As the Earth's temperature continues to rise, increasing investments are being made to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to address the current climate crisis.Through interviewing 19 participants-comprising climate and environmental advocates and developers of AI for sustainability in the US and Canada-we examine how advocates perceive and use these technologies, and how their perspectives converge and diverge from practitioners developing AI for sustainability.We identified three key findings: 1) while approaches differ, developers and advocates expressed care for people and the planet; 2) the developers' and advocates' values and perceptions of AI technology varied, especially around ethical issues; and 3) developers and advocates had distinct approaches to using and designing AI and digital tools.Our findings, guided by a climate justice lens, underscore the need for decision-makers to: engage with advocates from intended beneficiary communities early in the design process; prioritize the urgency of the climate crisis; and emphasize the tangible environmental and societal impact of digital systems.

This design fiction proposes a panel session in the near future having environment and climate advocates share their stories of using artificial intelligence (AI) in their work. This work explores how the development of an embodied river persona, a farming assistant app, and a community hazard mapping tool could pose challenges and aid successes to respective local communities. Our design fiction highlights issues of design and development challenges that local organizations might face in a varied AI development for the environment. We explore questions around incorporating traditional knowledge, ethical participatory design models, and challenges of implementing and sustaining tools. Our work demonstrates how design fiction might be used to imagine AI for the climate challenge that considers people, place, and community.

As phones have become cheaper, there are still instances where people share them. Researchers have explored the sharing in the context of developing economies and brought to light the barriers to ownership and highlight the resulting power differentials. In this work, we explore the dynamics of single and multi-device ownership and sharing in Kenya. Through interviews with 34 participants, we seek to understand what these ownership patterns inform us about affordances and unstated needs–adding to our knowledge of device usage. We find that these dimensions of ownership raise new questions about ethics and survival, and we describe how they also serve as bellwethers to designing for a developing economy–especially in the context of access to money and other financial infrastructures. We discuss the impact and harms of unregulated policies and the influence of survival on peoples’ choices, the implications on ethics, and further explore strategies for identifying, auditing, and mitigating these risks.

We describe a seven-year longitudinal study conducted in collaboration with an indigenous community in Kenya. We detail the process of conducting research with an oral community: the deliberate practice of understanding and collecting stories; working with inter-generational community to envision and design technologies that support their ways of storytelling and story preservation; and to influence the design of other technologies. We chronicle how we contended with translating oral stories with rich metaphors to new mediums, and the dimensions of trust we have established and continue to reinforce. We offer our griot-style methodology, informed by working with the community and retrofitting existing HCI approaches: as an example model of what has worked, and the dimensions of challenges at each stage of the research work. The griot-style methodology has prompted a reflection on how we approach research, and present opportunities for other HCI research and practice of handling community stories.

Technology has provided an environment for connecting indigenous community members and provide a means for them to seek and engage with their indigenous knowledge (IK). Emerging research has examined the effects of social media on specific IK, including the possibility of undermining community agency. In this work, we contrast how indigenous community members engage with IK offline, and in their own self-organized communities online. Through interviews with community members and a study of Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups, we seek to better understand these practices and elicit design recommendations. Our findings describe how community roles have shifted in the presence of technology, notably with absence of elders and the inclusion of “born towns”–community members who live in non-traditional settings. We also find that fluency in the indigenous language served both as a gatekeeper: guarding the community knowledge, while also facilitating discussion surrounding different aspects of IK.

Technology use by long-distance hikers provide a fascinating glimpse of the future of HCI research, as it intersects with technology isolation and (non)use. We can understand the use of technology, explore opportunities for rural and outdoor computing, and work with underrepresented communities in these spaces to amplify their stories. In this paper, we focus on the thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail and the stories they share on Instagram. We apply narrative analysis to understand the story content, and also leverage a News Value framework to describe how they craft their stories. The findings highlight opportunities to understand the different storytelling categories that thru-hikers employ, and the platforms they choose for the telling. We discuss the usefulness of understanding technology and storytelling needs for each type of storyteller, and explore the implications for designing technology and tools to amplify stories from underserved users and to support the telling of compelling stories.

Privacy policy and term agreement documents are considered the gateway for software adoption and use. The documents provide a means for the provider to outline expectations of the software use, and also provide an often-separate document outlining how user data is collected, stored, and used--including if it is shared with other parties. A user agreeing with the terms, assumes that they have a full understanding the terms of the agreement and have provided consent. Often however, users do not read the documents because they are long and full of legalistic and inconsistent language, are regularly amended, and may not disclose all the details on what is done to the user data. Enforcing compliance and ensuring user consent have been persistent challenges to policy makers and privacy researchers. This design fiction puts forward an alternate reality and presents a policy-based approach to fording the consent gap with the TL;DR Charter: an agreement governing the parties involved by harnessing the power of formal governments, industry, and other stakeholders, and taking users expectation of privacy into account. The Charter allows us as researchers to examine the implications on trust, decision-making, consent, accountability and the impact of future technologies.

