Playwrights use writing support tools to craft scripts for the stage. However, these tools are not attuned to the challenges of creating live performance and navigating theater ecosystems, instead complicating and constraining playwrights’ processes. Through thematic analysis of focus groups with 13 playwrights, we explored how playwrights’ creative needs and communities inform their tool use, and how playwrights adapt to tools that fail to meet their needs. We found three themes in playwriting processes: scaffolding communities of practice, incorporating voice and body into writing processes, and managing script elasticity across the theater lifecycle. We discuss lenses of embodied practice and non-normative time through which researchers can better understand creative writers’ overlooked writing behaviors and processes. To guide the development of playwriting support tools, we offer design considerations around enabling speech, visualizing performers, and contextualizing version management. By spotlighting playwrights, we illuminate how performance can inform creative writing support research.

As outdoor recreations have grown in popularity post the pandemic, their effect on local biodiversity has been unregulated, leading to shifts in local ecology and wildlife. Recreationalists today use digital tools like mobile apps (e.g. Surfline) to facilitate and guide them towards nature spaces for these activities, highlighting opportunities for these apps to ameliorate the effects of these interactions through alternative design goals and values. By centering our design around the experience of Otter 841 (i.e., “the surfing otter”) in Santa Cruz we study how existing research in environmental studies and conservation can be used to create alternative design frameworks to improve outdoor recreation, for long-term sustainable interactions. By using speculative design centered on the “Tragedy of the Commons” defined by Ostrom and Hardin we create alternate paradigms of how recreational technology can shift interactions to center the needs of non-human actors for technology design.

Social media platforms have become integral to everyday life and serve as the foundation for online communities. These platforms not only enable communication but also shape the ways in which online communities are formed and maintained. In this paper, we examine an online community, the BTS fandom ARMY, using Durkheim’s concept of solidarity, we show how ARMY’s symbolic commitments, collective labor, and boundary negotiations are simultaneously community practices and infrastructural labor that generate cultural and economic value. Using an online survey and ethnographic observations of BTS ARMY, we present the BTS Industrial Complex, an ecosystem of communities all related to BTS that rely on digital platforms to influence and interact with each other. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a conceptualization of the BTS Industrial Complex as a sociotechnical ecosystem, (2) empirical insights into how platforms shape collective action, and (3) implications for HCI in designing for and critically examining large-scale cultural economies.

The integration of mobile technology in education raises concerns about teachers’ work-life boundaries. Most studies examine boundary issues from a Western, individualistic perspective, prompting the question: How might work-life balance be understood within the context of a collectivist culture? This study examines how Chinese teachers manage boundaries on the all-in-one app WeChat. A survey of 108 teachers shows most view WeChat positively for work, while interviews with 18 teachers reveal that while teachers experience fatigue from blurred boundaries and constant availability, they also view WeChat as indispensable for managing fragmented responsibilities, sustaining relationships, and coordinating collective tasks. Teachers employ workarounds to negotiate expectations of accessibility. These practices highlight what we describe as expected permeability, a relationally constructed rhythm of accessibility shaped by obligations and tie-specific norms, while foregrounding relational agency as a stronger lens for rethinking both platform design and work-life balance theory beyond individualistic framings.

Museums are often perceived as objective sources of information on cultural objects and their histories. However, the colonial, political, and institutional contexts behind these objects are frequently obscured or excluded, prompting calls for repatriation. For visitors, this raises a question: how can contested objects and repatriation be understood beyond institutional narratives? Object \rlapive View of Contested Collection is an installation that reframes this process through embodiment, guiding visitors through stages of an object’s journey through the lens of their own cultural identity. By experiencing the processes an object undergoes, visitors reflect on the complexities of repatriation and connect these narratives to their personal backgrounds. This work offers a novel approach to repatriation education by situating learning within institutional contexts and embodied perspectives, fostering empathy, reflection, and participatory engagement.

