Shared Use of Intimate Technology: A Large-Scale Qualitative Study on the Use of Natural Cycles as a Digital ContraceptiveWe present a large-scale, qualitative interview study that examines how an intimate technology within reproductive health comes to be chosen and trusted as a mode of contraception and how its use is shared between partners. We conducted 133 semi-structured interviews with \textit{primary users} of Natural Cycles, focusing specifically on its use as \textit{a digital contraceptive}. Our interpretive analysis, first, sheds light on perceptions of risks and benefits, along with how, and by whom, the decision to adopt Natural Cycles got made. Second, we discuss participants' and their partners' gradual development of trust in the system, and how this intertwines with interpersonal trust. Third, we consider the shared use of Natural Cycles, including partner involvement in temperature tracking, the sharing of intimate data, and navigating specific choices and risks regarding sex and contraception. We make a primarily empirical contribution to Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research on shared uses of technology and the sharing of intimate data, and highlight avenues for future work to foster understanding of intimate technologies and their shared use in relational settings.2025ALAiri Lampinen et al.Women & GenderCSCW
Verifying or Clarifying? User Preferences for Mobile Crowdsourcing in Response to Seemingly Inconsistent Sensor DataIn the realm of smart cities, sensor technologies play a pivotal role in monitoring urban facilities and environments, providing real-time, site-specific information to residents. However, discrepancies often arise in sensor data due to variances in granularity, abstraction, and scope, which can foster uncertainty regarding the actual conditions on-site. This study explores whether, under these circumstances, individuals prefer on-site mobile crowds for verification purposes or for the provision of supplementary contextual information to aid in decision-making. Conducting an online study with 100 participants from our home country, who engaged in a think-aloud process while utilizing smart city sensor data for decision-making, our findings indicate that participants more often (54%) preferred seeking verification over supplementary contextual information (46%). Both pre-existing expectations and the sense of task urgency affected participants' choices between verification and supplementary contextual information. However, we found that the driving factor for seeking supplementary contextual information was not sensor data deviating from pre-existing expectations, but rather the absence of such pre-existing expectations. Our qualitative data also uncovered five primary motivations and four factors influencing the choice of crowdsourced information. Overall, these findings contribute to our understanding of how people leverage on-site mobile crowds to supplement sensor data in the context of smart cities.2025YCYou-Hsuan Chiang et al.Crowdsourcing & Peer ProductionCSCW
The Collaborative Work of Stewardship in Waste Management in Multi-tenant Apartment BuildingsThis paper examines the collaborative work of residents, housing associations, and property owners, in a multi-apartment housing complex, to manage household waste. Framed within the feminist ecological perspective of digital environmental stewardship - that is, how diverse actors, motivations, and capacities producing care for the environment that can be digitally mediated - we unpack how the many actors involved work together to keep waste in place, maintain the local waste system, and call on `responsibility' as a means to produce sustainable actions and accountability. We frame these practices of waste management within the mundane work of sociotechnical innovation. Borrowing from Jackson's notion of repair work, we weave together an argument for the novel and valuable contribution to sustainability research of CSCW approaches grounded in the everyday contingent emergencies of environmental care. We argue for approaches to sustainability that reflect the work to maintain sustainability ––not just produce it-- and the `good enough', a locally and reflexively produced equilibrium between maintenance and repair, which can frame the design of sociotechnical interventions mediating practices of waste management.2025CRChiara Rossitto et al.Infrastructure StudiesCSCW
Texergy: Textile-based Harvesting, Storing, and Releasing of Mechanical Energy for Passive On-Body ActuationHumans instinctively manipulate and "actuate" their clothing, for instance, to adapt to the environment or to modify aesthetics. However, such manual actuation remains inflexible and directly tied to user action. We introduce Texergy, a textile-based technical framework that decouples user input and actuated output to make passive on-body actuation interactive and programmable. Texergy achieves this by harvesting energy from user interactions with a set of input modules, storing it mechanically on the body in elastic materials, later releasing the energy on demand, and finally connecting to output end-effectors that realize the actuation. We present a fabrication approach based on almost entirely textile materials using laser-cutting and simple manual assembly to enable integration into clothing and easy prototyping. We report the results of technical experiments and provide a design tool to support customizing the actuation’s force and distance, type of harvesting, and deployment of Texergy mechanisms. We practically demonstrate the capabilities of Texergy with four applications, including a quick-release belt, a passive exosuit with dynamic assistance, a haptic feedback top powered by implicit user actions in VR, and a dance-driven shape-changing costume.2025YJYu Jiang et al.Force Feedback & Pseudo-Haptic WeightHaptic WearablesShape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsUIST
