Developing research indicates that teenagers have been integrating generative AI chatbots into their social lives through various ways—from enlivening group chats to nurturing intimate companionships. However, we know little about how these AI chatbots may shape the interactions between teenagers themselves and their close friends, despite the important consequences adolescent peer friendships have on social functioning in adulthood. To develop our understanding of this critical area, we conducted a speculative enactment and interview study with 47 teenagers aged 13-19 to understand teenagers’ views of AI chatbot use in the context of navigating consequential friendship interactions. After enacting speculative scenarios involving their own close friend, participants’ reflections highlighted distinct perceptions about the meaning of friendship, human effort, and interpretations of acceptable AI use. We discuss considerations for the impact of AI chatbots on teens’ social development and present design implications to support teenagers’ relationship autonomy and active social learning.

Online(-only) friendships have become increasingly common in daily lives post-COVID despite debates around their mental health benefits and equivalence to ''real'' relationships. Previous research has reflected a need to understand how online friends engage beyond individual platforms, and the lack of platform-agnostic inquiry limits our ability to fully understand the dynamics of online friendship. We employed an activity-grounded analysis of 25 interviews on lived experiences of close online friendship spanning multiple years. Our findings present unique challenges and strategies in online friendships, such as stigma from real-life circles, an ambivalent relationship with online communities, and counter-theoretical reappropriations of communication technology. This study contributes to HCI research in online communities and social interface design by refocusing prior impressions of strong vs. weak-ties in online social spaces and foregrounding time-stable interactions in design for relationship maintenance through technology. Our work also promotes critical reflection on biased perspectives towards technology-mediated practices and consideration of online friends as an invisible marginalized community.

Interpersonal communication often involves navigating social challenges like managing expectations and conveying intentions. In practical contexts like productivity and navigation of social boundaries, agent- and AI-mediated communication (AIMC) has served as an effective social intermediary. Communication within personal relationships, especially between intercultural friends from different backgrounds, can also face significant challenges, such as miscommunication and expressive suppression. However, AIMC remains underutilized in the context of established personal relationships due to ethical concerns about agency and authenticity. We propose designing openly-interpretable AIMC output as an augmented context cue to reduce its active social involvement, balancing AI support with preservation of relational agency. We developed and evaluated Poet-Weaver, a Discord text chat plugin that presents AI-generated insights on user conversations in a stylized, openly-interpretable way to encourage reflection on communication challenges. We conducted a mixed-methods study with 30 intercultural friend pairs to assess Poet-Weaver's impact. Findings showed Poet-Weaver effectively helped participants address communication failures, although AIMC still influenced users' behavior even with openly-interpretable output. We recommend future uses of AIMC that support transformative, positive relationship changes while preserving individual responsibility and identity within relationships.

Online community research routinely poses minimal risk to individuals, but does the same hold true for online communities? In response to high-profile breaches of online community trust and increased debate in the social computing research community on the ethics of online community research, this paper investigates community-level harms and benefits of research. Through 9 participatory-inspired workshops with four critical online communities (Wikipedia, InTheRooms, CaringBridge, and r/AskHistorians), we found researchers should engage more directly with communities' primary purpose by rationalizing their methods and contributions in the context of community goals to equalize the beneficiaries of community research. To facilitate deeper alignment of these expectations, we present the FACTORS (Functions for Action with Communities: Teaching, Overseeing, Reciprocating, and Sustaining) framework for ethical online community research. Finally, we reflect on our findings by providing implications for researchers and online communities to identify and implement functions for navigating community-level harms and benefits.

Close relationships are irreplaceable social resources, yet prone to high-risk conflict. Building on findings from the fields of HCI, virtual reality, and behavioral therapy, we evaluate the unexplored potential of retrospective VR-embodied perspective-taking to fundamentally influence conflict resolution in close others. We develop a biographically-accurate Retrospective Embodied Perspective-Taking system (REPT) and conduct a mixed-methods evaluation of its influence on close others’ reflection and communication, compared to video-based reflection methods currently used in therapy (treatment as usual, or TAU). Our key findings provide evidence that REPT was able to significantly improve communication skills and positive sentiment of both partners during conflict, over TAU. The qualitative data also indicated that REPT surpassed basic perspective-taking by exclusively stimulating users to embody and reflect on both their own and their partner’s experiences at the same level. In light of these findings, we provide implications and an agenda for social embodiment in HCI design: conceptualizing the use of ‘embodied social cognition,’ and envisioning socially-embodied experiences as an interactive context.

