PAPERS
A Reasonable Thing to Ask For: Towards a Unified Voice in Privacy Collective Action
Yuxi Wu, W. Keith Edwards, Sauvik Das
People feel concerned, angry and powerless when subjected to surveillance, data breaches and other privacy-violating experiences with institutions (PVEIs). Collective action may empower groups of people affected by a PVEI to jointly demand redress, but a necessary first step is for the collective to agree on demands. We designed a sensitizing prototype to explore how to shepherd a collective to generate a unified set of demands for redress in response to a triggering PVEI. We found that collectives can converge on high-priority concerns and demands for redress, and that many of their demands indicated preferences for broad reform. We then gathered a panel of security and privacy experts to react to the collective’s demands. Experts were dismissive, preferring incremental measures that cleanly mapped onto existing legal structures. We argue this misalignment may help uphold the power chasm between data-harvesting institutions and the individuals whose personal data they monetize.
Teresa O’Leary, Dhaval Parmar, Stefan Olafsson, Michael Paasche-Orlow, Timothy Bickmore, Andrea Parker
HCI researchers have increasingly examined how social context shapes health behaviors. Much of this work operates at the interpersonal level. Communities such as churches play important roles in supporting wellbeing and addressing health inequities. While some work has investigated creating digital health tools for religious populations, few have explicitly focused on the incorporation of community support in the form of prayer support. Embedding health interventions in any community has the potential to support or challenge the community’s dynamics. We report on findings from interviews with 17 church members who used a church-based mHealth application over a 4-week period and provide guidelines for developers based on these results. Through their use of the system, participants characterized several community dynamics including a desire for social intimacy, communicating care, creating opportunities for fellowship, maintaining privacy and discretion, and building community connections, and how these dynamics influence their aspirations for a church-based health app.
Yasmine Belghith, Sukrit Venkatagiri, Kurt Luther
Online investigations are increasingly conducted by individuals with diverse skill levels and experiences, with mixed results. Novice investigations often result in vigilantism or doxxing, while expert investigations have greater success rates and fewer mishaps. Many of these experts are involved in a community of practice known as Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), with an ethos and set of techniques for conducting investigations using only publicly available data. Through semi-structured interviews with 14 expert OSINT investigators from nine different organizations, we examine the social dynamics of this community, including the collaboration and competition patterns that underlie their investigations. We also describe investigators’ use of and challenges with existing OSINT tools, and implications for the design of social computing systems to better support crowdsourced investigations.
Esther Howe, Jina Suh, Mehrab Bin Morshed, Daniel McDuff, Kael Rowan, Javier Hernandez, Marah Abdin, Gonzalo Ramos, Tracy Tran, Mary Czerwinski
Workplace stress-reduction interventions have produced mixed results due to engagement and adherence barriers. Leveraging technology to integrate such interventions into the workday may address these barriers and help mitigate the mental, physical, and monetary effects of workplace stress. To inform the design of a workplace stress-reduction intervention system, we conducted a four-week longitudinal study with 86 participants, examining the effects of intervention type and timing on usage, stress reduction impact, and user preferences. We compared three intervention types and two delivery timing conditions: Pre-scheduled (PS) by users and Just-in-time (JIT) prompted by the system-identified user stress-levels. We found JIT participants completed significantly more interventions than PS participants, but post-intervention and study-long stress reduction was not significantly different between conditions. Participants rated low-effort interventions highest, but high-effort interventions reduced the most stress. Participants felt JIT provided accountability but desired partial agency over timing. We present type and timing implications.
Diffraction-in-action: Designerly Explorations of Agential Realism Through Lived Data
Pedro Sanches, Noura Howell, Vasiliki Tsaknaki, Tom Jenkins, Karey Helms
Recent design research has shown an interest in diffraction and agential realism, which promise to offer generative alternatives when designing with data that resist treating data as objective or neutral. We explore engaging diffractively with `lived data’ to surface felt and prospective aspects of data as it is entangled in everyday lives of designers. This paper presents five biodata-based case studies demonstrating how design researchers can create knowledge about human bodies and behaviors via strategies that allow them to engage data diffractively. These studies suggest that designers can find insights for designing with data as it is lived by working with it in a slow, open-ended fashion that leaves room for messiness and time for discovering difference. Finally, we discuss the role of ambiguous, open-ended data interpretations to help surface different meaning and entanglements of data in everyday lives.
Examining Identity as a Variable of Health Technology Research for OlderAdults: A Systematic Review
Christina Harrington, Aqueasha Martin-Hammond, Kirsten Bray
Innovations in HCI research of health-related pervasive and ubiquitous technologies can potentially improve older adults’ access to healthcare resources and support long-term independence in the home. Despite efforts to include their voices in technology research and design, many older adults have yet to actualize these health benefits, with barriers of access and proficiency actually widening the gap of health inequities. We reviewed 174 HCI publications through a systematic review to examine who is engaged in the design of health technologies for older adults, methods used to engage them, and how different types of participation might impact design directions. Findings highlight that thus far, many identity dimensions have not been explored in HCI aging research. We identify research gaps and implications to promote expanding research engagement with these dimensions as a way to support the design of health technologies that see better adoption among marginalized populations.
Family Learning Talk in AI Literacy Learning Activities
Duri Long, Anthony Teachey, Brian Magerko
The unique role that AI plays in making decisions that affect humans creates a need for public understanding of AI. Informal learning spaces are important contexts for fostering AI literacy, as they can reach a broader audience and provide spaces for children and parents to learn together. This paper explores 1) what types of dialogue familes engage in when learning about AI in an at-home learning environment to inform our understanding of 2) how to design AI literacy activities for informal learning contexts. We present an analysis of family dialogue surrounding three AI education activities and use our findings to update existing principles for designing AI literacy educational interventions. Our findings indicate that embodied interaction, collaboration, and lowering barriers to entry were effective at fostering learning talk. Our results also reveal emergent areas for future research on how to support parents and design visualizations and datasets for AI learning.
