What is Digital Wellbeing? A Leverage Points Framework to Guide Research and ActionWhile research on digital wellbeing has often focused on mitigating the harms of technology (over)use-especially around screen time-the concept itself remains inconsistently defined. In this paper, we first propose a layered taxonomy that characterizes digital wellbeing across three dimensions: technology scope and users, mediators, and strategies. The taxonomy is grounded in a review of ten years of CHI publications and refined through its application to 68 student projects on digital wellbeing. Building on this foundation, we then advance the Leverage Points for Digital Wellbeing, a framework inspired by system thinking that situates interventions along self-oriented, collective, and systemic orientations of change. Our conceptual model provides an actionable account of digital wellbeing-one that captures users’ evolving entanglements with technology, including generative AI, as well as the broader social and political conditions in which these entanglements unfold. We conclude by outlining implications for research, design, and policy.2026ARAlberto Monge Roffarello et al.Politecnico di TorinoSmartphone Addiction & Digital WellbeingBehavior Change & Reflection TechnologyAI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityCHI
Constructing Everyday Well-Being: Insights from God-Saeng (God生) for Personal InformaticsWhile Personal Informatics (PI) systems support behavior change, everyday well-being involves more than achieving individual target behaviors. It is shaped by cultural narratives that give actions meaning. In South Korea, the God-Saeng (God生) phenomenon—encompassing disciplined, collective, and publicly documented self-improvement practices—offers a lens into how well-being is negotiated in daily life. We conducted a 10-day probe (N=24) with bite-sized missions to examine how young adults engaged in God-Saeng. Participants relied on planning practices, accountability infrastructures, and datafication to stabilize themselves, yet these same routines also intensified pressures toward self-monitoring and performance. They navigated tensions between consistency and flexibility, authenticity and visibility, and productivity and broader values such as relationships, and reinterpreted ordinary activities through sociocultural contexts. These insights suggest design opportunities for PI systems that move beyond tracking, toward digital instruments that help users negotiate tensions, make meaning, and reflexively understand how technologies participate in their culturally and existentially situated well-being.2026ISInhwa Song et al.Princeton UniversityBehavior Change & Reflection TechnologyData-Driven Personal Decision-MakingInclusive DesignCHI
When Workout Buddies Are Virtual: AI Agents and Human Peers in a Longitudinal Physical Activity StudyPhysical inactivity remains a critical global health issue, yet scalable strategies for sustained motivation are scarce. Conversational agents designed as simulated exercising peers (SEPs) represent a promising alternative, but their long-term impact is unclear. We report a six-month randomized controlled trial (N=280) comparing individuals exercising alone, with a human peer, or with a large language model-driven SEP. Results revealed a partnership paradox: human peers evoked stronger social presence, while AI peers provided steadier encouragement and more reliable working alliances. Humans motivated through authentic comparison and accountability, whereas AI peers fostered consistent, low-stakes support. These complementary strengths suggest that AI agents should not mimic human authenticity but augment it with reliability. Our findings advance human-agent interaction research and point to hybrid designs where human presence and AI consistency jointly sustain physical activity.2026ASAlessandro Silacci et al.University of LausanneFitness Tracking & Physical Activity MonitoringAffective Human-Computer DialogueBehavior Change & Reflection TechnologyCHI
Narratives of War: Ukrainian Memetic Warfare on TwitterThe 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen an intensification in the use of social media by governmental actors in cyber warfare. Wartime communication via memes has been a successful strategy used not only by independent accounts such as @uamemesforces, but also---for the first time in a full-scale interstate war---by official Ukrainian government accounts such as @Ukraine and @DefenceU. We study this prominent example of memetic warfare through the lens of its narratives, and find them to be a key component of success: tweets with a 'victim' narrative garner twice as many retweets. However, malevolent narratives focusing on the enemy resonate more than those about heroism or victims with countries providing more assistance to Ukraine. Our findings present a nuanced examination of Ukraine's influence operations and of the worldwide response to it, thus contributing new insights into the evolution of socio-technical systems in times of war.2025YMYelena Mejova et al.Governing Platforms / Technology's Role in GovernanceCSCW
Collaborating with a Text-Based Chatbot: An Exploration of Real-World Collaboration Strategies Enacted during Human-Chatbot InteractionsA central problem for chatbots in the customer care domain revolves around how people collaborate with the agent to achieve their own situated goals. The majority of the previous research, however, relied on experiments within artificial settings, rather than on observation of real-world interactions. Moreover, such research mostly analyzed users’ responses to communication breakdowns, rather than the wider collaboration strategies utilized during a conversation. In this paper, we qualitatively analyzed 12,477 real-world exchanges with a task-based chatbot using a Grounded Theory approach as a rigorous coding method to analyze the data. We identified two main aspects of collaboration, behavioral and conversational, and for each aspect we highlighted the different strategies that users perform to “work together” with the agent. These strategies may be utilized from the very beginning of the conversation or in response to misunderstandings in the course of ongoing interactions and may show different evolving dynamics.2023ARAmon Rapp et al.University of TorinoConversational ChatbotsAgent Personality & AnthropomorphismCHI