Technological innovations are often recognized for improving accessibility, but are also critiqued for perpetuating exclusionary practices in disability research.In the context of neurodivergence, these tensions are intensified by its diverse and heterogeneous nature, alongside the continuously evolving understanding and awareness surrounding it.As tech startups act as catalysts for innovation, offering technological "solutions" that directly engage with the lived experiences of disabled individuals, a critical question arises: How do the discursive strategies used by these companies reflect and construct broader societal narratives surrounding neurodivergence?This study employs thematic and discourse analysis to examine the websites of 38 startups that claim to enhance the well-being of autistic people.Our analysis identifies three key thematic patterns in the corpus: fears, where startups emphasize urgency and evoke cultural anxieties; hopes, where they pin aspirations for empowerment and inclusion on technological innovation; and oscillations, where portrayals shift between different models of disability, allowing companies to address multiple audiences.These strategies not only influence how autism and care are publicly understood but also shape the design priorities, market logic, and ethical direction of disability-focused technologies.We call for greater attention to how language in disability tech participates in constructing the conditions of care and legitimacy in accessibility studies.

Music videos (MVs) offer new storytelling opportunities for songs and give fans in music-related fandoms a new medium to engage.However, the visual-forward and interpretive nature of MVs means they are not accessible to all fans.We introduce MVAuLT, a browser extension for authoring creative alternative text (alt text) for MVs.While alt text is typically an informational description of an individual static image, we apply it to video through sequential MV screenshots for which users can batch-write interpretive alt text that considers narrative context.We designed MVAuLT to minimize friction and maintain narrative coherence in alt text authoring.Through this work, we offer a novel consideration of alt text as both interpretive and informational, a new framework for multi-modal MV accessibility, and a lens of alt text as a participatory storytelling practice.

Alternative Research Outcomes (AROs) go beyond traditional academic publications, taking diverse forms such as documentaries, DIY tutorials, or exhibitions. With growing recognition of the need for more inclusive and contextually appropriate research dissemination, AROs are particularly relevant in HCI and design research. Yet, little has been discussed on why it is important to work on AROs. What are key qualities of AROs? How can the HCI community benefit from learning more about creating AROs? By analyzing six case studies, we propose four qualities of AROs and demonstrate how they emerge in the timeline of a research project. We argue AROs can be adapted to diverse audience needs and share research insights that may extend beyond the original research goals. Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of how AROs can support inclusive research dissemination practices, enabling HCI researchers to engage broader audiences and extend the relevance of their work.

Empathy-building, the first stage in human-centered design, often involves methods that inadvertently reinforce negative stereotypes and biases toward disabled communities. In this work, we introduce a new method: Disability-Related Empathy from Existing Media (DREEM). This method focuses on enculturation rather than traditional ideas of empathy. DREEM leverages media created by disabled individuals to facilitate a deeper, culturally informed understanding. Cultural content is rich with authentic perspectives and tacit design knowledge from people with disabilities. Our four-step process includes (1) discovering relevant media, (2) close reading, (3) reflective journaling, and (4) aggregation of insights. In this article, we present our process of creating DREEM using research through design in multiple research and education contexts. Our findings show that DREEM can be applied in both design classrooms and research contexts to foster a more nuanced understanding of disability for newcomers to the space.

Given the renewed attention on politics, values, and ethics within our field and the wider cultural milieu, now is the time to take stock of social justice research in HCI. We surveyed 124 papers explicitly pursuing social justice between 2009 and 2022 to better reflect on the current state of justice-oriented work within our discipline. We identified (1) how researchers understood the social justice-relevant harms and benefits, (2) the approaches researchers used to address harm, and (3) the tools that researchers leveraged to pursue justice. Our analysis highlights gaps in social justice work, such as the need for our community to conceptualize benefits, and identifies concrete steps the HCI community can take to pursue just futures. By providing a comprehensive overview of and reflection on HCI’s current social justice landscape, we seek to help our research community strategize, collaborate, and collectively act toward justice.

As user-generated video dominates media landscapes, it poses an accessibility challenge. While disability advocacy groups globally have secured hard-won accessibility regulations for broadcast media, no such regulation of user-generated content exists. Yet, one major player in this shift, TikTok, has a culture of user-generated, creative captioning. We sought to understand how TikTok videos are captioned and the impact current practices have on those who need captions to access audio content. Therefore, we conducted a content analysis of 300 open-captioned TikToks and contextualized these findings by interviewing nine caption users. We found that the current state of TikTok captioning does facilitate access to the platform but that a user-generated, social video-specific standard for captioning could improve caption quality and expand access. We contribute an empirical account of the state of TikTok captioning and outline steps toward a standard for user-generated captioning.

