This pictorial examines Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour and Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer as sites of sonic speculation—designed futures centering Blackness, technology, joy, and resistance through multisensory orchestration. We introduce sonic speculation as a holistic approach where sound, visual design, embodied performance, and technological intervention constitute experiential futures. Through close analysis, we trace how these performances integrate five design dimensions: sonic architectures, visual metaphors of transformation, interactivity and collective embodiment, fashion as technology, and futurist aesthetics. These dimensions address three Afrofuturist concerns: political resistance, Black embodiment, and technology's relationship to Black existence. For interaction designers and HCI scholars, these performances offer insights into multisensory, culturally-grounded speculative design. We demonstrate how large-scale performance design can model interactive systems honoring marginalized communities’ histories while imagining liberatory futures, challenging the field to learn from Black femme artists as design theorists whose practices reveal possibilities current scholarship has yet to theorize.

This paper positions Black Studies as a foundational analytic for Emancipatory HCI, showing how Afropessimism and Afrofuturism together model a praxis for designing otherwise worlds. Afropessimism offers a diagnostic lens for understanding how anti-Blackness structures the epistemic, institutional, and sociotechnical foundations of HCI, while Afrofuturism highlights the fugitive, kin-making, and improvisational practices through which people craft openings within those systems. Through three case studies, we examine how Black communities engage, appropriate, and transform sociotechnical systems in everyday life. These examples illuminate practices of accountability, attunement, and collective sensemaking that unsettle dominant design assumptions. We draw out design takeaways that challenge HCI’s inherited paradigms and demonstrate why Black Studies is indispensable for those seeking to expand and deepen Emancipatory HCI.

Critical consciousness as described by Paolo Freire involves the awareness of systemic inequalities.Critical consciousness is important in dismantling oppressive systems, but can be difficult and uncomfortable to develop.This study investigates how Papers, Please works as a transformational game about border crossing to facilitate the development of players' critical consciousness as well as how players' lived experiences are reflected through their ingame decision-making.We conducted a mixed-methods two-week diary study and phenomenological interviews with 41 participants, many of whom being first-time players.We assess players' experiences through the six qualitative stages of critical consciousness development, which we adopt as a method of assessing learning within critical pedagogies.Using this framework, we suggest that in-game conflicting and reactionary immigration policy changes spark value and moral disequilibrium, which, in turn, may trigger players' reflection on the game's unjust immigration system and lead to critical introspection, motivation, and praxis around border crossing and immigration in the United States.

Enhancing emotional well-being has become an important focus in HCI and CSCW, with technologies and AI increasingly designed to track, manage, and regulate emotions. However, these approaches have faced criticism for potentially suppressing certain emotional experiences. Through a scoping review of 53 empirical studies from ACM proceedings implementing Technology-Mediated Emotion Intervention (TMEI), we examine current practices through lenses from HCI critical theories. Our analysis reveals emotion intervention mechanisms that extend beyond ''emotion regulation'' paradigms, identifying care-centered goals that prioritize non-judgmental emotional support and preserve users' identities. The findings demonstrate how researchers design technologies to generate artificial care, intervene in power dynamics, and nudge behavioral changes. By grounding our review in critical HCI scholarship, we contribute the concept of '' emotion support '' as an alternative approach to ''emotion regulation,'' emphasizing human-centered approaches to emotional well-being. This work advances the understanding of diverse human emotional needs beyond individualistic and cognitive perspectives, offering design implications that critically reimagine how artificial intelligence systems can honor emotional complexity, curate spaces for bad feelings, preserve human agency, and transform power dynamics in care contexts.

Video games are celebrated for providing unique interactive experiences that allow players to construct their own narratives through play. However, Black gamers have been repeatedly denied representational agency to craft their own narrative and design game characters that reflect their true selves. To explore how a community of Black gamers has used game modifications (mods) to address representation, we conducted a qualitative study of 22 Black players of "The Sims" life simulation game. We investigate how "Black simmers" create and integrate mods and custom content to represent Black identities and culture in their gameplay through the lens of a 'community of play.' As a sensitizing concept, we also understand participants' testimonies through the lens of Black feminist thought. We found that participants have cultivated a community that exists as a site of theoretical praxis. Further, the community centers mentoring, collective care, storytelling, and Black joy, as well as performs the labor necessary to preserve this gaming space for Black players -- drawing further implications for resisting hegemonic whiteness in the games industry through a pluriversal game design practice.

To date, efforts to address misinformation have focused on broadly scoped legal, technical, and educational interventions. However, recent studies in HCI have begun exploring new directions that focus instead on the individualized nature of the problem and its roots in identity and community. To understand the potential benefits and challenges of applying community-driven methods in this and similarly contentious spaces, we examined the work of a large-scale participatory research project working to address the impact of misinformation, predominantly on rural communities and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) individuals, through the development of locally-contextualized educational resources and platforms. Through interviews with 23 project stakeholders, including both community partners and researchers, we heard that participants saw community-based research and design methods as a highly beneficial tool for addressing this problem. They shared that such methods allow participants to build relationships through the sharing of complex emotions and to surface a range of expertise and lived experiences that contribute to a more holistic understanding of misinformation. At the same time, participatory, community-based methods raise difficult questions around integrating such diverse expertise and protecting participants from internal and external risk. We also discuss emergent strategies for navigating these tensions, with the aim of informing and preparing CSCW researchers looking to apply participatory methods towards addressing misinformation and other contentious research topics.

