HCI increasingly engages with the concept of time, with many studies focusing on how temporal relations are produced and reconfigured through computing technologies. However, less attention is paid to the impact of temporality on researchers themselves and specifically their capacity for ethical reflection and action. This paper explores the interplay between temporal features and ethical reflection in HCI research projects. Through a reflective multi-ethnography of nine research projects, we examine how temporal features can influence ethical capacity across the lifecycle of research. The study employs infrastructural and chronopolitical analysis (after Star and Sharma) and offers a range of considerations for researchers to help activate greater temporal awareness for everyday wisdom, to acknowledge temporal power, mobilise responsibility, counter isolation in interdisciplinarity, and promote collective action and dynamic methodologies for temporal research. The study responds to calls for more ethnographic approaches to temporality that address specific HCI needs and focus on practice.

Networking research often abstracts away the people who build, operate, and experience the Internet. Yet, human decisions shape what gets measured, which problems are prioritized, and how solutions are deployed. This paper argues that such human influence is foundational and deserves methodological attention. To do so, we discuss three well-known qualitative methods and approaches: participatory action research, ethnographic methods, and positionality as concrete ways of engaging with the social and operational realities that underlie technical systems. These approaches formalize processes that are commonly implicit in networking research, help surface questions that cannot be answered with traces alone, and make space for voices often left out of the research pipeline or are inadvertently concealed due to the lack of formal procedures to include them in our research methods. Ultimately, we argue for a broader understanding of legitimate, and sometimes informal, contributions to networking research—one that better reflects the human element of how the Internet is structured and is experienced.

Generative AI technologies are reshaping everyday environments by enabling multimodal interaction. As their ubiquity and agentic capacities grow, there is a pressing need to understand how these systems reshape human–computer interaction in relational, social, and systemic terms. We introduce a scenario-based design pack for investigating Human–GenAI relations. Grounded in assemblage theory and structured around a three-stage process—Prepare, Make, Reflect—the pack supports the prototyping, analysis, and critical reflection of emergent sociotechnical configurations. We evaluated the pack across three deployments: an ACM workshop (n=22), a multidisciplinary design session (n=20), and a university HCI class (n=260). Participants generated scenarios that surfaced relational issues of power, agency, visibility, and care. We contribute the design pack alongside an exploratory framework to advance relational enquiry into multimodal Human–GenAI relations, support more inclusive and socially responsive GenAI practices, and complement FATE approaches by grounding fairness, accountability, and transparency in lived, multimodal configurations.

Crowdsourced data collection is a scalable approach to collecting mobile broadband performance data across space. However, existing platforms for crowdsourced mobile broadband measurements are not designed to engage workers over time or space, which can lead to spatial misrepresentation and stale data. With the insight that games and play offer naturally engaging frameworks for users, we held five iterative, participatory design sessions with 11 participants to co-design a catalog of 11 game concepts that could be used to create more spatially representative mobile broadband data sets. Importantly, we found that while games varied substantially with respect to theme, all used a few common game mechanics to incorporate mobile broadband data collection into play. This indicates that a designed prototype might focus on offering a customizable gaming structure that would allow communities and individuals to create thematic content that could overlay onto a set of common mechanics that could support more representative geospatial data collection.

Native American communities are disproportionately affected by a number of behavioral health disparities, including higher rates of depression, substance abuse, and suicide. As mobile health (mHealth) interventions gain traction as methods for addressing these disparities, they continue to lack relevance to Native American youth. In an effort to explore the design of relevant behavioral mHealth intervention for Native American communities, we have developed ARORA (Amplifying Resilience Over Restricted Internet Access), a prototype behavioral mHealth intervention that has been co-designed with Native American youth, a community advisory board, and a clinical psychologist. In this paper, we qualitatively analyze our co-design and focus group sessions using a grounded theory approach and identify the key themes that Native American community members have identified as being critical components of relevant mHealth designs. Notably, we find that the Native American youth who participated in our focus groups desired a greater level of didactic interaction with cultural and behavioral health elements. We conclude with a discussion of the significant challenges we faced in our efforts to co-design software with Native American stakeholders and provide recommendations that might guide other HCI researchers and designers through challenges that arise during the process of cross-cultural design.