Digital Civic Engagement in China: Using “Micro Advice” Platform to Improve People’s LivelihoodMicro Advice is a mobile platform for democratic governance in China, allowing access to voice social issues and advice to the government with the aim of improving people’s livelihood. However, due to the lack of first-hand experience, the current understanding of how end-users utilize Micro Advice to participate in democratic governance is incomplete. We interviewed 12 users to understand their practices and challenges in using the platform. Specifically, we illustrate the user's experience, introduce what difficulties they encountered, and how they strategically use the platform to improve people's livelihood. We also investigate the socio-technical aspects of Micro Advice within the Chinese political context, discussing how to accept and utilize Micro Advice in China's social environment, and develop technological solutions adapted to these backgrounds. Finally, we propose some design implications for civic technology participation platforms. Micro Advice provides a novel, open, and real-time channel for civic engagement, showcasing the practical effects and impact of digitized civic engagement in China. It offers researchers a new perspective for expressing and addressing societal issues. We believe that the innovation and insights of Micro Advice can extend to other types of digitized civic engagement initiatives. We will continue to explore the interactive processes between the government and the public, along with innovative technological approaches.2025YLYi Li et al.Community Engaged ResearchCSCW
Cultural Erosion or Innovation? Artisans’ Attitudes Toward AI-Generated Patterns in Traditional Chinese SubculturesGenerative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), particularly text-to-image (T2I) generation tools, presents new possibilities for preserving and innovating traditional cultural patterns. However, AI-generated images often lack cultural context, which risks cultural bias and the loss of cultural significance. This study explores the use of GAI in generating culturally meaningful patterns, focusing on Chinese intangible cultural heritage Huayao cross-stitch as a case study. By applying Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning to optimize T2I tools and using in-situ interviews and focus groups, we collected feedback from 18 Huayao artisans. The results show that while fine-tuned models improved stylistic accuracy, the cultural meaning of the patterns remained insufficient. This research highlights AI’s limited role in cultural innovation and emphasizes the necessity for dynamically maintaining cultural authenticity through the daily practices of cultural holders. It also reflects on how AI might have a long-term impact on the creative position of artisan communities.2025XYXiaojing Yuan et al.Generative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Technology Ethics & Critical HCIMuseum & Cultural Heritage DigitizationDIS
Customizable AI for Depression Care: Improving the User Experience of Large Language Model-Driven ChatbotsLarge Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate significant potential in the field of mental health. However, existing chatbots often lack personalized designs, which may limit their ability to fully address the complex needs of users with depression. This study builds upon the previously developed CloudEcho system, a mental health management application that integrates emotion monitoring and psychological support functions, to explore the impact of role customization features on user trust and customization experience. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study compares the differences between the system with role customization features and its original version. Quantitative results indicate that role customization can enhance user trust, showcasing high usability and satisfaction. Qualitative interviews further reveal the strengths and limitations of this feature and suggest directions for optimization. Together, these findings highlight the potential value of chatbot role customization in mental health support and offer theoretical and practical guidance for future LLM-driven personalized design and optimization in mental health contexts.2025YLYi Li et al.Conversational ChatbotsHuman-LLM CollaborationMental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesDIS
SkinGEN: an Explainable Dermatology Diagnosis-to-Generation Framework with Interactive Vision-Language ModelsWith the continuous advancement of vision language models (VLMs) technology, remarkable research achievements have emerged in the dermatology field, the fourth most prevalent human disease category. However, despite these advancements, VLM still faces explainable problems to user in diagnosis due to the inherent complexity of dermatological conditions, existing tools offer relatively limited support for user comprehension. We propose SkinGEN, a diagnosis-to-generation framework that leverages the stable diffusion(SD) model to generate reference demonstrations from diagnosis results provided by VLM, thereby enhancing the visual explainability for users. Through extensive experiments with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), we identify optimal strategies for skin condition image generation. We conduct a user study with 32 participants evaluating both the system performance and explainability. Results demonstrate that SkinGEN significantly improves users’ comprehension of VLM predictions and fosters increased trust in the diagnostic process. This work paves the way for more transparent and user-centric VLM applications in dermatology and beyond.2025BLYuyu Lin et al.Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) & NeurofeedbackExplainable AI (XAI)IUI