DxHF: Providing High-Quality Human Feedback for LLM Alignment with Interactive DecompositionHuman preferences are widely used to align large language models (LLMs) through methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, the current user interfaces require annotators to compare text paragraphs, which is cognitively challenging when the texts are long or unfamiliar. This paper contributes by studying the decomposition principle as an approach to improving the quality of human feedback for LLM alignment. This approach breaks down the text into individual claims instead of directly comparing two long-form text responses. Based on the principle, we build a novel user interface DxHF. It enhances the comparison process by showing decomposed claims, visually encoding the relevance of claims to the conversation and linking similar claims. This allows users to skim through key information and identify differences for better and quicker judgment. Our technical evaluation shows evidence that decomposition generally improves feedback accuracy regarding the ground truth, particularly for users with uncertainty. A crowdsourcing study with 160 participants indicates that using DxHF improves feedback accuracy by an average of 5%, although it increases the average feedback time by 18 seconds. Notably, accuracy is significantly higher in situations where users have less certainty. The finding of the study highlights the potential of HCI as an effective method for improving human-AI alignment.2025DSDanqing Shi et al.Human-LLM CollaborationExplainable AI (XAI)UIST
SPAT: Situational Prosocial and Aggressive Behavior Perception in Traffic ScaleAutomated vehicles (AVs) reached technological maturity and will soon arrive on streets as traffic participants. Human traffic participants such as drivers, pedestrians, or cyclists will be increasingly confronted with the presence of AVs within their environment, not necessarily knowing or understanding what to expect and how to interact with them. Although AVs are designed to act safely, effective interaction in mixed traffic scenarios will depend on successful communication, interaction, or even negotiation beyond static rules and regulations. Prosocial behavior, such as yielding one's right of way, will be needed to resolve unclear traffic situations or foster traffic flow. However, what are the characteristics of such prosocial behavior, and how to measure this not only for automated vehicles but for all road users? Here, we describe a new scale to measure perceived social behavior in urban traffic scenarios. Through an online survey on \textit{N} = 318 individuals and a validation study, we developed the Situational Prosocial and Aggressive Behavior in Traffic Scale and assessed it psychometrically.2025HİHatice Şahin İppoliti et al.Teleoperated DrivingV2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) Communication DesignAI-Assisted Decision-Making & AutomationAutoUI
Designing for Secondary Users of Intimate TechnologiesDigital contraceptives are intimate technologies that support their users, and their partners, in preventing pregnancy. These technologies rely on basal body temperature data to predict ovulation and calculate a fertile window, where there is a risk of pregnancy if partners have unprotected sex. Although their use is shared and relational, these technologies are mainly designed for a primary user — the person who can become pregnant. We turn our attention to secondary users of digital contraception (i.e., sexual partners), specifically, Natural Cycles. We investigate how secondary users are designed for and how primary users imagine them to be. We contribute empirical insights on how secondary users are and are not involved in digital contraception and conclude with three design proposals describing how digital contraception tools could be designed to involve secondary users. We discuss how designing for secondary users of intimate technologies requires balancing their potential as co-users and adversaries.2025AOAlejandra Gómez Ortega et al.Reproductive & Women's HealthEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsDIS
Designing with decolonial intent: Towards a decolonial archive in resistance to epistemicideThis paper follows a trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural arts research endeavour which seeks to utilise the restitution of neglected archival materials to engage the social and cultural trajectory of the villages and nation from which that material and intangible heritage was taken, stolen, destroyed, lost, or diminished. The paper engages with tensions in colonial and decolonial design of digital heritage between the potential for counter-histories and imaginaries on the one-hand and the colonial impulse of computing and its logics on the other. Through the research through design activities formed with a decolonial praxiology, we explore how the systems, practices and technologies of archival practices in this project develop an ethics of knowledge-making that neither satisfies or diminishes decolonial intent. We tentatively argue for approaches to decolonial design that are accounted for in local and pragmatic modes of knowledge making that are delinked from globalised and abstracted systems that otherwise repress them.2025RCRob Comber et al.Technology Ethics & Critical HCIDesign FictionMuseum & Cultural Heritage DigitizationDIS
