Student mental health and wellbeing have come under increased scrutiny in recent years. Postgraduate research (PGR) students are at risk of experiencing mental health concerns and this, with the often isolated and competitive nature of their work, can impact their sense of community and social connectedness. In response to these concerns, we designed Pears, a system to connect PGR students for regular “pearings” (in-person meetings) and provide activities to promote reflection and conversation. A four-week evaluation of Pears with 15 students highlighted its potential to sometimes, but not always, facilitate peer support. Some participants would instead meet formally and according to their needs, others instead used the system to make new social connections. Additionally, some participants who faced work-related difficulties during the study found using the system contributed to their stress levels. We conclude by noting how technologies that encourage peer support can help build social relationships, providing an avenue to share similar PhD experiences and guidance for those new to the experience, while importantly raising awareness and an understanding for the need to take time for self-care. However, these technologies must be utilised carefully, and are not a replacement for other sources of student support in universities.

Motivated by the effects of the filter bubble and echo chamber phenomena on social media, we developed a smart home device, Spkr, that unpredictably "pushes" socio-political discussion topics into the home. The device utilised trending Twitter discussions, categorised by their socio-political alignment, to present people with a purposefully assorted range of viewpoints. We deployed Spkr in 10 homes for 28 days with a diverse range of participants and interviewed them about their experiences. Our results show that Spkr presents a novel means of combating selective exposure to socio-political issues, providing participants with identifiably diverse viewpoints. Moreover, Spkr acted as a conversational prompt for discussion within the home, initiating collective processes and engaging those who would not often be involved in political discussions. We demonstrate how smart home assistants can be used as a catalyst for provocation by altering and pluralising political discussions within households.

Public commentary related to reality TV can be overwhelmed by thoughtless reactions and negative sentiments, which often problematically reinforce the cultural stereotyping typically employed in such media. We describe the design, and month-long evaluation, of a mobile "second-screening" application, Screenr, which uses co-voting and live textual tagging to encourage more critical co-viewing in these contexts. Our findings highlight how Screenr supported interrogation of the production qualities and claims of shows, promoted critical discourse around the motivations of programmes, and engaged participants in reflecting on their own assumptions and views. We situate our results within the context of existing second-screening co-viewing work, discuss implications for such technologies to support critical engagement with socio-political media, and provide design implications for future digital technologies in this domain.

This paper examines how data-driven performance monitoring technologies affect the work of telecommunications field engineers. As a mobile workforce, this occupational group rely on an array of smartphone applications to plan, manage and report on their jobs, and to liaise remotely with managers and colleagues. These technologies intend to help field engineers be more productive and have greater control over their work; however they also gather data related to the quantity and effectiveness of their labor. We conducted a qualitative study examining engineers' experiences of these systems. Our findings suggest they simultaneously enhance worker autonomy, support co-ordination with and monitoring of colleagues, but promote anxieties around productivity and the interpretation of data by management. We discuss the implications of data-driven performance management technologies on worker agency, and examine the consequences of such systems in an era of quantified workplaces.

The emergence of fake news, as well as filter bubbles and echo chambers, has precipitated renewed attention upon the ways in which news is consumed, shared and reflected and commented upon. While online news comments sections offer space for pluralist and critical discussion, studies suggest that this rarely occurs. Motivated by common practices of annotating, defacing and scribbling on physical newspapers, we built a mobile app -- Newsr -- that supports co-annotation, in the form of graffiti, on online news articles, which we evaluated in-the-wild for one month. We report on how the app encouraged participants to reflect upon the act of choosing news stories, whilst promoting exploration, the critique of content, and the exposure of bias within the writing. Our findings highlight how the re-design of interactive online news experiences can facilitate more directed, "in-the-moment" critique of online news stories as well as encourage readers to expand the range of news content they read.

The recent proliferation of a reality TV genre that focusses on welfare recipients has led to concerns that prime-time media experiences are exacerbating misconceptions, and stifling critical debate, around major societal issues such as welfare reform and poverty. Motivated by arguments that 'second screening' practices offer opportunities to engage viewers with issues of political concern, we describe the design and evaluation of two smartphone apps that facilitate and promote more critical live-viewing of reality TV. Our apps, Spotting Guide and Moral Compass, encourage users to identify, categorise, tag and filter patterns and tropes within reality TV, as well as reinterpret social media posts associated with their broadcast. We show that such interactions encourage critical thinking around typical editing and production techniques and foster co-discussion and reflection amongst viewers. We discuss, more broadly, how these interactions encourage users to identify the wider consequences and framings of reality TV, and offer implications and considerations for design that provokes criticality and reflection in second screening contexts.