Laser-cutting is a promising fabrication method that empowers makers, including blind or visually-impaired (BVI) creators, to create technologies that fit their needs. Existing work on laser-cut accessibility has facilitated easier assembly as a workaround for existing models. However, laser-cut models are still not designed to accommodate the needs of BVI users. Integrating BVI needs can enrich the greater maker community by enabling cross-group discourse on laser-cut making. To investigate how laser-cut model design can be more accessible overall, we study laser-cut assembly as a process deeply intertwined with the fundamental design of laser-cut models. We present a study with seven sighted and seven BVI participants to compare their usage of laser-cut model affordances during assembly. Data for the BVI participants in this study originate from a previous work [13]. We identify assembly cues common or unique to sighted and BVI users, and discuss implications to improve general accessibility in laser-cut design.

Depression is the most common mental health problem in older adults; however, a lack of understanding in the interaction between physical and social causes hinders effective treatment. Unique issues such as age-specific increases in comorbid physical problems and alienation from social contact can make it difficult for health providers to identify instances of depression. These also make it difficult for depressed older adults to communicate with their social resources, such as friends, family, and health providers. Integrating technology-assisted collaboration with members of patients' social network to observe and manage multi-dimensional factors in depressed older adults' states is a potential way to improve the quality of practitioners' treatment-planning around these multi-dimensional factors, as well as provide assistance for family and friends' involvement in managing the depression. We conducted an interview study on stakeholders' perceptions of depression and communication to understand the opportunities and challenges involved in implementing such collaborative design. Interviewees included 16 depressed older adult patients, 10 of their family members, and two psychiatrists. Our findings reveal new insights into 1) patients' and families' social values and understandings of patients' condition, as well as 2) how these values and understandings influenced decision-making on communicating with each other and acting on depression. These insights have implications for the consideration of information and communication systems to aid depressed older adults' recovery and engagement with social network members.

Virtual reality interactions that require a specific relationship between the virtual and physical coordinate systems, such as passive haptic interactions, are not possible with locomotion techniques using redirected walking. To address this limitation, recent research has introduced environmental alignment, which is the notion of using redirected walking techniques to align the virtual and physical coordinate systems such that these interactions are possible. However, the previous research has only implemented environmental alignment in a reactive manner, and the authors posited that better results could be achieved if a predictive algorithm was instead used. In this work, we introduce a novel way to model the environmental alignment problem as a version of the inverse kinematics problem which can be incorporated into several existing predictive algorithms, as well as a simple proof-of-concept implementation. An exploratory human subject study (N=17) was conducted to evaluate this implementation’s usability as a tool for authoring planned path redirected walking scenarios that incorporate physical interactivity. To our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate redirected walking experience design tools and provides a possible framework for future studies. Our qualitative analysis of the results generated both guidance for integrating automatic solvers and broad recommendations for designing redirected path authoring tools.

Design tools and research regarding laser-cut architectures have been widely explored in the past decade. However, such discussion has mostly revolved around technical and structural design questions instead of another essential element of laser-cut models — assembly — a process that relies heavily on components’ visual affordance, therefore less accessible to blind or low vision (BLV) people. To narrow the gap in this area, we co-designed with 7 BLV people to examine their assembly experience with different laser-cut architectures. From their feedback, we proposed several design heuristics and guidelines for Daedalus, a generative design tool that can produce tactile aids for laser-cut assembly given a few high-level manual inputs. We validate the proposed aids in a user study with 8 new BLV participants. Our results revealed that BLV users can manage laser-cut assembly more efficiently with Daedalus. Going forth from this design iteration, we discuss implications for future research on accessible laser-cut assembly.

This work presents Slice of Light, a visualization design created to enhance transparency and integrative transition between realities of Head-Mounted Display (HMD) users sharing the same physical environment. Targeted at reality-guests, Slice of Light's design enables guests to view other HMD users' interactions contextualized in their own virtual environments while allowing the guests to navigate among these virtual environments. In this paper, we detail our visualization design and the implementation. We demonstrate Slice of Light with a block-world construction scenario that involves a multi-HMD-user environment. VR developer and HCI expert participants were recruited to evaluate the scenario, and responded positively to Slice of Light. We discuss their feedback, our design insights, and the limitations of this work.

We present HMD Light, a proof-of-concept Head-Mounted Display (HMD) implementation that reveals the Virtual Reality (VR) user's experience in the physical environment to facilitate communication between VR and external users in a mobile VR context. While previous work externalized the VR user's experience through an on-HMD display, HMD Light places the display into the physical environment to enable larger display and interaction area. This work explores the interaction design space of HMD Light and presents four applications to demonstrate its versatility. Our exploratory user study observed participant pairs experience applications with HMD Light and evaluated usability, accessibility and social presence between users. From the results, we distill design insights for HMD Light and asymmetric VR collaboration.