Exploring the Role of Interaction Data to Empower End-User Decision-Making in UI PersonalizationUser interface personalization enhances digital efficiency, usability, and accessibility. However, in user-driven setups, limited support for identifying and evaluating worthwhile opportunities often leads to underuse. We explore a reflexive personalization approach where individuals engage with their digital interaction data to identify meaningful personalization opportunities and benefits. We interviewed 12 participants, using experimental vignettes as design probes to support reflection on different forms of using interaction data to empower decision-making in personalization and the preferred level of system support. We found that people can independently identify personalization opportunities but prefer system support through visual personalization suggestions. Interaction data can shape how users perceive and approach personalization by reinforcing the perceived value of change and data collection, helping them weigh benefits against effort, and increasing the transparency of system suggestions. We discuss opportunities for designing personalization software that raises end-users' agency over interfaces through reflective engagement with their interaction data.2026SASérgio Alves et al.Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de LisboaBehavior Change & Reflection TechnologyData-Driven Personal Decision-MakingPrototyping & User TestingCHI
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
No Spirituality Please, We’re HCI: Challenges for HCI Research on Religion and SpiritualityReligion and spirituality (R/S) shape billions of lives, yet they remain marginal in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Prior literature reviews mapped fragments of this space but missed key contributions and the lived realities of its researchers. We extend this picture through a review of 206 ACM and IEEE publications and a survey of R/S scholars in HCI (n=19). Our analysis shows a field in transition: Research on R/S is growing slightly in volume and diversity, with design-oriented work emerging as the dominant form of engagement. Yet the ACM and IEEE corpora remain largely separate, reflecting distinct epistemic traditions. Researchers report persistent challenges, including marginalization, exposing a deeper tension in HCI: While HCI claims to center the full range of human experience, R/S experience is still treated with suspicion. Our findings call for a reconsideration: If HCI is serious about human experience, it must take R/S experiences seriously as well.2026SWSara Wolf et al.Julius-Maximilians-Universität WürzburgTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIDeveloping Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)Gender & Race Issues in HCICHI
Civic Care in Place: Subtle Technologies and Community Stewardship in a Marginalized ContextHow do communities sustain public spaces when formal infrastructure fails? In Stanley, UK a post-industrial town facing infrastructural neglect and climate-related flooding, residents sustain their environment through micro-acts that formal participation metrics fail to capture. Through surveys, interviews and a diary study conducted in partnership with Wear Rivers Trust, a charity advancing Nature-based Solutions (NbS), we examine how communities perceive and enact care under conditions of environmental precarity and low institutional trust. We found that care practices are embedded in daily routines and social ties, shaped by both pride and frustration, and sustained through informal networks. We contribute: (1) empirical insights into everyday civic care as emotional, negotiated, and place-based; and (2) a framework of six design dimensions, embeddedness, visibility, reciprocity, autonomy with support, coordination without formalization, and frustration as data --- to guide HCI/CSCW in developing respectful, lightweight, and situated systems that amplify rather than replace community capacities.2026ACAnna R. L. Carter et al.Northumbria UniversityCommunity Engagement & Civic TechnologySustainable HCIHuman-Nature Relationships (More-than-Human Design)CHI
Scattered Searches, Broken Apps, Quiet Repairs: A Feminist Autoethnographic Critique of Technology and Research on Gender-Based ViolenceThis paper presents a feminist autoethnographic critique of technology and research on gender-based violence, grounded in my lived experience and current work as an HCI researcher engaged in community-led design on forced marriage and broader gender-based violence. Through chronological narratives, I recount encounters with digital technologies during help-seeking, from early online searches to the quiet work of rebuilding life, alongside reflections from my position as a researcher embedded in my own community and observing how HCI engages with it. These accounts reveal how digital interventions often fail to align with the realities of those affected, whether by prematurely pushing legal solutions, vanishing after research funding, or reinforcing harmful labels such as “victim.” I argue for HCI approaches that sustain tools beyond prototypes, translate research into practice, and attend to language and power, calling for research and design that begins with those most impacted: \textit{not spoken for, but speaking}.2026NANimra Ahmed et al.University of ZürichEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIParticipatory DesignCHI
