Science communication revision requires writers to dynamically balance scientific exposition and narrative engagement - a process where writers often struggle with competing directions. Existing LLM-assisted tools help with co-writing, but offer limited support for navigating this iterative, multi-directional revision process. To address this gap, we designed Spatial Balancing, an exploratory revision environment that maps rhetorical goals and revision strategies onto a two-dimensional spatial canvas for experienced science communication creators with domain expertise but lacking formal professional training. By building a design space of communication strategies and embedding them into a spatial exploratory canvas, our system treats feedback as navigational cues rather than prescriptive judgments. Our findings show that this integrated revision environment helps writers stay focused on writing goals, reason about revision as trajectories, and explore alternatives, which supports greater metacognitive control and confidence without increasing workload. This work highlights the value of spatially externalized revision environments for supporting iterative, reflective thinking during LLM-assisted writing.

Chinese ceramic-making involves complex and interdependent steps, making it technically demanding. Digital fabrication methods attempt to make the process more accessible, but for craft-creators, technical challenges such as CAD and CAM skills remain major obstacles. To address this, we designed a hybrid workflow that integrates Generative AI with clay 3D printing to support new creative possibilities. We evaluated the workflow through ClayScape, a design tool that operationalizes this approach, with four ceramic creators. Our findings show that the workflow supports accessible ceramic creation while revealing both expanded opportunities for creative exploration and challenges in balancing agency and control. This work demonstrates how hybrid workflows can lower barriers to digital fabrication while supporting creative possibilities in culturally grounded ceramic practices.

Soft floating robots (SFRs) represent a shift from rigid machines, offering gravity-defying, compliant, and tactile embodiments for indoor cohabitation. However, their development remains fragmented across isolated prototypes, lacking a coherent design vocabulary. Without a systematic understanding of their interactional capabilities, designers struggle to leverage SFRs’ unique affordances, and these systems often remain limited to novelty applications that are difficult to integrate into everyday life. To address this, we propose a design space for interaction with SFRs. Informed by an exploratory study with 12 experts from HCI, Design, and Robotics, we identify ten design dimensions spanning physical, interactive, and behavioral properties, along with a range of application scenarios. We further present proof-of-concept design examples to demonstrate how this design space can support diverse interaction possibilities. This work contributes a structured framework for understanding and designing interactions with SFRs, supporting their integration into everyday indoor environments.

The ways people remember and recall places reveal an invisible aspect of cultural heritage (CH), reflecting how individuals and communities relate to these places. Heritage is communal, emerging through collaboratively constructed narratives rather than individual records. To probe how people may share collective memories, we designed an immersive two-person workflow for collaboratively co-designing 3D artifacts and environments in virtual heritage locations, using Generative AI (GenAI) to instantiate these intangible memories. Observations of the co-creation process revealed that participants merged prompts and model placements when negotiating different perspectives. They used spatial operations to compose scenes, and also to express personal and embodied experiences of CH. When GenAI failed to meet their needs, participants engaged in creative appropriation, re-purposing unsatisfactory generated objects as sources of design inspiration to further shared narratives. While GenAI may have a homogenizing effect on CH expression, this work shows how people may overcome limitations in immersive collaborative workflows.

Cradle of Success is an interactive artwork that examines how human tendencies toward wishful thinking and stereotyping are transformed and amplified through interactions with Generative AI. Practices such as fortune-telling have long reflected desires to predict and control the future, often revealing underlying hopes, fears, and biases. As GenAI enters increasingly personal and social domains, these motivations are reframed through technological authority. In this installation, visitors select a baby photograph and a toy symbolizing a potential career. GenAI generates speculative life trajectories through videos and textual “fortunes,” exposing how societal stereotypes are reproduced and normalized through AI systems. Drawing inspiration from Japanese omikuji practices, visitors tie these AI-generated fortunes to a shrine-like structure, transforming biased predictions into moments of reflection. The work uses creativity as a critical lens to question how GenAI shapes notions of identity, destiny, and societal change.

Dreams are sources of inspiration for artists tapping into their subconscious states, but the uncertainty of fragmented elements and difficulty of recall make it challenging to harness dream-based inspiration for creative work. Generative AI shares a similar ambiguity with dreams, producing unexpected outputs that offer reinterpretation in the creative process. It suggests GenAI may help engage with such materials. To explore how artists work with dream content using GenAI, we held a four-week online residency with six artists including weekly sessions to process dream materials, followed by artistic creation for exhibition. Artists adapted their use of GenAI across stages: during early preparation, unexpected outputs were embraced as inspiration; during production, accuracy and coherence from GenAI were demanded. As artistic creation moves from abstract to concrete, GenAI shifts from inspirational reinterpretation to generative support. This work highlights differences in preparation and creative production when tapping into dreams for creativity.

The popularization of social media has led to increasing consumption of narrative content in byte-sized formats. Such micro-dramas contain fast-pace action and emotional cliffs, particularly attractive to emerging Chinese markets in platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou. Content writers for micro-dramas must adapt to fast-pace, audience-directed workflows, but previous research has focused instead on examining writers'experiences of platform affordances or their perceptions of platform bias, rather than the step-by-step processes through which they actually write and iterative content. In 28 semi-structured interviews with scriptwriters and writers specialized in micro-dramas, we found that the short-turn-around workflow leads to writers taking on multiple roles simultaneously, iteratively adapting to storylines in response to real-time audience feedback in the form of comments, reposts, and memes. We identified unique narrative styles such as AI-generated micro-dramas and audience-responsive micro-dramas. This work reveals audience interaction as a new paradigm for collaborative creative processes on social media.

