Playing with Privacy: Uncovering Everyday Judgments of Data Sensitivity Through an Arcade Machine InterfaceCurrent data protection legal frameworks, including the GDPR, classify “special” categories of personal data that are deemed deserving of higher protection due to their impact on fundamental rights. Yet, these legal abstractions fail to capture how individuals themselves judge sensitivity in everyday digital contexts. This disconnect may undermine intelligibility and erode trust in data protection as a legal institution. Despite its centrality to privacy protection, limited empirical work has systematically compared public sensitivity judgments against the special categories of protected data under Article 9 GDPR. We address this gap through a mixed-methods design that integrates nine semi-structured interviews with a game-like survey deployed on public arcade machines. This approach generated 2,935 responses from 224 participants enabling in-situ analysis of everyday judgments. By operationalising an ontology capturing who collects data, what data are collected, and for what purpose, we systematically compared responses across demographic groups. Contrary to literature assumptions that health and financial data are primary markers of data sensitivity, our findings demonstrate that expressive content, messages, photos, and social ties elicited the strongest resistance to sharing by citizens. Acceptance was shaped decisively by purpose. Citizens tolerated safety and functionality, whilst advertising and vague claims of “research” were rejected. Attitudes varied systematically, with women disproportionately resistant to sharing expressive content, and higher education and digital literacy predicting greater caution. This study demonstrates that data sensitivity cannot be reduced to fixed legal categories. Rather, it is socially situated and purpose-dependent. Our findings provide empirical foundations for reimagining consent flows, privacy defaults, and transparency mechanisms that align with everyday logics. This can enable the development of systems that people can genuinely understand, trust, and consent to.2026MKMaksim Kalameyets et al.Newcastle UniversityPrivacy by Design & User ControlPrivacy Perception & Decision-MakingParticipatory DesignIUI
HCI for Agroecology: Agri-Tech between Grassroots and CapitalismDigital technologies in agriculture are typically portrayed as enabling more sustainable production while increasing productivity. Yet, commercial solutions rarely address the root causes of unsustainable farming, limiting the uptake of more radical solutions such as agroecology. We conducted fieldwork on 11 UK small-scale agroecological farms investigating their adoption of digital technologies. Far from being anti-technological, agroecological farmers are currently poorly supported by appropriate digital tools. Further, the collaborative nature of agroecological farming, market productivity pressures, and regulatory requirements necessitate complex data practices for coordination, planning, monitoring, and learning. These data practices require labour that is often hidden and causes tension within farms. We develop these insights into a set of guiding principles for designing digital technologies appropriate for agroecology and suggest concrete design opportunities. We present a call to action for HCI to reimagine digital agriculture beyond capitalism and work with existing farmer-led grassroots networks towards technological sovereignty.2026SPSebastian Prost et al.City St George's, University of LondonSustainable HCIEcological Design & Green ComputingCitizen Science & Crowdsourced DataCHI
Caring about Care: A Meta-Narrative Review of HCI Research on CareThe number of HCI papers on care has grown rapidly in recent years. Despite growing interest in care both as an application domain for technology and as an ethical stance in research and design, our integrated understanding of the concept is limited. It remains unclear how various application areas of care relate to one another, to what extent their underlying assumptions align or contradict, and how they collectively shape HCI discourse on care. To address this, we present a meta-narrative review of 317 SIGCHI papers on care. We first outline the landscape of care in HCI. We then present six paradigmatic framings of care, and a conceptual map that positions these framings in relation to each other, their representative care–tech relations, and the temporal development of the field. We conclude by discussing the implications from the review, as well as gaps in the field and future directions.2026ZWZixuan Wang et al.University of EdinburghMental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