As the trend towards personalization in health science and technology fields has proliferated, researchers focusing on personal informatics (PI) tools for health management have grappled with when and how to design for a personalized user experience. While previous literature has addressed users’ perspectives on personalization, an important and underexplored research area is how personalization is approached within organizational contexts. This paper reports findings from qualitative interviews with designers, developers, and product managers at a multinational company that designs, builds, and commercializes PI tools for health management. The results point to four types of barriers participants consistently encountered, often leading personalization efforts to be scaled back, and three pragmatic approaches to personalization often adopted in the face of these barriers. The paper concludes with design implications for incorporating personalization while remaining aligned with the nuances, realities, and potential strain on systems and resources inherent to the design process in company settings.

Human experts are often engaged in the development of machine learning systems to collect and validate data, consult on algorithm development, and evaluate system performance. At the same time, who counts as an ‘expert’ and what constitutes ‘expertise’ is not always explicitly defined. In this work, we review 112 academic publications that explicitly reference ‘expert’ and ‘expertise’ and that describe the development of machine learning (ML) systems to survey how expertise is characterized and the role experts play. We find that expertise is often undefined and forms of knowledge outside of formal education and professional certification are rarely sought, which has implications for the kinds of knowledge that are recognized and legitimized in ML development. Moreover, we find that expert knowledge tends to be utilized in ways focused on mining textbook knowledge, such as through data annotation. We discuss the ways experts are engaged in ML development in relation to deskilling, the social construction of expertise, and implications for responsible AI development. We point to a need for reflection and specificity in justifications of domain expert engagement, both as a matter of documentation and reproducibility, as well as a matter of broadening the range of recognized expertise.

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.

Research and design in human-computer interaction centers problem-solving, causing a downstream effect of framing work with and for marginalized communities predominantly from the lens of deficit and damage. Frameworks such as assets-based design and designing for resilience have emerged to highlight the strengths of these communities. However, we observe an additional need to center positive aspects of humanity, such as joy, pleasure, rest, and cultural heritage, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. In this paper, we present three case studies of existing technologies that center BIPOC flourishing to provide an alternative path for HCI. We propose six actionable tenets for designing for flourishing in the everyday: (1) seek opportunities to design for self-actualization, (2) identify and center the desire to flourish, (3) collaborate and distribute power, (4) refrain from damage-centered reductionism, (5) bring the humanity of a community into the design process, (6) and evaluate for self-sustainability.

Engaging diverse participants in HCI research is critical for creating safe, inclusive, and equitable technology. However, there is a lack of guidelines on when, why, and how HCI researchers collect study participants’ race and ethnicity. Our paper aims to take the first step toward such guidelines by providing a systematic review and discussion of the status quo of race and ethnicity data collection in HCI. Through an analysis of 2016–2021 CHI proceedings and a survey with 15 authors who published in these proceedings, we found that reporting race and ethnicity of participants is very rare (<3%) and that researchers are far from consensus. Drawing from multidisciplinary literature and our findings, we devise considerations for HCI researchers to decide why, when, and from whom to collect race and ethnicity data. For truly inclusive, equitable technologies, we encourage deliberate decisions rather than default omissions.

Homelessness presents a long-standing problem worldwide. Like other welfare services, homeless services have gained increased traction in Machine Learning (ML) research. Unhoused persons are vulnerable and using their data in the ML pipeline raises serious concerns about the unintended harms and consequences of prioritizing different ML values. To address this, we conducted a critical analysis of 40 research papers identified through a systematic literature review in ML homelessness service provision research. We found that the values of novelty, performance, and identifying limitations were uplifted in these papers, whereas (in)efficiency, (low/high) cost, fast, (violated) privacy, and (homeless condition) reproducibility valuescollapse. Consequently, unhoused persons were lost (i.e., humans were deprioritized) at multi-level ML abstraction of predictors, categories, and algorithms. Our findings illuminate potential pathways forward at the intersection of data science, HCI and STS by situating humans at the center to support this vulnerable community.

The human-computer interaction community has made some efforts toward racial diversity, but the outcomes remain meager. We introduce critical race theory and adapt it for HCI to lay a theoretical basis for race-conscious efforts, both in research and within our community. Building on the theory's original tenets, we argue that racism is pervasive in everyday socio-technical systems; that the HCI community is prone to "interest convergence", where concessions to inclusion require benefits to those in power; and that the neoliberal underpinnings of the technology industry itself propagate racism. Critical race theory uses storytelling as a means to upend deep-seated assumptions, and we relate several personal stories to highlight ongoing problems of race in HCI. The implications: all HCI research must be attuned to issues of race; participation of underrepresented minorities must be sought in all of our activities; and as a community, we cannot become comfortable while racial disparities exist.