CaseCompass: Designing Sustainable, Community-Led Socio-Technical Systems for Gender-Based Violence Support WorkThird sector organizations that address gender-based violence often rely on makeshift tools to manage complex, emotionally intensive casework. Although digital systems promise structure, most fail to support the narrative, relational, and time-sensitive nature of frontline support. This paper presents the design, development, and deployment of CaseCompass, a digital case management system co-created with the Competence Center against Forced Marriages, a national NGO in Switzerland. The project emerged from a long-term, trust-based collaboration and foregrounded organizational priorities, care practices, and long-term sustainability. Rather than treating the tool as the endpoint, we use its creation as a lens to examine how participation can be structured under severe time and capacity constraints, and how design decisions can serve as infrastructural care. We contribute to feminist and social justice-oriented HCI by offering a detailed case study of community-led infrastructuring within a small NGO, articulating strategies for structuring participation under constraints, and framing sustainability as an active practice of care, responsibility, and justice.2026NANimra Ahmed et al.University of ZürichParticipatory DesignTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsCHI
Co-Designing Islamic AI Ethics: Insights from the UK Muslim CommunityAI governance frameworks are predominantly shaped by Western, secular values, which risks excluding the perspectives of 1.9 billion Muslims whose ethical reasoning is grounded in Islamic principles. To address this gap, we conducted co-design workshops with 12 Muslim women, to identify Islamic ethical values for AI systems and examine how these compare to the \textit{UK AI White Paper}. Our analysis revealed four themes that complement and challenge assumptions in secular AI governance, (1) Honesty, Transparency, and Trustworthiness; (2) Knowledge, Responsibility, and Divine Accountability; (3) Justice, Power, and Equity; and (4) Unity, Inclusivity, and Diversity. Our findings present Islamic ethical AI processes, including Hadith authentication for verification, collective consultation (shūrā), and wealth distribution (zakat) for restorative and re-distributive justice. This paper contributes to calls for decolonial AI governance and offers the HCI community an Islamic understanding of AI ethics to broaden debates beyond Western paradigms.2026RCRochelle Campbell-Esen et al.Northumbria UniveristyAI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIDeveloping Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)CHI
Bridging the Technical Gap: A Unified Representation Framework for Voice-based Community Engagement PlatformsHCI practitioners in development contexts utilize collaborative digital technologies for community engagement in international development, often mediated through platforms like social media, tele-conferencing, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR). However, the lack of standardized representation approaches for these platforms impedes effective communication among stakeholders. We propose a unified graphical framework for characterizing and representing collaborative platforms, focusing on audio/voice-based engagements. Our framework segments community engagement sessions into engagement formats, characterizing them with preconditions, configurations, and outputs, and visualizes them using state machine-based representations. A field study demonstrates the framework’s effectiveness in supporting stakeholder communication for real-life scenarios. We contribute to CSCW literature by providing a standardized approach that offers a common framework/language for discussing, developing, or reconfiguring collaborative platforms. Our findings show that this framework enables on-governmental organizations and researchers to navigate under-explored design spaces, enhancing the utilization of voice-based platforms for engaging distributed marginalized communities.2025MIMd Adnanul Islam et al.Working together (with other people)CSCW
The Development and (Mis)appropriation of a Digital Kit for JewellersJewellers’ participation in interaction design is scarce, yet the creativity of jewellers could add value as they interpret materials and mediate personal connections in poetic ways. We investigate how to empower jewellers to experiment with the possibilities that physical computing offers to their practice. This article presents the making of a Digital Jewellery Kit, a composite of pre-assembled circuitry, used by second-year BA jewellery students during a 10-week project which brought together theory and practice. Drawing on students’ reflective accounts, we discuss what made the jewellers’ path into physical computing more meaningful to their practice, what type of artefacts they created with electronics as well as what values drove their creative process. We offer design recommendations on how to support the praxes of jewellers whilst allowing their creativity to grow through their new understanding of physical computing and contribute to the discussions around hybrid craft within HCI and educational contexts.2025NKNantia Koulidou et al.Shape-Changing Materials & 4D PrintingMakerspace CultureDIS