Today, many modern gaming platforms use a reward system where players actively collect rewards and form communities around these rewards. Reward systems in games are used to celebrate players when they accomplish specific tasks, levels, or objectives within and beyond standard gameplay. Players can choose what they want to complete and will be rewarded for their efforts accordingly. While these have become commonplace, we know little about the preferences and engagement with reward systems from the players’ perspective. In this work, we conducted a qualitative analysis of 2,803 comments from a popular subreddit, r/Trophies, where PlayStation (PS) players share their experiences in completing games and obtaining digital trophies. Our findings show the preference for the PS trophy reward system over other reward systems through the following themes: 1) Incentivizing Player Engagement, 2) Enabling Greater Player Choice for Trophy List Completion, and 3) Connecting Through Personal History. This work is relevant to game researchers and developers as it expands existing knowledge of the player experience around reward system design.

For geographically dispersed communities, including professional, academic, hobbyist, and fandom communities, in-person events and meetups play a crucial role in the function and health of the whole community. Building off prior literature, we take a nuanced look at large scale community events that blend online and offline interactions across digital and physical embodied experiences in order to build understanding of how this knowledge can be leveraged to build more accessible hybrid modalities for community events. Building on this foundation, this paper presents a comprehensive study using ethnographic methods to examine large scale community events, specifically stadium music concerts of varying modalities (e.g., in-person, live-streamed). Using a disability lens, we explore how such community events are experienced and technologically mediated, as well as how the community and individuals design and construct their own sociotechnical worlds across multiple modalities and embodied experiences. By centering the disabled embodied experience, we examine how community members navigate the concert environment, time, and the social experience of concert attendance. Based on our findings, we highlight the nuanced complexities of inclusive community-centered large scale, multi-modal events.

Body doubling involves using the presence of others to stay focused on or accomplish tasks. The term has emerged as a community-driven phenomenon employed by neurodivergent individuals and technologically mediated services for body doubling have followed. Yet, no academic exploration exists on the topic. We survey 220 people to investigate how, when, and why they engage in body doubling and how they define it. Most participants acknowledged that they had used this technique long before learning its name. We present the variety of ways people engage in body doubling (e.g., at a café, with YouTube), a diverse range of tasks people utilize it for (e.g., studying, dishes, exercising), and their motivations for doing so (e.g., generating momentum, staying on task). We contribute a two-part model of body doubling as a continuum of space/time and mutuality. We close with implications for future development in this space.

Despite a common misconception that Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a childhood disorder, symptoms often persist into adulthood and many adults remain undiagnosed for a variety of reasons. Increased adoption of social media such as Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter has led to increased representation of neurodivergent community members with ADHD. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and increased social media use, many have come to recognize themselves in content made by social media members with ADHD and thus sought diagnoses of their own. Social media provides a valuable source of information, first-hand experiences, support, and validation through shared experiences. These networks, which we call “unbounded Online Health Communities”, have encouraged patients to advocate for themselves using information and support they have received from online ADHD communities. To understand these communities better and privilege the lived experiences of people with ADHD, we conduct a digital ethnography of three social media platforms to explore community content, specifically around acceptance, diagnoses, and tensions with the medical community. We discuss these informal online health communities as a source of knowledge, different, but no less important than that of traditional Online Health Communities and further the view of these communities as a valuable resource of shared expertise.

Play is an essential part of the human experience and can be found throughout the lifespan. While play has long been of interest to the HCI community, research has often focused on the technologies supporting game play, the potential outcomes of play (e.g., skill-building, health improvements), or play among children. This paper explores what play looks like in online communities that are not specifically game-based and consist primarily of adults. From online ethnographic work of the ARMY (i.e., Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth), fandom of the South Korean musical group BTS, we explore how BTS and ARMY collaboratively construct a playful social environment using various social media platforms. A contribution of this work is to expand our conceptualization of how adults create playful places that are not specifically game-based and highlights the role of socio-technical systems in their community building.