FlexHaptics: A Design Method for Passive Haptic Inputs Using Planar Compliant Structures
Hongnan Lin, Liang He, Fangli Song, Yifan Li, Tingyu Cheng, Clement Zheng, Wei Wang, HyunJoo Oh
This 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.
From Treatment to Healing: Envisioning a Decolonial Digital Mental Health
Sachin Pendse, Daniel Nkemelu, Nicola Bidwell, Sushrut Jadhav, Soumitra Pathare, Munmun De Choudhury, Neha Kumar
The field of digital mental health is making strides in the application of technology to broaden access to care. We critically examine how these technology-mediated forms of care might amplify historical injustices, and erase minoritized experiences and expressions of mental distress and illness. We draw on decolonial thought and critiques of identity-based algorithmic bias to analyze the underlying power relations impacting digital mental health technologies today, and envision new pathways towards a decolonial digital mental health. We argue that a decolonial digital mental health is one that centers lived experience over rigid classification, is conscious of structural factors that influence mental wellbeing, and is fundamentally designed to deter the creation of power differentials that prevent people from having agency over their care. Stemming from this vision, we make recommendations for how researchers and designers can support more equitable futures for people experiencing mental distress and illness.
Georgianna Lin, Elizabeth Mynatt, Neha Kumar
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research on menstrual tracking has emphasized the need for more inclusive design of mechanisms for tracking and sharing information on menstruation. We investigate menstrual tracking and data-sharing attitudes and practices in educated, young (20-30 years old) menstruating individuals based in the United States, with self-identified minimal menstrual education backgrounds. Using interviews (N=18), a survey (N=62), and participatory design (N=7), we find that existing mechanisms for tracking and sharing data on menstruation are not adequately responsive to the needs of those who seek relevant menstrual education, are not in the sexual majority, and/or wish to customize what menstrual data they share and with whom. Our analysis highlights a design gap for participants with minimal sexual education backgrounds who wish to better understand their cycles. We also contribute a deepened understanding of structural health inequities that impact menstrual tracking and sharing practices, making recommendations for technology-mediated menstrual care.
Nurul Suhaimi, Yixuan Zhang, Mary Joseph, Miso Kim, Andrea Parker, Jacqueline Griffin
The world population is projected to rapidly age over the next 30 years. Given the increasing digital technology adoption amongst older adults, researchers have investigated how technology can support aging populations. However, little work has examined how technology can support older adults during crises, despite increasingly common natural disasters, public health emergencies, and other crisis scenarios in which older adults are especially vulnerable. Addressing this gap, we conducted focus groups with older adults residing in coastal locations to examine to what extent they felt technology could support them during emergencies. Our findings characterize participants’ desire for tools that enhance community resilience-local knowledge, preparedness, community relationships, and communication, that help communities withstand disasters. Further, older adults’ crisis technology preferences were linked to their sense of control, social relationships, and digital readiness. We discuss how a focus on community resilience can yield crisis technologies that more effectively support older adults.
Sindhu Kiranmai Ernala, Moira Burke, Alex Leavitt, Nicole Ellison
Time spent on platform is a widely used measure in many studies examining social media use and well-being, yet the current literature presents mixed findings about the relationship between time on platform and well-being. In this paper, we consider the moderating effect of people’s mindsets about social media — whether they think a platform is good or bad for themselves and for society more generally. Combining survey responses from 29,284 participants in 15 countries with server-logged data of Facebook use, we found that when people thought that Facebook was good for them and for society, time spent on the platform was not significantly associated with well-being. Conversely, when they thought Facebook was bad, greater time spent was associated with lower well-being. Beliefs had a stronger moderating relationship when time-spent measures were self-reported rather than coming from server logs. We discuss potential mechanisms for these results and implications for future research.
Perspectives on Integrating Trusted Other Feedback in Therapy for Veterans with PTSD
Hayley Evans, Catherine Deeter, Jiawei Zhou, Kimberly Do, Andrew Sherrill, Rosa Arriaga
Past research has demonstrated that accounts of trusted others can provide additional context into real world behavior relevant to clinical decision-making and patient engagement. Our research investigates the Social Sensing System, a concept which leverages trusted other feedback for veterans in therapy for PTSD. In our two phase study, we work with 10 clinicians to develop text-message queries and realistic scenarios to present to patients and trusted others. We then present the results in the form of a storyboard to 10 veterans with PTSD and 10 trusted others and gather feedback via semi-structured interview and survey. We find that while trusted other feedback may provide a unique and useful perspective, key design features and considerations of underlying relationships must be considered. We present our findings and utilize the mechanisms and conditions framework to assess the power dynamics of systems such as social sensing in the mental health realm.
PITAS: Sensing and Actuating Embedded Robotic Sheet for Physical Information Communication
Tingyu Cheng, Jung Wook Park, Jiachen Li, Charles Ramey, Hongnan Lin, Gregory Abowd, Carolina Brum Medeiros, HyunJoo Oh, Marcello Giordano
This work presents PITAS, a thin-sheet robotic material composed of a reversible phase transition actuating layer and a heating/sensing layer. The synthetic sheet material enables non-expert makers to create shape-changing devices that can locally or remotely convey physical information such as shape, color, texture and temperature changes. PITAS sheets can be manipulated into various 2D shapes or 3D geometries using subtractive fabrication methods such as laser, vinyl, or manual cutting or an optional additive 3D printing method for creating 3D objects. After describing the design of PITAS, this paper also describes a study conducted with thirteen makers to gauge the accessibility, design space, and limitations encountered when PITAS is used as a soft robotic material while designing physical information communication devices. Lastly, this work reports on the results of a mechanical and electrical evaluation of PITAS and presents application examples to demonstrate its utility.