Estrangement through SilenceHow can we cultivate deeper attunement to one another, ourselves, and the environment that can, in turn, inform and enrich design? Over the course of four workshops conducted across 1.5 years – primarily outdoors – the authors engaged in prolonged periods of shared silence. This collective silence functioned as an estrangement method, revealing the porous and interdependent boundaries between people and things, mutually constituting one another. We unpack some of the experiential qualities emerging from these experiments and mobilize them for future design processes, including: cultivating multifaceted sensibilities, dynamic modes of noticing and interacting, such as coming together and dispersing, being alone together, and acting or playing in unison; the malleability of silence to specific, orchestrated design activities, such as cooking or designing; and reframing silence, not as an absence, but as a presence – rich with sounds, interactions, and possibilities for engagement. We discuss how to set up temporal and spatial boundaries, alongside boundaries within and between ourselves.2025JFJonas Fritsch et al.Technology Ethics & Critical HCIHuman-Nature Relationships (More-than-Human Design)DIS
Making Intimate Technologies TogetherFeminist research highlights the urgent need to challenge the oppressive design of commercial intimate technologies, particularly how the FemTech industry restricts access to intimate bodily knowledge through paywalls and proprietary systems. Yet, for decades, women and marginalized communities have turned to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) or 'hacking' practices to reclaim control over their own gynecology and intimate health, addressing gaps often ignored by medical research and healthcare. Inspired by visual themes from these movements, this pictorial critically explores how designers and HCI researchers might advance DIY approaches to intimate technologies. We exemplify this with reflections from a series of workshops on handmade intimate sensors, and draw out the joyful potential of collaborative making—building alliances, destigmatizing intimate health, and using craft to subvert gender stereotypes. We discuss matters of safety when making together and contribute to ongoing work on building feminist makerspaces.2025NWNadia Campo Woytuk et al.LGBTQ+ Community Technology DesignParticipatory DesignFood Culture & Food InteractionDIS
Yarn as a Means to Give Form to Entanglements of Regulation, Design and Sustainability PracticesWhen designing with and for complex sustainability processes like waste management, it is crucial to understand digital technologies as entangled with broader systemic factors, including physical infrastructures and regulatory instruments. Within the specific case of organic household waste management, this pictorial aims at making such relations visible through design methods. We have used yarn to represent the different threads of these entanglements and defined specific configurations: tangles, knots, loose ends, and frayed threads. We discuss how the design practice of giving form to these entanglements can make complex relations between digital technology, infrastructures, and regulatory instruments more visible and actionable for HCI, and explore how digital technologies are – and can be – made to work within them.2025ARAnton Poikolainen Rosén et al.Sustainable HCIEcological Design & Green ComputingDIS
Ambient Awareness: Experiencing Always-On Displays in the Life of PV HouseholdsThe adoption of photovoltaic (PV) panels, electric vehicles (EVs), and dynamic electricity pricing is transforming households into active "prosumers" who generate, consume, and sell electricity. This shift, driven by rising costs and environmental concerns, requires new technologies to help households manage their production and consumption. Electricity’s invisibility adds complexity, necessitating interfaces that make energy use and generation comprehensible. This paper presents the Always-On In-Home Display (AOIHD), a technology probe designed for prosumer households to navigate the dynamics of this production and consumption - balancing periods of solar abundance and grid reliance, by making energy data persistently and collectively accessible within the household. Adopting a practice theory lens, we explore how the AOIHD was experienced in daily life over a four-year autobiographical study and through deployments in other Swedish households. Our findings highlight four experiential qualities—Learning, Triggering, Including, and Troubling—that illustrate how the display supports the domestication of energy feedback technologies in prosumer contexts. We argue that fostering integration into household practices is key to sustaining meaningful interaction with smart energy technologies.2025AMArjun Rajendran Menon et al.Home Energy ManagementSustainable HCIEcological Design & Green ComputingDIS
