Although organizations increasingly position AI adoption as a pathway to competitiveness and innovation, organizations’ perspectives on productivity and efficiency often clash with workers’ perspectives on AI’s economic and social value. Through design workshops with 15 UX designers, we examine how AI adoption unfolds across individual, team, and organizational scales. At the individual level, designers weighed efficiency, skill development, and professional worth. At the team level, they negotiated collaboration, responsibility, and rigor. At the organizational level, adoption was shaped by compliance requirements and organizational norms. Across these scales, discourses of efficiency carried social and ethical dimensions of responsibility, trust, and autonomy. We view adoption as a site where roles, relationships, and power are reconfigured. We argue that AI adoption should be understood as a process of negotiating values, and call for future work examining how AI systems redistribute responsibility among team members, while understanding how such shifts could strengthen worker agency.

Ever since the introduction of internet technologies in South Korea, digital sexual violence (DSV) has been a persistent and pervasive problem. Evolving alongside digital technologies, the severity and scale of violence have grown consistently, leading to widespread public concern. In this paper, we present four eras of image-based DSV in South Korea, spanning from the early internet era of the 1990s to the deepfake scandals in the mid-2020s. Drawing from media coverage, legal documents, and academic literature, we elucidate forms and characteristics of DSV cases in each era, tracing how entrenched misogyny is reconfigured and amplified through evolving technologies, alongside shifting legislative measures. Taking a genealogical approach to read prominent cases of different eras, our analysis identifies three constitutive and interconnected dimensions of DSV: (1) the homo-social fabrication of “obscenity”, wherein victims’ imagery becomes collectively framed as obscene through participatory practices in male-dominant networks; (2) the increasing imperceptibility of violence, as technologies foreclose victims’ ability to perceive harm; and (3) the commercialization of abuse through decentralized economic infrastructures. We suggest future directions for CSCW research, and further reflect on the value of the genealogical method in enabling non-linear understanding of DSV as dynamically evolving sociotechnical configurations of harm. Warning: This paper includes descriptions and mentions of sexual violence, including violence towards minors and children.

This paper introduces Ethics Pathways, a design activity aimed at understanding HCI and design researchers’ ethics engagements and flows during their research process. Despite a strong ethical commitment in these fields, challenges persist in grasping the complexity of researchers’ engagement with ethics —practices conducted to operationalize ethics—in situated institutional contexts. Ethics Pathways, developed through six playtesting sessions, offers a design approach to understanding the complexities of researchers’ past ethics engagements in their work. This activity involves four main tasks: recalling ethical incidents; describing stakeholders involved in the situation; recounting their actions or speculative alternatives; and reflection and emotion walk-through. The paper reflects on the role of design decisions and facilitation strategies in achieving these goals. The design activity contributes to the discourse on ethical HCI research by conceptualizing ethics engagement as a part of ongoing research processing, highlighting connections between individual affective experiences, social interactions across power differences, and institutional goals.

Designing user experiences for group recommendation systems (GRS) is challenging, requiring a nuanced understanding of the influence of social interactions between users. Using Spotify Blend as a real-world case of music GRS, we conducted empirical studies to investigate intricate social interactions among South Korean users in GRS. Through a preliminary survey about Blend experiences in general, we narrowed the focus for the main study to relationships between two users who are acquainted or close. Building on this, we conducted a 21-day diary study and interviews with 30 participants (15 pairs) to probe more in-depth interpersonal dynamics within Blend. Our findings reveal that users engaged in implicit social interactions, including tacit understanding of their companions and indirect communication. We conclude by discussing the newly discovered value of GRS as a social catalyst, along with design attributes and challenges for the social experiences it mediates.

Voice-based Conversational Agents (VCA) have served as personal assistants that support individuals with special needs. Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may also benefit from VCAs to deal with their everyday needs and challenges, ranging from self-care to social communications. In this study, we explored how VCAs could encourage adolescents with ASD in navigating various aspects of their daily lives through the two-week use of VCAs and a series of participatory design workshops. Our findings demonstrated that VCAs could be an engaging, empowering, emancipating tool that supports adolescents with ASD to address their needs, personalities, and expectations, such as promoting self-care skills, regulating negative emotions, and practicing conversational skills. We propose implications of using off-the-shelf technologies as a personal assistant to ASD users in Assistive Technology design. We suggest design implications for promoting positive opportunities while mitigating the remaining challenges of VCAs for adolescents with ASD.