Pretty Princess vs. Successful Leader: Gender Roles in Greeting Card Messages
Jiao Sun, Tongshuang Wu, Yue Jiang, Ronil Awalegaonkar, Xi Victoria Lin, Diyi Yang
People write personalized greeting cards on various occasions. While prior work has studied gender roles in greeting card messages, systematic analysis at scale and tools for raising the awareness of gender stereotyping remain under-investigated. To this end, we collect a large greeting card message corpus covering three different occasions (birthday, Valentine’s Day and wedding) from three sources (exemplars from greeting message websites, real-life greetings from social media and language model generated ones). We uncover a wide range of gender stereotypes in this corpus via topic modeling, odds ratio and Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT). We further conduct a survey to understand people’s perception of gender roles in messages from this corpus and if gender stereotyping is a concern. The results show that people want to be aware of gender roles in the messages, but remain unconcerned unless the perceived gender roles conflict with the recipient’s true personality. In response, we developed GreetA, an interactive visualization and writing assistant tool to visualize fine-grained topics in greeting card messages drafted by the users and the associated gender perception scores, but without suggesting text changes as an intervention.
Kirsten Bray, Christina Harrington, Andrea Parker, N’Deye Diakhate, Jennifer Roberts
When considering the democratic intentions of co-design, designers and design researchers must evaluate the impact of power imbalances embedded in common design and research dynamics. This holds particularly true in work with and for marginalized communities, who are frequently excluded in design processes. To address this issue, we examine how existing design tools and methods are used to support communities in processes of community building or reimagining, considering the influence of race and identity. This paper describes our findings from 27 interviews with community design practitioners conducted to evaluate the Building Utopia toolkit, which employs an Afrofuturist lens for speculative design processes. Our research findings support the importance of design tools that prompt conversations on race in design, and tensions between the desire for imaginative design practice and the immediacy of social issues, particularly when designing with Black and brown communities.
Rethinking Menstrual Trackers Towards Period-Positive Ecologies
Anupriya Tuli, Surbhi Singh, Rikita Narula, Neha Kumar, Pushpendra Singh
Menstrual tracking is a mechanism widely engaged towards preserving menstrual dignity, as natural birth control, for ensuring adequate preparation for an upcoming cycle, among other motivations. We investigate the design of digital menstrual trackers towards enabling period-positive ecologies in otherwise stigmatized contexts. We examine menstrual tracking practices across ages (12–65 yrs.) using a combination of methods—3 surveys (450+ responses), a cultural probe (10 adolescents), interviews (16 adults), and a review of (9) mobile applications. {Our analysis highlights the diversity across menstrual tracking practices and the role of relationships in influencing these practices throughout the menstrual journey. We also identify menstrual tracking as an avenue towards the emancipation of those who menstruate. Finally, we draw on Martha Nussbaum’s central human capabilities to discuss sociotechnical implications for redesigning digital menstrual trackers towards crafting just and period-positive futures.
Semantic Gap in Predicting Mental Wellbeing through Passive Sensings
Vedant Das Swain, Victor Chen, Shrija Mishra, Stephen Mattingly, Gregory Abowd, Munmun De Choudhury
When modeling passive data to infer individual mental wellbeing, a common source of ground truth is self-reports. But these tend to represent the psychological facet of mental states, which might not align with the physiological facet of that state. Our paper demonstrates that when what people “feel” differs from what people “say they feel”, we witness a semantic gap that limits predictions. We show that predicting mental wellbeing with passive data (offline sensors or online social media) is related to how the ground-truth is measured (objective arousal or self-report). Features with psycho-social signals (e.g., language) were better at predicting self-reported anxiety and stress. Conversely, features with behavioral signals (e.g., sleep), were better at predicting stressful arousal. Regardless of the source of ground truth, integrating both signals boosted prediction. To reduce the semantic gap, we provide recommendations to evaluate ground truth measures and adopt parsimonious sensing.
Shape-Haptics: Planar & Passive Force Feedback Mechanisms for Physical Interfaces
Clement Zheng, Zhen Zhou Yong, Hongnan Lin, HyunJoo Oh, Ching Chiuan Yen
We present Shape-Haptics, an approach for designers to rapidly design and fabricate passive force feedback mechanisms for physical interfaces. Such mechanisms are used in everyday interfaces and tools, and they are challenging to design. Shape-Haptics abstracts and broadens the haptic expression of this class of force feedback systems through 2D laser cut configurations that are simple to fabricate. They leverage the properties of polyoxymethylene plastic and comprise a compliant spring structure that engages with a sliding profile during tangible interaction. By shaping the sliding profile, designers can easily customize the haptic force feedback delivered by the mechanism. We provide a computational design sandbox to facilitate designers to explore and fabricate Shape-Haptics mechanisms. We also propose a series of applications that demonstrate the utility of Shape-Haptics in creating and customizing haptics for different physical interfaces.
Yixuan Zhang, Nurul Suhaimi, Nutchanon Yongsatianchot, Joseph Gaggiano, Miso Kim, Shivani Patel, Yifan Sun, Stacy Marsella, Jacqueline Griffin, Andrea Parker
During crises like COVID-19, individuals are inundated with conflicting and time-sensitive information that drives a need for rapid assessment of the trustworthiness and reliability of information sources and platforms. This parallels evolutions in information infrastructures, ranging from social media to government data platforms. Distinct from current literature, which presumes a static relationship between the presence or absence of trust and people’s behaviors, our mixed-methods research focuses on situated trust, or trust that is shaped by people’s information-seeking and assessment practices through emerging information platforms (e.g., social media, crowdsourced systems, COVID data platforms). Our findings characterize the shifts in trustee (what/who people trust) from information on social media to the social media platform(s), how distrust manifests skepticism in issues of data discrepancy, the insufficient presentation of uncertainty, and how this trust and distrust shift over time. We highlight the deep challenges in existing information infrastructures that influence trust and distrust formation.
