Towards Equitable Community-Industry Collaborations: Understanding the Experiences of Nonprofits' Collaborations with Tech CompaniesCommunity-based partnerships are essential to creating inclusive and equitable technologies and design practices. Though recent scholarship in HCI focuses on equitable design practices, there is less focus on understanding the experiences of community-based nonprofit organizations (CBOs) when partnering with technology companies. In this paper, we focus on understanding the perspectives of CBOs by answering the following research question: What are the experiences of CBOs that have collaborated with technology companies? Through a series of design workshops with 18 participants who work at community-based nonprofits that have collaborated with technology firms, we identified four elements of community-industry collaborations that collectively shape the overall experience: divergences in cultural and organizational norms, "setting the table," project relationship dynamics, and affective qualities. We conclude by discussing the power structures that impact community-industry collaboration and suggest reflective practices to guide equitable collaborations between CBOs and tech companies.2025SESheena Erete et al.Community Engaged ResearchCSCW
Collective Consent: Who Needs to Consent to the Donation of Data Representing Multiple People?Data donation is a growing form of personal data collection that foregrounds consent and conscious participation of the data donor. There remains little guidance on who must consent to data donation, particularly when the data represents multiple people. We provide empirical perspectives on this question through in-situ observation and interviews (N=18) with online daters who chose to donate messaging interactions with potential sexual partners for sexual violence research. Findings elucidate two diverging perspectives. Participants advocating for “unilateral consent” argued that consent of their messaging partner is not necessary, in part, because the anticipated benefit of data donation superceded consent. Participants advocating for “collective consent” wanted both messaging partners to consent to its donation, citing concerns for privacy of, and personal relationships with, the other person. Findings suggest that collective consent interfaces should be incorporated in data donation platforms, even if not strictly required by legal regulation, to increase donation of multi-person data.2025EWEmma Walquist et al.Toward More Ethical and Transparent Systems and EnvironmentsCSCW
"It’s Not What We Were Trying to Get At, but I Think Maybe It Should Be": Learning How to Do Trauma-Informed Design With a Data Donation Platform for Online Dating Sexual ViolenceA majority of people experience trauma, spurring calls to incorporate trauma-informed approaches (TIA) from public health and social work into technology design. While technologies touted as trauma-informed are starting to propagate the literature, there persists a gap in knowledge around how design teams apply TIA and qualify their technology as adhering to trauma-informed principles. We address this through a 12-month development project with trauma and sexual violence experts to produce Ube, a data donation platform for collecting online dating sexual consent data to improve sexual risk detection AI. Through analysis of design documentation we retrospectively articulate a trauma-informed design process that evolved through the course of Ube’s development, comprising three elements for integrating trauma-informed principles: design goals that adapt the definition of TIA to the application domain, design activities that map to trauma-informed principles, and consequent design choices. We conclude with methodological recommendations to improve trauma-informed design processes.2024WZWenqi Zheng et al.Oakland UniversityEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIParticipatory DesignCHI
Participatory Noticing through Photovoice: Engaging Arts- and Community-Based Approaches in Design ResearchNoticing differently commits to stepping out of familiar reference frameworks while attending to oft-neglected actors, relations, and ways of knowing for design. Photovoice is an arts- and community-based participatory approach allowing individuals to communicate their lives and stories about pressing community concerns through photography. This paper bridges photovoice and the commitment to noticing in HCI and design through a photovoice project with Detroit residents on safety and surveillance. The photovoice process---alongside the production, reflection, and dissemination of photographs---makes residents' everyday situations legible and sensible, allowing both community members and researchers to orient to and engage with multiple viewpoints, sensibilities, and temporal trajectories. This process confronts the invisibility of both the sociotechnical infrastructures (in our case, surveillance infrastructures) and minoritized communities' relational ontologies. By advocating participatory noticing in design research, we show the opportunities for adopting arts- and community-based participatory approaches in decentering dominant ways of knowing and seeing, while at the same time fostering community capacity and relations for future potentialities.2023ALAlex Jiahong Lu et al.Community Engagement & Civic TechnologyInclusive DesignParticipatory DesignDIS
Smartphone-derived Virtual Keyboard Dynamics Coupled with Accelerometer Data as a Window into Understanding Brain Health We examine the feasibility of using accelerometer data exclusively collected during typing on a custom smartphone keyboard to study whether typing dynamics are associated with daily variations in mood and cognition. As part of an ongoing digital mental health study involving mood disorders, we collected data from a well-characterized clinical sample (N = 85) and classified accelerometer data per typing session into orientation (upright vs. not) and motion (active vs. not). The mood disorder group showed lower cognitive performance despite mild symptoms (depression/mania). There were also diurnal pattern differences with respect to cognitive performance: individuals with higher cognitive performance typed faster and were less sensitive to time of day. They also exhibited more well-defined diurnal patterns in smartphone keyboard usage: they engaged with the keyboard more during the day and tapered their usage more at night compared to those with lower cognitive performance, suggesting a healthier usage of their phone.2023ENEmma Ning et al.University of Illinois at ChicagoBrain-Computer Interface (BCI) & NeurofeedbackSleep & Stress MonitoringBiosensors & Physiological MonitoringCHI
