With the increasing emphasis on real-world applications of Extended Reality (XR), the field faces growing challenges in creating meaningful, user-centred, and ethical experiences. Understanding how human values have been considered in prior research is essential for ensuring that future XR experiences are designed with a deep awareness of human needs, behaviours, and cultural contexts. This study presents a systematic review of human values in the extant XR literature. It aims to address which values have been explored, how they have been studied, and why they have been considered in XR contexts. We report findings on authors' research motivations, approaches to studying values, application domains, forms of technology, target groups and associated values, as well as identified directions for future research. Based on these findings, we propose a structured analysis that synthesises key trends and gaps, providing a foundation for future research to advance more inclusive, ethically grounded, and context-aware XR design.

Current mixed reality (MR) designs predominantly prioritise functionality and usability, often overlooking individual's diverse value needs. To create more meaningful MR experiences, this paper aims to address this gap by exploring how human values can be integrated into MR design. We propose a values-based design process and evaluate it through three design workshops considering a remote collaborative learning scenario. By comparing our approach to an existing MR application for collaborative learning, we demonstrate how embedding human values into MR design can lead to more ethical and human-centred outcomes. Our findings contribute to advancing the design and application of MR technologies to be more aligned with people's diverse needs and values.

In low-and middle-income countries like India, people with severe mental illness (PSMI) rely on their families as a primary source of care, given the lack of support from healthcare systems. The demanding nature of caregiving places significant physical and mental demands on caregivers, who are the primary source of support to PSMI. We explore how caregivers in under-resourced settings can be better supported through everyday digital technologies. We conducted interviews with caregivers (from urban and rural India), as well as workshops with professionals from Indian NGOs that work directly with PSMIs. We found that technology has the potential to (1) provide carer-centred support that empowers carers who experience stigma and issues with existing support networks; (2) provide support for carers to overcome barriers and progress in the recovery of the PSMI. We conclude with design considerations, proposing how an online peer community can leverage carers’ expertise to actualise support provision.

Online self-presentation is recognized as a global phenomenon largely influenced by and sensitive to users’ cultural norms. However, incorporating cultural understanding into the design process can be challenging. Designing for culture creates dilemmas between designing for a pre-existing cultural ‘status quo’ or for cultural change. We argue that culturally sensitive design should not be a tool for (i) perpetuating existing cultural inequalities or (ii) empowering the individual isolated from their wider cultural milieu. We propose “designing for culturally sensitive cultural change”—a process in which we support creating a trajectory departing from the status quo, to bridge the gap between people's aspirations and practices related to cultural change. We demonstrate this in a case study on designing for Saudi women's self-presentation in digital media. We conclude with reflections on cultural sensitivity in designing for cultural change and broader implications for HCI.

It is widely acknowledged in HCI that culture is embodied in many aspects of an individual's identity and interaction with technology. Whilst existing cultural models have been criticized for providing a deterministic view of culture, alternative methods for incorporating culture in design remain scarce. We introduce the use of Qualitative Secondary Analysis (QSA) as a bottom-up approach to construct a richer and more dynamic understanding of culture to inform our best practices in Cross-Cultural Design. We demonstrate the use of QSA within a culturally specific context, namely Saudi transnationals. We draw upon two case studies (with 55 participants) to investigate the cultural factors underpinning our participants views. We conclude with a reflection on key affordances and challenges of QSA, illustrating how QSA can be leveraged to unravel otherwise overlooked knowledge present in many qualitative HCI studies.

Values are an integral part of human identity and have a pervasive impact upon human behavior. This makes understanding them a central concern in the design of technology, as exemplified by approaches such as Value Sensitive Design ("VSD"). Identifying and concreting the values held by a given population can be a difficult endeavor, especially where there is a cultural barrier limiting an effective discussion of them, for example in societies where freedom of expression is discouraged. Addressing this concern requires an in-depth consideration of appropriate value elicitation methods, which responds to the fact that it is not possible to understand values detached from their cultural context. We introduce a novel implicit method, Scenario Co-Creation Cards, and show how it can be used to incorporate existing models of culture in the value elicitation process. We demonstrate this in a case study of Saudi women's visibility in the digital media.