Exploring Alternative Socio-Technical Systems for Careful Data Work in Recovery ContextsNon-profits such as voluntary and community-based (VC) organisations are facing increasing pressures to engage in data work to sustain themselves. They face challenges with practices, information systems and tools associated with capturing data for supporting service provision. Most recently, researchers working with VC organisations have turned to Feminist and Care discourses to envision alternatives to current socio-technical systems whereby their values and purposes do not match with those of non-profits, consequently pulling the latter away from their socially driven mission. We report on a longitudinal, collaborative study with a UK-based mental health peer support organisation that created innovative tools as a means of navigating current pressures to practice data work for the quantification of mental health service provision. We present findings from interviews conducted with our community partner and share how recovery work has informed careful data practices, offering recommendations for supporting data work in mental health recovery.2025CCCaroline Claisse et al.Newcastle University, Open Lab, School of ComputingTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIDeveloping Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)Participatory DesignCHI
Stop the Clock - Counteracting Bias Exploited by Attackers through an Interactive Augmented Reality Phishing TrainingPhishing attacks become increasingly sophisticated in targeting humans and exploiting cognitive biases, e.g., through inducing authority or urgency. Previous approaches to user training focused on URL warnings, textual, or click-based training, yielding mixed results. For more interactive training, uncoupled from users’ screens, we explore the potential of Augmented Reality (AR) technologies to enhance phishing detection. Through visual representations of biases that attackers typically exploit and gesture-based interactions with them, the training aims to enable users to counteract cognitive biases by increasing awareness and suspicion. In a laboratory study with N=117 users, we evaluated phishing detection rates, user interaction with, and feedback on the AR-based training in comparison with a click-based variant and a control condition. Our results show that interactive phishing training addressing cognitive biases increased detection rates by 33% and that interactive elements were well perceived. AR technologies further enhance the training.2025LSLorin Schöni et al.ETH Zurich, Security, Privacy & SocietySocial & Collaborative VRCybersecurity Training & AwarenessContext-Aware ComputingCHI
Smell Above All: Envisioning Smell-Centred Future WorldsTake a deep breath; what do you smell? While sight and hearing dominate our perceptions, the sense of smell is often overlooked, even undervalued. However, the importance of our sense of smell goes beyond detecting odours. It shapes our emotions, memories, behaviour, and quality of life. Recent advances in olfactory interfaces have sparked discussions about the future of smell in human-computer interaction. While efforts mainly focus on the realization of new olfactory interfaces, here we collectively explore alternative worlds centred around the sense of smell. First, we conducted a design futuring workshop involving individuals with varying smell capabilities and expertise to envision and discuss smell-centred futures. Then, through iterative reflection, we arrived at three smell worlds presented as narratives and visuals. From this conceptual work, we offer new perspectives and generative possibilities for design research that prioritizes our noses.2024CBCeylan Beşevli et al.Design FictionDigital Art Installations & Interactive PerformanceDIS
Who Should Hold Control? Rethinking Empowerment in Home Automation among Cohabitants through the Lens of Co-DesignRecent HCI research has highlighted home automation's potential in providing residents with technology-enhanced domestic autonomy. However, in the cohabitation context, the prevalent solutionist paradigm of automated systems introduces challenges to non-experts, paradoxically marginalizing specific members. This paper reports a co-creation initiative involving cohabitants, exploring a new understanding of empowerment in home automation. Participants collaborated to construct Trigger-Action Program (TAP) schemes using card-based tools during workshops. Our findings showcase how cohabitants engaged in collective ideations and embodied different negotiation patterns, which reveals the significance of more perceptible and participatory design. We frame home automation as "problematic co-design", arguing the universal overlook of collaborative resources. Furthermore, we examine how automation systems act as obstacles and sources of empowerment through the co-design lens. The paper concludes with pragmatic recommendations for designers and researchers, emphasizing the need to foster contestability for cohabitants in the evolving home automation landscape.2024XXXiao XUE et al.Tsinghua UniversitySmart Home Interaction DesignParticipatory DesignCHI
