Envisioning Future Food, Technology, and Health: Teens’ Perspectives Through Design FictionTeenage years are a critical period for shaping food practices and health behaviors, yet teens remain underrepresented in research on future food and health technologies. This paper reports on design fiction workshops where 20 teens speculated on artifacts such as health-tracking mirrors and food-making machines while reflecting on their eating habits and values. Our analysis shows how teens negotiate their human stances in a techno-centric world, balancing excitement about innovation with concerns over health, control, and responsibility. We contribute to HCI by: (1) identifying teen-specific design considerations for reflective healthy-eating technologies, highlighting “absence” as a protective affordance; (2) reframing food technologies for teens as sites of family care and playful identity work, opening a design space at the intersection of reflection and play; and (3) advancing methodological understanding of youth-centered design fiction by showing how dual-mode speculative workshops can move teen participants beyond solutionist or anti-solutionist positions toward grounded negotiation with sociotechnical systems.2026CWChun-Han Ariel Wang et al.University of California, Santa CruzDesign FictionChild-Computer Interaction DesignDigital Parenting & Screen Time ManagementCHI
“To be that one other brick in the pillar”: Online Communities, Platforms, and Collective Action in the BTS Industrial ComplexSocial media platforms have become integral to everyday life and serve as the foundation for online communities. These platforms not only enable communication but also shape the ways in which online communities are formed and maintained. In this paper, we examine an online community, the BTS fandom ARMY, using Durkheim's concept of solidarity, we show how ARMY’s symbolic commitments, collective labor, and boundary negotiations are simultaneously community practices and infrastructural labor that generate cultural and economic value. Using an online survey and ethnographic observations of BTS ARMY, we present the BTS Industrial Complex, an ecosystem of communities all related to BTS that rely on digital platforms to influence and interact with each other. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a conceptualization of the BTS Industrial Complex as a sociotechnical ecosystem, (2) empirical insights into how platforms shape collective action, and (3) implications for HCI in designing for and critically examining large-scale cultural economies.2026KRKathryn E. Ringland et al.University of California, Santa CruzSocial Platform Design & User BehaviorContent Moderation & Platform GovernanceActivism & Political ParticipationCHI
RIP Moxie: Lessons for Supporting Emotional Detachment at Product End-of-Life through a Case Study of a Social Companion RobotMeaningful connections formed between people and robots are a key factor in sustaining long-term interaction. Yet while onboarding experiences for social robot products are often carefully designed to cultivate these bonds, offboarding receives far less attention. This imbalance can result in abrupt disruptions in human-robot bonds when products reach end-of-life. In this paper, we examine a case study describing the shutdown of Moxie, a social robot designed to support children's socio-emotional learning. Through a qualitative analysis of the company’s public communications and users’ online reactions to the shutdown, we identify key missed opportunities to prepare and support users throughout the robot’s final interactions. In the absence of a structured offboarding experience, the emotional, technical, and communicative burdens were shifted to parents. Drawing from these findings, we introduce ethical sunsetting recommendations for social robots and offer a reimagined offboarding experience aimed at supporting healthy emotional detachment during product end-of-life.2026BCBengisu Cagiltay et al.University of Wisconsin - MadisonSocial Robot InteractionTechnology in End-of-Life CareDigital Legacy & Online MemorialsCHI
"I have a plan to start": Empowering Awareness and Behavior Change through a Collaborative Flood Resilience GameGames empowering active engagement in real-world climate adaptation measures are underexplored. Yet, bottom-up engagement is crucial for addressing natural hazard impacts at the community and individual levels. Our work employed an iterative research for and through co-design approach to develop a locally adapted tabletop game for a community-led educational Center. We tested the game onsite (n = 254), followed by two surveys, one immediately after playing (n = 57) and one conducted two weeks later (n = 11), assessing players' awareness, and sense of empowerment and agency. Results show an increase in participants' awareness of local countermeasures, a sense of agency, and their participatory efficacy in contributing to their own, their family's, and their community's climate resilience. Our work contributes a transferable game concept that reflects complex real-world interdependencies, empowering a sense of agency through practice-based game mechanics.2026LHLinda Hirsch et al.University of California Santa CruzSerious & Functional GamesVolunteer Coordination & Crowdsourced Disaster ReliefCommunity Engagement & Civic TechnologyCHI
Preparing and Experiencing Food During Life Events: Implications for Technology Supporting Social and Value ChangesHealthy eating is essential to overall well-being. Deciding what and how to eat often requires collaboration and coordination with others to develop routines and create enjoyable experiences. However, life changes like moving or unemployment can disrupt food routines and social dining. Current technologies often overlook these evolving changes and do not adequately support individuals in collaborating with others to adapt to these impacts. In this paper, we interviewed 18 participants who experienced various routine changes during life events. Findings highlight the need for tools to support individuals in adapting to food practices, facilitating social coordination, and mediating conflicts during transitions. We explore design opportunities that facilitate technology reconfiguration, value clarification and mediation, and social coordination, aiming to better support individuals in times of change, both for those who undergo life events and others who offer help with food practices. Our work offers design considerations for technologies that enhance healthy eating and food service, ensuring sustained support during life changes.2025SHSeung Wan Ha et al.University of California, Santa Cruz, Department of Computational MediaMental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesFood Culture & Food InteractionCHI