User Experience of Autonomous Ferries: What Passengers Need and How to Design for ItDesigning autonomous public transport requires understanding how passengers experience such systems in real-world use. For autonomous ferries, however, little is known about how users interpret waterborne autonomy. We address this gap through post-ride interviews (N=164) from a public trial of an autonomous ferry held in Trondheim, Norway, in 2022. Our thematic analysis identifies several ferry-specific factors that shape the user experience (UX). The themes were formed around sensitivity to motion and docking, the readability of manoeuvres without a visible operator, expectations around on-demand timing, and accessibility challenges at the vessel-quay interface. From these findings, we propose six design guidelines that address embodied experience, transparency of autonomous behaviour, temporal predictability, accessibility across travel chains, and the redistribution of social informational roles traditionally held by the crew. These findings extend land-based autonomous vehicle research by revealing how waterborne contexts shape trust and acceptance. The contribution of this work is a set of actionable design guidelines to achieve a predictable, trustworthy, accessible, and reliable autonomous ferry service.2026FPFelix Petermann et al.Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)Automated Driving Interface & Takeover DesignMotion Sickness & Passenger ExperienceExternal HMI (eHMI) — Communication with Pedestrians & CyclistsCHI
留白 (Liubai) at a Hushed Sanctuary: Layered Reflections on an Artist ResidencyConsidering that silence has long been intertwined with ritual and spiritual practice, we explore how digital technology might support silence thereby allowing space for reflection, attunement, and meaning-making. How does the Chinese aesthetic concept of liubai (留白, “empty space”) open up new ways of designing for noticing and reflection? In this paper, we present lived experiences of shared silence and meditation within a one-month artist residency. By weaving together field study with interview data, first-person inquiry and artistic artefacts, we offer empirical insights at the intersection of art, spirituality, and HCI. Through this study, the residency became a site to both experiment with artistic practice and explore silence as a positive and creative practice for attentive noticing. We discuss dwelling in the in-between, the art of liubai in design, a technical inward turn, and posthuman perspectives to inform a design agenda for techno-spirituality with broader implications for future research in HCI.2026XSXiaran Song et al.Aalto UniversityDigital Art Installations & Interactive PerformanceTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIHuman-Nature Relationships (More-than-Human Design)CHI
AI as an Agent and Collaborative Space: Exploring the role of Generative AI in Small Group Synchronous and Asynchronous Collaborative DynamicsWhile Generative AI (GenAI) systems are designed primarily for individual use, it is increasingly integrated into collaborative work. Its impact, however, on collaboration dynamics, such as information flow, role negotiation, and decision-making, remains unclear. To investigate this, we conducted a qualitative study comprising observations and semi-structured interviews with a total of 27 higher education students through the lens of distributed cognition. Our findings show that in synchronous settings, shared use of GenAI supported transparency and mutual awareness, with the interaction space functioning as attentional anchors, shared memory, and negotiable contributions to group decisions. Instead, in asynchronous teamwork, GenAI was typically used individually, with outputs later introduced into discussions, reducing opportunities for negotiation. As such, we contribute empirical evidence on GenAI's influence on collaborative dynamics and design considerations that position GenAI-Supported Cooperative Work (GSCW) as a bridge between Human–AI Interaction and CSCW.2026HXHaowei Xu et al.Newcastle UniversityHuman-LLM CollaborationCrowdsourcing Task Design & Quality ControlDistributed Team CollaborationCHI
Unpacking Visual Metaphors in Infographics: A Design SpaceVisual metaphors illuminate infographics by leveraging graphical representations from more familiar source domains (e.g., a dandelion) to explain concepts in more abstract target domains (e.g., information propagation). However, designing effective visual metaphors remains a challenge, especially for novice designers, because it requires selecting a suitable source concept for the target concept and devising a reconstruction strategy that maps the source concept to the target concept. Through a systematic review of 2,029 metaphoric infographics, we derive a design space that characterizes visual metaphors across three dimensions: target, source, and reconstruction strategy. We demonstrate the utility of our design space by transforming it into actionable design knowledge for prompting generative models in metaphor ideation. A user study with 30 participants shows that design-space-augmented prompting generates more diverse and inspiring metaphor designs than direct prompting without design-space cues.2026YGYukai Guo et al.Tsinghua UniversityData StorytellingInteractive Data VisualizationCHI
FretFlow: Adaptive Haptics for Rhythm and Articulation in Guitar LearningRhythm and articulation are essential for expressive guitar performance. Existing tools provide basic beat cues, whereas beginners often struggle to align with these cues when playing complex techniques, such as strumming and muting. Informed by a formative study with five instructors and grounded in embodied learning theories, we present FretFlow, a haptic vest-based tool that simulates common instructional practices to guide learners through physical interactions like tapping. The key to FretFlow is its design space that maps rhythmic and articulation patterns in various playing techniques to distinct haptic patterns, enabling authoring of haptic scores. FretFlow further dynamically adapts haptic intensity based on learners' real-time performance accuracy, accompanied by multimodal guidance across haptic, visual, and audio channels. We iteratively refined haptic designs across two rounds with 46 participants, followed by a two-week user study with 20 beginners. Results show that FretFlow improves learners’ rhythmic accuracy and expressive performance.2026XSXin Shu et al.Newcastle UniversityHaptic WearablesBehavior Change & Reflection TechnologyFull-Body Interaction & Embodied InputCHI