FabSound: Audio-Tactile and Affective Fabric Experiences Through Mid-air HapticsThe sound produced when touching fabrics, like a blanket, often provides information regarding the fabric’s texture properties (e.g., its roughness). Fabric roughness is one of the most important aspects of assessing fabric tactile properties. Prior research has demonstrated that touch-related sounds can alter the perception of textures. However, understanding touch-related sound of digital fabric textures, and how they could convey affective responses remain a challenge. In this study, we mapped digital fabric textures using mid-air haptics stimuli and examined how auditory manipulation influences people’s roughness perception. Through qualitative interviews, participants detailed that while rubbing sounds smoothen fabric texture perception, pure tone sounds of 450Hz and 900Hz accent roughness perception. The rubbing sound of fabric evoked associations with soft-materials and led to more calming experiences. In addition, we discussed how haptic interaction can be extended to multisensory modes, revealing a new perspective of mapping multisensory experiences for digital fabrics.2024JXJing Xue et al.University College LondonMid-Air Haptics (Ultrasonic)Haptic WearablesCHI
Data Ethics Emergency Drill: A Toolbox for Discussing Responsible AI for Industry TeamsResearchers urge technology practitioners such as data scientists to consider the impacts and ethical implications of algorithmic decisions. However, unlike programming, statistics, and data management, discussion of ethical implications is rarely included in standard data science training. To begin to address this gap, we designed and tested a toolbox called the data ethics emergency drill (DEED) to help data science teams discuss and reflect on the ethical implications of their work. The DEED is a roleplay of a fictional ethical emergency scenario that is contextually situated in the team’s specific workplace and applications. This paper outlines the DEED toolbox and describes three studies carried out with two different data science teams that iteratively shaped its design. Our findings show that practitioners can apply lessons learnt from the roleplay to real-life situations, and how the DEED opened up conversations around ethics and values.2024VHVanessa Aisyahsari Hanschke et al.University of BristolAI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityResearch Ethics & Open ScienceCHI
Challenges and Opportunities for the Design of Inclusive Digital Mental Health Tools: Understanding Culturally Diverse Young People's ExperiencesMental health issues affect approximately 13% of people aged 10-24 years old worldwide. In Western countries (e.g. USA, UK, Australia), mental health issues are particularly prominent in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) individuals, yet they are disproportionately affected in relation to service provision. Despite demand, there is a significant lack of literature explicitly exploring the design of digital mental health tools for CALD populations. Our study engaged five professionals working in CALD mental health, to gain insights into challenges for service access and provision, and then engaged 41 CALD young people to explore their experiences. We contribute a set of unique insights into the barriers that CALD young people face when seeking help, and their needs for future digital mental health tools. We also provide design recommendations for future researchers on how they might better support the inclusion of CALD communities in the design of digital health tools.2024ESEwan Soubutts et al.University College LondonCognitive Impairment & Neurodiversity (Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia)Universal & Inclusive DesignMental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesCHI
Navigates Like Me: Understanding How People Evaluate Human-Like AI in Video GamesWe aim to understand how people assess human likeness in navigation produced by people and artificially intelligent (AI) agents in a video game. To this end, we propose a novel AI agent with the goal of generating more human-like behavior. We collect hundreds of crowd-sourced assessments comparing the human-likeness of navigation behavior generated by our agent and baseline AI agents with human-generated behavior. Our proposed agent passes a Turing Test, while the baseline agents do not. By passing a Turing Test, we mean that human judges could not quantitatively distinguish between videos of a person and an AI agent navigating. To understand what people believe constitutes human-like navigation, we extensively analyze the justifications of these assessments. This work provides insights into the characteristics that people consider human-like in the context of goal-directed video game navigation, which is a key step for further improving human interactions with AI agents.2023SMStephanie Milani et al.Carnegie Mellon UniversityHuman-LLM CollaborationGame UX & Player BehaviorGamification DesignCHI