Humans think visually—we remember in images, dream in pictures, and use visual metaphors to communicate. Yet, most creative writing tools remain text-centric, limiting how writers plan and translate ideas. We present Vistoria, a system for synchronized image-text co-editing in fictional story writing. A formative Wizard-of-Oz co-design study with 10 story writers revealed how sketches, images, and text serve as essential elements for ideation and organization. Drawing on theories of Instrumental Interaction, Vistoria introduces instrumental operations—Lasso, Collage, Perspective Shift, and Filter that enable seamless narrative exploration across modalities. A controlled study with 12 participants shows that co-editing enhances expressiveness, immersion, and collaboration, opening space for writers to follow divergent story directions and craft more vivid, detailed narratives. While multimodality increased cognitive demand, participants reported stronger senses of ownership and agency. These findings demonstrate how multimodal co-editing expands creative potential by balancing abstraction and concreteness in narrative development.

Chatbots are increasingly applied to domains previously reserved for human actors. One such domain is comedy, whereby both the general public working with ChatGPT and research-based LLM-systems have tried their hands on making humor. In formative interviews with professional comedians and video analyses of stand-up comedy in humans, we found that human performers often use their ethnic, gender, community, and demographic-based identity to enable joke-making. This suggests whether the identity of AI itself can empower AI humor generation for human audiences. We designed a machine-identity-based agent that uses its own status as AI to tell jokes in online performance format. Studies with human audiences (N=32) showed that machine-identity-based agents were seen as funnier than baseline-GPT agent. This work suggests the design of human-AI integrated systems that explicitly utilize AI as its own unique identity apart from humans.

In human conversation, empathic dialogue requires nuanced temporal cues indicating whether the conversational partner is paying attention. This type of "active listening"is overlooked in the design of Conversational Agents (CAs), which use the same pacing for one conversation. To model the temporal cues in human conversation, we need CAs that dynamically adjust response pacing according to user input. We qualitatively analyzed ten cases of active listening to distill five context-aware pacing strategies: Reflective Silence, Facilitative Silence, Empathic Silence, Holding Space, and Immediate Response. In a between-subjects study (N=50) with two conversational scenarios (relationship and career-support), the context-aware agent scored higher than static-pacing control on perceived human-likeness, smoothness, and interactivity, supporting deeper self-disclosure and higher engagement. In the career-support scenario, the CA yielded higher perceived listening quality and affective trust. This work1 shows how insights from human conversation like context-aware pacing can empower the design of more empathic human-AI communication. © 2026 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

Human–robot creative collaboration is often constrained by command–response paradigms that position robots as tools rather than partners. While expressive robotics has shown social values, its role and behaviors in shaping creative partnerships with humans remains underexplored. Therefore, we investigate how robots’ expressive behaviors influence co-creative engagement. In a formative study with 5 participants, we identified design insights for users to perceive a robot arm’s expressive behaviors. We then implemented these expressive behaviors and conducted a within-subject study with 18 participants, comparing functional-only and expressive conditions in figure drawing tasks. Results showed that expressive behaviors significantly enhanced human-robot collaboration where they shifted from viewing the robot as a tool to a partner with a stronger emotional connection and collaborative satisfaction. Our contributions include empirical evidence of partnership transformation and design insights for facilitating human-robot creative collaboration.

While public discourse often reduces Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) to stereotypes that overlook the invisible struggles of those who live with it, ADHD people are increasingly using social media to express their experiences on their own terms. On platforms like Instagram, memes have become a powerful and accessible medium for expressing everyday challenges through humor and relatability. This study analyzed 350 ADHD-related memes and over 28,000 associated comments to explore how ADHD was expressed and engaged with in online spaces, and consulted a neurodevelopmental science and clinical researcher. Findings show that memes depict behavioral inconsistencies, internal conflicts, and societal pressures, while comments reveal strong resonance, personal identification, and peer support, including informal self-diagnosis and shared experiences. By combining meme and comment analyses, this study contributes to digital mental health research by demonstrating how memes serve as an interactional mechanism for neurodivergent storytelling and identity formation and informing future platform design.

People who experienced near-death events often turn to personal expression as a way of processing trauma and articulating beliefs. While scholars have examined how individuals share near-death experiences (NDEs), limited research has explored how these narratives are communicated collaboratively on today’s social media platforms. We analyzed 200 randomly sampled TikTok videos tagged with #nde and related hashtags. Content analysis revealed that individuals often use NDE narratives to articulate personal meaning, with spiritual and religious themes appearing in the majority of posts and serving as a means of exploring and making sense of personal spiritual perspectives. Consistent with this, analyses of comment sections reveal that videos containing spiritual themes tend to attract more engagement and foster deeper conversations around faith and meaning. Our findings offer insights into how online platforms facilitate community-level engagement with spirituality, and suggest implications for design of spaces that support shared expression and connection in specialized communities.

