What happens when a rideshare driver is suddenly locked out of the platform connecting them to riders, wages, and daily work? Deactivation—the abrupt removal of gig workers’ platform access—typically occurs via arbitrary AI and algorithmic decisions with little explanation or recourse. This represents one of the most severe forms of algorithmic control and often devastates workers’ financial stability. Recent U.S. state policies now mandate appeals processes and recovering compensation during periods of wrongful deactivation based on past earnings. Yet, labor organizers still lack effective tools to support these complex, error-prone workflows. We designed FareShare , a computational tool for automating lost wages estimation for deactivated drivers, through a 6-month partnership with the State of Washington’s largest rideshare labor union. Our 3-month field deployment yielded 178 worker account signups. We observed that the tool could reduce lost wages calculation time by over 95%, eliminate manual data entry errors, and enable legal teams to generate arbitration-ready reports more efficiently. Beyond these gains, the deployment also surfaced important socio-technical challenges around trust, consent, and tool adoption in high-stakes labor contexts.

Young people are major consumers of Augmented Reality (AR) tools like Pokémon GO, but they rarely engage in creating these experiences. Creating with technology gives young people a platform for expressing themselves and making social connections. However, we do not know what young people want to create with AR, as existing AR authoring tools are largely designed for adults. To investigate the requirements for an AR authoring tool, we ran eight design workshops with 17 young people in Argentina and the United States that centered on young people's perspectives and experiences. We identified four ways in which young people want to create with AR, and contribute the following design implications for designers of AR authoring tools for young people: (1) Blending imagination into AR scenarios to preserve narratives, (2) Making traces of actions visible to foster social presence (3) Exploring how AR artifacts can serve as invitations to connect with others, and (4) Leveraging information asymmetry to encourage learning about the physical world.

Beyond the well-known giants like Uber Eats and DoorDash, there are hundreds of independent food delivery platforms in the United States. However, little is known about the sociotechnical landscape of these "indie'' platforms. In this paper, we analyzed these platforms to understand why they were created, how they operate, and what technologies they use. We collected data on 495 indie platforms and detailed survey responses from 29 platforms. We found that personalized, timely service is a central value of indie platforms, as is a sense of responsibility to the local community they serve. Indie platforms are motivated to provide fair rates for restaurants and couriers. These alternative business practices differentiate them from mainstream platforms. Though indie platforms have plans to expand, a lack of customizability in off-the-shelf software prevents independent platforms from personalizing services for their local communities. We show that these platforms are a widespread and longstanding fixture of the food delivery market. We illustrate the diversity of motivations and values to explain why a one-size-fits-all support is insufficient, and we discuss the siloing of technology that inhibits platforms' growth. Through these insights, we aim to promote future HCI research into the potential development of public-interest technologies for local food delivery.

Writing skills are often considered unimportant by computer science students and were under-emphasized in our curriculum. We describe our experience embedding CS-specific writing instruction at scale in most of our large, core, first- and second-year Computer Science courses, each with 300-800+ students. Our approach is to collaborate with a writing specialist and a community of course instructors, centralize the management of writing teaching assistants, and introduce a variety of relevant genres and contexts to help students develop and apply writing skills. We outline the institutional support and organization crucial to a project of this scale. In addition, we report on a survey collecting student perception of the writing instruction/assessment. We reflect on quantitative and qualitative evidence of success, as well as the challenges that we faced. We believe that many of these challenges will be common across institutions, particularly those with large courses.

The timeless social activity of passing down oral stories preserves family memory, identity, values, and culture. Existing tools for family memories often take a techno-determinist approach by focusing on the mechanics of connecting families and the resulting documentation, rather than the social process of sharing stories and morals, and largely without considering the specific needs of immigrant families. For immigrant families, cultural exchange, particularly crucial across grandparent and grandchild generations, is threatened by the language and cultural barriers emerging from displacement and migration. As a result, immigrant grandparents and their young grandchildren struggle with fostering social kinship, leading to social disconnect and loss of cultural heritage. In our research, we collaborate with multi-generational and culturally-at-risk immigrant families through Participatory Design activities towards the design of reminiscence tools that support their needs focusing on language and cultural connection. We report on the designs created by families and propose design guidelines supporting cultural resilience, focusing on flexible, visual storytelling.

Language and cultural barriers critically threaten the social relationships between grandparents and grandchildren in immigrant families. Cultural exchange activities, like shared storytelling, can foster these crucial connections. However, existing barriers make these seemingly routine interactions challenging for families to navigate. The resulting intergenerational drift places grandparents at high risk of sustained social isolation from their families. Past works have presented technology-mediated supports for grandparent-grandchild social interactions in non-immigrant families and have found that these interventions do foster stronger connections in both physically close and distant multigenerational families. We explore how to support the specific needs of immigrant families through Magic Thing participatory design workshops with grandchildren and grandparents together in order to reveal the social interactions that would support their cultural exchange. We use the Magic Thing to move the standard dialogic grandparent-grandchild relationship into a trialogic one, creating space for comfortable social connection and storytelling through the shared creation of the design. We find that technology-mediated support of intergenerational immigrant cultural exchange must be designed for this trialogic process, consider the role of expressing values as a form of meta-commentary on a story, and shift the perspective on existing "barriers" to consider how they might foster further engagement.

For adult newcomers to countries such as Canada, learning language is more than an academic task. Language proficiency is their gateway to long-term economic and social stability, but limited access to resources contributes to systemic inequities which disproportionately place immigrants at socioeconomic disadvantages. Many new immigrants rely heavily on informal peer-networks to pursue avenues of success within an unfamiliar and inadequate system. To explore how we could leverage such a peer-based approach to meet their needs for feedback and support when learning to write in English, we deployed a peer-based writing app with 16 participants. Post-deployment focus groups and analysis of writing artifacts reveal that the design of writing support tools should present transparent feedback from both peers and automated sources, foster community through semi-structured discussions, incorporate guided review, and scaffold affective development. We discuss how incorporating these elements into the design of community learning platforms can address the language literacy needs of diverse immigrant learners and foster more positive experiences for newcomers as they negotiate their evolving identities.

Improving the written literacy of newcomers to English-speaking countries can lead to better education, employment, or social integration opportunities. However, this remains a challenge in traditional classrooms where providing frequent, timely, and personalized feedback is not always possible. Analytics can scaffold the writing development of English Language Learners (ELLs) by providing such feedback. To design these analytics, we conducted a field study analyzing essay samples from immigrant adult ELLs (a group often overlooked in writing analytics research) and identifying their epistemic beliefs and learning motivations. We identified common themes across individual learner differences and patterns of errors in the writing samples. The study revealed strong associations between epistemic writing beliefs and learning strategies. The results are used to develop guidelines for designing writing analytics for adult ELLs, and to propose ideas for analytics that scaffold writing development for this group.