From Asymptomatics to Zombies: Visualization-Based Education of Disease ModelingThroughout the COVID-19 pandemic, visualizations became commonplace in public communications to help people make sense of the world and the reasons behind government-imposed restrictions. Though the adult population were the main target of these messages, children were affected by restrictions through not being able to see friends and virtual schooling. However, through these daily models and visualizations, the pandemic response provided a way for children to understand what data scientists really do and provided new routes for engagement with STEM subjects. In this paper, we describe the development of an interactive and accessible visualization tool to be used in workshops for children to explain computational modeling of diseases, in particular COVID-19. We detail our design decisions based on approaches evidenced to be effective and engaging such as unplugged activities and interactivity. We share reflections and learnings from delivering these workshops to 140 children and assess their effectiveness.2023GMGraham McNeill et al.University of Warwick, King's College LondonMedical & Scientific Data VisualizationSTEM Education & Science CommunicationCHI
Feellustrator: A Design Tool for Ultrasound Mid-Air HapticsUltrasound mid-air haptic technology provides a large space of design possibilities, as one can modulate the ultrasound intensity in a continuous 3D space at a high speed over time. Yet, the need for programming the patterns limits rapid ideation and testing of alternatives. We present Feellustrator, a graphical design tool for quickly creating and editing ultrasound mid-air haptics. With Feellustrator, one can create custom ultrasound patterns, layer or sequence them into complex effects, project them on the user's hand, and export them for use in external programs (e.g., Unity). To create the tool, we interviewed 13 designers who had from a few months to several years of experience with ultrasound, then derived a set of requirements for supporting ultrasound design. We demonstrate the design power of Feellustrator through example applications and an evaluation with 15 participants. Then, we outline future directions for ultrasound haptic design.2023HSHasti Seifi et al.Arizona State University, University of CopenhagenMid-Air Haptics (Ultrasonic)CHI
"My Perfect Platform Would Be Telepathy" - Reimagining the Design of Social Media with Autistic AdultsIn this paper, we critically examine the design of mainstream social media platforms from the point of view of autistic experiences and perspectives, drawing inspiration from the neurodiversity movement, the notion of autism as neurodivergence, and the concept of autistic sociality. We conducted 12 participatory design sessions with 20 autistic adult collaborators. Through thematic analysis of qualitative data, we identify seven challenges our participants experienced when using social media, and a set of imagined features that represent their vision of how design could better support their social media use. We discuss how mainstream social media platforms are primarily designed to address neurotypical sensitivities, and fail autistic adults through lack of user control, inadequate mechanisms for expressing tone and intention, and an orientation towards phatic interactions. To close, we outline how autistic sociality can inspire the design of kinder and more considerate social media platforms.2023BPBelén Barros Pena et al.City, University of LondonCognitive Impairment & Neurodiversity (Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia)Gender & Race Issues in HCIEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsCHI
Responsible Innovation of Touchless Haptics: A Prospective Design Exploration in Social InteractionThe rapid development of touchless systems has introduced many innovations in social interaction scenarios in recent years. People now can interact with touchless systems in social applications that are aimed to be used in everyday situations in the future. This accelerated development makes us ask, what will the next generation of touchless systems be like? How can we responsibly develop new touchless technologies in the future? To answer the first question, we brought together 20 experts to ideate, speculate, and evaluate possible touchless applications for social interactions. A total of 48 ideas were generated from two consecutive workshops. Then, to answer the second question, we critically analyzed those ideas through a thematic analysis using a responsible innovation (RI) framework, and identified key ethical considerations to guide developers, practitioners when designing future touchless systems. We argue that the social scenarios described, and the RI framework proposed in this paper are a useful starting point for responsibly designing the next generation of touchless systems2023PCPatricia Cornelio et al.Ultraleap, University College LondonMid-Air Haptics (Ultrasonic)Agent Personality & AnthropomorphismTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