LLM-assisted technologies are increasingly used to support cognitive processing and information interpretation, yet their role in aiding memory recall—and how people choose to engage with them—remains underexplored. We studied participants who watched a short robbery video (approximating a one-time eyewitness scenario) and composed recall statements using either a default GPT or a guided GPT prompted with a standardized eyewitness protocol. Results show that default-condition participants who believed they had a clearer understanding of the event were more likely to trust GPT’s output, whereas guided-condition participants showed stronger alignment between subjective clarity and actual recall. Additionally, participants evaluated the legitimacy of the individuals in the incident differently across conditions. Interaction analysis further revealed that default-GPT users spontaneously developed diverse strategies, including building on existing recollections, requesting potentially missing details, and treating GPT as a recall coach. This work shows how GPT–user interplay subconsciously affects beliefs and perceptions of remembered events.

Sustainable Development Goals are currently universal objectives in all domains of engineering. Nevertheless, design for this global mission is exceedingly intricate and nearly surpasses the limits of human capability. Industrial and academic communities have devoted considerable of effort to developing new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), as new design tools. Generative AI is the latest advancement among these tools, which can empower human designers with its capability to process massive amount of data from diverse sources and recast it in a comprehensible form. Despite the heated discussion on the relationship between creative innovation and frontier technologies, little attention has been paid to empowering young designers with the new skills of the AI era. Therefore, this study conducted a two-week design workshop to explore the interaction between generative AI tools and novice designers, especially in shaping their AI self-efficacy and design thinking process of novice designers.

Visitors to Urban Cultural Heritage (UCH) often encounter official narratives but not the imaginations and relationships shaping its intangible aspects. Existing immersive experiences emphasize historical realities, overlooking personal and collective imaginations that shift with rapid development. To address this, we designed an Extended Reality (XR) experience around eight Hong Kong landmarks, enabling transitions between virtual and mixed-reality environments where users explore UCH narratives across past, present, and future. These narratives integrate (1) historical documentation with 360° visualizations and (2) images created in workshops supported by Generative AI tools. A mixed-method study with 24 participants examined their experiences and reflections. Results revealed deep immersion in both real and imagined worlds, as well as personal reinterpretations of UCH. This work demonstrates how XR can blend reality and imagination within one immersive experience and highlights design implications for archiving human imagination as an intangible form of cultural heritage.

Traditional methods for raising awareness of privacy protection often fail to engage users or provide hands-on insights into how privacy vulnerabilities are exploited.To address this, we incorporate an adversarial mechanic in the design of the dialogue-based serious game Cracking Aegis.Leveraging LLMs to simulate natural interactions, the game challenges players to impersonate characters and

Figure 1: This figure summarizes the process of this study in probing adaptation strategies for social isolation through an immersive virtual experience.(Left) Participants described how they modified and adapted their isolation private rooms in a virtual spaceflight experience.(Center) Participants engaged in collaborative storytelling, proposing individual or cooperative adaptation methods.(Right) Seven days later, in a follow-up interview, we found that the immersive virtual experience inspired participants' self-regulation and real-world isolation adaptation.

This qualitative paper examines the needs of residents to remember a local cultural heritage site collaboratively.The study observes and then designs for intangible affordances supporting this memory recall using the photo-elicitation method with generative artificial intelligence imagery.Specifically, collaboration was observed when editing a panoramic photograph using generative artificial intelligence.These instances were rare, and were analyzed to highlight intangible affordances aiding collaborative memory recall and content creation.Afterward, five examples were correlated to influence the design of an immersive and responsive 360° theatre system using specific combinations of artificial intelligence models to aid subjective recall.In this immersive space, storyteller preferences for edited content are finally made available for new users, thereby affording new collaborative storytelling about a cultural heritage site.As a contribution, this study aids the work of designers and sociologists by showing the photo-elicitation method's crossdisciplinary relevance to designing for collaborative, yet intangible storytelling affordances.

Figure 1: Traditional Performing arts theatre experience versus screen-based video watching experience versus Spatial Interaction-based Segmented-Audio (SISA) prototype experience.(Left) Traditional performance, though sensory engaging and immersive, requires physical attendance at theatre venues, extended passive listening, and relies on conventional practitioner enactment, highlighting fundamental constraints in ICH engagement and preservation.(Middle) Screen-based videos provides temporal flexibility but still lacks immersive engagement essential for authentic cultural appreciation.(Right) Our SISA prototype enables active audience participation through spatial interactions with segmented audio elements in an immersive environment.

Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) like traditional culinary practices face increasing pressure to adapt to globalization while maintaining their cultural authenticity.Centuries-old traditions in Chinese cuisine are subject to rapid changes for adaptation to contemporary tastes and dietary preferences.The preservation of these cultural practices requires approaches that can enable ICH practitioners to reimagine and recreate ICH for modern contexts.To address this, we created workshops where experienced practitioners of traditional Chinese cuisine co-created recipes using GenAI tools and realized the dishes.We found that GenAI inspired ICH practitioners to innovate recipes based on traditional workflows for broader audiences and adapt to modern dining contexts.However, GenAIinspired co-creation posed challenges in maintaining the accuracy of original ICH workflows and preserving traditional flavors in the culinary outcomes.This study offers implications for designing human-AI collaborative processes for safeguarding and enhancing culinary ICH.