The Emotional Dimensions of Young Adults’ Encounters with Online InformationThe platformisation of news is increasingly shaping young adults’ emotional wellbeing, presenting urgent challenges for HCI. Existing approaches prioritise control, visibility, and agency, neglecting the emotional and relational dimensions of everyday news encounters. Such frameworks tend to overlook how information encounters contribute to emotional strain, affective overload, and the need for self-care. In this study, we adopted a qualitative, context-sensitive methodology to explore how young adults engage with news in their daily lives, foregrounding the emotional experiences that accompany these interactions. Our findings reveal that information encounters are deeply entangled with emotional needs such as self-expression, self-preservation, care for others, and a relational dependence on personalisation algorithms. Our insights call for a reorientation toward emotionally aware, harm-reducing design that supports emotional resilience, fosters empathetic engagement, and promotes self-care in information encounters. This work contributes to ongoing conversations in HCI around affective computing and the ethics of personalisation in socio-technical systems.2026IJIan Graham Johnson et al.Open LabEmotion Recognition & DetectionAffective Feedback & Emotion Regulation InterfacesAI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityCHI
Exploring Teacher-Chatbot Interaction and Affect in Block-Based ProgrammingAI-based chatbots have the potential to accelerate learning and teaching, but may also have counterproductive consequences without thoughtful design and scaffolding. To better understand teachers’ perspectives on large language model (LLM) based chatbots, we conducted a study with 11 teams of middle-school teachers using chatbots for a science and computational thinking activity within a block-based programming environment. Based on a qualitative analysis of audio transcripts and chatbot interactions, we propose three profiles: explorer, frustrated, and mixed that reflect diverse scaffolding needs. In their discussions, we found that teachers perceived chatbot benefits such as building prompting skills and self confidence alongside risks including potential declines in learning and critical thinking. Key design recommendations include scaffolding the introduction to chatbots, facilitating teacher control of chatbot features, and suggesting when and how chatbots should be used. Our contribution informs the design of chatbots to support teachers and learners in middle school coding activities.2026BRBahare Riahi et al.North Carolina State UniversityHuman-LLM CollaborationProgramming Education & Computational ThinkingIntelligent Tutoring Systems & Learning AnalyticsCHI
ViseGPT: Towards Better Alignment of LLM-generated Data Wrangling Scripts and User PromptsLarge language models (LLMs) enable the rapid generation of data wrangling scripts based on natural language instructions, but these scripts may not fully adhere to user-specified requirements, necessitating careful inspection and iterative refinement. Existing approaches primarily assist users in understanding script logic and spotting potential issues themselves, rather than providing direct validation of correctness. To enhance debugging efficiency and optimize the user experience, we develop ViseGPT, a tool that automatically extracts constraints from user prompts to generate comprehensive test cases for verifying script reliability. The test results are then transformed into a tailored Gantt chart, allowing users to intuitively assess alignment with semantic requirements and iteratively refine their scripts. Our design decisions are informed by a formative study (N=8) that explores user practices and challenges. We further evaluate the effectiveness and usability of ViseGPT through a user study (N=18). Results indicate that ViseGPT significantly improves debugging efficiency for LLM-generated data-wrangling scripts, enhances users’ ability to detect and correct issues, and streamlines the workflow experience.2025JZJiajun Zhu et al.Human-LLM CollaborationExplainable AI (XAI)Interactive Data VisualizationUIST