A Gameful Organizational Assimilation Process: Insights from World of Warcraft for Gamification DesignA central process of virtual organization design relates to how newcomers are assimilated into organizational dynamics. Research on organizational assimilation has traditionally investigated “serious” organizational contexts. Nonetheless, video games can offer insights on how such assimilation can be effectively supported. In this article, I propose to look at World of Warcraft (WoW) to understand how individuals can be successfully integrated into online organizations. Through an ethnographic research, made up of participant observation and 36 semi-structured interviews, I explore the role that specific game design elements have in supporting organizational assimilation into WoW raiding guilds. This role is particularly relevant because it shows how designers can elicit extremely engaging organizational dynamics, which encourage players to identify with their organizations. On the basis of the study findings, I also propose some design considerations, as practical implications of the research, to gamify virtual organizations that may present similarities with WoW raiding guilds.2020ARAmon RappTeams, Groups, and CreativityCSCW
Reflexive Ethnographies in Human-Computer Interaction: Theory and PracticeThis course aims at introducing some key issues in contemporary ethnographic practice, emphasizing the role of the writing style and the epistemic position of the fieldworker in shaping a particular perspective on the observed phenomena. It outlines the theoretical assumptions that lie behind the traditional “realist position” of HCI ethnographies to propose methodological tools for conducting and writing reflexive ethnographies, valuing the role of the ethnographer and her subjective experiences.2018ARAmon RappUniversity of TorinoParticipatory DesignUser Research Methods (Interviews, Surveys, Observation)CHI
The Spirit of the City: Using Social Media to Capture Neighborhood AmbiancePlace ambiance has a huge influence over how we perceive places. Despite its importance, ambiance has been crucially overlooked by urban planners and scientists alike, not least because it is difficult to record and analyze at scale. We explored the possibility of using social media data to reliably map the ambiance of neighborhoods in the entire city of London. To this end, we collected geo-referenced picture tags from Flickr and matched those tags with the words in a newly created ambiance dictionary. In so doing, we made four main contributions: i) map the ambiance of London neighborhoods; ii) ascertain that such a mapping meets residents' expectations, which are derived from a survey we conducted; iii) show that computer vision techniques upon geo-referenced pictures are of predictive power for neighborhood ambiance; and iv) explain each prediction of a neighborhood's ambiance by identifying the picture that best reflects the meaning of that ambiance (e.g., artsy) in that neighborhood (e.g., South Kensington---the richest and most traditional neighborhood---and Shoreditch---among the most progressive and hipster neighborhoods in the city---are both `artsy' but in very different ways). The combination of the predictive power of mapping ambiance from images and the ability to explain those predictions makes it possible to discover hidden gems across the city at an unprecedented scale.2018MRMiriam Redi et al.Social Media in the WildCSCW
Know Thyself: A Theory of the Self for Personal InformaticsAlthough Personal Informatics stresses the importance of “self”-awareness and “self”-knowledge in collecting personal data, a description of the “self,” to which all these knowledge endeavors are addressed, is missing in the current debate. In this article we first review how the different theoretical assumptions that currently inform the design of Personal Informatics tools fail to convey a convincing image of the self, which ought to be quantified by these technologies. We then move on to the outline of a theory of the self that may ground the current discourse in Personal Informatics. Building on this theoretical framework, we propose a set of design guidelines as its implications, which may drive the design of future self-tracking technologies. Finally, we outline a research agenda, organized around such guidelines, in the form of research questions to be addressed in the future.2018ARAmon Rapp et al.University of TorinoUniversal & Inclusive DesignMental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesCHI
Gamification for Self-Tracking: From World of Warcraft to the Design of Personal Informatics SystemsWorld of Warcraft (WoW) may be a source of inspiration to enrich the Personal Informatics systems user’s experience and, at the same time, improve gamification design. Through the findings of a four-year reflexive ethnography in WoW, I outline how its game design elements support players in making sense of their own data, emphasizing how “game numbers” are turned into meanings. On the basis of the study results, I propose a series of design considerations to be used in the design of self-tracking systems, which recommend to embody data into digital entities, provide different analytical tools depending on the users’ expertise through a flexible model, and foster the formation of “communities of practice” in order to support learning processes.2018ARAmon RappUniversity of TorinoGamification DesignCHI
Session-based Suggestion of Topics for Exploratory SearchExploratory information search can challenge users in the formulation of efficacious search queries to find the data they are interested in. Moreover, complex information spaces can disorient people, making it difficult to explore all the types of information relevant to their activities. In order address these issues, we propose a session-based concept suggestion model that, given the observed search queries, proposes context-dependent query expansions as a {\em ``you might also be interested in''} function. Our model can be applied to incrementally generate suggestions during the search sessions. This can be employed for query expansion, and in general to guide users in the exploration of the possibly complex space of information categories managed by an information system. Our model is based on the generation of a concept co-occurrence graph that describes how frequently concepts are searched together in sessions. Starting from an ontological domain representation, we generated the graph by analyzing the query log of a major search engine. Moreover, we identified clusters of ontology concepts which frequently co-occur in users' searches via community detection on the graph. An experiment carried out using the log provided satisfactory accuracy results.2018NMNoemi Mauro et al.Recommender System UXIUI