Frontline staff of emergency shelters face challenges such as vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, and burnout. The technology they use is often not designed for their unique needs, and can feel burdensome on top of their already cognitively and emotionally taxing work. While existing literature focuses on data-driven technologies that automate or streamline frontline decision-making about vulnerable individuals, we discuss scenarios in which staff may resist such automation. We then suggest how data-driven technologies can better align with their human-centred decision-making processes. This paper presents findings from a qualitative fieldwork study conducted from 2022 to 2024 at a large emergency shelter in Canada. The goal of this fieldwork was to co-design, develop, and deploy an interactive data-navigation interface that supports frontline staff when making collaborative, high-stakes decisions about individuals experiencing homelessness. By reflecting on this fieldwork, we contribute insight into the role that administrative shelter data play during decision-making, and unpack staff members' apparent reluctance to outsource decisions about vulnerable individuals to data systems. Our findings suggest a ''data-outsourcing continuum,'' which we discuss in terms of how designers may create technologies to support compassionate, data-driven decision-making in nonprofit domains.

We call attention to the challenges associated with Global South women’s safety in public transportation and investigate the potential of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in providing them with greater mobility and broader opportunities. In a mixed-methods study with Bangladeshi women (n=23), we explored their safety issues, including sexual harassment and assault, to inform AV design, especially for shared rides. Our focus group findings revealed women’s distressing experiences of abuse and undertaken safety measures in public transport of Global South. We conducted co-design sessions utilizing virtual reality (VR) scenarios and investigated participants’ perceptions of potential AV designs addressing unique safety concerns and transportation challenges. Participants suggested prioritizing their own safety, achieved through design justice of equitable AV, over the current, often ineffective, retributive justice. Our work contributes to AV design, ICTD, and feminist HCI by suggesting implications for designing community-based and culturally contextual transportation infrastructure for Bangladeshi women and similar other communities.

Despite an abundance of open data initiatives aimed to inform and empower "general" audiences, we still know little about the ways people outside of traditional data analysis communities experience and engage with public data and visualizations. To investigate this gap, we present results from an in-depth qualitative interview study with 19 participants from diverse ethnic, occupational, and demographic backgrounds. Our findings characterize a set of lived experiences with open data and visualizations in the domain of energy consumption, production, and transmission. This work exposes information receptivity - an individual's transient state of willingness or openness to receive information -as a blind spot for the data visualization community, complementary to but distinct from previous notions of data visualization literacy and engagement. We observed four clusters of receptivity responses to data- and visualization-based rhetoric: Information-Avoidant, Data-Cautious, Data-Enthusiastic, and Domain-Grounded. Based on our findings, we highlight research opportunities for the visualization community. This exploratory work identifies the existence of diverse receptivity responses, highlighting the need to consider audiences with varying levels of openness to new information. Our findings also suggest new approaches for improving the accessibility and inclusivity of open data and visualization initiatives targeted at broad audiences. A free copy of this paper and all supplemental materials are available at https://OSF.IO/MPQ32.

Anthropographics are human-shaped visualizations that aim to emphasize the human importance of datasets and the people behind them. However, current anthropographics tend to employ homogeneous human shapes to encode data about diverse demographic groups. Such anthropographics can obscure important differences between groups and contemporary designs exemplify the lack of inclusive approaches for representing human diversity in visualizations. In response, we explore the creation of demographically diverse anthropographics that communicate the visible diversity of demographically distinct populations. Building on previous anthropographics research, we explore strategies for visualizing datasets about people in ways that explicitly encode diversity—illustrating these approaches with examples in a variety of visual styles. We also critically reflect on strategies for creating diverse anthropographics, identifying social and technical challenges that can result in harmful representations. Finally, we highlight a set of forward-looking research opportunities for advancing the design and understanding of diverse anthropographics.

Discussions about polarizing topics are essential to have, yet they can easily become hostile, aggressive, or distressing on current social media platforms. Content moderation interventions aim to mitigate this issue, though such approaches are reactionary, removing harmful content only after it has been posted. We conducted a mixed-methods experiment with 40 participants to investigate how a design friction that manipulates the temporal flow during a contentious conversation can foster interpersonal mindfulness, a trait critical for productive communication. Dyads were randomly assigned into the Control Group which received no intervention, and the Experiment Group where participants were limited to sending one message per two-minute interval. Triangulating quantitative and qualitative data from conversation logs, questionnaires, interviews, and computational text analysis, our findings revealed a two-fold effect: Experiment Group participants felt simultaneously frustrated by the intervention as it disrupted the pacing of their conversation and interfered with rapport-building, and appreciative of the intervention as it nudged them towards writing thoughtful and task-focused messages. We discuss implications of these findings for future investigation into the design of temporal interventions to influence interpersonal mindfulness during polarizing online conversations.

