Globally, about 40% of women and people assigned female at birth live under laws that restrict or prohibit access to safe abortion care. Even where abortion is legal, socio-cultural stigma and health inequities hinder timely, equitable access. Technologies have been developed to support abortion seekers and providers in overcoming barriers to information, safe abortion care, and support. However, research on abortion care technologies is fragmented, spanning medical and computing publications, and lacking a consolidated understanding. To address this gap, we conducted a scoping review of 92 studies, examining technological applications, contexts of use, research methods, ethical considerations, and pathways to impact. This analysis informs the HCI research agenda for abortion care, highlighting future directions, and fostering reflection on design, ethics, and meaningful impact. We call on HCI researchers to move beyond telemedicine and U.S.-centric perspectives, re-politicize abortion care technologies, and consider temporality in delivering timely abortion care amid broader sociopolitical constraints.

As Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers increasingly conduct studies involving populations with stigmatised identities, more researchers must focus on creating conversational spaces where participants feel comfortable discussing their experiences. This study unpacks how and why HCI researchers engage in self-disclosure to facilitate such spaces. We share eight autoethnographic personal stories of key moments when we disclosed or concealed personal information in our HCI studies with diverse participant groups (people with dementia, victims of online romance scams, children with autism, and North Korean defectors). Through analysing these stories, we found that these decisions were shaped by various goals: creating a welcoming environment, demonstrating credibility, establishing common ground, reducing stigma, and directing the interview’s focus. The acts of disclosure or concealment affected the interactions with participants, the collected data, and the well-being of the researcher and participant. We argue that greater awareness, reflection, guidance, and sharing are needed regarding self-disclosure in HCI research and offer a reflexive guide to help researchers prepare for and reflect on their self-disclosure practices. By making these practices visible and open to discussion, we aim to make researcher-participant interactions in sensitive settings more ethical, effective, and transparent. • HCI researchers dynamically disclose/conceal personal information with stigmatised groups. • Researchers differ in the who/what/when/why(not)/how of their self-disclosure. • HCI lacks awareness, guidelines, and transparency for researcher self-disclosure. • Reflexivity around self-disclosure is needed for ethical and effective research.

Deepfake technology is often used to create non-consensual synthetic intimate imagery (NSII), mainly of celebrity women. Through Critical Discursive Psychological analysis, we ask; i) how celebrities construct being targeted by deepfakes and ii) how they navigate infrastructural and social obstacles when seeking recourse. In this paper, we adopt Baumer’s concept of “Usees” (stakeholders who are non-consenting, unaware and directly targeted by technology), to understand public statements made by eight celebrity women and one non-binary individual targeted with NSII. Celebrities describe harms of being non-consensually targeted by deepfakes and they describe various infrastructural/social factors) which hinder activism and recourse. This work has implications in recognizing the roles of infrastructures underlying deepfake abuse and the potential of human-computer interaction to improve existing recourses for NSII. We also contribute to understanding false victim-blaming rhetoric about deepfake abuse. Future work should involve interventions which challenge values and false beliefs which motivate NSII creation/dissemination.

Online pregnancy loss communities can allow users to locate valuable support and information after experiencing a loss. However, platform users also face challenges in learning how to safely engage with the emotive content and diverse experiences present in these communities. This raises questions about how these online communities are currently moderated. However, the practices and experiences of online pregnancy loss community moderators have not yet been examined in past research. This study sought to examine how moderators currently work to protect and maintain online pregnancy loss communities, and to determine how community moderation could potentially be improved in these online spaces. To address these research aims, ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with moderators of online pregnancy loss communities located across different online forums and social media platforms. A reflexive thematic analysis was conducted to analyse this interview data. Our findings show that moderators worked to foster supportive and inclusive communities by carefully removing inappropriate or insensitive posts, providing direct informational and emotional support to members, and creating separate online spaces to bring together members with specific experiences. While platform features and the support of charity organisations helped moderators to engage in these practices, we also identified factors which limited moderator performance. Reflecting on these findings, we discuss how many of the moderator practices specifically align with a trauma-informed approach, which could usefully inform the work of moderators in other online support contexts. We also outline research directions and sociotechnical implications for improving online pregnancy loss community moderation in the future.