The Effect of Explanation Design on User Perception of Smart Home Lighting Systems: A Mixed-method Investigation It has been shown that providing explanations about AI-based systems’ decisions can be an effective way to increase users’ trust and acceptance. The effect of explanation design in smart home systems on users’ acceptance and perceptions is however less known. We therefore explored the effect of different explanation designs on acceptance in the context of the Philips Hue smart home lighting system. We conducted interviews (N = 10) and an online experiment (N = 452) using three everyday smart home lighting scenarios with different explanation types. The results showed that although participants indicated a positive attitude towards explanations, receiving an explanation can potentially reduce the perceived control of the lighting system. Furthermore, participants preferred system-based explanations rather than user-based explanations. Our study also provides recommendations for the design of explanations in smart home systems.2023JDJiaxin Dai et al.Signify ResearchExplainable AI (XAI)Smart Home Interaction DesignCHI
Show of Hands: Leveraging Hand Gestural Cues in Virtual Meetings for Intelligent Impromptu Polling InteractionsGreater ubiquity and improvements of virtual meeting software usage have allowed for people to meet more seamlessly when in-person meetings are not feasible. However, certain valuable interaction cues such as impromptu group polling are less optimally executed compared to in-person meetings due to less easily gauging meeting participants who are not co-located, while requiring prior meeting setup to set up built-in polling tools for automated counting. We propose a novel intelligent user interface approach for prevalent virtual meeting software, which allows for more seamlessly impromptu polling interactions similarly to in-person meetings. Our approach leverages recognized communicative hand gestures and video filters as real-time responses for more easily informing meeting participants on impromptu polling results, and computer vision techniques to automatically count responses with the software’s default gallery view. We first performed studies to motivate leveraging gestures and visual cues into our prototype virtual meeting, which were then evaluated on system performance and user task workload assessment. Our results demonstrated that our system was able to recognize attendees’ gestures and polled responses with reasonable accuracy, and demonstrated improvements in hosts’ task workload performance. From our findings, we developed an interface that can allow hosts to be better informed of valuable impromptu polling while maintaining organic gestural interaction cues with participants similarly performed in in-person meetings.2022JKJung In Koh et al.Hand Gesture RecognitionPrototyping & User TestingIUI
How Experienced Designers of Enterprise Applications Engage AI as a Design MaterialHCI research has explored AI as a design material, suggesting that designers can envision AI's design opportunities to improve UX. Recent research claimed that enterprise applications offer an opportunity for AI innovation at the user experience level. We conducted design workshops to explore the practices of experienced designers who work on cross-functional AI teams in the enterprise. We discussed how designers successfully work with and struggle with AI. Our findings revealed that designers can innovate at the system and service levels. We also discovered that making a case for an AI feature's return on investment is a barrier for designers when they propose AI concepts and ideas. Our discussions produced novel insights on designers' role on AI teams, and the boundary objects they used for collaborating with data scientists. We discuss the implications of these findings as opportunities for future research aiming to empower designers in working with data and AI.2022NYNur Yildirim et al.Carnegie Mellon UniversityGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)AI-Assisted Decision-Making & AutomationCHI
User Perspectives and Ethical Experiences of Apps for Depression: A Qualitative Analysis of User ReviewsApps for depression can increase access to mental health care but concerns abound with disparities between academic development of apps and those available through app stores. Reviews highlighted ethical shortcomings of these self-management tools, with a need for greater insight into how ethical issues are experienced by users. We addressed these gaps by exploring user reviews of such apps to better understand user experiences and ethical issues. We conducted a thematic analysis of 2,217 user reviews sampled from 40 depression apps in Google Play and Apple App Store, totaling over 77,500 words. Users reported positive and negative experiences, with ethical implications evident in areas of benefits, adverse effects, access, usability and design, support, commercial models, autonomy, privacy, and transparency. We integrated our elements of ethically designed apps for depression and principles of nonmaleficence, beneficence, justice, autonomy, and virtue, and we conclude with implications for ethical design of apps for depression.2022DBDionne Bowie-DaBreo et al.Lancaster UniversityMental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesPrivacy by Design & User ControlCHI