SilentSpeller: Towards mobile, hands-free, silent speech text entry using electropalatography
Naoki Kimura, Tan Gemicioglu, Jonathan Womack, Yuhui Zhao, Richard Li, Abdelkareem Bedri, Zixiong Su, Alex Olwal, Jun Rekimoto, Thad Starner
Speech is inappropriate in many situations, limiting when voice control can be used. Most unvoiced speech text entry systems can not be used while on-the-go due to movement artifacts. Using a dental retainer with capacitive touch sensors, SilentSpeller tracks tongue movement, enabling users to type by spelling words without voicing. SilentSpeller achieves an average 97% character accuracy in offline isolated word testing on a 1164-word dictionary. Walking has little effect on accuracy; average offline character accuracy was roughly equivalent on 107 phrases entered while walking (97.5%) or seated (96.5%). To demonstrate extensibility, the system was tested on 100 unseen words, leading to an average 94% accuracy. Live text entry speeds for seven participants averaged 37 words per minute at 87% accuracy. Comparing silent spelling to current practice suggests that SilentSpeller may be a viable alternative for silent mobile text entry.
Zheng Zhang, Ying Xu, Yanhao Wang, Bingsheng Yao, Daniel Ritchie, Tongshuang Wu, Mo Yu, Dakuo Wang, Toby Li
Despite its benefits for children’s skill development and parent-child bonding, many parents do not often engage in interactive storytelling by having story-related dialogues with their child due to limited availability or challenges in coming up with appropriate questions. While recent advances made AI generation of questions from stories possible, the fully-automated approach excludes parent involvement, disregards educational goals, and underoptimizes for child engagement. Informed by need-finding interviews and participatory design (PD) results, we developed StoryBuddy, an AI-enabled system for parents to create interactive storytelling experiences. StoryBuddy’s design highlighted the need for accommodating dynamic user needs between the desire for parent involvement and parent-child bonding and the goal of minimizing parent intervention when busy. The PD revealed varied assessment and educational goals of parents, which StoryBuddy addressed by supporting configuring question types and tracking child progress. A user study validated StoryBuddy’s usability and suggested design insights for future parent-AI collaboration systems.
Supporting Data-Driven Basketball Journalism through Interactive Visualization
Yu Fu, John Stasko
Basketball writers and journalists report on the sport that millions of fans follow and love. However, the recent emergence of pervasive data about the sport and the growth of new forms of sports analytics is changing writers’ jobs. While these writers seek to leverage the data and analytics to create engaging, data-driven stories, they typically lack the technical background to perform analytics or efficiently explore data. We investigated and analyzed the work and context of basketball writers, interviewed nine stakeholders to understand the challenges from a holistic view. Based on what we learned, we designed and constructed two interactive visualization systems that support rapid and in-depth sports data exploration and sense-making to enhance their articles and reporting. We deployed the systems during the recent NBA playoffs to gather initial feedback. This article describes the visualization design study we conducted, the resulting visualization systems, and what we learned to potentially help basketball writers in the future.
Supporting the Contact Tracing Process with WiFi Location Data: Opportunities and Challenges
Kaely Hall, Dong Whi Yoo, Wenrui Zhang, Mehrab Bin Morshed, Vedant Das Swain, Gregory Abowd, Munmun De Choudhury, Alex Endert, John Stasko, Jennifer Kim
Contact tracers assist in containing the spread of highly infectious diseases such as COVID-19 by engaging community members who receive a positive test result in order to identify close contacts. Many contact tracers rely on community member’s recall for those identifications, and face limitations such as unreliable memory. To investigate how technology can alleviate this challenge, we developed a visualization tool using de-identified location data sensed from campus WiFi and provided it to contact tracers during mock contact tracing calls. While the visualization allowed contact tracers to find and address inconsistencies due to gaps in community member’s memory, it also introduced inconsistencies such as false-positive and false-negative reports due to imperfect data, and information sharing hesitancy. We suggest design implications for technologies that can better highlight and inform contact tracers of potential areas of inconsistencies, and further present discussion on using imperfect data in decision making.
To Self-persuade or Be Persuaded: Examining Interventions for Users’ Privacy Setting Selection
Kimi Wenzel, Laura Dabbish, Jason I. Hong, Isadora Krsek, Sauvik Das
User adoption of security and privacy (S&P) best practices remains low, despite sustained efforts by researchers and practitioners. Social influence is a proven method for guiding user S&P behavior, though most work has focused on studying peer influence, which is only possible with a known social graph. In a study of 104 Facebook users, we instead demonstrate that crowdsourced S&P suggestions are significantly influential. We also tested how reflective writing affected participants’ S&P decisions, with and without suggestions. With reflective writing, participants were less likely to accept suggestions — both social and Facebook default suggestions. Of particular note, when reflective writing participants were shown the Facebook default suggestion, they not only rejected it but also (unknowingly) configured their settings in accordance with expert recommendations. Our work suggests that both non-personal social influence and reflective writing can positively influence users’ S&P decisions, but have negative interactions.
Yihe Liu, Anushk Mittal, Diyi Yang, Amy Bruckman
Large language models are increasingly mediating, modifying, and even generating messages for users, but the receivers of these messages may not be aware of the involvement of AI. To examine this emerging direction of AI-Mediated Communication (AI-MC), we investigate people’s perceptions of AI written messages. We analyze how such perceptions change in accordance with the interpersonal emphasis of a given message. We conducted both large-scale surveys and in-depth interviews to investigate how a diverse set of factors influence people’s perceived trust in AI-mediated writing of emails. We found that people’s trust in email writers decreased when they were told that AI was involved in the writing process. Surprisingly trust increased when AI was used for writing more interpersonal emails (as opposed to more transactional ones). Our study provides insights regarding how people perceive AI-MC and has practical design implications on building AI-based products to aid human interlocutors in communication.
Shiza Ali, Afsaneh Razi, Seunghyun Kim, Ashwaq Alsoubai, Joshua Gracie, Munmun De Choudhury, Pamela Wisniewski, Gianluca Stringhini
We collected Instagram Direct Messages (DMs) from 100 adolescents and young adults (ages 13-21) who then flagged their own conversations as safe or unsafe. We performed a mixed-method analysis of the media files shared privately in these conversations to gain human-centered insights into the risky interactions experienced by youth. Unsafe conversations ranged from unwanted sexual solicitations to mental health-related concerns, and images shared in unsafe conversations tended to be of people and convey negative emotions, while those shared in regular conversations more often conveyed positive emotions and contained objects. Further, unsafe conversations were significantly shorter, suggesting that youth disengaged when they felt unsafe. Our work uncovers salient characteristics of safe and unsafe media shared in private conversations and provides the foundation to develop automated systems for online risk detection and mitigation.
