This paper reports on the co-design of data comics for participants in clinical research trials and reflects on the specific challenges encountered when working in this design space. The data comics aimed to aid the communication of medical test results collected during the trial to individual study participants in a simple and understandable way. However, navigating the complexities, uncertainties and constraints associated with the clinical trial environment required adaptation to the co-design process. Over 14 months we co-designed a set of comics, overcoming a unique combination of challenges associated with designing in the context of a clinical research trial, such as strict ethical and legal frameworks, complex data and ongoing uncertainty. Reflecting upon the process, we identify several recurring challenges. Based on these challenges we give guidance on negotiating the constrained and uncertain design space of a clinical trial, with design method considerations that apply beyond this domain.

This paper presents speculative performance as an approach for engaging participants in imagining, enacting, and reflecting on technological futures through a combination of speculative design, performance, and intergenerational engagement. While speculative and performance-based methods are well established in HCI, there has been limited exploration of how these practices might explore critical technological literacies across generations. To investigate this, we ran two five-day workshops with approximately 30 older adults and young people, who collaboratively created speculative artefacts and dramatic scenes of technological futures, which culminated in a final public performance. We demonstrate how speculative performance can foster critical literacies of digital technologies and data by enabling participants to embody technological issues, move from technological malfunction to social and relational implications, and imagine alternative futures. We reflect on the opportunities and challenges of speculative performance and argue that this methodological approach expands how HCI imagines, critiques and performs technological futures with intergenerational communities.

This paper reports how clinicians explain personal health data to patients and the tensions which arise from this in practice, leading us to describe a set of implications for designing communication aids around personal health data. With the trend towards patient-centered care and shared decision making, it is crucial that patients understand their clinical data and respective implications during medical consultations. So, what strategies do clinicians currently use to ensure this? And how can these inform the development of successful patient communication aids? Through interviewing 19 healthcare professionals, we identify 57 techniques, painting a rich picture of current practices. However, we also note 9 tensions that arise when applying these techniques in reality; such as balancing transparency with disclosing data inappropriate for a patient’s current situation. Based on the techniques and motivated by these tensions, we present a set of considerations to inform the design of technological patient communication aids consistent with current clinical practice.

This paper presents LLooM, a probe designed to capture situated, temporal, and contradictory experiences with language technologies such as voice assistants, chatbots, and LLMs. The design of LLooM draws on work in probes, feminist HCI, and storytelling to invite participants to write stories about their encounters with language technologies on fabric strips and weave them into looms. Through a public, researcher-facilitated, and collective participant deployment with 56 participants, LLooM enabled participants to share diverse perspectives on language technologies. This methodological approach makes two contributions to probe design in HCI: enabling participants to reshape the methodological assumptions underlying research and allowing participants' visible contributions to become provocations that support collaborative meaning-making across diverse experiences.

The number of HCI papers on care has grown rapidly in recent years. Despite growing interest in care both as an application domain for technology and as an ethical stance in research and design, our integrated understanding of the concept is limited. It remains unclear how various application areas of care relate to one another, to what extent their underlying assumptions align or contradict, and how they collectively shape HCI discourse on care. To address this, we present a meta-narrative review of 317 SIGCHI papers on care. We first outline the landscape of care in HCI. We then present six paradigmatic framings of care, and a conceptual map that positions these framings in relation to each other, their representative care–tech relations, and the temporal development of the field. We conclude by discussing the implications from the review, as well as gaps in the field and future directions.

Generative AI technologies are reshaping everyday environments by enabling multimodal interaction. As their ubiquity and agentic capacities grow, there is a pressing need to understand how these systems reshape human–computer interaction in relational, social, and systemic terms. We introduce a scenario-based design pack for investigating Human–GenAI relations. Grounded in assemblage theory and structured around a three-stage process—Prepare, Make, Reflect—the pack supports the prototyping, analysis, and critical reflection of emergent sociotechnical configurations. We evaluated the pack across three deployments: an ACM workshop (n=22), a multidisciplinary design session (n=20), and a university HCI class (n=260). Participants generated scenarios that surfaced relational issues of power, agency, visibility, and care. We contribute the design pack alongside an exploratory framework to advance relational enquiry into multimodal Human–GenAI relations, support more inclusive and socially responsive GenAI practices, and complement FATE approaches by grounding fairness, accountability, and transparency in lived, multimodal configurations.

The rise of generative AI presents new opportunities for the understanding and practice of self-care through its capability to generate varied content, including self-care suggestions via text and images, and engage in dialogue with users over time. However, there are also concerns about accuracy and trustworthiness of self-care advice provided via AI. This paper reports our findings from workshops, diaries, and interviews with five researchers and 24 participants to explore their experiences and use of generative AI for self-care. We analyze our findings to present a framework for the use of generative AI to support five types of self-care, – advice seeking, mentorship, resource creation, social simulation, and therapeutic self-expression – mapped across two dimensions – expertise and modality. We discuss how these practices shift the role of technologies for self-care from merely offering information to offering personalized advice and supporting creativity for reflection, and we offer suggestions for using the framework to investigate new self-care designs.

The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across a wide range of domains comes with both high expectations of its benefits and dire predictions of misuse. While AI systems have largely been driven by a technology-centered design approach, the potential societal consequences of AI have mobilized both HCI and AI researchers towards researching human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI). However, there remains considerable ambiguity about what it means to frame, design and evaluate HCAI. This paper presents a critical review of the large corpus of peer-reviewed literature emerging on HCAI in order to characterize what the community is defining as HCAI. Our review contributes an overview and map of HCAI research based on work that explicitly mentions the terms ‘human-centered artificial intelligence’ or ‘human-centered machine learning’ or their variations, and suggests future challenges and research directions. The map reveals the breadth of research happening in HCAI, established clusters and the emerging areas of Interaction with AI and Ethical AI. The paper contributes a new definition of HCAI, and calls for greater collaboration between AI and HCI research, and new HCAI constructs.

This paper investigates how making activities and participation in makerspaces supports the wellbeing and empowerment of women, particularly in making domains that are typically male-dominated. We spent six months undertaking participant observations in a women-only makerspace that runs workshops aimed at teaching women skills in using power tools and woodwork. We conducted contextual interviews with 12 workshop attendees as well as with the makerspace founder and lead instructor. Through the lens of feminist HCI and legitimate peripheral participation, we present trajectories of participation within a women-only makerspace - from beginning as a peripheral participant to becoming a competent and confident maker. We found that through structured workshops in a women-only space that actively teach making skills, the women-only makerspace works to transform the current makerspace landscape so more women can engage with these spaces and participate within them. We contribute three core qualities to foster participation: women-only but without a 'feminist' label, configuring a formal and collaborative learning environment, and reification through artefacts. Collectively these work towards new configurations of makerspaces for women that enable their participation within them, and we detail how such configurations work to create trajectories for women's participation.

Women can face barriers to participation in universal makerspace environments and are consequently underrepresented within them. Further, women have historically been excluded from learning and working with particular types of materials, such as wood. To explore how we might address these inequalities in regards to both access to makerspaces and to diverse materials, we present the wooden quilt probe. Through this probe we aimed to 1) create a makerspace environment specifically for women where they could engage with materials and tools traditionally found in more male-dominated craft environments, and 2) facilitate the sharing of stories and experiences with other women within the community center where this work took place. We contribute a rich understanding of the stories and experiences of women from the community center, and discuss the implications of the work for Interaction Design: how designers can contribute towards diversifying makerspace environments that enable women's participation within them, the benefits of intertwining storytelling and making, and the boundaries around sharing personal narratives.