Emerging evidence from other disciplines indicates that women's engagement with fitness content and communities on social media can have both positive and negative impacts, with particular concerns arising around misinformation, body image and privacy. To investigate this further, we conducted a three-step data collection process, including a qualitative survey (n=97), in depth interviews (n=17), and a process of shared looking (n=10) with our female participants. We then used thematic analysis to understand users' experiences navigating fitness content online. Our paper delineates three themes focusing on 1) Qualities and Characteristics of Trust, 2) Working with the Algorithm, and 3) Competence and Capacity for Control. Based on these findings, we present design considerations that might improve women's experience of navigating fitness content online.

Online social platforms can provide important benefits to users following pregnancy loss. However, while research to date has provided insights into the opportunities and challenges of online platform use after pregnancy loss, we have a limited understanding of how users actively work to navigate these environments in order to successfully share their experiences, seek support, and protect themselves online. Therefore, this study aimed to develop a comprehensive understanding of online platform engagement after pregnancy loss, by examining how users manage their experiences and make decisions across platforms. We recruited 92 participants who had experienced pregnancy loss, through a qualitative online survey and semi-structured interviews. A reflexive thematic analysis was then conducted. Our findings demonstrate how participants actively worked to locate relevant pregnancy loss content, to share such content only with desired audiences, and to find safe online pregnancy loss spaces. However, users also struggled to manage algorithm-driven content, upsetting audience reactions, and discomfort in online pregnancy loss spaces. As these challenges could lead to emotional distress and potential re-traumatisation among this population, this raises key concerns for their safety and wellbeing online. In response to this, we discuss the implications of our study for supporting safer online platform engagement within future CSCW research and practice, specifically from the perspective of trauma-informed care.

Cervical cancer screening has the potential to save lives, but it can also produce strong anxiety and self-stigma in those who are screened. Although there has been a recent turn towards women's health in design, the potential for design to ameliorate experiences of cervical screening remains underexplored. In this paper, we report on a design research study with 15 Irish women that qualitatively unpacked their attitudes towards screening, their social learning processes, mediated through technology, and how they live with and give meaning to health-related information related to the topic of cervical screening and which they procure online. Following this, we developed NALA, a product-service-system that aimed to 1) allow self-sampling for HPV via menstrual blood, and 2) provide information around the topic of HPV, cervical cancer, and screening. This paper presents NALA, a preliminary evaluation of the system, and concludes with provocations for continuing design research in the area of digital design for women's health.

Recent HCI research has addressed emerging approaches for public engagement. One such public-facing method which has gained popularity over the previous decade has been open design events, or hackathons. In this article, we report on DemVR, a hackathon event that invited designers, technologists, and students of these disciplines to design Virtual Reality (VR) environments for people with dementia and their care partners. While our event gained reasonable attraction from designers and developers, this article unpacks the challenges in representing and involving people with dementia in these events, which had multiple knock-on effects on participant's outputs. Our analysis presents insights into participants’ motivations, challenges participants faced when constructing their “absent user”, and the design features teams developed to address the social context of the user. We conclude the article by proposing a set of commitments for collaborative design events, community building through design, and reification in design.

Synthetic biology has utilised engineering concepts for the rational design of biocompatible systems. Here we utilise two bacterial populations to create a modulated molecular channel coding scheme for molecular communications systems. We believe this approach can drive the development of more reliable biocompatible molecular communications systems to apply in the dairy industry.

There is a growing body of HCI work that seeks to understand and enhance the lived experience of people with dementia. The majority of this work involves researchers working alongside people with dementia and their carers, focused on the design project outcomes. In order to enrich the social context of this work, we explore broadening participation to include student volunteers. To encourage mutually engaging experiences in this design context, careful consideration of how to support both students and people with dementia is needed. In this paper, we present two case- studies of co-design projects between students and people with dementia. Our findings detail the use of design methods to reconfigure the role of the residents in care contexts and the students learning process. We discuss the project learning outcomes as well as practical and ethical considerations to support the use of design methods to support mutual engagement in sensitive contexts.