When is ML data good?: Valuing in Public Health Datafication
Divy Thakkar, Azra Ismail, Pratyush Kumar, Alex Hanna, Nithya Sambasivan, Neha Kumar
Data-driven approaches that form the foundation of advancements in machine learning (ML) are powered in large part by human infrastructures that enable the collection of large datasets. We study the movement of data through multiple stages of data processing in the context of public health in India, examining the data work performed by frontline health workers, data stewards, and ML developers. We conducted interviews with these stakeholders to understand their varied perspectives on valuing data across stages, working with data to attain this value, and challenges arising throughout. We discuss the tensions in valuing and how they might be addressed, as we emphasize the need for improved transparency and accountability when data are transformed from one stage of processing to the next.
ZenVR: Design Evaluation of a Virtual Reality Learning System for Meditation
Rachel Feinberg, Udaya Lakshmi, Matthew Golino, Rosa Arriaga
Meditation has become a popular option to manage stress. Though studies examine technologies to assist in meditation, few explore how technology supports development of such skills for independent practice. From a two-phase mixed-methods study, we contribute learner-centered insights from 36 participants in a virtual reality environment designed to teach meditation skills to novices. In Phase I, we gathered affective and behavioral learner needs from 21 meditation novices, experts, and instructors to synthesize insights for learning. We then designed ZenVR: an interactive system to deliver an eight-lesson meditation curriculum to support learners’ progress. In Phase II, we conducted a 6-week longitudinal lab-based evaluation with 15 novice meditation learners. We found statistically significant improvements in mindfulness and self-reported meditation ability. Their insights from a self-managed practice, two weeks after the study ended, offered opportunities to understand how technology can be designed to offer progressive support without creating dependence in technology-mediated meditation practice.
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Design Futuring for Love, Friendship, and Kinships: Five Perspectives on Intimacy
Sumita Sharma, Britta Schulte, Rocío Fatás, Noura Howell, Amy Twigger Holroyd, Grace Eden
Human relationships, intimacy and the role of technology within it constantly change, catapulted in 2020 by COVID-19. We take this social rupture as an opportunity to reimagine possible futures for love, friendship, and kinships. Through design futuring and related approaches, we offer five prompts we developed for imagining alternative futures exploring a diverse range of intimacies. Through generating responses to the prompts, we offer alternative intimate futures as well as reflections on how such ‘prompts for futuring’ can be generative for design research. Our work extends calls for diversifying design futuring, imploring design researchers to consider diverse and inclusive ways of designing for futures, especially for human relationships and intimacy.
Annabel Rothschild, Justin Booker, Christa Davoll, Jessica Hill, Venise Ivey, Carl DiSalvo, Ben Shapiro, Betsy DiSalvo
This work contributes to just and pro-social treatment of digital pieceworkers (“crowd collaborators”) by reforming the handling of crowd-sourced labor in academic venues. With the rise in automation, crowd collaborators treatment requires special consideration, as the system often dehumanizes crowd collaborators as components of the “crowd” [40]. Building off efforts to (proxy-)unionize crowd workers and facilitate employment protections on digital piecework platforms, we focus on employers: academic requesters sourcing machine learning (ML) training data. We propose a cover sheet to accompany submission of work that engages crowd collaborators for sourcing (or labeling) ML training data. The guidelines are based on existing calls from worker organizations (e.g., Dynamo [28]); professional data workers in an alternative digital piecework organization; and lived experience as requesters and workers on digital piecework platforms. We seek feedback on the cover sheet from the ACM community.
Case Studies
Afsaneh Razi, Ashwaq Alsoubai, Seunghyun Kim, Nurun Naher, Shiza Ali, Gianluca Stringhini, Munmun De Choudhury, Pamela Wisniewski
In this work, we present a case study on an Instagram Data Donation (IGDD) project, which is a user study and web-based platform for youth (ages 13-21) to donate and annotate their Instagram data with the goal of improving adolescent online safety. We employed human-centered design principles to create an ecologically valid dataset that will be utilized to provide insights from teens’ private social media interactions and train machine learning models to detect online risks. Our work provides practical insights and implications for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers that collect and study social media data to address sensitive problems relating to societal good.
Courses
Wearable Technology Design and Accessibility Considerations Course
Clint Zeagler, Brian D Jones, Maribeth Gandy, Scott L Robertson
The course proposed here will focus on design and accessibility considerations for wearable technology. In this course we will explore how to develop a robust set of design and accessibility considerations (guidelines) for wearable technology. The course will begin a presentation on wearability and accessibility then participants will engage in an activity using a new Wearable Technology Designer’s Web Tool. The tool can be accessed again after the course and shared with students and colleagues. The course will end with a discussion about what design considerations might need to be added to the tool and what human factors information or other research should be updated.
Doctoral Consortium
Azra Ismail
Frontline health workers in many countries are responsible for filling gaps in essential primary health infrastructure, as witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their work increasingly involves the use of purportedly “intelligentÁ systems or data collection for such systems, to support diagnosis, disease forecasting, and information delivery. My research aims to inform the design of data-driven and automated systems in frontline health work, particularly for women workers in low-level and precarious roles in the Global South. Drawing from literature in the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI), gender and development studies, and health informatics, I will critically examine health workers’ experiences and relationships with “intelligentÁ systems, and engage in the participatory design of technology that might better serve worker needs while strengthening the frontline health ecology overall.