Rapid changes in social networks have transformed the way people express themselves, turning past neologisms, values, and mindsets embedded in these expressions into online heritage.How can we preserve these expressions as cultural heritage?Instead of traditional archiving methods for static material, we designed an interactive and experiential form of archiving for Chinese social networks.Using dialogue data from 2000-2010 on early Chinese social media, we developed a GPT-driven agent within a retro chat interface, emulating the language and expression style of the period for interaction.Results from a qualitative study with 18 participants show that the design captures the past chatting experience and evokes memory flashbacks and nostalgia feeling through conversation.Participants, particularly those familiar with the era, adapted their language to match the agent's chatting style.This study explores how the design of preservation methods for digital experiences can be informed by experiential representations supported by generative tools.

The use of motion capture in live dance performances has created an emerging discipline enabling dancers to play different avatars on the digital stage. Unlike classical workflows, avatars enable performers to act as different characters in customized narratives, but research has yet to address how movement, improvisation, and perception change when dancers act as avatars. We created five avatars representing differing genders, shapes, and body limitations, and invited 15 dancers to improvise with each in practice and performance settings. Results show that dancers used avatars to distance themselves from their own habitual movements, exploring new ways of moving through differing physical constraints. Dancers explored using gender-stereotyped movements like powerful or feminine actions, experimenting with gender identity. However, focusing on avatars can coincide with a lack of continuity in improvisation. This work shows how emerging practices with performance technology enable dancers to improvise with new constraints, stepping outside the classical stage.

Unsustainable behaviors are challenging to prevent due to their long-term, often unclear consequences. Serious games offer a promising solution by creating artificial environments where players can immediately experience the outcomes of their actions. To explore this potential, we developed EcoEcho, a GenAI-powered game leveraging multimodal agents to raise sustainability awareness. These agents engage players in natural conversations, prompting them to take in-game actions that lead to visible environmental impacts. We evaluated EcoEcho using a mixed-methods approach with 23 participants. Results show a significant increase in intended sustainable behaviors post-game, although attitudes towards sustainability had only marginal effects, suggesting that in-game actions likely can motivate intended real world behaviors despite similar opinions on sustainability. This finding highlights multimodal agents and action-consequence mechanics to effectively raising sustainability awareness and the potential of motivating real-world behavioral change. © 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools are transforming creative practices, yet their role in game poem design remains largely unexplored. Game poems serve as a bridge between interactive artwork and design for engagement. Although game poems themselves are a small genre, they serve as a microcosm for exploring how AI influences minimal, expressive, and human-centric design. This research was based on ten student-made game poems with GenAI tools. Using qualitative analysis, this study explores how student designers navigate, integrate, and revise GenAI in game poem making. Analysis of the ten included student projects demonstrates that the influence of GenAI accelerates technical implementation and ideation scaffolding, but human authorship and emotional intention play a vital role in game poem design. Students simultaneously engaged in iterative prompting, Human Creative Override, and manual curation to negotiate GenAI’s outputs.

Curators face challenges in selecting, ideating, coordinating, and publicizing exhibited works. Recent advances in GenAI has shaped the role of curators in the exhibition design and production process, leading to new adaptations in the exploration, design, planning, and dissemination phases. To explore the impact of GenAI on curatorial practice, we interviewed 13 curators and followed an additional 3 curators in real-world online exhibition production process. We found that GenAI can support theme selection, space design, topic research, artwork selection, and element production. However, GenAI may also stifling critical thinking, perpetuate inaccuracies, leading to fragmented workflows, misperceptions of feasbility, and concerns about copyright. The effectiveness of GenAI tools often depends on the curator’s understanding of their roles and limitations. This work offer practical design recommendations for curators and suggest future research to design for adopting the use of GenAI in technology-mediated curatorial workflows.

Dancers often prototype movements themselves or with each other during improvisation and choreography. How are these interactions altered when physically manipulable technologies are introduced into the creative process? To understand how dancers design and improvise movements while working with instruments capable of non-humanoid movements, we engaged dancers in workshops to co-create movements with a robot arm in one-human-to-one-robot and three-human-to-one-robot settings. We found that dancers produced more fluid movements in one-to-one scenarios, experiencing a stronger sense of connection and presence with the robot as a co-dancer. In three-to-one scenarios, the dancers divided their attention between the human dancers and the robot, resulting in increased perceived use of space and more stop-and-go movements, perceiving the robot as part of the stage background. This work highlights how technologies can drive creativity in movement artists adapting to new ways of working with physical instruments, contributing design insights supporting artistic collaborations with non-humanoid agents.

Visitors to cultural heritage sites often encounter official information, while local people's unofficial stories remain invisible. To explore expression of local narratives, we conducted a workshop with 20 participants utilizing Generative AI (GenAI) to support visual narratives, asking them to use Stable Diffusion to create images of familiar cultural heritage sites, as well as images of unfamiliar ones for comparison. The results revealed three narrative strategies and highlighted GenAI's strengths in illuminating, amplifying, and reinterpreting personal narratives. However, GenAI showed limitations in meeting detailed requirements, portraying cultural features, and avoiding bias, which were particularly pronounced with unfamiliar sites due to participants' lack of local knowledge. To address these challenges, we recommend providing detailed explanations, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning AI models to reduce uncertainties, using objective references to mitigate inaccuracies from participants' inability to recognize errors or misconceptions, and curating datasets to train AI models capable of accurately portraying cultural features.

