In practice, therapy often involves the restructuring of patients’ personal narratives, which are inherently nonlinear in nature. Thus, interactive narrative authoring tools - which allow for the creation and restructuring of nonlinear, or branching narratives - are uniquely poised to provide an avenue for individuals to undergo this process on their own. However, existing interactive narrative authoring tools do not provide the kinds of support and guidance a therapist would. The aim of this dissertation work is to investigate the design and effectiveness of scaffolds within interactive narrative authoring tools that can foster therapeutic reflection. I have conducted two studies thus far: an interview study exploring how college students reflect on their life narratives and a user study examining how students reflect using an existing tool, Twine. Currently I am developing my capstone study, which seeks to investigate the design and effectiveness of AI-supported scaffolds to facilitate reflection through nonlinear story creation.

Physical computing toolkits for children expose young minds to the concepts of computing and electronics within a target activity. To this end, these kits usually make use of a custom Visual Programming Language (or VPL) environment that extends past the functionality of simply programming, often also incorporating representations of electronics aspects in the interface. These representations of the electronics function as a scaffold to help the child focus on programming, instead of having to handle both the programming and details of the electronics at the same time. This paper presents a review of existing physical computing toolkits, looking at the What, How, and Where of electronics representations in their VPL interfaces. We then discuss potential research directions for the design of VPL interfaces for physical computing toolkits for children.

Many story authoring tools have been designed to support children’s creativity through story enactment. However, at school, children are encouraged to engage in formal modes of expression, such as writing. This paper aims to explore how we may design tools that support children in writing using body-based enactment as a scaffold. In our study, 17 children used an interactive story authoring system to enact and record stories as videos and then write the stories while viewing them. We compared the story enactment videos and the corresponding written story essays in terms of the narrative structure, content, and coherence. Our results show a significant difference in story structure in the two formats and a marginally significant difference in the coherence ratings. We present our findings in terms of learned lessons for designing children’s enactment-based authoring tools to encourage more substantial written outcomes.

People use a significant amount of gestures when engaging in creative brainstorming. This is especially typical for creative workers who frequently convey ideas, designs, and stories to team members. These gestures produced during natural conversation contain information that is not necessarily conveyed through speech. This paper investigates the design of a system that uses people's gestures in natural communication contexts to produce external visualizations of their mental imagery, focusing on gestures that describe dimension-related information. While much psycholinguistics research address how gestures relate to the representations of concepts, little HCI work has explored the possibilities of harnessing gestures to support thinking.

Storytelling is a critical step in the cognitive development of children. Particularly, this requires children to mentally project into the story context and to identify with the thoughts of the characters in their stories. We propose to support free imagination in creative storytelling through an enactment-based approach that allows children to embody an avatar and perform as the story character. We designed our story creation interface with two modes of avatar: the story-relevant avatar and the self-avatar, to investigate the effects of avatar design on the quality of children's creative products. In our study with 20 child participants, the results indicate that self-avatars can create a stronger sense of identification and embodied presence, while story-relevant avatars can provide a scaffold for mental projection.

Movie recommender systems help users to navigate the magnitude and diversity of movies that people have easy access to nowadays, especially with online streaming services. However, current systems personalize recommendations primarily based on what they think a specific user would like or prefer using information about how similar the users are to other users. Prior work has suggested that this could lead to a ‘filter bubble’ whereby users only watch movies that they are comfortable with. This paper presents the novel concept of event-inspired movies that draw on users’ highly specific everyday life experiences to recommend movies that are meaningful to them. To conduct the study, we developed a systematic process to align movies with viewer variables. Meaningful movies have been said to have therapeutic potential to possibly affect one’s sense of overall well-being. We conducted a study with 24 participants to explore how users engage with event-inspired movies, whether event-inspired movies are perceived as more relevant, and their potential to affect users’ sense of life satisfaction. In so doing, we also contribute a process and insights on how to operationalize event-inspired movies that can inform the implementation of a movie recommender system situated within the proposed paradigm.