Journals
Noura Howell, Audrey Desjardins, Sarah Fox
What can design researchers learn from our own and each other’s failures? We explore “failure” expansively—turning away from tidy success narratives toward messy unfoldings and reflexive discomfort—through retrospective trioethnography. Our findings reflect on failures we identified in six past design research projects: issues of relational labor of deployment, mismatched designer/participant imaginaries, burden of participation, and invisibility of researcher labor. Our discussion contributes to broader reflections on shifting design research practice: (1) methodological considerations inviting others to engage failures through retrospective trioethnography, (2) letting go as a mode of research care, (3) possibilities for more candid research reporting, and (4) how centering failure may contribute to design justice by providing a technique for attending to harm and healing in design research practices. Throughout, we call for challenging success narratives in design research, and underscore the need for systemic changes in design research practice.
Late-Breaking Work
MisVis: Explaining Web Misinformation Connections via Visual Summary
Seongmin Lee, Sadia Afroz, Haekyu Park, Zijie Wang, Omar Shaikh, Vibhor Sehgal, Ankit Peshin, Duen Horng Chau
Identifying and raising awareness about web misinformation is crucial as the Internet has become a major source of information for many people. We introduce MisVis, a web-based interactive tool that helps users better assess misinformation websites and understand their connections with other misinformation sites through visual explanations. Different from the existing techniques that primarily only focus on alerting users of misinformation, MisVis provides new ways to visualize how the site is involved in spreading information on the web and social media. Through MisVis, we contribute novel interactive visual design: Summary View helps users understand a site’s overall reliability by showing the distributions of its linked websites; Graph View presents users with the connection details of how a site is linked to other misinformation websites. In collaboration with researchers at a large security company, we are working to deploy MisVis as a web browser extension for broader impact.
Youngwook Do, Seong-Eun Moon, Minsuk Chang
Privacy-invasive sensors such as cameras and microphones in smart devices (e.g., Facebook Portal, Google Nest Hub Max, Amazon Echo Show) are now ubiquitous in a user’s private setting, which raises users’ privacy concerns of always listening and monitoring. To address such privacy concerns, we developed ParaSight, a smart speaker add-on device that communicates to users sensing data transfer. ParaSight transmits the information yet speaks out loud what is being transmitted to a smart speaker connected to a server via utterances by leveraging the smart speaker’s ability to understand human languages. Communicating sensing data as utterances brings two benefits: (i) a user can hear and understand what data, and when, are being transferred as utterances are human-understandable; (ii) raw data are processed locally and only filtered signals can be uploaded to a server. ParaSight, for example, can receive and locally process raw data of a user’s audio and video data (e.g., snoring sound, workout video), and only transmit the filtered data to a server. We demonstrate two work-in-progress applications—snoring detection and home training applications—to show ParaSight’s use cases.
StickyLand: Breaking the Linear Presentation of Computational Notebooks
Zijie Wang, Katie Dai, W. Keith Edwards
How can we better organize code in computational notebooks? Notebooks have become a popular tool among data scientists, as they seamlessly weave text and code together, supporting users to rapidly iterate and document code experiments. However, it is often challenging to organize code in notebooks, partially because there is a mismatch between the linear presentation of code and the non-linear process of exploratory data analysis. We present StickyLand, a notebook extension for empowering users to freely organize their code in non-linear ways. With sticky cells that are always shown on the screen, users can quickly access their notes, instantly observe experiment results, and easily build interactive dashboards that support complex visual analytics. Case studies highlight how our tool can enhance notebook users’s productivity and identify opportunities for future notebook designs. StickyLand is available at https://github.com/xiaohk/stickyland.
Toward Handling the Complexities of Non-Anthropomorphic Hands
Jennifer Molnar, Yigit Menguc
Virtual reality allows us to operate bodies that differ substantially from our own. However, avatars with different topologies than the human form require control schemes and interfaces that effectively translate between user and avatar. In this position paper, we discuss the concept of “non-anthropomorphic designs” that are inhuman in not just appearance, but in topology and/or motion. We examine current implementations of real and virtual non-anthropomorphic hands (NAHs), finding that existing NAHs generally rely on one-to-one or reductionist control strategies that limit their possible forms. We discuss the structure of a functional NAH system and design considerations for each component, including metrics for evaluating NAH system performance. The terminology and design considerations presented here support future research on NAHs in virtual and physical reality, as well as virtual and physical tool design, the body schema, and novel control interfaces and mappings.
Travelogue: Representing Indoor Trajectories as Informative Art
Yunzhi Li, Tingyu Cheng, Ashutosh Dhekne
In this work, we explore if informative art can represent a user’s indoor trajectory and promote user’s self-reflection, creating a new type of interactive space. Under the assumption that the simplicity of a digital picture frame can be an appealing way to represent indoor activities and further create a dyadic relationship between users and the space they occupy, we present Travelogue, a picture-frame like self-contained system which can sense human movement using wireless signal reflections in a device free manner. Breaking away from traditional dashboard-based visualization techniques, Travelogue only renders the high-level extent and location of users’ activities in different informative arts. Our preliminary user study with 12 participants shows most users found Travelogue intuitive, unobtrusive, and aesthetically pleasing, as well as a desired tool for self-reflection on indoor activity.
Special Interest Groups
Heloisa Candello, Adriana S Vivacqua, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Marisol Wong-Villacres, Laura Sanely Gaytán-Lugo, Adriana Alvarado Garcia
Connecting with each other on the basis of research interests, geographies or identity has shown to be an important aspect of community development within HCI. The advent of a variety of committees and Special Interest Groups (SIG) are a testament to this need of connecting with each other. As members of the nascent SIGCHI LATAM committee, we see an opportunity in learning together with different communities across the HCI field about how we are working to attract more practitioners, academics, and students to work together and grow research surrounding HCI. With this SIG, we want to promote an environment for discussing and exchanging practices among different collectives within SIGCHI worldwide. We propose inviting community leaders from different geographies, sub-fields and identities to discuss their strategies and experiences growing their communities. The event is open to all members interested in gaining insight into how to grow communities within HCI.