Conversations With The Stressed Body: Facilitating Stress Self-Disclosure Among Adolescent Girls Through an Embodied Approach Adolescent girls face significant mental health challenges during their transition to adulthood, often experiencing heightened stress from various sources. While various interactive technologies for self-disclosure had been explored to support stress relief, little is known about how to encourage stress-related self-disclosure through an embodied approach. This study presents a co-design workshop centred on Embodied Probes—a series of artefacts and activities incorporating embodied methods and technologies. During the workshop, nine participants aged 15-18 engaged with their bodies, expressed bodily sensations through tangible means, and designed embodied prototypes tailored to their personal needs for stress perception and relief. The workshop revealed insights into somatic symptoms, sources, and coping strategies for stress among adolescent girls, as well as how embodied methods can support their stress self-disclosure. This paper contributes to the HCI community by offering design implications on leveraging embodied technologies to support self-disclosure for young women’s mental well-being.2025XSXinglin Sun et al.Full-Body Interaction & Embodied InputMental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesSleep & Stress MonitoringDIS
Remarkable Wireless Home NetworkingThis paper argues that wireless home networking has been critically underexamined and yet is an infrastructure that has come to configure everyday life. This design research inquiry offers a contemporary account of the domesticated Internet, with specific attention to the participants’ mundane practices (configurations, living with, and maintenance) of WiFi. Six rented households were remotely engaged through probe activities and three bespoke WiFi meters that allowed participants to measure otherwise invisible qualities of the network. It is found that while wireless opens the possibility of a home network for people who do not own their homes, the complex invisible dynamics of these networks are too inscrutable for even simple fixes to be made. The discussion closes with a question: if the services and infrastructures of the home become further entangled in the wireless network, might the problem of WiFi maintenance become an existential threat to a functioning home?2025DCDavid ChattingUbiquitous ComputingSmart Home Privacy & SecurityDIS
Exploring Legal Journeys in Family Justice Systems: Towards Relational Design Approaches to Advance Access to Justice for Domestic Abuse Survivors Access to justice includes mechanisms enabling people to have their voice heard, exercise their rights, and hold decision-makers accountable. This paper reports on an exploratory study aiming to understand Domestic Abuse (DA) survivors’ experiences of legal journeys through Family Court (FC) and Family Justice Systems (FJS) in England and Wales, and the potential for digital technologies to support their access to justice. We used qualitative methods including interviews and designed prompts to engage eight DA survivors and three Family Court professionals. Designed prompts enabled discussions and articulation of perceptions of socio-technical systems’ potential to support access to justice in FJS. Our findings describe challenges faced by survivors when accessing FJS, participating in proceedings, and living with outcomes stemming from Family Courts processes. We discuss opportunities for digital interventions in these contexts and provide design orientations for relational approaches to design research seeking to advance access to justice for DA survivors across legal jurisdictions.2025CCClara Crivellaro et al.Empowerment of Marginalized GroupsParticipatory DesignDIS
FretMate: ChatGPT-Powered Adaptive Guitar Learning AssistantLearning to play the guitar poses significant challenges for beginners, who often choose to practice alone to avoid the embarrassment of making mistakes in front of others. This isolation leads to a lack of timely feedback and encouragement, resulting in frustration and decreased motivation. Traditional learning methods fail to provide personalized and immediate support. To address these issues, we propose a GPT-powered guitar learning assistant, FretMate, that provides immediate error correction, personalized learning paths, and emotional support. The design was informed by formative interviews with six guitar instructors and six learners. We evaluated our assistant against the traditional self-guided practice in a controlled two-week study with 16 participants. Results showed that participants using FretMate improved in skill acquisition, engagement, and motivation compared to the control group. We discuss the po- tential of integrating conversational AI into instrument learning to provide personalized instruction and emotional engagement.2025XSXin Shu et al.Intelligent Voice Assistants (Alexa, Siri, etc.)Generative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Intelligent Tutoring Systems & Learning AnalyticsIUI
Unveiling High-dimensional Backstage: A Survey for Reliable Visual Analytics with Dimensionality ReductionDimensionality reduction (DR) techniques are essential for visually analyzing high-dimensional data. However, visual analytics using DR often face unreliability, stemming from factors such as inherent distortions in DR projections. This unreliability can lead to analytic insights that misrepresent the underlying data, potentially resulting in misguided decisions. To tackle these reliability challenges, we review 133 papers that address the unreliability of visual analytics using DR. Through this review, we contribute (1) a workflow model that describes the interaction between analysts and machines in visual analytics using DR, and (2) a taxonomy that identifies where and why reliability issues arise within the workflow, along with existing solutions for addressing them. Our review reveals ongoing challenges in the field, whose significance and urgency are validated by five expert researchers. This review also finds that the current research landscape is skewed toward developing new DR techniques rather than their interpretation or evaluation, where we discuss how the HCI community can contribute to broadening this focus.2025HJHyeon Jeon et al.Seoul National University, Department of Computer Science and EngineeringInteractive Data VisualizationUncertainty VisualizationVisualization Perception & CognitionCHI
