Generative AI’s humanlike qualities are driving its rapid adoption in professional domains. However, this anthropomorphic appeal raises concerns from HCI and responsible AI scholars about potential hazards and harms, such as overtrust in system outputs. To investigate how technology workers navigate these humanlike qualities and anticipate emergent harms, we conducted focus groups with 30 professionals across six job functions (ML engineering, product policy, UX research and design, product management, technology writing, and communications). Our findings reveal an unsettled knowledge environment surrounding humanlike generative AI, where workers’ varying perspectives illuminate a range of potential risks for individuals, knowledge work fields, and society. We argue that workers require comprehensive support, including clearer conceptions of “humanlikeness” to effectively mitigate these risks. To aid in mitigation strategies, we provide a conceptual map articulating the identified hazards and their connection to conflated notions of “humanlikeness.”

Responsible AI (RAI) is the science and practice of ensuring the design, development, use, and oversight of AI are socially sustainable---benefiting diverse stakeholders while controlling the risks. Achieving this goal requires active engagement and participation from the broader public. This paper introduces "We are AI: Taking Control of Technology," a public education course that brings the topics of AI and RAI to the general audience in a peer-learning setting. We outline the goals behind the course's development, discuss the multi-year iterative process that shaped its creation, and summarize its content. We also discuss two offerings of "We are AI" to an active and engaged group of librarians and professional staff at New York University, highlighting successes and areas for improvement. The course materials, including a multilingual comic book series by the same name, are publicly available and can be used independently. By sharing our experience in creating and teaching "We are AI", we aim to introduce these resources to the community of AI educators, researchers, and practitioners, supporting their public education efforts.

Community-based partnerships are essential to creating inclusive and equitable technologies and design practices. Though recent scholarship in HCI focuses on equitable design practices, there is less focus on understanding the experiences of community-based nonprofit organizations (CBOs) when partnering with technology companies. In this paper, we focus on understanding the perspectives of CBOs by answering the following research question: What are the experiences of CBOs that have collaborated with technology companies? Through a series of design workshops with 18 participants who work at community-based nonprofits that have collaborated with technology firms, we identified four elements of community-industry collaborations that collectively shape the overall experience: divergences in cultural and organizational norms, ''setting the table,'' project relationship dynamics, and affective qualities. We conclude by discussing the power structures that impact community-industry collaboration and suggest reflective practices to guide equitable collaborations between CBOs and tech companies.

This paper reports on a research through design (RtD) inquiry into public perceptions of transparency of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors increasingly deployed within urban neighborhoods as part of smart city programs. In particular, we report on the results of three participatory design workshops during which 40 New York City residents used physical signage as a medium for materializing transparency concerns about several sensors. We found that people’s concerns went beyond making sensors more transparent but instead sought to reveal the technology’s interconnected social, political, and economic processes. Building from these findings, we highlight the opportunities to move from treating transparency as an object to treating it as an ongoing activity. We argue that this move opens opportunities for designers and policy-makers to provide meaningful and actionable transparency of smart cities.

As the role technology plays in relationships between people and their governments grows, developing a better understanding of how trust can inform designing civic technology with trust is urgent work for human computer-interaction researchers. This paper reports our efforts to design with trust through a two-year design-ethnography with the City of Atlanta Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. We developed a sociotechnical system—Code Enforcer—to help this office guide immigrant residents through successfully engaging the city's code enforcement process. To inform the design process, we adapted our framework of trust-as-distance. While the framework was instrumental for integrating issues of trust throughout our design process, it also introduced tensions between how and by whom trust was enacted and interpreted. By reflecting on these tensions, we tease out the political and moral elements of designing with trust vital for HCI to navigate moving forward.

There is growing interest in Digital Civics regarding how trust can inform the design of technology in the civic space. Previous work has identified several key elements of trust in digital civics to consider in design such as the connection between trust and distance, trust as sociotechnical, trust as process and trust design affordances. However, these elements have not yet been applied to design. We address this gap by engaging these elements in ongoing design research within Atlanta's Department of Immigrant Affairs. Our research inquiry with the department centered on developing a design intervention to improve the department's community engagement work. We developed a design intervention with the department through co-design which was then assessed and advanced using the elements of trust. By reflecting on this design process informed through the elements, we unify the elements of trust in digital civics towards a design framework.

Gentrification-the spatial expression of economic inequality-is fundamentally a matter of social justice. Yet, even as work outside of HCI has begun to discuss how computing can enable or challenge gentrification, HCI's growing social justice agenda has not engaged with this issue. This omission creates an opportunity for HCI to develop a research and design agenda at the intersection of computing, social justice, and gentrification. We begin this work by outlining existing scholarship describing how the consumption side dynamics of gentrification are mediated by contemporary socio-technical systems. Subsequently, we build on the social justice framework introduced by Dombrowski, Harmon, and Fox to discuss how HCI may resist or counter such forces. We offer six modes of research that HCI scholars can pursue to engage gentrification.

Digital civics research seeks to understand how technology can create new forms of relationships and services between public officials and citizens in governance. To accomplish this, design in digital civics emphasizes the importance of relationships based on dialogue, empowerment, and participation; all of which are contingent upon the existence of trust. Currently, however, these relationships are most often characterized by entrenched distrust which problematizes opportunities for dialogue and participation. In this paper, we explore how design might support trust in the relational aims of digital civics. To do so, we led 13 public officials in a large US city through a design-based inquiry centered around the role of trust in their various efforts to engage communities. In our findings, we discuss four strategies for supporting trust in digital civics.

Trust is a vital component of citizen participation-whether citizens decide to engage in opportunities for participation in local government can hinge entirely on the existence of trust between citizens and public officials. Understanding the role of trust in this space is vital for HCI and the growing area of Digital Civics which works to improve or create new modes of citizen participation. Currently, however, trust is understudied from the perspectives of public officials. This gap creates a critical blind spot as technical interventions may be mismatched to the ways trust is put into action by public officials working to support citizen participation. We begin to address this gap by presenting a broad qualitative study of how public officials in a large US city operationalize trust in citizen participation. We found trust is enacted through ongoing practices that man-age distance in relationships between public officials and city residents.

In this paper, we work to inform the growing space of Digital Civics with a qualitative study of community engagement practices across the breadth of municipal departments and agencies in a large US city. We conducted 34 inter-views across 15 different departments, including elected and professional city employees to understand how different domains within local government define and practice the work of engaging residents. Our interviews focused on how respondents conceptualized community engagement, how it fit into the other forms of work, and what kinds of outcomes they sought when they did 'engagement.' By reporting on this broad qualitative account of the many forms the work of community engagement takes in local government, we are contributing to an expansive view of digital civics that looks beyond the transactions of service delivery or the privileged moments of democratic ritual, to consider the wider terrain of mundane, daily challenges when trying to bridge between municipal government and city residents.

Voice interactions on mobile phones are most often used to augment or supplement touch based interactions for users' convenience. However, for people with limited hand dexterity caused by various forms of motor-impairments voice interactions can have a significant impact and in some cases even enable independent interaction with a mobile device for the first time. For these users, a Mobile Voice User Interface (M-VUI), which allows for completely hands-free, voice only interaction would provide a high level of accessibility and independence. Implementing such a system requires research to address long standing usability challenges introduced by voice interactions that negatively affect user experience due to difficulty learning and discovering voice commands.