Effectively mitigating online misinformation requires understanding of their mechanisms and learning of practical skills for identification and counteraction. Serious games may serve as tools for combating misinformation, teaching players to recognize common misinformation tactics, and improving their skills of discernment. However, current interventions are designed as single-player, choice-based games, which present players with limited predefined choices. Such restrictions reduce replayability and may lead to an overly simplistic understanding of misinformation and how to debunk them. This study seeks to empower people to understand opinion-influencing and misinformation-debunking processes. We created a Player vs. Player (PvP) game in which participants attempt to generate or debunk misinformation to convince the public opinion represented by LLM. Using a within-subjects mixed-methods study design (N=47), we found that this game significantly raised participants' media literacy and improved their ability to identify misinformation. Qualitative analyses revealed how participants' use of debunking and content creation strategies deepened their understanding of misinformation. This work shows the potential for illuminating contrasting viewpoints of social issues by LLM-based mechanics in PvP games.

Online dating is frequently used by individuals looking for potential relationships and intimate connections. Central to dating apps is the creation and refinement of a dating profile, which represents the way individuals desire to present themselves to potential mates, while hiding information they do not care to share. To investigate the way frequent users of dating apps construct their online profiles and perceive the effectiveness of strategies taken in making profiles, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 experienced users who are Chinese college-educated young adults and uncovered the processes and rationales by which they make profiles for online dating, particularly in selecting images for inclusion. We found that participants used idealized photos that exaggerated their positive personality traits, sometimes traits that they do not possess but perceive others to desire, and sometimes even traits they wish they had possessed. Users also strategically used photos that show personality and habits without showing themselves, and often hid certain identifying information to reduce privacy risks. This analysis signals potential factors that are key in building online dating profiles, providing design implications for systems that limit the use of inaccurate information while still promoting self-expression in relationship platforms.

Cultural Heritage is not just about tangible artifacts; it also includes intangible elements such as personal memories, community ties, and envisioned futures. Traditional museums and archives often emphasize physical items like architectural pieces and photos, while overlooking people’s personal and emotional connections to cultural heritage. To illustrate the personal connections people have with cultural heritage sites, we designed an exhibition that displayed images created by participants, which represent their perspectives and future visions of cultural heritage sites. The exhibition’s images, generated through GenAI, helped participants narratively describe cultural heritage locations, allowing them to express their visions of future threats like over-tourism and climate change on these sites. Contrary to constraints, co-creating with Generative AI associates participants with personal memories of cultural heritage, stimulating personal narratives and promoting deep reflection on cultural heritage preservation. The dissemination strategies we designed illustrate the use of GenAI to empower the expression of matters of cultural value beyond the physical.

It is difficult to tangibly feel climate change because it must be imagined into the future. The original cave painting in pre-historic times, too was an attempt to imagine the future in a creative space that we no longer understand. Generative AI (GenAI) serves as a tool for us today much as cave paintings were for pre-historic humans to imagine a climate future by interfacing our tools into drawings of our visions. TIME ENOUGH is a collective voice of today concerning the future narrated using GenAI, showing both how we envision challenges of the climate and how we may adapt to them in the future. These images and videos recreate a modern version of the age-old cave painting in the first truly creative space in human history, showing how our imaginations and anxieties of today are mere echoes of what concerned our ancestors from a seemingly remote time.

Dreams are a source of inspiration for writers, artists, and creative professionals for generations, but recent Generative AI (GenAI) tools make it possible to use natural language to record details of dreams in image form for creativity support. This workshop invites Creativity and Cognition participants working in creative fields with interest in recording and utilizing their dream materials to use GenAI to support their dream documentation. We aim to highlight the unique contribution of dream experiences to art and design inspiration and how it can be supported by technology. Participants bring their dream sketches or records for sharing, reinterpreting, and applying GenAI for visualization. Participants will use GenAI with partners to transcribe their dreams, then create an original visual story based on their own practice and the dream inspiration. The outcome is a hands-on experience with sharing dream inspiration and applying it to creative work, allowing participants to share their insights and enrich the emerging community of dream-supported creativity in HCI.

As drones become interwoven in human activities, increasingly taking on tasks interpreted as creative and performative, such as choreographed light shows, there is emerging interest in understanding how drones and humans can perform together. Humans have different habits when performing with partners as opposed to solo. How do people adapt their behaviors and perspectives when improvising with robotic partners? To explore these questions, we conducted a study investigating dancer-drone interactions using a system of micro aerial vehicles designed to facilitate improvised solo and partnered dances. Through solo and tandem dances with one or two robots, we analyzed the performers’ perceived workflow from semi-structured interviews and quantified their movement patterns during the improvisation. We found that the dancers perceived drone movements through spatial metaphors like the ceiling and gravity, anthropomorphizing drones as props on a stage through position and generated sound. The dancers felt a greater connection in single-drone scenarios and showed heightened avoidance behavior in two-drone situations. Our work shows how a robotic system can energize human dancers to improvise individually and in pairs.