A growing body of work has emphasized the need for customizability and flexibility in mobile health technologies to increase support user autonomy. However, customization may be burdensome for people with motivational and cognitive challenges, such as those with mental illnesses, and the optimal level and type of customizability are unclear. Based on 32 interviews with people who experience symptoms of depression and anxiety, we examine how individuals use and customize mental health apps to manage their symptoms. Our findings suggest that participants’ engagement with the apps is affected by their level of energy and motivation, depending on the severity of symptoms. Customization is deemed desirable when the required user effort does not exceed users’ mental and motivational capacity and when ample resources are available. We discuss how customizable systems can increase autonomy without overburdening users in the context of mental health.

Working from home has become a mainstream work practice in many organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. While remote work has received much scholarly and public attention over the years, we still know little about how people with disabilities engage in remote work from their homes and what access means in this context. To understand and rethink accessibility in remote work, the present paper studies work-from-home practices of neurodivergent professionals who have Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, learning disabilities (e.g., dyslexia) and psychosocial disabilities (e.g., anxiety, depression). We report on interviews with 36 US-based neurodivergent professionals who have been working from home during the pandemic. Our findings reveal that while working from home, neurodivergent professionals create accessible physical and digital workspaces, negotiate accessible communication practices, and reconcile tensions between productivity and wellbeing. Our analysis reconsiders what access means in remote work for neurodivergent professionals and offers practical insights for inclusive work practices and accessibility improvements in remote collaboration tools.

The last decade has seen increased reports of mental health problems among college students, with college counseling centers struggling to keep up with the demand for services. Digital mental health tools offer a potential solution to expand the reach of mental health services for college students. In this paper, we present findings from a series of design activities conducted with college students and counseling center staff aimed at identifying needs and preferences for digital mental health tools. Results emphasize the social ecosystems and social support networks in a college student's life. Our findings highlight the predominant role of known peers, and the ancillary roles of unknown peers and non-peers (e.g., faculty, family) in influencing the types of digital mental health tools students desire, and the ways in which they want to learn about mental health tools. We identify considerations for designing digital mental health tools for college students that take into account the identified social factors and roles.

Digital games have long been of interest to Game Studies communities, but relatively few have examined how teachers design with and incorporate commercial digital games in their teaching in K-12 classrooms. In this paper, we examine a corpus of 627 online lesson plans designed for Minecraft Education Edition. First, we provide descriptive statistics about the authors, language, subject areas, skills, and intended student age of the lessons. We then share our work-in-progress to analyze lessons uploaded by 16 power users. With this analysis, we hope to work towards a taxonomy of teachers’ designs with sandbox games. Our work contributes a snapshot of the current landscape of uses of Minecraft Education Edition as an educational tool and begins exploring how teachers design with a sandbox game for learning.

Psychosocial disability involves actual or perceived impairment due to a diversity of mental, emotional, or cognitive experiences. While assistive technology for psychosocial disabilities has been understudied in communities such as ASSETS, advances in computing have opened up a number of new avenues for assisting those with psychosocial disabilities beyond the clinic. However, these tools continue to emerge primarily within the framework of "treatment," emphasizing resolution or improvement of mental health symptoms. This work considers what it means to adopt a social model lens from disability studies and incorporate the expertise of assistive technology researchers in relation to mental health. Our investigation draws on interviews conducted with 18 individuals who have complex health needs that include mental health symptoms. This work highlights the potential role for assistive technology in supporting psychosocial disability outside of a clinical or medical framework.

Children with autism often have sensory processing differences that can lead to a myriad of challenges, including difficulty with awareness of how their bodies occupy physical space. Natural User Interfaces (NUI) can help augment therapies to support these children. We developed DanceCraft, a whole-body interface to augment dance therapy for children with autism. In a pilot study, we deployed DanceCraft to nine homes for one week for children with autism to use. We received feedback on both the system's central activity (dance), as well as elements of its design and set up, offering lessons to guide future field deployments of such systems.