Temporal Trajectories: Characterizing Somatic Experiences that Unfold Over Time The body technologies we design profoundly influence our somatic experiences, yet they are often evaluated through short-term or one-off studies. To design for sustained, longer-term engagements, we need to understand how somatic experiences evolve when people repeatedly interact with the same technology over time. With this goal, we report on two in-the-wild studies of body sonification, one with physically inactive individuals and another with professional dancers. For one month, participants used SoniBand, a movement sonification wearable, in their daily lives and shared their experiences with us through questionnaires and in-depth interviews. Drawing from the concept of trajectories, we identified four temporal patterns that characterized the participants' evolving experience with SoniBand: singular, sustained, deepening, and meandering. We unpack these temporal trajectories and reflect on the characteristics that may contribute to their emergence. Our findings offer insights for studying and designing future technologies that embrace the dynamic, evolving nature of people's somatic experiences.2025LVLaia Turmo Vidal et al.Vibrotactile Feedback & Skin StimulationHaptic WearablesFull-Body Interaction & Embodied InputDIS
One Does Not Simply Meme Alone: Evaluating Co-Creativity Between LLMs and Humans in the Generation of HumorCollaboration has been shown to enhance creativity, leading to more innovative and effective outcomes. While previous research has explored the abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to serve as co-creative partners in tasks like writing poetry or creating narratives, the collaborative potential of LLMs in humor-rich and culturally nuanced domains remains an open question. To address this gap, we conducted a user study to explore the potential of LLMs in co-creating memes—a humor-driven and culturally specific form of creative expression. We conducted a user study with three groups of 50 participants each: a human-only group creating memes without AI assistance, a human-AI collaboration group interacting with a state-of-the-art LLM model, and an AI-only group where the LLM autonomously generated memes. We assessed the quality of the generated memes through crowdsourcing, with each meme rated on creativity, humor, and shareability. Our results showed that LLM assistance increased the number of ideas generated and reduced the effort participants felt. However, it did not improve the quality of the memes when humans collaborated with LLM. Interestingly, memes created entirely by AI performed better than both human-only and human-AI collaborative memes in all areas on average. However, when looking at the top-performing memes, human-created ones were better in humor, while human-AI collaborations stood out in creativity and shareability. These findings highlight the complexities of human-AI collaboration in creative tasks. While AI can boost productivity and create content that appeals to a broad audience, human creativity remains crucial for content that connects on a deeper level.2025ZWZhikun Wu et al.Generative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)AI-Assisted Creative WritingIUI
Towards Caring Touch From Technologies: Knowledge From Healthcare PractitionersWe present a qualitative study with five healthcare experts specialised in different types of touch practice to gain insight in how caring touch can be enacted. Through our analysis we focus on how to transfer this learning into design considerations towards enacting caring touch from technologies. Despite the rapidly growing expectation for and design interest in touch from technologies intending to enhance care and well-being, the knowledge on how to design caring touch is still fragmented. How caring touch is enacted in inter-personal touch is under-explored and such expertise from healthcare practitioners has not been engaged from the perspective of HCI design research. We propose designers to consider caring as an experiential quality instead of a division between instrumental types of touch and caring types. We recommend when designing for a caring quality in technology-initiated touch that designers create a progression of touch with dynamic sensitivity and adapt the materiality of actuating devices to the plural dimensions of the body's textures.2025CZCaroline Yan Zheng et al.KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyEV Charging & Eco-Driving InterfacesVibrotactile Feedback & Skin StimulationCHI
Digital Play in Nature: A Study of Digital Play Installations from a Nature Play PerspectiveWhile digital play installations for outdoor use are becoming more common, little work has been done on how such technology shapes play in nature-rich environments. We performed a study of children’s self-directed play with access to nature as well as digital installations. Our findings show that play with nature materials and digital installations emerged in different ways. Most notably, imaginative play was observed emerging in close interaction with nature, while the digital installations mostly inspired rule-based play. Furthermore, engagement with digital installations typically involved an active exploration phase which was not observed with nature materials. Nature materials instead engaged the children’s senses more immediately, and often offered opportunities for collection and consumption, paving way for fluent play activities roaming large areas. We argue that these differences motivate rethinking the design of digital installations for play in nature and suggest guidelines to this purpose.2025AWAnnika Waern et al.Dept of Informatics and Media, Uppsala UniversityInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingFood Culture & Food InteractionCHI