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
Artificial Intelligence and other Speculative MetaphorsThe paper proposes “speculative metaphors” as constructs for reframing and critically engaging with ideas of artificial intelligence. It identifies a broad range of AI metaphors in the wider culture and technical literature and discusses metaphor design in terms of explanation, persuasion and speculation. To explore different metaphor design strategies, we use a custom GPT to generate a large number of variants on the “artificial intelligence” metaphor. The paper contributes a conceptual framing for such speculative metaphor drawing on ideas of knowledge and understanding, fusion and synthesis, collaboration and collectives. We argue that generating speculative metaphors provides a means of thinking critically about human-AI interaction.2025MBMark Blythe et al.Technology Ethics & Critical HCIDesign FictionDIS
Blending Code and Cause: Understanding the Dynamic Motivations of Volunteer Developers in community-driven FOSS projectsUnderstanding the motivations of volunteer developers is crucial for the HCI community as it seeks to design sustainable, community-driven digital platforms. This study explores the dynamics of motivation among volunteer developers in the Foodsharing.de platform, a grassroots movement focused on reducing food waste through community engagement. By investigating the evolving motivations and challenges faced by these developers, our research highlights the unique blend of personal passion, technical skill, and social commitment that sustains their long-term involvement. Through interviews, observations, and participatory research, we uncover how developers balance their commitment to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) with the platform’s socio-ecological mission. Our findings emphasize the importance of fostering a supportive community, clear governance, and effective infrastructuring to manage motivation, frustration, and expectations. We discuss strategies to enhance volunteer retention, such as improving feedback mechanisms and recognizing contributions, which are critical for the sustainability of volunteer-driven platforms.2025LJLeonie Jahn et al.University of SiegenCrowdsourcing Task Design & Quality ControlParticipatory DesignCHI
Towards Neuroqueer Spatial Justice: A Critical Literature Review of Public Space Technologies for Neurodivergent PopulationsAccess to public spaces is of the utmost importance for social cohesion, inclusion, and civic engagement. Nevertheless, a large majority of public spaces remain incredibly uncomfortable environments for neurodivergent individuals due to, for instance, the unpredictability of such spaces and the sensory stimuli within them. Smart City technologies present an exciting opportunity to improve the accessibility and enjoyment of the spaces where they are deployed by, for instance, offering users the ability to customise a space to their specific sensory needs. However, the research topic of public space technologies for neurodivergent individuals remains scattered and sparsely documented. This critical review analyses the existing domains of inquiry, contributing a theoretical framework based on Spatial Justice and Neuroqueer Technoscience and suggests future research avenues informed by this framework. We advocate for the participatory co-creation of a neurodivergent-affirming landscape of public space technologies that both support neurodivergent needs and promote neurodivergent joy.2025PPPatricia Piedade et al.University of Lisbon, Interactive Technologies Institute, LARSySCognitive Impairment & Neurodiversity (Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia)Community Engagement & Civic TechnologyTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
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
Design Courts: Workshops for Exploring Emerging Technology EthicsAlthough it is now well recognized that HCI must take a greater account of ethics there is little consensus about which ethical systems are most appropriate or how to incorporate them into the design process. In this paper, we contribute a Design Court workshop method where opposing legal and ethical arguments are set against one another in the form of a mock trial. We describe how we structured and enacted these workshops by combining legal thought experiments and design fiction. The paper reports findings from three Design Courts where a fictional device is the subject of litigation. These court disputations focused on issues of privacy, reciprocity and intent in rich and nuanced debate. We argue that Design Courts may be a useful method for engaging competing ethical standpoints through contested dialogue.2025NPNamrata Primlani et al.Northumbria UniversityTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIDesign FictionCHI