Play is the work of children-but access to play is not equal from child to child. Having access to a place to play is a challenge for marginalized children, such as children with disabilities. For autistic children, playing with other children in the physical world may be uncomfortable or even painful. Yet, having practice in the social skills play provides is essential for childhood development. In this ethnographic work, I explore how one community uses the sense of place and the digital embodied experience in a virtual world specifically to give autistic children access to play with their peers. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, I demonstrate how various physical and virtual spaces work together to make play possible. Second, I demonstrate these spaces, though some of them are digital, are no more or less "real" than the physical spaces making up a schoolyard or playground.

Much of the scholarly work for and about individuals with disabilities focused on accessibility and on disability identity. In this ethnographic study of a Minecraft community for children and youth with autism, Autcraft, I analyze community members' intersecting identities of gamer and autistic. I also describe the role of gender-identity as it impacts how youth explore and express their other identities. This work shows that autistic is only one facet of the community members' lives and that they consider themselves gamers as part of their core identity. I discuss the similarities in mainstream discourse about autism and gaming and the importance of approaching marginalized gaming communities with an intersectional lens. The contribution of this work points to how these complicated, intersecting identities affect how we, as researchers, should approach gaming communities in future work.

While parents of young children regularly make decisions about sharing content about their child or family online, we know less about how they create, produce, and share video-based content of children with stigmatizing experiences. Through an analysis of publicly available content on YouTube, supplemented with semi-structured interviews, we report on the ways in which parents of children with developmental disabilities produce, share, and interact with others through videos of their children's experiences. Our analysis finds that parents disclose child information on YouTube to build authenticity, connect with others, advocate for social change, and justify monetization and child involvement. We discuss tensions between parents' practices and the ethical complexities of sharing and studying parent-generated content featuring children with disabilities.

Millions of Americans struggle with depression, a condition characterized by feelings of sadness and motivation loss. To understand how individuals managing depression conceptualize their self-management activities, we conducted visual elicitations and semi-structured interviews with 30 participants managing depression in a large city in the U.S. Midwest. Many depression support tools are focused on the individual user and do not often incorporate social features. However, our analysis showed the key importance of sociality for self-management of depression. We describe how individuals connect with specific others to achieve expected support and how these interactions are mediated through locations and communication channels. We discuss factors influencing participants' sociality including relationship roles and expectations, mood state and communication channels, location and privacy, and culture and society. We broaden our understanding of sociality in CSCW through discussing diffuse sociality (being proximate to others but not interacting directly) as an important activity to support depression self-management.

We draw on a qualitative study of homeowners who engage in do-it-yourself (DIY) home repair and introduce "home worlds" as a conceptual lens to understand how interactions with the home as a built environment (local and mechanical engagements with its material components) are situated in broad, diffuse, and constraint-rich social worlds. A "home worlds" perspective challenges domestic computing inquiries to adopt a broader orientation when considering a home's users and requirements; our case of home repair, in particular, provokes us to consider the home as embedded in communities and framed in relation to the precarious constraints of everyday life. We discuss how these insights open up new avenues for future research and design of collaborative domestic computing technologies. ?

Engagements with social media today frequently involve the use of multiple platforms, which often exchange personal data about users. We explore individuals' experiences with the flow of personal data across platforms through interviews about dating apps, often requiring integration with a Facebook account. Inductive analysis revealed complex and, at times, conflicted ideas over what appropriate behaviors around personal data should look like in multiplatform engagements-central to these tensions were the multiple relationships that must be managed through participation in these ecosystems. For example, individuals talked of resignation in relation to specific platforms and the 'cost" of using free services (people:platform), a lack of clarity and agency in defining what personal data might be shared between platforms (people:platform:platform), and, of course, the role of personal data in their efforts to establish and maintain relationships with other users in these 'social discovery" ecosystems (people:people). We explore how these attitudes can be understood as morally charged, drawing attention to the ways in which personal data flows can enact expectations and obligations between various sociotechnical actors in personal data ecosystems and how these compound relationships reveal the complexity and texture of multiplatform participation.