The struggle to thrive as a productive student researcher, an attentive parent, and a caring partner can be difficult, particularly for international student parents who are far from home and also possibly burdened with complex cultural expectations, interpersonal dynamics, and institutional biases. Using uses and gratifications theory as a framing mechanism, we describe interviews with twelve international student mothers in the United States who are primary caregivers of children between six months to five years old, focusing on the context of their use of screen media content and devices, the gratifications they seek from their children's use of screen media devices, and the differences in their perceptions about the use of screen media as an educated, non-US parent. Our findings give an initial account of the role of screen based technology in their domestic life with young children, and the limitations of their technological experience. We present four opportunities for designing for this population including technologies for positive distraction, interactive language aids, playful acquaintance tools, and anonymous peer networks for parent support. We conclude by formulating future promising avenues of research in this design space.

Emerging research in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has considered the use of technology to preserve Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) while wrestling with the dilemma of local participation in the face of post-colonialism. There remains a need to understand how ICH is portrayed by museums and texts, how communities regard these representations, and how technology would affect preservation. We conducted a study in the North Rift region of Kenya to understand how ICH is preserved and disseminated by the museum in comparison with the community. The findings describe a respectful technology space where community needs and museum needs can co-exist. We also articulate social challenges that should be considered by designers when recommending or designing technological solutions. This paper concludes by recommending ways for researchers to smoothly integrate technology with ICH through community participation and an awareness of the respectful space.

A months-long hike of the Appalachian Trail often involve long-term preparation and life-altering decisions. Would-be hikers leverage institutional knowledge from literature and online forums to physically and mentally prepare for such an arduous hike. Their use of social platforms provide useful insights on motivations for undertaking the thru-hike, how they deal with unexpected conditions on the trail and understand choices made in conditions of scarcity. By analyzing over 100,000 Reddit posts and comments in r/AppalachianTrail and applying a Sense of Community theory, we sought to understand hikers' identity as community members, how their emotional and practical needs are met, and how they evolve. We found that the role and language of thru-hikers change as they progress from pre-hike, on-hike, and post-hike stages, from a questioner early on, to an expert post-hike. We conclude with design recommendations to support offline communities online.

In this Research-to-Practice paper, we describe our approach to using smartwatches in a college level computer science class. Smartwatches are unique in the way they provide an interface for interaction-similar to smart phones, while also leveraging affordances inherent in wristwatches such as glanceability. This hybrid nature is especially useful as a means for guiding design scenarios in classroom instruction. We first considered different application domains such as community physical activity and how they leveraged smart watches. From these domains, we elicited general ground rules that inform our approach for using smart watches in a computer science course. We then synthesize and describe five design guidelines that directed our approach to teaching and evaluating students' designs. We assessed and evaluated these guidelines in a third-year level mobile computing class where students were asked to consider them as part of a three-week design and development assignment. After concluding the assignment, the students were asked to complete a survey to capture their experience with the use of the design guidelines, and to also provide general feedback on the suitability of these design goals. Throughout these exercises, we found the design guidelines to be especially useful in three ways: in providing small-screen specific design and development experience, in affording practice and reinforcement of core mobile computing topics, and as a means to meaningfully contribute to socially relevant projects. We contribute to the computing education corpus by detailing the five design guidelines, how they can be used to lead higher-level computer courses, and how they can be used as a lens in considering design approaches in general.

Multiple-display environments (MDEs) have promise in helping co-located sensemaking tasks by supporting searching, organizing, and discussion tasks. Co-located sensemaking occurs when two or more sensemakers forage for useful information within a dataset, creating and leveraging knowledge structures individually and together. Group territories in MDEs support communicating and assembling findings, but questions remain regarding how to best represent individual sensemaking efforts in the group territory to support the sensemaking collaboration. This paper empirically examines exploration of a large Twitter dataset using three group territory paradigms: parallel, connected, and merged. Results reveal that merging group work increases task complexity while separating individuals' sections in the group territory supports monitoring, and more interactions are performed when individual work is not connected in the group territory.

In this paper, we propose a trustworthy data management framework for wireless networks in Cyber-Physical System (CPS), in which the trust values of both CPS data and the reporting devices are assessed. In addition, a set of policy rules are declared to accurately describe how we determine the trustworthiness of each reporting device based on the contextual factors. Experimental results on both simulation and on real CPS datasets show that the proposed framework can properly evaluate the trustworthiness of the reporting devices and data in CPS.