Studies of Generative AI (GenAI)-assisted creative workflows have focused on individuals overcoming challenges of prompting to produce what they envisioned. When designers work in teams, how do collaboration and prompting influence each other, and how do users perceive generative AI and their collaborators during the co-prompting process? We engaged students with design or performance backgrounds, and little exposure to GenAI, to work in pairs with GenAI to create stage designs based on a creative theme. We found two patterns of collaborative prompting focused on generating story descriptions first, or visual imagery first. GenAI tools helped participants build consensus in the task, and allowed for discussion of the prompting strategies. Participants perceived GenAI as efficient tools rather than true collaborators, suggesting that human partners reduced the reliance on their use. This work highlights the importance of human-human collaboration when working with GenAI tools, suggesting systems that take advantage of shared human expertise in the prompting process.

Amidst the increasingly prevalent smartphone addiction, we introduce StayFocused, a mobile app to help people focus on their tasks at hand by reducing compulsive smartphone use. Besides guiding people to set focus sessions for non-screen time, we incorporated reflective prompts probing individuals’ phone-checking intentions whenever they check their phones and a chatbot to deliver these prompts. To examine the effects of the reflective prompts and the chatbot support, we designed three versions of StayFocused: baseline, reflection, and reflection-chatbot, and conducted a stage-based between-subjects study with 36 college students over five weeks. We found that participants who received the reflective prompts were able to focus longer and resist distractions, and those with chatbot support seemed to better maintain their smartphone use reduction. By highlighting how participants reflected on their focus session activities and their preferences for the chatbot, we discuss the implications of designing persuasive conversational interfaces to reduce unintended behaviors.

Online dating has become a popular way for individuals to connect with potential romantic partners. Many dating apps use personal profiles that include a headshot and self-description, allowing users to present themselves and search for compatible matches. However, this traditional model often has limitations. In this study, we explore a non-traditional voice-based dating app called “Soul”. Unlike traditional platforms that rely heavily on profile information, Soul facilitates user interactions through voice-based communication. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 dedicated Soul users to investigate how they engage with the platform and perceive themselves and others in this unique dating environment. Our findings indicate that the role of voice as a moderator influences impression management and shapes perceptions between the sender and the receiver of the voice. Additionally, the synchronous voice-based and community-based dating model offers benefits to users in the Chinese cultural context. Our study contributes to understanding the affordances introduced by voice-based interactions in online dating in China.

Conventional methods of assessing attitudes towards climate change are limited in capturing authentic opinions, primarily stemming from a lack of context-specific assessment strategies and an overreliance on simplistic surveys. Game-based Assessments (GBA) have demonstrated the ability to overcome these issues by immersing participants in engaging gameplay within carefully crafted, scenario-based environments. Concurrently, advancements in AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) show promise in enhancing the gamified testing environment, achieving this by generating context-aware, human-like dialogues that contribute to a more natural and effective assessment. Our study introduces a new technique for probing climate change attitudes by actualizing a GPT-driven chatbot system in harmony with a game design depicting a futuristic climate scenario. The correlation analysis reveals an assimilation effect, where players’ post-game climate awareness tends to align with their in-game perceptions. Key predictors of pro-climate attitudes are identified as traits like ’Openness’ and ’Agreeableness’, and a preference for democratic values.

Robots are increasingly deployed in crowded, large-scale environments where the demands on their services can outweigh their ability to respond. When robots fail to respond, humans may interpret the unintended consequence negatively as a form of rejection, leading to a loss of trust. How do service robots recover from such rejection to remediate human trust due to perceived rejection? We created a task mimicking shopping malls where the robot arm is asked to provide coffee, juice, or tea to participants. When the robot rendered service elsewhere, participants reported feeling excluded and less trusting of the robot. When the robot subsequently apologized or provided promise of future favor, participants regained trust in the robot, with favor rendering yielding significantly more trust responses. This study highlights the importance of understanding inadvertently negative consequences of robot behaviors, and suggests design solutions for overcoming this negative perception through remediation strategies.

RAY LC's practice creates interaction environments for building bonds between humans and machines.He uses human-computer interaction and speculative narrative approaches in diverse media to probe the ways humans adapt to technologies and machines in the context of spatial environmental influences.

Character design in games involves interdisciplinary collaborations, typically between designers who create the narrative content, and illustrators who realize the design vision. However, traditional workflows face challenges in communication due to the differing backgrounds of illustrators and designers, the latter with limited artistic abilities. To overcome these challenges, we created Sketchar, a Generative AI (GenAI) tool that allows designers to prototype game characters and generate images based on conceptual input, providing visual outcomes that can give immediate feedback and enhance communication with illustrators' next step in the design cycle. We conducted a mixed-method study to evaluate the interaction between game designers and Sketchar. We showed that the reference images generated in co-creating with Sketchar fostered refinement of design details and can be incorporated into real-world workflows. Moreover, designers without artistic backgrounds found the Sketchar workflow to be more expressive and worthwhile. This research demonstrates the potential of GenAI in enhancing interdisciplinary collaboration in the game industry, enabling designers to interact beyond their own limited expertise.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are decentralized digital tokens to represent the unique ownership of items. Recently, NFTs have been gaining popularity and at the same time bringing up issues, such as scams, racism, and sexism. Decentralization, a key attribute of NFT, contributes to some of the issues that are easier to regulate under centralized schemes, which are intentionally left out of the NFT marketplace. In this work, we delved into this centralization-decentralization dilemma in the NFT space through mixed quantitative and qualitative methods. Centralization-decentralization dilemma is the dilemma caused by the conflict between the slogan of decentralization and the interests of stakeholders. We first analyzed over 30,000 NFT-related tweets to obtain a high-level understanding of stakeholders' concerns in the NFT space. We then interviewed 15 NFT stakeholders (both creators and collectors) to obtain their in-depth insights into these concerns and potential solutions. Our findings identify concerning issues among users: financial scams, counterfeit NFTs, hacking, and unethical NFTs. We further reflected on the centralization-decentralization dilemma drawing upon the perspectives of the stakeholders in the interviews. Finally, we gave some inferences to solve the centralization-decentralization dilemma in the NFT market and thought about the future of NFT and decentralization.