From Viral Content to Real-Life Cuisine and Beyond: Examining Teenagers’ Interactions with TikTok Food Videos and the Influence on Their Food PracticesTikTok has gained immense popularity among teenagers, offering access to numerous user-generated content. Notably, food videos have emerged as a prominent theme on this short-form video social platform, exerting influence on teenage users. The casual and enjoyable nature of short food videos on TikTok belies their potential influence on one of teenagers' most immediate and regular health practices--eating. Understanding how teenagers interact with these videos, their subsequent actions, and the resulting impact on their food practices and eating habits have the potential to provide insight into their broader lifestyle choices and their interactions within their social circles, including parents, friends, and other people online. By examining how teenagers use TikTok food videos online and offline, we gain a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between social media, teenage lifestyle, and social dynamics surrounding food practices. In this research, we conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with teenagers aged 13 to 19, investigating their consumption of TikTok food videos and the actions inspired by them. By examining the multifaceted influence of TikTok food videos from a temporal perspective, this study contributes to the reflections of teens' use of TikTok food videos and their inspired food practices in the short and long term, online and offline. We propose design and theoretical implications to support teenagers' health. These insights have the potential to extend to various contexts that help educators, policymakers, and designers in fostering healthy lifestyles among teenagers.2024CWChun-Han Ariel Wang et al.Session 3d: Teens in the Digital Age: Safety, Creativity, and Well-BeingCSCW
Drawing From Social Media to Inspire Increasingly Playful and Social Drone FuturesIn this pictorial, we explore the potential of social media to help inspire ideas for future drone design applications that support playful and social experiences. Drawing from a Situated Play Design approach, we turn to social media posts to identify recurring playful and social instances of drone use in social settings. We present the results of collecting 143 posts found on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, from which we identified a non-exhaustive list of drone-based play potentials, i.e. existing ways in which people already appropriate drones to playfully augment social situations. We present these play potentials as potentially valuable and inherently situated intermediate-level knowledge with generative power. We argue they might inspire the design of future drone technologies and experiences in Human-Drone Interaction (HDI), in directions that increasingly respond to people’s desires for play and social connection.2021APAlexandra Pometko et al.Social Platform Design & User BehaviorDrone Interaction & ControlDIS
Personalized Explanations for Hybrid Recommender SystemsRecommender systems have become pervasive on the web, shaping the way users see information and thus the decisions they make. As these systems get more complex, there is a growing need for transparency. In this paper, we study the problem of generating and visualizing personalized explanations for hybrid recommender systems, which incorporate many different data sources. We build upon a hybrid probabilistic graphical model and develop an approach to generate real-time recommendations along with personalized explanations. To study the benefits of explanations for hybrid recommender systems, we conduct a crowd-sourced user study where our system generates personalized recommendations and explanations for real users of the last.fm music platform. We experiment with 1) different explanation styles (e.g., user-based, item-based), 2) manipulating the number of explanation styles presented, and 3) manipulating the presentation format (e.g., textual vs. visual). We apply a mixed model statistical analysis to consider user personality traits as a control variable and demonstrate the usefulness of our approach in creating personalized hybrid explanations with different style, number, and format.2019PKPigi Kouki et al.Explainable AI (XAI)Recommender System UXData StorytellingIUI
Scene Text Access: A Comparison of Mobile OCR Modalities for Blind UsersWe present a study with seven blind participants using three different mobile OCR apps to find text posted in various indoor environments. The first app considered was Microsoft SeeingAI in its Short Text mode, which reads any text in sight with a minimalistic interface. The second app was Spot+OCR, a custom application that separates the task of text detection from OCR proper. Upon detection of text in the image, Spot+OCR generates a short vibration; as soon as the user stabilizes the phone, a high-resolution snapshot is taken and OCR-processed. The third app, Guided OCR, was designed to guide the user in taking several pictures in a 360º span at the maximum resolution available by the camera, with minimum overlap between pictures. Quantitative results (in terms of true positive ratios and traversal speed) were recorded. Along with the qualitative observation and outcomes from an exit survey, these results allow us to identify and assess the different strategies used by our participants, as well as the challenges of operating these systems without sight.2019LNLeo S Neat et al.Visual Impairment Technologies (Screen Readers, Tactile Graphics, Braille)IUI