Shifting from Surveillance-as-Safety to Safety-through-Noticing: A Photovoice Study with Eastside Detroit ResidentsSafety has been used to justify the expansion of today's large-scale surveillance infrastructures in American cities. Our work offers empirical and theoretical groundings on why and how the safety-surveillance conflation that reproduces harm toward communities of color must be denaturalized. In a photovoice study conducted in collaboration with a Detroit community organization and a university team, we invited eleven Black mid-aged and senior Detroiters to use photography to capture their lived experiences of navigating personal and community safety. Their photographic narratives unveil acts of "everyday noticing" in negotiating and maintaining their intricate and interdependent relations with human, non-human animals, plants, spaces, and material things, through which a multiplicity of meaning and senses of safety are produced and achieved. Everyday noticing, as simultaneously a survival skill and a more-than-human care act, is situated in residents' lived materialities, while also serving as a site for critiquing the reductive and exclusionary vision embedded in large-scale surveillance infrastructures. By proposing an epistemological shift from surveillance-as-safety to safety-through-noticing, we invite future HCI work to attend to the fluid and relational forms of safety that emerge from local entanglement and sensibilities.2023ALAlex Lu et al.University of MichiganTechnology Ethics & Critical HCISustainable HCICHI
The Village: Infrastructuring Community-based Mentoring to Support Adults Experiencing PovertyMentorship and other social and relational support have been vital to poverty alleviation and transformative change. It is crucial to understand the underlying factors in the success of mentoring models and subsequent programs to support them. Thus, we conducted a mixed methods study consisting of longitudinal surveys of community participants and semi-structured interviews with 28 community members, eight mentors, and two coaches participating in a community-based mentorship program. Drawing from community-based participatory research in partnership with a non-profit located in a Midwestern United States (U.S.) city, we unpack how the program supported self-sufficiency and economic mobility among adults experiencing financial hardships. Through an infrastructural lens, we attend to individuals' infrastructuring work in social support, flexibility, and trust to support a ``village'' model of community-based mentorship. Our results show how the village model differs from traditional mentorship models that assume dyadic, one-to-one, often didactic, and hierarchical relationships (e.g., expert and prot\'eg\'e, adult and child) and are used primarily in the workplace and educational settings. The village mentorship model advocates for less hierarchical and more balanced relationships in non-institutional settings and flexible communication and technological needs. We discuss new research opportunities and design strategies for rethinking technology-mediated mentorship to support poverty-stricken adults in the U.S.2022TDTawanna R. Dillahunt et al.University of MichiganCommunity Engagement & Civic TechnologyEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsCHI
HairBrush for Immersive Data-Driven Hair ModelingWhile hair is an essential component of virtual humans, it is also one of the most challenging and time-consuming digital assets to create. Existing automatic techniques lack the generality and flexibility for users to create the exact intended hairstyles. Meanwhile, manual authoring interfaces often require considerable skills and experiences from character modelers, and are difficult to navigate for intricate 3D hair structures. We propose an interactive hair modeling system that can help create complex hairstyles that would otherwise take weeks or months with existing tools. Modelers, including novice users, can focus on the overall intended hairstyles and local hair deformations, as our system intelligently suggests the desired hair parts. Our method combines the flexibility of manual authoring and the convenience of data-driven automation. Since hair contains intricate 3D structures such as buns, knots, and strands, they are inherently challenging to create from scratch using traditional 2D interfaces. Our system provides a new 3D hair authoring interface for immersive interaction in virtual reality (VR). We use a strip-based representation, which is commonly adopted in real-time games due to rendering efficiency and modeling flexibility. The output strips can be converted to other hair formats such as strands. Users can draw high-level guide strips, from which our system predicts the most plausible hairstyles in the dataset via a trained deep neural network. Each hairstyle in our dataset is composed of multiple variations, serving as blendshapes to fit the user drawings via global blending and local deformation. The fitted hair models are visualized as interactive suggestions, that the user can select, modify, or ignore. We conducted a user study to confirm that our system can significantly reduce manual labor while improve the output quality for modeling a variety of hairstyles that are challenging to create using existing techniques.2019JXJun Xing et al.3D Modeling & AnimationDigital Art Installations & Interactive PerformanceUIST
The Algorithm and the User: How Can HCI Use Lay Understandings of Algorithmic Systems?In studying the increasing role that opaque, algorithmically-driven systems, such as social media feeds, play in society and people’s everyday lives, user folk theories are emerging as one powerful lens with which to examine the relationship between user and algorithmic system. Folk theories allow researchers to better see from users’ own perspectives how they understand these systems and how their understanding impacts their behavior. However, this approach is still new. Methods, interpretation, and future directions are up for debate. This panel will be an active discussion of the contribution of folk theories to HCI to date, how to advance a folk theory perspective, and how this perspective can bridge academic and industry study of these systems. Our panel gathers key folk theory HCI researchers from academia and industry to share their perspectives and engage the CHI audience.2018MDMichael A DeVito et al.Northwestern UniversityExplainable AI (XAI)Algorithmic Transparency & AuditabilityCHI