Maker culture values fabrication and production in both the digital and physical realms as well as the sharing of resources. As such, maker culture provides an opportunity to be democratic and inclusive. Likewise, spaces that stem from maker culture, such as makerspaces, provide the same opportunity for inclusion, even for those with disabilities. Autcraft is a community that supports children with autism and is centered on a Minecraft virtual world that embodies maker culture. The Autcraft community's unique form of maker culture supports self-expression, sociality, and learning for children with autism by providing structure in a virtual space, allowing for and enabling creating and sharing. In this paper, we explore design implications for the creation of inclusive spaces for making and self-expression in the future based on intensive fieldwork in the Autcraft community.

Overselectivity is a learning challenge that is largely unaddressed in the assistive technology community. Screening and intervention, done by specialists, is time-intensive and requires substantial training. Little to no treatments are available to the broader population of preliterate, minimally verbal individuals. In this work, we examine the impact of an iPad game based on the tenets of behavioral therapy to mitigate overselectivity. We developed software-based techniques and evaluated the system using established methods from the field of Special Education. We present the results of a deployment in a special education school that demonstrates that an assistive tablet game is a feasible means of addressing overselectivity, and we present generalizable technological features drawn from evidenced-based therapies to consider in future assistive technologies. We suggest that designers of assistive technology systems, particularly those who address physical, cognitive, and behavioral difficulties for preliterate AAC users, should consider overselectivity as a potential co-occurring condition.

Those with disabilities have long adopted, adapted, and appropriated collaborative systems to serve as assistive devices. In this paper, we present the results of a digital ethnography in a Minecraft virtual world for children with autism, specifically examining how this community has used do-it-yourself (DIY) making activities to transform the game into a variety of assistive technologies. Our results demonstrate how players and administrators "mod" the Minecraft system to support self-regulation and community engagement. This work highlights the ways in which we, as researchers concerned with accessible and equitable computing spaces, might reevaluate the scope of our inquiry, and how designers might encourage and support appropriation, enhancing users' experience and long-term adoption.

Traditional face-to-face social interactions can be challenging for individuals with autism, leading some to perceive and categorize them as less social than their typically-developing peers. Individuals with autism may even see themselves as less social relative to their peers. Online communities can provide an alternative venue for social expression, enabling different types of communication beyond face-to-face, oral interaction. Using ethnographic methods, we studied the communication ecology that has emerged around a Minecraft server for children with autism and their allies. Our analysis shows how members of this community search for, practice, and define sociality through a variety of communication channels. These findings suggest an expansion in how sociality has traditionally been conceptualized for individuals with autism.

The use of online games and virtual worlds is becoming increasingly prominent, particularly in children and young adults. Parents have concerns about risks their children might encounter in these online spaces. Parents dynamically manage the boundaries between safe and unsafe spaces online through both explicit and implicit means. In this work, we use empirical data gathered from a digital ethnog-raphy of a Minecraft server, Autcraft, to explore how par-ents of children with autism continually create a "safe" virtual world through both implicit and explicit means. In par-ticular, we demonstrate how their actions in these spaces define and produce "safety," shedding light on our theoreti-cal understanding of child safety in online spaces.

Multimodal and natural user interfaces offer an innovative approach to sensory integration therapies. We designed and developed SensoryPaint, a multimodal system that allows users to paint on a large display using physical objects, body-based interactions, and interactive audio. We evaluated the impact of SensoryPaint through two user studies: a lab-based study of 15 children with neurodevelopmental disorders in which they used the system for up to one hour, and a deployment study with four children with autism, during which the system was integrated into existing daily sensory therapy sessions. Our results demonstrate that a multimodal large display, using whole body interactions combined with tangible interactions and interactive audio feedback, balances children's attention between their own bodies and sensory stimuli, augments existing therapies, and promotes socialization. These results offer implications for the design of other ubicomp systems for children with neurodevelopmental disorders and for their integration into therapeutic interventions.

Many clothing characteristics (from garment color to care instructions) are inaccessible to people with vision impairments. To address this problem, clothing information is gathered from sighted companions, and later recalled using low-tech solutions such as adding safety pins to clothes. Unfortunately, these low-tech solutions require precise memory (such as recalling a pin's meaning) and provide limited information. Using an iterative design approach, we prototyped several alternative technology solutions and tested them with five people with vision impairments. We are working towards an interface that provides detailed information in a streamlined interaction, focusing our future efforts on a wearable RFID tagging solution.