Supporting Remote Survey Data Analysis by Co-researchers with Learning Disabilities through Inclusive and Creative Practices and Data Science Approaches.Through a process of robust co-design, we created a bespoke accessible survey platform to explore the role of co-researchers with learning disabilities (LDs) in research design and analysis. A team of co-researchers used this system to create an online survey to challenge public understanding of LDs [3]. Here, we describe and evaluate the process of remotely co-analyzing the survey data across 30 meetings in a research team consisting of academics and non-academics with diverse abilities amid new COVID-19 lockdown challenges. Based on survey data with >1,500 responses, we first co-analyzed demographics using graphs and art & design approaches. Next, co-researchers co-analyzed the output of machine learning-based structural topic modelling (STM) applied to open-ended text responses. We derived an efficient five-steps STM co-analysis process for creative, inclusive, and critical engagement of data by co-researchers. Co-researchers observed that by trying to understand and impact public opinion, their own perspectives also changed.2021DCDorota Chapko et al.Universal & Inclusive DesignCollaborative Learning & Peer TeachingTelemedicine & Remote Patient MonitoringDIS
Deliberating Data-Driven Societies Through Live Action Role PlayPeople's data practices and their supporting personal informatics are imbued with a wide range of concepts of value that are central to their data imaginaries. They inform how individuals adopt particular products and services. This elusiveness of value creates a challenge for designers to gauge users' value preferences, which are personal, contextual and abstract. We propose deliberation as a process to operationalise design for elicitation, reflection and value formation, using Live Action Role Play (LARP). The paper demonstrates how our deliberative LARP precipitates the otherwise ethereal data values to unfold in a social setting. We argue that engaging people in reflecting on and playing out their own value formation offers designers more powerful insights to address complex challenges of data-driven societies. We report on our findings that agency and negotiability are key to transcend the politics of preferences in data practices and thus enhance acceptability.2021KPKruakae Pothong et al.Community Engagement & Civic TechnologyParticipatory DesignResearch Ethics & Open ScienceDIS
Augmented Reality and Older Adults: A Comparison of Prompting TypesOlder adults can benefit from technologies that help them to complete everyday tasks. However, they are an often-under-represented population in augmented reality (AR) research. We present the results of a study in which people aged 50 years or older were asked to perform actions by interpreting visual AR prompts in a lab setting. Our results show that users were less successful at completing actions when using ARROW and HIGHLIGHT augmentations than when using ghosted OBJECT or GHOSTHAND augmentations. We found that user confidence in performing actions varied according to action and augmentation type. Users preferred combined AUDIO+TEXT prompts (our control condition) overall, but the GHOSTHAND was the most preferred visual prompt. We discuss reasons for these differences and provide insight for developers of AR content for older adults. Our work provides the first comparative study of AR with older adults in a non-industrial context.2021TWThomas J. Williams et al.University of BathAR Navigation & Context AwarenessAging-in-Place Assistance SystemsCHI
Algorithmic Food Justice: Co-Designing More-than-Human Blockchain Futures for the Food CommonsThe relationships that constitute the global industrial food system tend towards two dominant values that are creating unsustainable social and environmental inequalities. The first is a human-centered perspective on food that privileges humans over all other species. The second is a view of food as a commodity to be traded for maximum economic value, rewarding a small number of shareholders. We present work that explores the unique algorithmic affordances of blockchain to create new types of value exchange and governance in the food system. We describe a project that used roleplay with urban agricultural communities to co-design blockchain-based food futures and explore the conditions for creating a thriving multispecies food commons. We discuss how the project helped rethink algorithmic food justice by reconfiguring more-than-human values and reconfiguring food as more-than-human commons. We also discuss some of the challenges and tensions arising from these explorations.2021SHSara Heitlinger et al.City, University of LondonSustainable HCIHuman-Nature Relationships (More-than-Human Design)CHI