Care provision in many nations increasingly relies on the work of informal, or non-professional, carers. Often these carers experience substantial disruptions and reductions to their own sociality, weakened social support networks and, ultimately, a heightened risk of social isolation. We describe a qualitative study, comprised of interviews, design workshops and probes, that investigated the social and community support practices of carers. Our findings highlight issues related to becoming and recognising being a carer, and feelings of being ignored by, and isolated from, others. We also note the benefits that sharing between carers can bring, and routes to coping and relaxing from the burdens of care. We conclude with design considerations for facilitating new forms of digitally mediated support that connect those that care, emphasising design qualities related to transitioning, talking, belonging and escaping.

Bots are estimated to account for well over half of all web traffic, yet they remain an understudied topic in HCI. In this paper we present the findings of an analysis of 2284 submissions across three discussion groups dedicated to the request, creation and discussion of bots on Reddit. We set out to examine the qualities and functionalities of bots and the practical and social challenges surrounding their creation and use. Our findings highlight the prevalence of misunderstandings around the capabilities of bots, misalignments in discourse between novices who request and more expert members who create them, and the prevalence of requests that are deemed to be inappropriate for the Reddit community. In discussing our findings, we suggest future directions for the design and development of tools that support more carefully guided and reflective approaches to bot development for novices, and tools to support exploring the consequences of contextually-inappropriate bot ideas.

In this paper we investigate how online counter-discourse is designed, deployed and orchestrated by activists to challenge dominant narratives around socio-political issues. We focus on activism related to the UK broadcast media’s negative portrayal of welfare benefit claimants; portrayals characterised as “poverty porn” by critics. Using critical discourse analysis, we explore two activist campaigns countering the TV programme Benefits Street . Through content analysis of social media, associated traditional media texts, and interviews with activists, our analysis highlights the way activists leverage the specific technological affordances of different social media and other online platforms in order to manage and configure counter-discourse activities. We reveal how activists use different platforms to carefully control and contest discursive spaces, and the ways in which they utilise both online and offline activities in combination with new and broadcast media to build an audience for their work. We discuss the challenges associated with measuring the success of counter-discourse, and how activists rely on combinations of social media analytics and anecdotal feedback in order to ascertain that their campaigns are successful. We also discuss the often hidden power-relationships in such campaigns, especially where there is ambiguity regarding the grassroots legitimacy of activism, and where effort is placed into controlling and owning the propagation of counter-discourse. We conclude by highlighting a number of areas for further work around the blurred distinctions between corporate advocacy, digilantism and grassroots activism.

This paper presents an empirical investigation of how people appropriated Twitter for socio-political talk in response to a television (TV) portrayal of people supported by state welfare and benefits. Our findings reveal how online discussion during, and in-between, TV broadcasts was characterised by distinctly different qualities, topics and user behaviours. These findings offer design opportunities for social media services to (i) support more balanced real-time commentaries of politically-charged media, (ii) actively promote discussion to continue after, and between, programming; and (iii) incorporate different motivations and attitudes towards socio-political concerns, as well as different practices of communicating those concerns. We contribute to the developing HCI literature on how social media intersects with political and civic engagement and specifically highlight the ways in which Twitter interacts with other forms of media as a site of everyday socio-political talk and debate.

Obesity is a major health concern caused by unhealthy eating behaviors. Digital weight loss interventions have adopted mobile technology primarily in order to support self-monitoring. However, many available apps are not designed as a part of dietetic practice; therefore, a distinct gap in the research exists relating to technology that supports the patient-practitioner relationship. This paper presents myPace, which is a complete weight loss and management system that is deployed via a smartphone and a PC. It connects dietitians and patients between face-to-face consultations and extends the relationship through patients' regular progress updates and dietitians' tailored and timely advice, for sustained behavior change. The prototype was developed from research into behavior change for weight loss, which furthermore was underpinned by theory and tenets of human support models, such as the supportive accountability framework. We report on an early-phase system design goals via a formative research process, which aimed to implement theoretical principles and match practical dietetic practice. To that end, only the clinical end user's perspective was sought through a coaching think-aloud protocol on the first iteration of the prototype and interviews with dietitians. Findings show that the system has many positive design features, but which require further development in order for the system to be fully acceptable within dietetic practice and motivate patient engagement.

The debate concerning how many participants represents a sufficient number for interaction testing is well-established and long-running, with prominent contributions arguing that five users provide a good benchmark when seeking to discover interaction problems. We argue that adoption of five users in this context is often done with little understanding of the basis for, or implications of, the decision. We present an analysis of relevant research to clarify the meaning of the five-user assumption and to examine the way in which the original research that suggested it has been applied. This includes its blind adoption and application in some studies, and complaints about its inadequacies in others. We argue that the five-user assumption is often misunderstood, not only in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, but also in fields such as medical device design, or in business and information applications. The analysis that we present allows us to define a systematic approach for monitoring the sample discovery likelihood, in formative and summative evaluations, and for gathering information in order to make critical decisions during the interaction testing, while respecting the aim of the evaluation and allotted budget. This approach -- which we call the Grounded Procedure -- is introduced and its value argued.