Queer Joy on Social Media: Exploring the Expression and Facilitation of Queer Joy in Online PlatformsQueer Joy is conceptualised as a form of resistance to oppression by celebrating queerness in the face of adversity. This research aimed to centre queer joy and understand how it is expressed and may be facilitated in online spaces. To do this we conducted a survey with 100 UK participants who indicated they identified as LGBTQ+ on the online recruitment platform Prolific. We asked a series of open and closed questions in an online survey to investigate 1) what queer joy looks like on social media 2) how queer joy content is engaged with on social media 3) which platforms are perceived to facilitate queer joy and 4) how queer people protect their privacy online. The results suggested that to facilitate queer joy online, platforms should allow flexible self expression and community engagement, while allowing for granular control over privacy and the audience such content is shown to.2025MSMadeleine Steeds et al.University College Dublin, School of Information and Communication StudiesSocial Platform Design & User BehaviorGender & Race Issues in HCILGBTQ+ Community Technology DesignCHI
More Than ‘ticking-a-box’: The Affordances of Short-form Video for Community Reporting to GovernmentCommunication between government agencies and not-for-profits (NFPs) within the local funding sector typically require the writing and submitting of long-form text-based reports. These processes are time and resource intensive and require skill in written communication, placing a significant administrative burden on the small, already under-resourced organisations who interact with programs. NFP's now have the technical literacy to create rich video content, but little is understood about how video could be used instead of, or alongside traditional written reports. We present findings from a novel funding acquittal (final report) process that we designed for a government grant programme to explore the affordances of video from the perspective of the grantee. We discuss the affordances of structured short-form video to overcome the barriers faced by organisations during these reporting processes. We present design considerations for digitally mediated processes that could support the media augmentation of these established workflows.2025TBTom Bartindale et al.Northumbria UniversityHead-Up Display (HUD) & Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS)Content Moderation & Platform GovernanceCommunity Engagement & Civic TechnologyCHI
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
Using Anonymous Discussion Platforms to Support Open Conversations about Cybersecurity in OrganisationsPeople-centred security is critical for the security of an organisation, but we know that it comes at a cost. Recently the academic literature base has started to focus on how security might be understood and promoted as a facet of the overall culture of an organisation. This work sets out to understand the experiences of employees and management when using an anonymous online discussion platform to discuss cybersecurity policies. Following a 2-week deployment in a large UK educational institution, we found that anonymity helped individuals share their experiences, and that these experiences helped others understand more about the rationale for security policies. However, we also found that anonymity negatively impacted on individuals’ ability to discuss specific problems and follow up on incidents. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of using anonymous discussion platforms in organisations for improving the security culture through social participation and a more transparent listening culture.2025EJEve Jenkins et al.Northumbria UniversityPrivacy by Design & User ControlCybersecurity Training & AwarenessSocial Platform Design & User BehaviorCHI
A Feminist Care Ethics Toolkit for Community-Based Design: Bridging Theory and PracticeExisting ethics frameworks for participatory engagement in HCI often overlook the nuanced ethical challenges of dynamic community-based contexts given the latter’s relational nature. We hope to bridge this gap by grounding feminist care ethics in actionable tools for community-based projects to enhance ethical engagement in these settings. Prior research advocates for adaptable, context-sensitive ethics in participatory research, informed by feminist care ethics. To address this need, we developed and iteratively refined a toolkit embodying the underlying principles of feminist care ethics through workshops with participants working in academic and non-academic community-based settings. Our findings suggest that the toolkit fosters ethical reflection aligned with the feminist care ethics ethos while facilitating meaningful experiences for participants. This work contributes to the field by offering a practical design artefact that not only embodies feminist care ethics but also supports researchers and communities in navigating complex ethical landscapes in participatory engagements, together or independently.2025AHAna O Henriques et al.University of Lisbon, Interactive Technologies InstituteTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIParticipatory DesignCHI