The cave painting was a creative space we no longer understand. What technologies of today can we use to understand our own concerns of a climate future analogous to the way pre-historic humans drew their conceptions onto the cave? HUMAN ENOUGH uses machine learning-generated visions of climate futures (Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, etc) and climate adaptions / potential solutions (ChatGPT) in a creative space (Gather) to reconstruct a modern analog of the age-old cave painting. It then constructs the machine visions into physical installed objects using recycled, organic, found materials from site-specific builds for physical exhibition. The outcome is a collective imagining of our climate future and our adaptions to it from a technological and material perspective.

Virtual exhibitions have long been regarded as an extension of information delivery for physical exhibitions. However, what virtual exhibitions can offer audiences as a novel experience independently from physical exhibitions has been largely unexplored. In this study, we aim to understand the promises and challenges of experiencing and curating exhibitions in VR by interviewing nine expert curators. Drawing from expert insights, we summarized a set of design guidelines to inform what we can learn and adapt from physical exhibitions when curating in VR. Then, using an autobiographical design approach, we curated an interactive exhibition in VRChat to explore novel interaction techniques. We also hosted an open tour guide in the user study to validate our design guidelines with thirty participants. Results show that our approach of curating an exhibition in VRChat provided the participants with engaging and novel experiences interacting with the exhibits and other audiences.

Increasingly popular social virtual reality (VR) platforms like VRChat created new ways for people to interact with each other, generating dedicated user communities with unique idioms of socializing in an alternative world. In VRChat, users frequently gather in front of mirrors en masse during online interactions. Understanding how user communities deal with the mirror’s unique interactions can generate insights for supporting communication in social VR. In this study, we investigated the mirror’s synergistic effect with avatars on behaviors and dedicated user conversational performance. Qualitative findings indicate that avatar-mediated communication through mirrors provides functions like ensuring synchronization of incarnations, increasing immersion, and enhancing idealized embodiment to express bolder behaviors anonymously. Quantitative studies show that while mirrors improve self-perception, it has a potentially adverse effect on conversational performance, similar to the role of self-viewing in video conferencing. Studying how users interact with mirrors in an immersive environment allows us to explore how digital environments affect spatialized interactions when transported from physical to digital domains.

Information access is one of the most significant challenges faced by d/Deaf signers due to a lack of sign language information. Given the challenges in machine-driven solutions, we seek to understand how d/Deaf communities can support the growth of sign language content. Based on interviews with 12 d/Deaf people in China, we found that d/Deaf videos, i.e., sign language videos created by and for d/Deaf people, can be crucial information sources and educational materials. Combining content analysis of 360 d/Deaf videos to better understand this type of video, we show how d/Deaf communities co-create information accessibility through collaboration in content creation online. We uncover two major challenges that creators need to address, e.g., difficulties in interpretation and inconsistent content qualities. We propose potential design opportunities and future research directions to support d/Deaf people’s needs for sign language content through collaboration within d/Deaf communities.

The increasing virtualization of the performance process has resulted in passive interactions between performer and audience based on the observing paradigm, but without the presence of in-person staging. We designed a more interactive paradigm of remote performance using a multimedia exhibition strategy where visitors can alter the environment of the performer's location by changing its music and lighting, whereas the performer can create engagement in the exhibition space by affecting a remote robotic arm. We conducted a case study with five participating performers, investigating their expectations, workflows, and perceptions before and after the performance-exhibition, and examining the video footage of their interactions with visitors to understand how they adapt and respond to this remote performance paradigm. We found that the robot arm was perceived as a mediating character with its own distinct identity, that musical changes have implicit behavioral effects on the performance, that lighting manipulations actively changed performer actions during improvisation, and that audiences appear to identify themselves and the robot as integral co-performers in this setup. This work provides insights into how performers learn to engage with audiences in novel distanced spaces and diverse interactive media, generating insights for future virtualized performative interactions beyond the classical stage metaphor.

