We investigate the ethical and privacy implications of voice-first ambient interfaces (VFAIs) for aging in place through an in-depth engagement with five older adults. Our participants were in the process of becoming experienced VFAI users, and had used a VFAI-based design probe for health data reporting. We create and iteratively refine an interview protocol using Privacy Cards. We customize Privacy Cards by drawing on participants’ previous interviews and device usage logs. Using Privacy Cards, we conduct interviews to surface their mental models, and explore their privacy concerns. We find insufficient mental models for proper consent. For example, participants did not know who could access their data, and experienced difficulty distinguishing built-in functionality from third-party apps. Participants initially expressed little worry about VFAI-related ethical concerns, but interviews with Privacy Cards revealed nuanced issues, resulting in various implications for future research and design.

We present Homeroom, a homeschooling platform that treats parents as reflective partners in collaboration with LLMs, integrates culturally responsive personalization for generating schooling materials, and supports the formation of small, trusted circles. Homeroom provides plan-then-generate story and curriculum creation, alignment, and comparison to local school standards, and resource sharing in invite-only groups. We conducted a summative usability study with 15 Muslim homeschooling parents in the Greater Toronto Area. Findings show that previewable, editable drafts preserve parental agency; values work best as revisable “soft constraints” integrated into the platform; and parents prefer private circles with clear lineage. Parents also requested lightweight infrastructure (e.g., rubric libraries, portfolio builders) to reduce paperwork. We discuss opportunities and challenges in positioning AI as a deliberative partner in family- and community-shaped pedagogy.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into Building Automation Systems (BAS) to enhance energy efficiency and occupant comfort. Yet, rather than functioning as neutral optimization tools, AI in BAS operates within fragile infrastructures, limited resources, and institutional politics. We present a qualitative study of 23 interviews with energy professionals, AI researchers, and student representatives at the University of Toronto, an institution recognized for its sustainability leadership. Participants expressed ambivalence: AI was valued for forecasting and optimization, yet concerns arose around legitimacy, labor demands, and environmental paradoxes. Fairness in occupant comfort was highlighted, not as an inherent property of models but as a situated practice shaped by infrastructural governance negotiated across roles and inequities. Communication also emerged as a form of occupant agency, where human, machine, and AI-mediated dialogue makes automated decisions legible and contestable. These findings reframe AI in BAS as socio-technical infrastructure and inform our design recommendations for transparent, participatory, and just systems.

The use of ICT tools and platforms to support the financial practices of underserved communities has been growing, but on-ground experiences have been mixed and sometimes detrimental. To achieve the potential benefits of technologies for financial inclusion, a deeper understanding of the design of digital financial interventions is essential. We systematically and critically reviewed studies that developed and implemented technological interventions for financial inclusion from 2007 to 2024. Our analysis examines the types of financial technologies developed, the devices and technical channels used, the research methodologies employed, and the target populations. Additionally, we conducted a reflexive thematic analysis to investigate the values underpinning these studies. By analyzing 30 articles, we interpreted a total of 13 value themes-including trust, accessibility, robustness, and compatibility. Our work highlights a complex interplay of values, structural considerations, technical attributes, financial practices, and economic factors that underlie the design of financial technologies.

In response to climate change and continued urbanization, urban transportation systems around the world are undergoing transitions to promote lower-emission vehicles, public transit, biking and walking. However, mobility is a complex issue that raises important questions of social justice as a result of its connections to numerous aspects of everyday life and the broader social and political contexts. Drawing on interviews with transportation advocates across Canada, we identify four ways in which the design and use of existing mobility tools and technologies perpetuate mobility injustices, and deepen the divide between urban planners and the public. Looking across these arguments, we note path-dependence in transportation knowledge infrastructures as a common barrier to mobility justice advocacy that can be difficult to recognize or overcome. Finally, we consider tactics that research in HCI and CSCW might pursue as part of efforts to unsettle path-dependence and reorient transportation planning towards mobility justice.

