The platformisation of news is increasingly shaping young adults’ emotional wellbeing, presenting urgent challenges for HCI. Existing approaches prioritise control, visibility, and agency, neglecting the emotional and relational dimensions of everyday news encounters. Such frameworks tend to overlook how information encounters contribute to emotional strain, affective overload, and the need for self-care. In this study, we adopted a qualitative, context-sensitive methodology to explore how young adults engage with news in their daily lives, foregrounding the emotional experiences that accompany these interactions. Our findings reveal that information encounters are deeply entangled with emotional needs such as self-expression, self-preservation, care for others, and a relational dependence on personalisation algorithms. Our insights call for a reorientation toward emotionally aware, harm-reducing design that supports emotional resilience, fosters empathetic engagement, and promotes self-care in information encounters. This work contributes to ongoing conversations in HCI around affective computing and the ethics of personalisation in socio-technical systems.

The broader adoption of social media platforms (e.g., TikTok), combined with recent developments in Generative AI (GAI) technologies has had a transformative effect on many peoples’ ability to confidently assess the veracity and meaning of information online. In this paper, building on recent related work that surfaced the social ways that young people evaluate information online, we explore the decision-making practices, challenges and heuristics involved in young adults’ assessments of information online. To do so, we designed and conducted a novel digital diary study, followed by data-informed interviews with young adults. Our findings uncover the information practices of young adults including the social and emotional motivations for ignoring, avoiding, and engaging with online information and the ways this is entangled with collaborative arrangements with algorithms as agents. In our discussion we bring these findings in close dialogue with work on information sensibility and contribute rich insights into young peoples’ information sensibility practices embedded within social worlds. Finally, we surface how such practices are attuned to prioritise wellbeing over convenience or other commonly associated sufficing heuristics.

Access to the internet and digital technology are reported determinants and enablers of social capital and community resilience. However, despite rural areas facing ecological, social, and economic uncertainties across the world, communication technologies and the design of civic technologies in HCI are not designed with the rural in mind. In this paper, we explore information infrastructures within and across rural villages in the UK focusing on the interplay between human, social, and technical infrastructures. We report on the existing communication practices, underlining the impacts of transitioning to digital communication technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings point to the fragility of information infrastructure, the "civic duty" of bridging information and skills gaps, and the role of technology as a threat to social norms and disrupter of the 'politics of the rural'. The work presented here has implications for Rural HCI researchers and designers interested in design from the rural.

In this paper we report insights from the design and delivery of a process that invited distinct groups of citizens to co-develop and apply social impact assessment criteria for the purpose of reviewing research proposals on HCI, social justice and digital technologies. We describe our process, designed to create dialogic spaces that foster critical engagements with technologies and social issues, cooperation and peer-support. In our findings we explore how people defined and contextualised social impact in lived experiences, negotiated and legitimised their role as reviewers, and articulated the value of HCI research for social justice. We reflect on the significance of involving citizens in the commissioning of research that addresses inequalities and social justice in technology design and draw implications for HCI researchers concerned with ethical dimensions of technology. The work contributes to HCI and civic engagement's traditions to develop effective participatory methods and collaborative processes to produce digital technologies that support social justice.

In this paper, we investigate the role of technology to address the concerns of a civil society group carrying out community-level consultation on the allocation of £1 million of community funds. We explore issues of devolved decision-making through the evaluation of a sociodigital system designed to foster deliberative virtues. We describe the ways in which this group used our system in their consultation practices. Our findings highlight how they adopted our technology to privilege specific forms of expression, ascertain issues in their community, make use of and make sense of community data, and create resources for action within their existing practices. Based on related fieldwork we discuss the impacts of structuring and configuring tools for 'talk-based' consultation in order to turn attention to the potential pitfalls and prospects for designing civic technologies that create resources for action for civil society.

There is a growing public, political, and academic discourse around the idea that data has the potential to empower citizens. In particular, evidence-based policymaking is at the centre of national and regional planning processes. At the same time a shift towards Localism in planning means that while citizens and civic groups are centrally involved in decision-making about their communities, they lack the skills, resources and access to data that might inform their decision-making. There is a need to establish new ways of supporting deliberation and decision-making in local planning. We report a study that explores the role of data in the complex processes involved in consultation events and the broader collaborative processes surrounding them. In doing so we highlight the need for the integration of dialogic forms of participation with other locally produced data, and for this to be shared in ways that position data as a resource for action.

The value of data in supporting citizen participation in processes of place-making and community building is widely recognised. While the open data movement now permits citizens to acquire governmental data relating to their communities, little to no effort is made to ensure that these datasets are accessible and interpretable by non-professionals. Through a series of community engagements spanning an 18-month period, we co-designed Data:In Place, an open source web tool which supports citizens in accessing, interpreting and making sense of open data. Leveraging visual map-based querying, citizens can access official statistics about their community, interrogate the data, and map their own data sources to create data visualisations. Reflecting on the participatory design process and the designed technology, we provide a framing to make open data work for civic advocacy.

The development of platforms for community decision-making has been of growing interest to the HCI community, yet the ways technology might be woven into traditional consultation processes has been under-studied. We conducted fieldwork at consultation events where residents were invited to discuss and map assets related to their neighbourhoods to inform community decision-making. The fieldwork highlighted problems with equality, turn taking, the evidencing and elaborating on opinions by residents, and challenges related to capturing and documenting the events. We developed Community Conversational-a hybrid table-top game and digital capture and review platform-in response to these issues. Community Conversational was designed to provide a flexible structure to consultation events related to 'place', and support the production, capture and review of deliberative 'talk' to support decision-making. We study how the platform was used in two consultation events, and discuss the implications of capturing and evidencing local people's opinions for the accountability of decision-makers and community organisations.

In recent years there has been an increased focus upon developing platforms for community decision-making, and an awareness of the importance of handing over civic platforms to community organisations to oversee the process of decision-making at a local level. In this paper, we detail fieldwork from working with two community organisations who used our distributed situated devices as part of consultation processes. We focus on some of the mundane and often-untold aspects of this type of work: how questions for consultations were formed, how locations for devices were determined, and the ways in which the data collected fed into decision-making processes. We highlight a number of challenges for HCI and civic technology research going forward, related to the role of the researcher, the messiness of decision making in communities, and the ability of community organisations to influence how citizens participate in democratic processes.