Engaging in participatory research in HCI raises numerous ethical complexities such as consent, researcher relationships, and participant compensation. Doing HCI work in the area of dementia amplifies these issues, and researchers in this area are modelling ethical stances to ensure researcher-participant relationships focus on meaningful engagement and care. This paper presents an insight into the kinds of ethical foci required when doing design research with people living with dementia and their carers. We interviewed 22 HCI researchers with experience working in dementia care contexts. Our qualitative analysis outlines subsequent lessons-learned, such as recognition of the participants, self-care, research impact, and subjectivity in ethical review boards. Furthermore, we found the complexity of navigating both "everyday" and more formal, institutional ethics in dementia research has implications beyond the context of working with people with dementia and outline key considerations for ethical practices in socially orientated HCI research.

Metaphors are important at multiple levels within design and society-from the specifics of interfaces, to wider societal imaginaries of technology and progress. Exploring alternative metaphors can be generative in creative processes, and for reframing problems strategically. In this pictorial we introduce an inspiration card workshop method using juxtaposition (or bisociation) to enable participants to explore novel metaphors for hard-to-visualise phenomena, drawing on a provisional set of inspiration material. We demonstrate the process through illustrating creative workshops in France, Portugal, Chile, and the USA, and reflect on benefits, limitations, and potential development of this format for use within interaction design.

While there have been considerable developments in designing for dementia within HCI, there is still a lack of empirical understanding of the experience of people with advanced dementia and the ways in which design can support and enrich their lives. In this paper, we present our findings from a long-term ethnographic study, which aimed to gain an understanding of their lived experience and inform design practices for and with people with advanced dementia in residential care. We present our findings using the social theory of recognition as an analytic lens to account for recognition in practice and its challenges in care and research. We discuss how we, as the HCI community, can pragmatically engage with people with advanced dementia and propose a set of considerations for those who wish to design for and with the values of recognition theory to promote collaboration, agency and social identity in advanced dementia care.

Whereas there have been significant improvements in the quality of care provided for people with dementia, limited attention to the importance for people with dementia being enabled to make positive social contributions within care home contexts can restrict their sense of agency. In this paper we describe the design and deployment of 'Printer Pals' a receipt-based print media device, which encourages social contribution and agency within a care home environment. The design followed a two-year ethnography, from which the need for highlighting participation and supporting agency for residents within the care home became clear. The residents use of Printer Pals mediated participation in a number of different ways, such as engaging with the technology itself, offering shared experiences and participating in co-constructive and meaningful ways, each of which is discussed. We conclude with a series of design consideration to support agentic and caring interactions through inclusive design practices.

Focusing on the person with advanced dementia as a social being presents a new opportunity for Experience-Centered Design (ECD), opening design to appreciate the agency and intentional actions of the person with advanced dementia. If Human-Computer Interaction is to shift from the predominantly assistive approach to a focus on experience, a theoretical framing that emphasizes the relational nature of selfhood is needed. In this article, we present Recognition Theory—a social theory based on an inter-subjectivist account of the struggle for recognition—to extend ECD approaches for advanced dementia. Focusing on people with advanced dementia, we examine recognition as a social and ethical perspective for establishing and maintaining self. We present a framework for design based on research with people with advanced dementia, experience-centered engagement and social identity, that will support designers to craft opportunities for mutual recognition in the design process and the practice of making.

We explore the role of digital media in supporting intergenerational interactions between people with dementia and young people. Though meaningful social interaction is integral to quality of life in dementia, initiating conversation with a person with dementia can be challenging, especially for younger people who may lack knowledge of someone's life history. This can be further compounded without a nuanced understanding of the nature of dementia, along with an unfamiliarity in leading and maintaining conversation. We designed a mobile application - Ticket to Talk - to support intergenerational interactions by encouraging young people to collect media relevant to individuals with dementia to use in conversations with people with dementia. We evaluated Ticket to Talk through trials with two families, a care home, and groups of older people. We highlight difficulties in using technologies such as this as a conversational tool, the value of digital media in supporting intergenerational interactions, and the potential to positively shape people with dementia's agency in social settings.