Empathy-building, the first stage in human-centered design, often involves methods that inadvertently reinforce negative stereotypes and biases toward disabled communities. In this work, we introduce a new method: Disability-Related Empathy from Existing Media (DREEM). This method focuses on enculturation rather than traditional ideas of empathy. DREEM leverages media created by disabled individuals to facilitate a deeper, culturally informed understanding. Cultural content is rich with authentic perspectives and tacit design knowledge from people with disabilities. Our four-step process includes (1) discovering relevant media, (2) close reading, (3) reflective journaling, and (4) aggregation of insights. In this article, we present our process of creating DREEM using research through design in multiple research and education contexts. Our findings show that DREEM can be applied in both design classrooms and research contexts to foster a more nuanced understanding of disability for newcomers to the space.

Given the renewed attention on politics, values, and ethics within our field and the wider cultural milieu, now is the time to take stock of social justice research in HCI. We surveyed 124 papers explicitly pursuing social justice between 2009 and 2022 to better reflect on the current state of justice-oriented work within our discipline. We identified (1) how researchers understood the social justice-relevant harms and benefits, (2) the approaches researchers used to address harm, and (3) the tools that researchers leveraged to pursue justice. Our analysis highlights gaps in social justice work, such as the need for our community to conceptualize benefits, and identifies concrete steps the HCI community can take to pursue just futures. By providing a comprehensive overview of and reflection on HCI’s current social justice landscape, we seek to help our research community strategize, collaborate, and collectively act toward justice.

For geographically dispersed communities, including professional, academic, hobbyist, and fandom communities, in-person events and meetups play a crucial role in the function and health of the whole community. Building off prior literature, we take a nuanced look at large scale community events that blend online and offline interactions across digital and physical embodied experiences in order to build understanding of how this knowledge can be leveraged to build more accessible hybrid modalities for community events. Building on this foundation, this paper presents a comprehensive study using ethnographic methods to examine large scale community events, specifically stadium music concerts of varying modalities (e.g., in-person, live-streamed). Using a disability lens, we explore how such community events are experienced and technologically mediated, as well as how the community and individuals design and construct their own sociotechnical worlds across multiple modalities and embodied experiences. By centering the disabled embodied experience, we examine how community members navigate the concert environment, time, and the social experience of concert attendance. Based on our findings, we highlight the nuanced complexities of inclusive community-centered large scale, multi-modal events.

Body doubling involves using the presence of others to stay focused on or accomplish tasks. The term has emerged as a community-driven phenomenon employed by neurodivergent individuals and technologically mediated services for body doubling have followed. Yet, no academic exploration exists on the topic. We survey 220 people to investigate how, when, and why they engage in body doubling and how they define it. Most participants acknowledged that they had used this technique long before learning its name. We present the variety of ways people engage in body doubling (e.g., at a café, with YouTube), a diverse range of tasks people utilize it for (e.g., studying, dishes, exercising), and their motivations for doing so (e.g., generating momentum, staying on task). We contribute a two-part model of body doubling as a continuum of space/time and mutuality. We close with implications for future development in this space.

Most traditional robotic mechanisms feature inelastic joints that are unable to robustly handle large deformations and off-axis moments. As a result, the applied loads are transferred rigidly throughout the entire structure. The disadvantage of this approach is that the exerted leverage is magnified at each subsequent joint possibly damaging the mechanism. In this paper, we present two lightweight, elastic, bio-inspired tensegrity robotic arms adapted from prior static models which mitigate this danger while improving their mechanism's functionality. Our solutions feature modular tensegrity structures that function similarly to the human elbow and the human shoulder when connected. Like their biological counterparts, the proposed robotic joints are flexible and comply with unanticipated forces. Both proposed structures have multiple passive degrees of freedom and four active degrees of freedom (two from the shoulder and two from the elbow). The structural advantages demonstrated by the joints in these manipulators illustrate a solution to the fundamental issue of elegantly handling off-axis compliance. Additionally, this initial experiment illustrates that moving tensegrity arms must be designed with large reachable and dexterous workspaces in mind, a change from prior tensegrity arms which were only static. These initial experiments should be viewed as an exploration into the design space of active tensegrity structures, particularly those inspired by biological joints and limbs.