Maintaining "Balanced" Conflict: Proactive Intervention Strategies of AI Voice Agents in Online Collaboration of Temporary Design TeamsTemporary teams are important in modern work but often struggle with interpersonal factors that hinder consensus-driven tasks, especially in design teams where effective discussion and execution are critical. Integrating AI into these teams provides a promising solution. While some studies have explored AI’s role in enhancing teamwork, they often ignore the bidirectional impact of team dynamics: teams need to maintain a moderate level of disagreement, which must be effectively managed. To explore the mechanisms regulating conflict escalation and de-escalation in online collaboration of temporary design teams, we conducted exploratory research and an expert workshop (N=6) to propose proactive intervention strategies for AI voice agents. A controlled experiment (N=36) showed that teams with AI voice agent intervention performed better in improving interpersonal relationships, communication-related collaboration quality, and collaboration experience. This work suggests that AI voice agents can support team conflict dynamics by fostering constructive discussions and managing disagreements arising positively.2025XCXinHui Chen et al.School of design, Hunan UniversityVoice User Interface (VUI) DesignCreative Collaboration & Feedback SystemsCHI
Smart "Error"! Exploring Imperfect AI to Support Creative IdeationDesigners widely accept AI as a partner in the design process for its efficient and intelligent decision-making. However, AI is often not perfect, and AI error often makes humans dumbfounded. Literature has pointed out the value of such AI error, while still leaving its inspiration essence and application strategies uncharted from the practice perspective. This work focuses on bridging the practice gap by looking into and exploiting the imaginative ``mislabeled'' objects of object detection models. To gain insights into the inspiration of AI ``error'', we collected a dedicated AI ``error'' dataset from object detection and invited 8 designers to share divergent comments on the ``mislabeled'' objects. Coding was then performed on the comments, which summarizes the inspiration of AI ``error'' into six atomic dimensions. Subsequently, we took a step further to an exploratory study, a comparative ideation experiment with 20 designers, investigating how to apply these inspiration dimensions to create ideas. Questionnaire and interview results revealed that essential inspiration of AI ``error'' could positively activate creativity, especially the ``Outline'' dimension. A design model CETR is then formulated by summarizing the application of atomic inspiration of ``error'' into four forms of creativity, which could be taken as a guideline for cooperative design with AI ``error''. In addition, we also sketch two approaches to generate more inspiring and applicable AI ``error'', elaborate on two principal characteristics of AI ``error'' for promoting creativity, and propose three strategies for better co-creating with AI ``error''. Finally, we provide insight into design research about AI self-awareness and human-AI collaboration.2024FLFang Liu et al.Session 3a: AI in Creative Workflows: Opportunities and ChallengesCSCW
StyleWe: Towards Style Fusion in Generative Fashion Design with Efficient Federated AICollaboration can amalgamate diverse ideas, styles, and visual elements, fostering creativity and innovation among different designers.In collaborative design, sketches play a pivotal role as a means of expressing design creativity.However, designers often tend to not openly share these meticulously crafted sketches.This phenomenon of data island in the design area hinders its digital transformation under the third wave of AI.In this paper, we introduce a Federated Generative Artificial Intelligence Clothing system, namely StyleWe, employing federated learning to aid in sketch design.StyleWe is committed to establishing an ecosystem wherein designers can exchange sketch styles among themselves.Through StyleWe, designers can generate sketches that incorporate various designers' styles from their peers, drawing inspiration from collaboration without the need for data disclosure or upload.Extensive performance evaluations and user studies indicate that our StyleWe system can produce multi-styled sketches of comparable quality to human-designed ones while significantly enhancing efficiency compared to hand-drawn sketches.2024DWDi Wu et al.Session 3a: AI in Creative Workflows: Opportunities and ChallengesCSCW
HAIGEN: Towards Human-AI Collaboration for Facilitating Creativity and Style Generation in Fashion DesignJiang等人提出人机协作框架HAIGEN，利用AI辅助时尚设计师创意生成与风格探索，提升设计效率与创新多样性。2024JJJianan Jiang et al.Generative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)AI-Assisted Creative WritingUbiComp
Hicclip: Sonification of Augmented Eating Sounds to Intervene Snacking BehaviorsIn this paper, we present a field study on using sonification of augmented eating sounds to intervene snacking behaviors in daily routines. The sonic feedback achieved through a snack storing device named Hicclip for verifying snacking behaviors and producing augmented eating sounds. The study was conducted with nine participants who were commonly addicted to snacking. The effectiveness of the sonification was examined by comparing snack-related data and questionnaire over the three study weeks: a baseline week, a Hicclip intervention week, and a post-intervention week. We also analyzed interview results to understand user experiences and opportunities for future research. Quantitative results showed that the snacking pattern has been improved due to reduced eating duration and snack consumptions. Qualitative results suggested that Hicclip may benefit self-regulation, afford easy adoption, and support data acquisition. We discuss design implications for embodiment of augmented eating sounds for healthy snacking.2024XLXinyue Liu et al.Mental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesDiet Tracking & Nutrition ManagementDIS
