The commitment to multiplicity and pluriversality challenges design to move beyond singular, stable conceptions of the human. Personal sensing systems offer a rich site for examining this challenge because in mediating the human experience, they constitute the human, although typically as a bounded, rational subject. Building on the critical discourse around sensing technologies, we examine what it might mean to make space for multiplicity in sensing. We articulate “purple zone” as an ontologically ambiguous space emerging from crossing boundaries previously naturalized or deemed fixed, and instantiate it through “EDA purple zone,” marking the threshold of in/visibility in Electrodermal Activity sensing. Through a multi-year process, we developed a real-time biofeedback system that surfaces EDA purple zone. Through a two-week study with 24 participants, we examine encounters with purple zone, instances where the relational human emerges through assemblages, and participants’ strategies for navigating such encounters. We conclude by reflecting on the inherent tensions and possibilities for reconstituting the human in/through personal sensing and engaging ontological multiplicity through design.

Amid the recent uptake of Generative AI, sociotechnical scholars and critics have traced a multitude of resulting harms, with analyses largely focused on values and axiology (e.g., bias). While value-based analyses are crucial, we argue that ontologies -- concerning what we allow ourselves to think or talk about -- is a vital but under-recognized dimension in analyzing these systems. Proposing a need for a practice-based engagement with ontologies, we offer four orientations for considering ontologies in design: pluralism, groundedness, liveliness, and enactment. We share examples of potentialities that are opened up through these orientations across the entire LLM development pipeline by conducting two ontological analyses: examining the responses of four LLM-based chatbots in a prompting exercise, and analyzing the architecture of an LLM-based agent simulation. We conclude by sharing opportunities and limitations of working with ontologies in the design and development of sociotechnical systems.

Moderating online spaces effectively is not a matter of simply taking down content: moderators also provide private feedback and defuse situations before they cross the line into harm. However, moderators have little tool support for these activities, which often occur in the backchannel rather than in front of the entire community. In this paper, we introduce Chillbot, a moderation tool for Discord designed to facilitate backchanneling from moderators to users. With Chillbot, moderators gain the ability to send rapid anonymous feedback responses to situations where removal or formal punishment is too heavy-handed to be appropriate, helping educate users about how to improve their behavior while avoiding direct confrontations that can put moderators at risk. We evaluated Chillbot through a two week field deployment on eleven Discord servers ranging in size from 25 to over 240,000 members. Moderators in these communities used Chillbot more than four hundred times during the study, and moderators from six of the eleven servers continued using the tool past the end of the formal study period. Based on this deployment, we describe implications for the design of a broader variety of means by which moderation tools can help shape communities' norms and behavior.

Voice-first ambient interfaces (VFAIs), such as Alexa, can uniquely meet the health needs of older adults. However, inequitable technology may worsen health disparities and decrease independence, calling for participatory methods to increase the agency of older adults in the design processes of these technologies. We adapt and conduct a participatory design workshop to focus on ambient interfaces for home health with 13 diverse older adults in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. Using the prototypes they made as discussion catalyzers, participants shared different perspectives entailing stigmatized topics that can be difficult to discuss, such as drug use, sex, isolation, and dementia. They deliberated on the negative implications of VFAIs, such as a justified concern for surveillance, in conjunction with their positive implications, such as receiving always-available ''non-judgmental'' support. Similarly, the risk of leaking drug use data was considered alongside the benefits of sharing important medical information with clinicians. We synthesize our findings into design considerations, such as how we might address varying levels of trust in different stakeholders and reduce stigma that may hinder users from fully benefiting from VFAIs' capabilities.

The rapid pace of technological progress carries with it a heightened risk of ethics and privacy violations, creating an urgent need for mechanisms to address this risk. We approach this problem from the perspective of designers and technologists aiming to design technology that better accounts for ethical implications. We iteratively developed a workshop-based method (N=113, seven workshops) for probing ethical implications of emerging ubiquitous computing technologies. We contribute a method that enables people with varying levels and areas of domain expertise and with a variety of lived experiences to collectively speculate about the ethical implications of emerging technologies, navigate value tensions, and prototype artifacts as a way to grapple with those tensions. We introduce implication design as a means for participants with and without design experience to communicate how a technology might change to better serve them. Lastly, we share our learnings from and reflections on our design process.

Self-Interfaces are interfaces that intuitively communicate relevant subconscious physiological signals through biofeedback to give the user insight into their behavior and assist them in creating behavior change. The human heartbeat is a good example of an intuitive and relevant haptic biofeedback; does not distract and is only felt when the heart beats fast. In this work, we discuss the design and development of a wearable haptic Self-Interface for Electrodermal Activity (EDA). EDA is a covert physiological signal correlated with high and low arousal affective states. We will evaluate the effectiveness of the EDA Self-Interface based on its intuitiveness, its ability to generate useful insight, whether this insight leads to behavior change, and whether the user can develop an intuitive awareness of their EDA over time when the device is removed. We hope the findings from this study will help us establish a series of guidelines for development of other Self-Interfaces in the future.