployment of acoustic-enabled devices. However, most of the existing acoustic sensing systems work in a very short range only due to fast attenuation of ultrasonic signals, hindering their real-world deployment. In this paper, we present a novel acoustic sensing system using only a single microphone and speaker, named LoEar, to detect vital signs (respiration and heartbeat) with a significantly increased sensing range. We first develop a model, namely Carrierforming, to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) via coherent superposition across multiple subcarriers on the target path. We then propose a novel technique called Continuous-MUSIC (Continuous-MUltiple SIgnal Classification) to detect a dynamic reflections, containing subtle motion, and further identify the target user based on the frequency distribution to enable Carrierforming. Finally, we adopt an adaptive Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) comb notch filter to recover the heartbeat pattern from the Channel Frequency Response (CFR) measurements which are dominated by respiration and further develop a peak-based scheme to estimate respiration rate and heart rate. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our system, and results show that our system outperforms the state-of-the-art using commercial devices, i.e., the range of respiration sensing is increased from 2 m to 7 m, and the range of heartbeat sensing is increased from 1.2 m to 6.5 m. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3550293"2023LWLei WANGSleep & Stress MonitoringBiosensors & Physiological MonitoringUbiComp
Comparing the Tangible Tutorial System and the Human Teacher in Intangible Cultural Heritage EducationComputer-supported digital-physical tutorial systems have been widely used in the field of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) education for their advances in conveying multimodal contents. However, there is limited work in comparing strengths and weaknesses of the teaching effects between the human teachers and the non-human tutorial systems in ICH education. In this paper, we designed an introductory course and presented BatikGuide, a tangible tutorial system that provides multimodal instructions on Batik art and real-time evaluations. Followed by, we conducted a comparative experiment and analyzed the data collected from the quantitative scales, observation, and semi-structured interviews. The results revealed that there is no obvious disparity between BatikGuide and the human teacher. Although the human teacher could have better performance in professional instructions, BatikGuide remains the potential in stimulating learning motivation, large-scale replication, and public dissemination. According to these findings, we discussed the prospects of computer-based systems in ICH education and preservation.2020JGJiahao Guo et al.Special Education TechnologyTextile Art & Craft DigitizationDIS
It Is Your Turn: Collaborative Ideation With a Co-Creative Robot through SketchCo-creative systems have been widely explored in the field of computational creativity. However, existing AI partners of these systems are mostly virtual agents. As sketching on paper with embodied robots could be more engaging for designers' early-stage ideation and collaborative practices, we envision the possibility of Cobbie, a mobile robot that ideates iteratively with designers by generating creative and diverse sketches. To evaluate the differences in co-creativity and user experience between the co-creative robots and virtual agents, we conducted a comparative experiment and analyzed the data collected from quantitative scales, observation, and semi-structured interview. The results reveal that Cobbie is more satisfying in motivating exploration, provoking unexpected ideas and engaging designers in the collaborative ideation process. Based on these findings, we discussed the prospects of co-creative robots for future developments of human-AI collaborative systems.2020YLYuyu Lin et al.Zhejiang UniversityCreative Collaboration & Feedback SystemsHuman-Robot Collaboration (HRC)CHI