Technology is becoming increasingly embedded within our material worlds, resulting in an exponential rise in the production and consumption of consumer electronics. Rapid innovations in technological systems reduce technology lifecycles, deprecating digital systems, rendering devices obsolete or incompatible with supporting infrastructure, resulting in the generation of electronic waste (e-waste). Sustainable unmaking practices are a promising avenue for harnessing and repurposing resources used in technology production, enabling us to move closer towards sustainable technology design. This paper presents an applied study investigating the pragmatics of sustainable unmaking, reporting on 12 semi-structured interviews conducted with domain experts engaged in unmaking with e-waste across diverse contexts in the consumer technology lifecycle. We present folk strategies — from rich first-hand accounts, revealing real, vivid, and current perspectives, as well as motivations, passions, and frustrations, of engaging with unmaking e-waste. These strategies inform five declarations as actionable provocations for unmaking in the HCI and design communities.

Emancipation is fundamentally a work of unmaking, as it entails undermining, dissolving, and undoing oppressive structures. This paper offers an account of a frequently misunderstood unmaking movement, Luddism. The Luddites were a loosely organized collective of nineteenth century English textile makers who destroyed machines that were replacing their skilled labor and leading to deteriorating working conditions. In this account, we show that the goals and tactics of Luddism have significant alignments with current HCI work in the areas of unmaking and social justice. Through articulation of six characteristics of unmaking in Luddism - practical and symbolic, community-engaged, emancipatory, selective, antagonistic, and enduring - we identify potential limits and opportunities in HCI research and design practice, as currently construed. In doing so, we build upon and extend prior HCI research to suggest unmaking as emancipation, a new category of unmaking around issues of social justice.

Design has been used to contest existing socio-technical arrangements, provoke conversations around matters of concern, and operationalize radical theories such as agonism, which embraces difference and contention. However, the focus is usually on creating something new: a product, interface or artifact. In this paper, we investigate what happens when critical unmaking is deployed as a deliberate design strategy in an intergenerational, agonistic urban context. Specifically, we report on how youth in a six-week design internship used unmaking as a design move to subvert conventional narratives about their surrounding urban context. We analyze how this led to conflictual encounters at the local senior center, and compare it to the other, making-centric proposals which received favorable feedback but failed to raise the same important discussions. Through this ethnographic account, we argue that critical unmaking is important yet overlooked, and should be in the repertoire of design moves available for agonism and provocation.

Current research in HCI with immigrants predominantly focuses on their practical needs and little attention is given to their cultural identities. As such, we aim to understand how newcomers reflect their cultural values within domestic settings. We explore this by provoking memories immigrants associate with physical spaces inside their homes. Hence, we built "Our Home Sketcher": a paper-based home drafting tool that allows novice users to design their homes by sketching and implicitly expressing their space, light, and privacy preferences. The collected drawings are then fed into a computer algorithm that produces 3D models of the sketched houses. This process of design acts as an artifact-driven storytelling for heritage sharing and rapport building within migrant communities. We engage 13 Middle Eastern newcomers in Canada with the tool and use Halbwachs' [44] theory of collective memory to frame how home sketching provokes former experiences. Our findings show a strong longing for reclaiming the past, narrating space-related oral history, and designing beyond current limitations.

Given the focus of professional graduate ICT programs on technical and managerial skills, pedagogical engagement with external organizations tends to be transactional and artifact-centered. This inhibits the students' ability to understand social, technical and ethical issues in context, or to develop affective relationships with users and other stakeholders. To address this, we designed a service learning course that partnered students with non-profit organizations to help with their technology challenges. The service project was deliberately left open-ended to force students (and partners) to tackle important questions around project scoping and impact. By drawing parallels to soil care practices, we explore how "care time" emerged in this context, and how the incorporation of ambiguity galvanized students, community, and faculty to make time to navigate it. This led to non-tangible yet vital outcomes such as overcoming social limitations, building symbiotic relationships, and enacting acts of care necessary for more ethical orchestration of technology.