Exploring Assumptions about Sustainability: Towards a Constructive Framework for Action in Sustainable HCIThe global environmental crises continue to get worse, fast approaching various irreversible thresholds. While a vast array of approaches to solving sustainability problems are found under the umbrella of Sustainable HCI, their contributions are sometimes hard to compare. In this essay, we describe a set of assumptions that influence what is considered meaningful and important areas of sustainability research, along four dimensions of sustainability: 1) the depth and nature of the sustainability challenges; 2) the role of technological innovation in sustainability; 3) what gets defined as "externalities" to a design or system; and 4) the time perspective used to consider sustainability. We argue that what one assumes within each of these dimensions directly influences what one means by the term "sustainability", which is then reflected in the questions that are asked, the methods chosen, the proposed solutions and the developed systems. By describing these assumptions and some of their commensurate actions, we offer a framework that may enable members of the SHCI community to reflect on and better position their own work and that of others in the field. Our intention is for the framework to lead to better transparency and more constructive conversations about where we might collectively direct our efforts moving forward.2025MTMinna K Laurell Thorslund et al.KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Media Technology and Interaction DesignSustainable HCIEcological Design & Green ComputingCHI
Friction in Processual Ethics: Reconfiguring Ethical Relations in Interdisciplinary ResearchFriction -- disagreement and breakdown -- is an omnipresent aspect of conducting interdisciplinary research yet is rarely presented in formal research reporting. We analyse a performance-led research process where professional dancers with different disabilities explored how to improvise with an industrial robot, with the support of an interdisciplinary team of human-computer and human-robot interaction researchers. We focus on one site of friction in our research process; how to dance -- safely -- with robots? By presenting our research process, we exemplify the different ways in which we encountered this friction and how we reconfigured the research process around it. We contribute five ways in which we arrived at a generative ethical outcome, which may be helpful in productively engaging with friction in interdisciplinary collaboration.2025RGRachael Garrett et al.KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Media Technology and Interaction DesignHuman-Robot Collaboration (HRC)Technology Ethics & Critical HCIDance & Body Movement ComputingCHI
Designing Touch Technologies for and with Bodies in Menstrual DiscomfortMenstrual discomfort is a prevalent, diverse, and cyclical lived experience, impacting everyday lives. However, in HCI, it has been mostly approached as a data point, leaving much unknown on how technologies can care for these experiences. In response, we designed Touchware, a collection of on-body touch probes with pneumatic shape-change and weight components, which invite wearers to engage with and care for their menstrual discomfort. We report on the participatory soma design process of making Touchware and its two-week-long deployment study with 6 participants in a workplace setting. Our data analysis highlights diffuse and lingering qualities of menstrual discomfort, shedding light on how technologies may touch bodies in vulnerable states. We discuss the importance and challenges of designing touch technologies for and with bodies in the moments of menstrual discomfort. We conclude with a reflection on the agency of touch and its potential to support the self-care labour and nurturing the radical normalization of rest.2025JPJoo Young Park et al.KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Media Technology and Interaction DesignHaptic WearablesShape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsCHI
Doing the Feminist Work in AI: Reflections from an AI Project in Latin AmericaThe contemporary AI development landscape is dominated by big corporations, lacks diversity, and mostly centres the Global North, or applies extractivist logics in the South. This paper showcases a feminist process of AI development from Latin America, where we created an interactive, AI-powered tool that helps criminal court officers open justice data, addressing a data gap on gender-based violence. Through a collaborative autoethnography, drawing from Latin American feminisms, we unpack and visibilize the feminist work that was required, as a crucial step to counter hegemonic narratives. Foregrounding the subjugated knowledges of our experiences, we offer a concrete example of a feminist approach to AI development grounded in practice. With this, we aim to critically inspire those who consider building technology in service of social justice causes, or who choose to build AI systems otherwise.2025MFMarianela Ciolfi Felice et al.KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyAI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityAlgorithmic Fairness & BiasGender & Race Issues in HCICHI