The virtualization of traditionally in-person experiences has altered the workflows of performing arts communities, resulting in modifications to performance venues and alterations to expressiveness and interaction. 25 professional movement-based performers who have participated in both live and online performances were interviewed in order to determine how virtualization processes affected their practices and how they adapted to these changes. We discovered that performers viewed online performances as time-limited, non-interactive film recordings. Instead of avoiding distant venues, performers adapted to new limitations, inventing improvisation strategies in distracting environments and using time and technological constraints as creative constraints. To investigate how a distanced paradigm affects the live-action workflow of dancers, we staged a performance in which a dancer interacted with a robot in a remote location. The case study demonstrated that the performer modified her rehearsal techniques to work with remote technology and adapted to live interaction with a remote audience by visualizing unseen interactions. This study provides guidance for the design of interactive technology for virtual performances, taking into account the adaptation strategies that performers are currently employing to circumvent limitations of time, location, and absence.

Virtual reality (VR) has shown great potential in enhancing users’ empathy towards vulnerable populations. Previous work has demonstrated that navigation modes relaying different spatial information can affect a user’s presence and understanding. In this research, we designed a 360° VR video-based prototype environment to depict real-life scenarios of a refugee camp in Southern Bangladesh. Our study consists of 2 conditions: active (i.e., selecting thematic video clips freely) and passive (i.e., watching sequence-determined clips passively). Thirty-six participants evaluated the prototype’s usability and its effects on their empathy towards refugees. The results showed that active navigation resulted in higher kindness and usability scores. Finally, we provide empirical insights into navigation modes in future VR design. This research should help refugee groups receive more attention and promote recognition and empathy towards refugees and their families.

As robots become increasingly part of human social systems, how humans are psychologically affected by machine behaviors in groups such as ostracism and prejudice, becomes criteria for design. Parameters of Robot group can have an effect on the dynamics of robot-robot-human interaction. The cohesiveness of robot groups, termed entitativity, affects humans' willingness to engage with the group and alters their perception of threat and cooperativity. To investigate how group composition affects how people perceive negative social intent from robots, we showed subjects videos of various ways humans are socially rejected by robots under high and low entitativity conditions. The results reveal that when robotic groups are less cohesive, the sense of rejection is greater, implying that humans experience increased anxiety over being rejected by more diverse sets of machines. Understanding the social consequences of robot group dynamics can assist us in avoiding unanticipated negative affects caused by machines.

Arguments for and against action in regards to climate change are deeply rooted in predetermined emotional responses, making it difficult to counter climate change denial armed only with objective data and scientific evidence. Interactive games, however, can engage people on an unconscious level, by promoting causes that align with the player's intrinsic motivations in the interaction. Instead of argumentation and data, we created a game exhibit that promotes the values that align with pro-climate action without explicitly persuading for climate action. We designed Chikyuchi based on the purpose of caring for a nonhuman entity that represents nature, engaging antagonistic viewpoints like climate change denial indirectly. The game uses the guise of a Tamagotchi to enable audiences to take pro-climate actions metaphorically in the interaction with the avatar. Audiences understand the game as communicating care-taking in the context of the environment as opposed to a physical intervention in depletion of resource. They also collaborate in taking pro-social actions using the game instrument, sharing their purpose on a human level as opposed to debating about policy.

Older adults' technology learning is a long-term process, during which family members often play significant roles. Although much research has emphasized how family support is important, little research has dove into the evolution of family dynamics when older adults are learning to use new technology. Drawing on the results from a qualitative study that performed semi-structured interviews with 20 older adults and 18 younger adults in China, we unpack how family members were involved in technology learning over time. Our findings suggest that younger family members play transformative roles throughout older adults' learning stages, i.e., as influencers, supporters, protectors, and monitors. Younger family members' roles co-evolve with not only older adults' changing needs but also their perceptions of older adults' learning abilities and online behaviors. They may struggle to adjust their teaching strategies to accommodate older adults' needs and abilities during the process. They may also worry about older adults' online benefits and safety as many older adults become far more active online than anticipated. Challenges while teaching and tensions regarding protection may thus emerge during the support process. With these findings, we suggest that older adults' technology learning should be treated as a collaborative activity with family members rather than an activity they pursue alone. We also highlight older adults' technology learning as a recurrent, dynamic, and evolving process, and call attention to the unique culture of "xiaoshun" in China that acts as a buffer to the burdens and tensions found with family support.

Most robots are unclothed. However, we believe that robot clothes present an underutilized opportunity for the field of designing interactive systems. Clothes can help robots become better robots––by helping them be useful in a new, wider array of contexts, or better adapt and function in the contexts they are already in. In this paper, we provide a foundation for a research area of robot clothing by speculating on its potential. We systematically present functional requirements of robot clothing, considerations, and parameters for robot clothing designers, as well as key reference cases of robots in clothes. We then discuss what robot clothes can do specifically for the field of designing interactive systems.

The complexity of tasks and computations undertaken by machines has grown exponentially. In order to communicate these complexities to humans working with machines, these machines must be programmed to express themselves in forms that humans can understand, not merely with procedures and numbers, but with intentions, expressive gestures that communicate emotion, and interactions that form stories, all of which can be more intuitively grasped by humans. I explored machine gestures for communicating personality and narratives by building a “shy” lamp that looks away when humans gaze closely, and follows human faces when they're far away. I followed by building a group of machines that all direct their gaze at the human unless she looks away, at which time they continue performing a skit. Artistic interventions with audiences shows playful interactions that depend on placement of the camera, showing a way of communicating machine personality using playful face-detection-based interactions.