"Waves Push Me to Slumberland": Reducing Pre-Sleep Stress through Spatio-Temporal Tactile Displaying of Music.Despite the fact that spatio-temporal patterns of vibration, characterized as rhythmic compositions of tactile content, have exhibited an ability to elicit specific emotional responses and enhance the emotion conveyed by music, limited research has explored their underlying mechanism in regulating emotional states within the pre-sleep context. Aiming to investigate whether synergistic spatio-temporal tactile displaying of music can facilitate relaxation before sleep, we developed 16 vibration patterns and an audio-tactile prototype for presenting an ambient experience in a pre-sleep scenario. The stress-reducing effects were further evaluated and compared via a user experiment. The results showed that the spatio-temporal tactile display of music significantly reduced stress and positively influenced users' emotional states before sleep. Furthermore, our study highlights the therapeutic potential of incorporating quantitative and adjustable spatio-temporal parameters correlated with subjective psychophysical perceptions in the audio-tactile experience for stress management.2024HZHui Zhang et al.Hunan UniversityVibrotactile Feedback & Skin StimulationSleep & Stress MonitoringCHI
Multi-Vib: Precise Multi-point Vibration Monitoring Using mmWave Radar"Vibration measurement is vital for fault diagnosis of structures (e.g., machines and civil structures). Different structure components undergo distinct vibration patterns, which jointly determine the structure's health condition, thus demanding simultaneous multi-point vibration monitoring. Existing solutions deploy multiple accelerometers along with their power supplies or laser vibrometers on the monitored object to measure multi-point vibration, which is inconvenient and costly. Cameras provide a less expensive solution while heavily relying on good lighting conditions. To overcome these limitations, we propose a cost-effective and passive system, called Multi-Vib, for precise multi-point vibration monitoring. Multi-Vib is implemented using a single mmWave radar to remotely and separately sense the vibration displacement of multiple points via signal reflection. However, simultaneously detecting and monitoring multiple points on a single object is a daunting task. This is because most radar signals are scattered away from vibration points due to their tilted locations and shapes by nature, causing an extremely weak reflected signal to the radar. To solve this issue, we dedicatedly design a physical marker placed on the target point, which can force the direction of the reflected signal towards the radar and significantly increase the reflected signal strength. Another practical issue is that the reflected signal from each point endures interferences and noises from the surroundings. Thus, we develop a series of effective signal processing methods to denoise the signal for accurate vibration frequency and displacement estimation. Extensive experimental results show that the average errors in multi-point vibration frequency and displacement estimation are around 0.16Hz and 14μm, respectively. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3569496"2023YYYanni Yang et al.Human Pose & Activity RecognitionBiosensors & Physiological MonitoringUbiComp
VibPath: Two-Factor Authentication with Your Hand’s Vibration Response to Unlock Your Phone"Technical advances in the smart device market have fixated smartphones at the heart of our lives, warranting an ever more secure means of authentication. Although most smartphones have adopted biometrics-based authentication, after a couple of failed attempts, most users are given the option to quickly bypass the system with passcodes. To add a layer of security, two-factor authentication (2FA) has been implemented but has proven to be vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, we introduce VibPath, a simultaneous 2FA scheme that can understand the user's hand neuromuscular system through touch behavior. VibPath captures the individual's vibration path responses between the hand and the wrist with the attention-based encoder-decoder network, authenticating the genuine users from the imposters unobtrusively. In a user study with 30 participants, VibPath achieved an average performance of 0.98 accuracy, 0.99 precision, 0.98 recall, 0.98 f1-score for user verification, and 94.3% accuracy for user identification across five passcodes. Furthermore, we also conducted several extensive studies, including in-the-wile, permanence, vulnerability, usability, and system overhead studies, to assess the practicability and viability of the VibPath from multiple aspects." https://doi.org/10.1145/36108942023SCSeokmin Choi et al.Vibrotactile Feedback & Skin StimulationPasswords & AuthenticationUbiComp
HearFire: Indoor Fire Detection via Inaudible Acoustic Sensing"Indoor conflagration causes a large number of casualties and property losses worldwide every year. Yet existing indoor fire detection systems either suffer from short sensing range (e.g., ≤ 0.5m using a thermometer), susceptible to interferences (e.g., smoke detector) or high computational and deployment overhead (e.g., cameras, Wi-Fi). This paper proposes HearFire, a cost-effective, easy-to-use and timely room-scale fire detection system via acoustic sensing. HearFire consists of a collocated commodity speaker and microphone pair, which remotely senses fire by emitting inaudible sound waves. Unlike existing works that use signal reflection effect to fulfill acoustic sensing tasks, HearFire leverages sound absorption and sound speed variations to sense the fire due to unique physical properties of flame. Through a deep analysis of sound transmission, HearFire effectively achieves room-scale sensing by correlating the relationship between the transmission signal length and sensing distance. The transmission frame is carefully selected to expand sensing range and balance a series of practical factors that impact the system's performance. We further design a simple yet effective approach to remove the environmental interference caused by signal reflection by conducting a deep investigation into channel differences between sound reflection and sound absorption. Specifically, sound reflection results in a much more stable pattern in terms of signal energy than sound absorption, which can be exploited to differentiate the channel measurements caused by fire from other interferences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HireFire enables a maximum 7m sensing range and achieves timely fire detection in indoor environments with up to 99.2% accuracy under different experiment configurations. https://doi.org/10.1145/3569500"2023ZWZheng Wang et al.Context-Aware ComputingUbiquitous ComputingUbiComp