Designing for Continuous Interaction with Artificial Intelligence Systems
Philipp Wintersberger, Niels van Berkel, Nadia Fereydooni, Benjamin Tag, Elena L. Glassman, Daniel Buschek, Ann Blandford, Florian Michahelles
The increasing capabilities of Artificial Intelligence enable the support of users in a continuously growing number of applications. Current systems typically dictate that interaction between user input and AI output unfolds in discrete steps, as is the case with, for example, conversational agents. Novel scenarios require AI systems to adapt and respond to continuous user input, e.g., image-guided surgery and AI-supported text entry. In and across these applications, AI systems need to support more varied and dynamic interactions in which users and AI interact continuously and in parallel. Current methods and guidelines are often inadequate and sometimes even detrimental to user needs when considering continuous usage scenarios. Realizing a continuous interaction between users and AI requires a substantial change in perspective when designing Human-AI systems. In this SIG, we support the exchange of cutting-edge research contributing to a better understanding and improved methods and tools to design continuous Human-AI interaction.
SIGCHI Executive Committee, Adriana S Vivacqua, Andrew L Kun, Cale Passmore, Helena M. Mentis, Josh Andres, Kashyap Todi, Luigi De Russis, Matt Jones, Naomi Yamashita, Neha Kumar, Nicola J Bidwell, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Priya C. Kumar, Shaowen Bardzell, Simone Kriglstein, Stacy Branham, Susan Dray, Susanne CJ Boll, Tamara Clegg
The Executive Committee (EC) of ACM Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction (SIGCHI) organized a series of ten equity talks from March 2021 to August 2021. These were hour-long recorded virtual roundtable sessions, for which we solicited participation from the SIGCHI community on concerns and questions relating to equity, in a number of areas relevant to SIGCHI. Many concerns were listed, some were repeated across topics, and the EC followed due diligence when it came to presenting this information to the community. What comes next?
Exploring Hybrid: A (hybrid) SIG to discuss hybrid conferences
SIGCHI Executive Committee, Adriana S Vivacqua, Andrew L Kun, Cale Passmore, Helena M. Mentis, Josh Andres, Kashyap Todi, Luigi De Russis, Matt Jones, Naomi Yamashita, Neha Kumar, Nicola J Bidwell, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Priya C. Kumar, Shaowen Bardzell, Simone Kriglstein, Stacy Branham, Susan Dray, Susanne CJ Boll, Tamara Clegg
In this special interest group (SIG), we follow up on previous conversations around hybrid models for conferences, conducted in open sessions by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Executive Committee (EC). The COVID-19 pandemic led to a sudden shift to virtual conferences; as we start to go back to in-person events, it is important to reflect on the types of events we desire, and design these accordingly. With this SIG, we hope to share experiences from previous conferences (successful or not) and discuss potential solutions to pending issues. This SIG will be led by VP at Large Adriana S. Vivacqua, with the participation of other EC members.
Human-Computer Interaction and the Future of Work
CHIWORK Collective, Naveena Karusala, Nabil Al Nahin Ch, Diana Tosca, Alberta A Ansah, Emeline Brulé, Nadia Fereydooni, Le-En Huang, Azra Ismail, Pranjal Jain, Yi Xuan Khoo, Isabel Munoz, Clemens Schartmüller, Himanshu Verma, Preeti Vyas, Susanne CJ Boll, Sarah E Fox, Noopur Raval, Max L Wilson, Anna L Cox, Christian P. Janssen, Helena M. Mentis, Neha Kumar, Orit Shaer, Andrew L Kun
Advances in computing technology, changing policies, and slow crises are rapidly changing the way we work. Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a critical aspect of these trends, to understand how workers contend with emerging technologies and how design might support workers and their values and aspirations amidst technological change. This SIG invites researchers across diverse backgrounds within HCI to reflect on the range of approaches to future of work research, recognize connections and gaps, and consider how HCI can support workers and their wellbeing in the future.
SIG on Designing for Constructive Conflict
Amanda Baughan, ashwin rajadesingan, Alexis Hiniker, Paul Resnick, Amy Bruckman
Online arguments are an increasingly important and controversial part of modern life. From the spread of political conspiracies to managing relationships while socially distanced, the past several years have stressed the role technology plays in our interactions with one another. And unavoidably, part of maintaining relationships includes managing conflict and disagreements, from who does which chores to who’s a better political candidate. This SIG will bring together an interdisciplinary group of designers and researchers to discuss how to design, build, and evaluate systems to support constructive arguments online. We ask: How can online systems support conflict while sustaining and possibly strengthening interpersonal relationships? We will explore these questions in the context of a collaborative literature review across fields relevant to social computing and the psychology of conflict, paired with a design activity to begin to address how to design for disagreements.
SIGCHI Turns 40: Honoring the Past, Celebrating the Present, and Envisioning the Next 40
SIGCHI Executive Committee, Adriana S Vivacqua, Andrew L Kun, Cale Passmore, Helena M. Mentis, Josh Andres, Kashyap Todi, Luigi De Russis, Matt Jones, Naomi Yamashita, Neha Kumar, Nicola J Bidwell, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Priya C. Kumar, Shaowen Bardzell, Simone Kriglstein, Stacy Branham, Susan Dray, Susanne CJ Boll, Tamara Clegg
This Special Interest Group (SIG) will collaboratively explore potential futures of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) on the organization’s 40th anniversary. Taking stock of where we are now, forty years after inception, our goal will be to engage members of the SIGCHI community in a participatory approach towards imagining how SIGCHI might evolve, and how it can ensure that the elements it values most, such as connection, inclusion, and equity, among others, can be nurtured as the field evolves, and technologies come and go.