Exploring Alternative Socio-Technical Systems for Careful Data Work in Recovery ContextsNon-profits such as voluntary and community-based (VC) organisations are facing increasing pressures to engage in data work to sustain themselves. They face challenges with practices, information systems and tools associated with capturing data for supporting service provision. Most recently, researchers working with VC organisations have turned to Feminist and Care discourses to envision alternatives to current socio-technical systems whereby their values and purposes do not match with those of non-profits, consequently pulling the latter away from their socially driven mission. We report on a longitudinal, collaborative study with a UK-based mental health peer support organisation that created innovative tools as a means of navigating current pressures to practice data work for the quantification of mental health service provision. We present findings from interviews conducted with our community partner and share how recovery work has informed careful data practices, offering recommendations for supporting data work in mental health recovery.2025CCCaroline Claisse et al.Newcastle University, Open Lab, School of ComputingTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIDeveloping Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)Participatory DesignCHI
Leaky Cups: Tinkering with Hydrofeminist Temporalities for HCIThis paper offers new perspectives for More-Than-Human (MTH) design and Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) by rethinking technoscientific logics of temporality. To do this, we draw on alternative logics such as Hydrofeminism, interlocutor and autobiographical accounts, and Leaky Cups—a set of willfully dysfunctional data-enabled artefacts that leak in response to local water data. In doing so, it repositions more-than-human agency not as a passive conduit merely mediating human experiences but as a force capable of creating change and ethics through non-progressivist care labor. By engaging with these ideas, this work critiques and disrupts normative assumptions about progress, openness, fluidity, and objectivity in MTH research and design, and presents productive tensions that challenge dominant temporal frameworks.2025CKCayla Key et al.University of Washington, Human Centered Design & Engineering; Northumbria University, School of DesignTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIDesign FictionCHI
Friend or Foe? Navigating and Re-configuring ``Snipers' Alley''In a 'digital by default’ society, essential services must be accessed online. This opens users to digital deception not only from criminal fraudsters but from a range of actors in a marketised digital economy. Using grounded empirical research from northern England, we show how supposedly 'trusted' actors, such as governments, (re)produce the insecurities and harms that they seek to prevent. Enhanced by a weakening of social institutions amid a drive for efficiency and scale, this has built a constricted, unpredictable digital channel. We conceptualise this as a ''snipers' alley''. Four key snipers articulated by participants' lived experiences are examined: 1) Governments; 2) Business; 3) Criminal Fraudsters; and 4) Friends and Family to explore how snipers are differentially experienced and transfigure through this constricted digital channel. We discuss strategies to re-configure the alley, and how crafting and adopting opportunity models can enable more equitable forms of security for all.2025ADAndrew C Dwyer et al.Royal Holloway, University of London, Information Security GroupPrivacy by Design & User ControlPrivacy Perception & Decision-MakingTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
How the Role of Generative AI Shapes Perceptions of Value in Human-AI Collaborative WorkAs artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform the modern workplace, generative AI (GenAI) has emerged as a prominent tool capable of augmenting work processes. Defined by its ability to create or modify content, GenAI differs significantly from traditional machine learning models that classify, recognize, or predict patterns from existing data. This study explores the role of GenAI in shaping perceptions of AI’s contribution and how these perceptions influence both creators’ internal assessments of their work and their anticipation of external evaluators’ assessments. Our research develops and empirically tests a structural model through a between-subjects experiment, revealing that the role GenAI plays in the work process significantly impacts perceived enhancements in work quality and effort relative to human input. Additionally, we identify a critical trade-off between fostering worker assessments of creativity and managing perceived external assessments of the work’s value.2025ASAaron Schecter et al.University of Georgia, Terry College of BusinessGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Human-LLM CollaborationCHI