The rapid digitalisation of public services has raised concerns about the exclusion of older adults. To examine this issue, we conducted a qualitative study in Shantou, China, exploring how older adults sustained participation in digital welfare. Despite limited direct interaction with digital systems, they wove digital engagement into daily life by mobilising personal, social, community, and institutional networks. By foregrounding this often-hidden human infrastructural labour, we expand understandings of what constitutes the “success” of digital welfare and the scope of digital engagement in later life. Building on these insights, we propose design recommendations for sociotechnical conditions that better support relational arrangements, making delegation smoother, lighter, and more legitimate. Finally, we introduce the notion of anticipatory infrastructure to capture how older adults prepare for inevitable breakdowns. The study contributes to HCI debates on inclusion by centring equity and collective capacities in sustainable digital welfare.

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.

Background information is very important for news reading and understanding, especially with today’s rapid new media development for news production and consumption. When researchers actively develop tools to automatically provide back-ground information for people, we still have little understanding of how people, from readers’ perspective, engage with news and what background information is needed. To address such a gap, we conducted a study with a news reading platform, observed participants’ news reading behaviors using the platform and interviewed them over the process. Our study highlighted that news reading is a learning activity between leisure and study, and their background information searching behavior is part of Gestalt knowing – to make their existing knowledge more complete, by deepening their prior understandings, broadening their horizons, filling the gaps, clearing their confusion, as well as tracking the progress of an event as a whole, so a more holistic understanding could be achieved. We end by discussing implications of our findings.

Mobility is the key for people with disabilities to have full participation in life. To support their mobility, previous work primarily focused on accessibility as an attribute of the external environment to be evaluated, labeled, visualized, and improved. Relatively less work has looked at how people with disabilities go out and move around in practice and work to achieve mobility. This paper presents a qualitative study of 14 wheelchair users' travel practices in everyday life in China, highlighting urban accessibility as alignment work -- the use of an awareness of the conditions along the journey to continuously align and re-align various resources to ensure accessibility and mobility across contexts and moments. By highlighting alignment work, we present another side of the story of urban accessibility, and broaden design considerations to support mobility for wheelchair users.

The HCI community cares for the human and social aspects of technologies. Ethical discussion on the social implications of new technologies often happen among researchers, but it is important to raise this discussion also in the industry that designs and implements new systems. In this paper, we introduce a case in which design fiction was used as an ethical discussion tool among company partners. We report the process of creating and prototyping a fictional world embedded with conflicting values that aimed to shift the focus from industrial merits towards societal values and raise discussion among participants. Moreover, we examine the challenges and propose suggestions in crafting critiques and friction to the industrial context. Our findings suggest why and how one should use design fiction as a means to raise ethical awareness in a technology- and profit-focused context, to support further activities on developing more humane technological futures.