Workshops & Symposia
Tom Ongwere, Andrew B.L. Berry, Clara Caldeira, Rosa I. Arriaga, Amid Ayobi, Eleanor R. Burgess, Kay Connelly, Patricia Franklin, Andrew D Miller, Aehong Min, Nervo Verdezoto
The intertwined and sometimes contradictory work of managing complex health needs (e.g., discordant, enigmatic, and/or rare conditions) creates many challenges for patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers. While researchers have created interventions such as technologies and services to address particular health needs, interventions must be designed to better account for gaps in technologies and interdependencies across health needs. In this workshop we will adopt an ecosystems perspective to better understand the nature of complex needs and how to support the management of those needs through holistic and multi-faceted support. Using a hands-on design sprint technique, participants will (1) map out different complex care ecosystems, (2) generate ideas for technologies, services, and other multi-faceted interventions to address gaps in those ecosystems, and (3) choose the most promising ideas to further develop and refine. We will close by reflecting together on what we have created, our approaches to design, and the theories and concepts that shaped our approaches. Through this process, we will collectively generate an agenda for research and design to better support the management of complex health needs.
Crossing Data: Building Bridges with Activist and Academic Practices from and for Latin America
Adriana Alvarado Garcia, Ivana Feldfeber, Milagros Miceli, Saide Mobayed, Helena Suárez Val
This workshop proposes a space for Latin American academics and activists engaging with emph{data} to think critically about the legitimacy and power dynamics of knowledge production. Given that most research on data, as well as its area of application, have focused on and is informed by the Global North, this workshop sets the spotlight on Latin America and places activist and academic knowledge on equal standing. The organisers are an interdisciplinary group of Latin American scholars and activists, women based in the North and the South, engaging with data across the borderlands of disciplines, practices, migrations, and languages. By hosting the workshop in Spanish (with English interpretation), the organisers aim to create a space where Latin American voices are heard and appreciated, without requiring English proficiency from speakers and participants. We invite the CHI community to cross the borders and join a different conversation, including panels and interactive sessions that will inspire,—,and challenge,—,current thinking around data and data practices.
Grand Challenges for Personal Informatics and AI
Lena Mamykina, Daniel A. Epstein, Predrag Klasnja, Donna Sprujt-Metz, Jochen Meyer, Mary P Czerwinski, Tim Althoff, Eun Kyoung Choe, Munmun De Choudhury, Brian Y Lim
Increasing availability of personal data opened new possibilities for technologies that support individuals’ reflection, increase their self-awareness, and inform their future choices. Personal informatics, chiefly concerned with investigating individuals’ engagement with personal data, has become an area of active research within Human-Computer Interaction. However, more recent research has argued that personal informatics solutions often place high demands on individuals and require knowledge, skills, and time for engaging with personal data. New advances in Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help to reduce the cognitive burden of personal informatics and identify meaningful trends using analytical engines. Furthermore, introducing ML and AI can enable systems that provide more direct support for action, for example through predictions and recommendations. However, there are many open questions as to the design of personal informatics technologies that incorporate ML and AI. In this workshop, we will bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers in personal informatics, ML, and AI to outline the design space for intelligent personal informatics solutions and develop an agenda for future research in this area.
HCI Across Borders: Navigating the shifting borders in CHI
Vikram Kamath Cannanure, Naveena Karusala, Cuauhtémoc Rivera-Loaiza, Annu Sible Prabhakar, Rama Adithya Varanasi, Anupriya Tuli, Dilrukshi Gamage, Faria Noor, David Nemer, Dipto Das, Susan Dray, Christian Sturm, Neha Kumar
Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research has led to major innovations used by large and diverse audiences in different parts of the world. However, a recent meta-analysis[25] found that research at CHI is still highly (73%) concentrated in western contexts. HCI Across Borders (HCIxB) has gathered a diverse audience by conducting workshops and symposia since CHI 2016, aiming to expand borders within CHI. For CHI 2022, we expect to regroup for a virtual workshop to reflect on shifting boundaries from CHI’s past and emerging challenges in HCI research, education, and practice in recent years.
Human-centered Explainable AI (HCXAI): Beyond Opening the Black-Box of AI
Upol Ehsan, Philipp Wintersberger, Q. Vera Liao, Elizabeth Anne Watkins, Carina Manger, Hal Daumé III, Andreas Riener, Mark O Riedl
Explainability of AI systems is crucial to hold them accountable because they are increasingly becoming consequential in our lives by powering high-stakes decisions in domains like healthcare and law. When it comes to Explainable AI (XAI), understanding textit{who} interacts with the black-box of AI is just as important as “opening” it, if not more. Yet the discourse of XAI has been predominantly centered around the black-box, suffering from deficiencies in meeting user needs and exacerbating issues of algorithmic opacity. To address these issues, researchers have called for human-centered approaches to XAI. textit{In this second CHI workshop on Human-centered XAI (HCXAI)}, we build on the success of the first installment from CHI 2021 to expand the conversation around XAI. We chart the domain and shape the HCXAI discourse with reflective discussions from diverse stakeholders. The goal of the second installment is to go beyond the black box and examine how human-centered perspectives in XAI can be operationalized at the conceptual, methodological, and technical levels. Encouraging holistic (historical, sociological, and technical) approaches, we put an emphasis on “operationalizingÁ, aiming to produce actionable frameworks, transferable evaluation methods, concrete design guidelines, and articulate a coordinated research agenda for XAI.
Social Presence in Virtual Event Spaces
Matthew J. Bietz, Nitesh Goyal, Nicole Immorlica, Blair MacIntyre, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Benjamin C. Pierce, Sean Rintel, Donghee Yvette Wohn
It is generally acknowledged that the virtual event platforms of today do not perform satisfactorily at what is arguably their most important function: providing attendees with a sense of social presence. Social presence is the “sense of being with anotherÁ and can include ways of knowing who is in the virtual space, how others are reacting to what is happening in the space, an awareness of others’ activities and availability, and an idea of how to connect with them. Issues around presence and awareness have been perennial topics in the CHI and CSCW communities for decades. Nevertheless, the time feels ripe for a new effort with a special focus on larger-scale virtual events, given the accelerated pace of change in the socio-technological landscape and the tremendous potential impact that new insights could now have. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and developers from academia and industry with a shared interest in improving the experience of virtual events to exchange insights and hopefully energize an ongoing community effort in this area.