Wizundry: A Cooperative Wizard of Oz Platform for Simulating Future Speech-based Interfaces with Multiple WizardsWizard of Oz (WoZ) as a prototyping method has been used to simulate intelligent user interfaces, particularly for speech-based systems. However, as our societies' expectations on artificial intelligence (AI) grows, the question remains whether a single Wizard is sufficient for it to simulate smarter systems and more complex interactions. Optimistic visions of 'what artificial intelligence (AI) can do' places demands on WoZ platforms to simulate smarter systems and more complex interactions. This raises the question of whether the typical approach of employing a single Wizard is sufficient. Moreover, while existing work has employed multiple Wizards in WoZ studies, a Multi-Wizard approach has not been systematically studied in terms of feasibility, effectiveness, and challenges. We offer Wizundry, a real-time, web-based WoZ platform that allows multiple Wizards to collaboratively operate a speech-to-text based system remotely. We outline the design and technical specifications of our open-source platform, which we iterated over two design phases. We report on two studies in which participant-Wizards were tasked with negotiating how to cooperatively simulate an interface that can handle natural speech for dictation and text editing as well as other intelligent text processing tasks. We offer qualitative findings on the Multi-Wizard experience for Dyads and Triads of Wizards. Our findings reveal the promises and challenges of the Multi-Wizard approach and open up new research questions.2023SHSiying Hu et al.MethodsCSCW
StyleMe: Towards Intelligent Fashion Generation with Designer StyleHand-drawn sketches and sketch colourization are the most laborious but necessary steps for fashion designers to design exquisite clothes, especially when the fashion design requires distinctive and personal characteristics from designer style. This paper presents an artificial intelligent aided fashion design system, namely StyleMe, to support the automatic generation of clothing sketches with designer style. Given the clothing pictures specified by the designer, StyleMe can use deep learning based generative model to generate clothing sketches that are consistent with the designer style. The system also supports intelligent colourization on clothing sketch by style transfer, according to specified styles from the real fashion images. Through a series of performance evaluations and user studies, we found that our system can generate effective clothing sketches as good as fashion designers' human work, and significantly improve the efficiency of fashion design with its sketch colourization method.2023DWDi Wu et al.Hunan UniversityGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Graphic Design & Typography ToolsCHI
FlexHaptics: A Design Method for Passive Haptic Inputs Using Planar Compliant StructuresThis paper presents FlexHaptics, a design method for creating custom haptic input interfaces. Our approach leverages planar compliant structures whose force-deformation relationship can be altered by adjusting the geometries. Embedded with such structures, a FlexHaptics module exerts a fine-tunable haptic effect (i.e., resistance, detent, or bounce) along a movement path (i.e., linear, rotary, or ortho-planar). These modules can work separately or combine into an interface with complex movement paths and haptic effects. To enable the parametric design of FlexHaptic modules, we provide a design editor that converts user-specified haptic properties into underlying mechanical structures of haptic modules. We validate our approach and demonstrate the potential of FlexHaptic modules through six application examples, including a slider control for a painting application and a piano keyboard interface on touchscreens, a tactile low vision timer, VR game controllers, and a compound input device of a joystick and a two-step button.2022HLHongnan Lin et al.Georgia Institute of TechnologyForce Feedback & Pseudo-Haptic WeightShape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsPrototyping & User TestingCHI
Geocaching with a Beam: Shared Outdoor Activities through a Telepresence Robot with 360 Degree ViewingPeople often enjoy sharing outdoor activities together such as walking and hiking. However, when family and friends are separated by distance it can be difficult if not impossible to share such activities. We explore this design space by investigating the benefits and challenges of using a telepresence robot to support outdoor leisure activities. In our study, participants participated in the outdoor activity of geocaching where one person geocached with the help of a remote partner via a telepresence robot. We compared a wide field of view (WFOV) camera to a 360° camera. Results show the benefits of having a physical embodiment and a sense of immersion with the 360° view. Yet challenges related to a lack of environmental awareness, safety issues, and privacy concerns resulting from bystander interactions. These findings illustrate the need to design telepresence robots with the environment and public in mind to provide an enhanced sensory experience while balancing safety and privacy issues resulting from being amongst the general public.2018YHYasamin Heshmat et al.Simon Fraser University360° Video & Panoramic ContentTeleoperation & TelepresenceCHI