The meaning we attribute to another's actions significantly impact our subsequent behaviors and interactions towards that person. Distributed teams often combine native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) and are particularly prone to making attribution errors. Language difficulties place NNS under a higher cognitive load, potentially leading NS to make inaccurate attributions of NNS. We conducted an exploratory laboratory study to investigate the attributions NS and NNS form about each other in multiparty videoconferencing. Our findings revealed significant mismatches in NS' attributions of NNS behavior, but no significant mismatch in NNS' attributions of NS behavior. Due to cognitive overload stemming from language challenges, NNS were only able to engage in "compromised" impression management during the task. Yet, NS were relatively unaware of how profoundly language difficulties impacted NNS' behaviors. Our findings identify opportunities for technology support for NS-NNS interactions, particularly with regards to impression construction and impression management.

Global virtual teams experience intercultural conflict. Yet, research on how Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) tools can mitigate such conflict is minimal. We conducted an experiment with 30 Japanese-Canadian dyads who completed a negotiation task over email. Dyads were assigned to one of three conditions: C1) no feedback; C2) automated language feedback of participant emails based on national culture dimensions; and C3) automated language feedback (as in C2), and participants' shared self-reflections of that feedback. Results show Japanese and Canadian partners interpreted the negotiation task differently, resulting in perceptions of intercultural conflict and negative impressions of their partner. Compared to C1, automated language feedback (C2) and shared self-reflections (C3) made cultural differences more salient, motivating participants to empathize with their partner. Shared self-reflections (C3) served as a meta-channel to communication, providing insight into each partner's intentions and cultural values. We discuss implications for CMC tools to mitigate perceptions of intercultural conflict.

We present findings from a qualitative study with 28 participants of the dyadic intercultural communication tensions professionals experience in Face-to-Face (FTF) and Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) workplace interactions. We identify four categories of intercultural communication tensions that emerged most frequently in our dataset including range of emotional expression, level of formality, "fixed" versus flexible appointments and task versus social-orientation. We discuss how these tensions manifested in FTF and CMC media and unravel the ways media supports or hinders intercultural communication. We present the adaptations participants made to mitigate such tensions and offer implications for design. Our findings demonstrate that the most frequently occurring intercultural communication tensions manifested in both FTF and CMC, regardless of the medium used. This indicates that cultural communication challenges will persist no matter the medium, highlighting the opportunity for technologies to better support workplace intercultural communication.

Global warming, and the climate change it induces, is an urgent global issue. One remedy to this problem, and the focus of this paper, is to motivate sustainable energy usage behaviors by people. One approach is the development of technologies that provide real-time, continuous feedback of energy usage. However, there is one problem - most tech-nologies use a one-size-fits-all solution, providing the same feedback to differently motivated individuals at different stages of readiness, willingness and ableness to change. In this paper, we synthesize a wide range of motivational psychology literature to develop a motivational framework based on the Transtheoretical (aka Stages of Behavior Change) Model. For each stage, we state the mo-tivational goal(s), and recommendation(s) for how technol-ogies can reach these goals. Each goal and recommendation is supported by a rationale based on motivational literature. Each recommendation is supported by a simple textual example illustrating one way to apply the recommendation.

In any collaborative system, there are both symmetries and asymmetries present in the design of the technology and in the ways that technology is appropriated. Yet media space research tends to focus more on supporting and fostering the symmetries than the asymmetries. Throughout more than 20 years of media space research, the pursuit of increased symmetry, whether achieved through technical or social means, has been a recurrent theme. The research literature on the use of contemporary awareness systems, in contrast, displays little if any of this emphasis on symmetrical use; indeed, this body of research occasionally highlights the perceived value of asymmetry. In this paper, we unpack the different forms of asymmetry present in both media spaces and contemporary awareness systems. We argue that just as asymmetry has been demonstrated to have value in contemporary awareness systems, so might asymmetry have value in media spaces and in other CSCW systems, more generally. To illustrate, we present a media space that emphasizes and embodies multiple forms of asymmetry and does so in response to the needs of a particular work context.