As Extended Reality (XR) transitions from specialized domains into domestic settings, industry narratives envision a future of seamless, ubiquitous integration. Yet these imaginaries, largely shaped by Western contexts, often overlook the complex social organization and material constraints of diverse households. To address this gap, we examined how individuals in Singapore interpret XR in everyday life. Using value scenarios as sociotechnical imaginaries, we conducted a survey (N = 206) and interviews (N = 22). We identify two layers of mental models: (1) perceived immersion and (2) XR’s roles in domestic life. Through these models, participants conceptualized XR as a situational fix for overcoming spatial, temporal, or relational constraints, or as an enabling medium for connection, expression, and wellbeing. We argue for a shift from functional optimization to relational maintenance, and propose design considerations for XR as an episodic, situational utility that supports the home.

Flexible work is increasingly pursued as a means of achieving work-life balance, particularly as growing caregiving responsibilities for children and aging family members shape workers’ lives. Yet most HCI research has examined flexibility primarily through productivity and organizational perspectives, with less attention to how it intersects with workers’ personal and family responsibilities. To address this gap, we conducted a qualitative study with 20 workers in Singapore engaging in flexible arrangements to manage paid work and care responsibilities. Using an asset-based lens, we show that flexibility is not a static benefit but a continual practice of rhythm-making. Participants maintained rhythms by drawing on temporal and spatial assets, negotiated them through relational and institutional dynamics, and sustained them through intrapersonal assets such as self-care and positive reframing. Our study reframes blurred boundaries as resources rather than disruptions and offers design implications for technologies that support flexible workers’ everyday rhythm-making practices.

Reflection is fundamental to how people make sense of everyday life, helping them navigate moments of growth, uncertainty, and change. Yet in HCI, existing frameworks of designing technologies to support reflection remain narrow, emphasizing cognitive, rational problem-solving, and individual self-improvement. We introduce Daoist philosophy as a non-Western lens to broaden this scope and reimagine reflective practices in interactive systems. Combining insights from Daoist literature with semi-structured interviews with 18 Daoist priests, scholars, and practitioners, we identified three key dimensions of everyday reflection: Stillness, Resonance, and Emergence. These dimensions reveal emergent, embodied, relational, and ethically driven qualities often overlooked in HCI research. We articulate their potential to inform alternative frameworks for interactive systems for reflection, advocating a shift from reflection toward reflecting-with, and highlight the potential of Daoism as an epistemological resource for the HCI community.

Despite technology's pervasive integration into aged care to address aging populations and labor shortages, its deployment often overlooks the critical role of care workers who shape the experience of care through technologies. This paper presents a four-month ethnographic study at a long-term residential aged care facility in Singapore, involving 37 staff members from frontline workers to senior management. We examine how they adopt, implement, and use three distinct digital technologies at different stages of maturity in the delivery of care. Adopting an infrastructuring lens, our findings, presented through six affective vignettes, reveal the invisible labor involved in ''patchworking'' technologies implemented in a top-down, fragmented manner as well as the significant impacts on workers' liability and professional agency. The discussion unpacks the invisible burden of organizational unpreparedness in technology integration, the resulting negotiation of care work's meaning and power differentials with care workers for decent work.

This paper presents a scoping review of immersive virtual nature experiences delivered via head-mounted displays (HMDs) and their role in promoting well-being, psychological restoration, cognitive performance, and nature connectedness. As access to natural environments becomes increasingly constrained by urbanization, technological lifestyles, and environmental change, immersive technologies offer a scalable and accessible alternative for engaging with nature. Guided by three core research questions, this review explores how HMD-mediated immersive technologies have been used to promote nature connectedness and well-being, what trends and outcomes have been observed across applications, and what methodological gaps or limitations exist in this growing body of work. Fifty-five peer-reviewed studies were analyzed and categorized into six key implication areas: emotional well-being, stress reduction, cognitive performance, attention recovery, restorative benefits, and nature connectedness. The review identifies immersive virtual nature as a promising application of extended reality (XR) technologies, with potential across healthcare, education, and daily life, while also emphasizing the need for more consistent methodologies and long-term research.

With the rise of remote and hybrid work after COVID-19, there is growing interest in understanding remote workers’ experiences and designing digital technology for the future of work within the field of HCI. To gain a holistic understanding of how remote workers navigate the blurred boundary between work and home and how designers can better support their boundary work, we employ humanistic geography as a lens. We engaged in co-speculative design practices with 11 remote workers in the US, exploring how future technologies might sustainably enhance participants’ work and home lives in remote/hybrid arrangements. We present the imagined technologies that resulted from this process, which both reinforce remote workers’ existing boundary work practices through everyday routines/rituals and reclaim the notion of home by fostering independence, joy, and healthy relationships. Our discussions with participants inform implications for designing digital technologies that promote sustainability in the future remote/hybrid work landscape.

Graduate students are facing a mental health crisis due to a combination of individual, community, and societal factors. Many existing stress management interventions engage with one factor at a time, typically focusing on providing a user with data about their stress state. We conducted co-design workshops with graduate students who work closely together to explore their strategies for managing stress and to learn about what types of technologies they envision to help address their stress. Using Ecological Systems Theory as an conceptual framework, our analysis of the designs and discussions from these workshops contributes an expanded design space for stress management—one that foregrounds the affordances and challenges of designing interventions that cut across ecological systems levels along with designs that approach stress management using a broader diversity of strategies: controlling, disconnecting, and normalizing stress. We argue that this expanded design space embraces a more holistic and human approach to designing stress management technologies.

Personal informatics (PI) systems have been developed to support reflection. While reflection is considered an indispensable activity in PI use, how and when reflection occurs is still under-studied. In this paper, we present an analysis of the interactive features of 123 commercial PI apps, revealing that reflective practices are unevenly supported. The lack of features that encourage user-driven reflection, scaffolding for setting goals and configuring data collection and presentation, and consideration of wider implications stand to limit meaning-making and frustrate nuanced insight generation based on lived experiences. Based on our findings, we discuss how reflection is currently misrepresented in personal informatics tools, identify and characterize the gaps between theoretical research on reflection and interface features in current apps, and offer suggestions about how reflection could be better supported.

The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed the nature of work by shifting most in-person work to a predominantly remote modality as a way to limit the spread of the coronavirus. In the process, the shift to working-from-home rapidly forced the large-scale adoption of groupware technologies. Although prior empirical research examined the experience of working-from-home within small-scale groups and for targeted kinds of work, the pandemic provides HCI and CSCW researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to understand the psycho-social impacts of a universally mandated work-from-home experience rather than an autonomously chosen one. Drawing on boundary theory and a methodological approach grounded in humanistic geography, we conducted a qualitative analysis of Reddit data drawn from two work-from-home-related subreddits between March 2020 and January 2021. In this paper, we present a characterization of the challenges and solutions discussed within these online communities for adapting work to a hybrid or fully remote modality, managing reconfigured work-life boundaries, and reconstructing the home's sense of place to serve multiple, sometimes conflicting roles. We discuss how these findings suggest an emergent interplay among adapted work practice, reimagined physical (and virtual) spaces, and the establishment and continual re-negotiation of boundaries as a means for anticipating the long-term impact of COVID on future conceptualizations of productivity and work.

Abstract Online communities, socio-technical systems where people interact with others, depend on new members coming to the community. While the majority of research in online communities relation to the recruitment of new members has focused on new members’ socialization and retention, little work has focused on howpotential new memberswho are not yet a member of the community make the decision on whether they are willing to join in the online community. To understand this initial decision process, we investigated how potential new members build mental models of the online community from their first experience within the community, and how this process impacts the decision to continue participating in the community. We interviewed 31 potential new members of the online communities, Quora and Reddit, to better understand how they evaluate a new community. We found that the process of understanding a community involves orienting toward multiple different aspects of the community, including the content available on the community, the people who are already part of the community, and the technology interface and mechanisms that control the community. Participants who focused on consuming and enjoying content were much more likely to express an interest in future participation in these communities than participants who just evaluated the community, looking at the people in the community or the technology of the community. This extends previous considerations for recruiting new members in online communities. We conclude by discussing how our findings can have broad implications in developing successful online communities and suggesting future research efforts that could help understand potential new members.

In "smart speaker'' digital assistant systems such as Google Home, there is no visual user interface, so people must learn about the system's capabilities and limitations by experimenting with different questions and commands. However, many new users give up quickly and limit their use to a few simple tasks. This is a problem for both the user and the system. Users who stop trying out new things cannot learn about new features and functionality, and the system receives less data upon which to base future improvements. Symbiosis---a mutually beneficial relationship---between AI systems like digital assistants and people is an important aspect of developing systems that are partners to humans and not just tools. In order to better understand requirements for symbiosis, we investigated the relationship between the types of digital assistant responses and users' subsequent questions, focusing on identifying interactions that were discouraging to users when speaking with a digital assistant. We conducted a user study with 20 participants who completed a series of information seeking tasks using the Google Home, and analyzed transcripts using a method based on applied conversation analysis. We found that the most common response from the Google Home, a version of "Sorry, I'm not sure how to help'', provided no feedback for participants to build on when forming their next question. However, responses that provided somewhat strange but tangentially related answers were actually more helpful for conversational grounding, which extended the interaction. We discuss the connection between grounding and symbiosis, and present recommendations for requirements for forming partnerships with digital assistants.

Transparency can empower users to make informed choices about how they use an algorithmic decision-making system and judge its potential consequences. However, transparency is often conceptualized by the outcomes it is intended to bring about, not the specifics of mechanisms to achieve those outcomes. We conducted an online experiment focusing on how different ways of explaining Facebook's News Feed algorithm might affect participants' beliefs and judgments about the News Feed. We found that all explanations caused participants to become more aware of how the system works, and helped them to determine whether the system is biased and if they can control what they see. The explanations were less effective for helping participants evaluate the correctness of the system's output, and form opinions about how sensible and consistent its behavior is. We present implications for the design of transparency mechanisms in algorithmic decision-making systems based on these results.