Escape rooms are traditionally in-person activities that foster collaboration. Augmented reality (AR) enables these experiences to extend into distributed (all participants separated) and hybrid settings (both co-located and remote) while retaining embodied, physically grounded play. This study examines how players communicate and collaborate in an AR escape room across different spatial configurations, and how design choices affect situation awareness, engagement, and social connection. We developed an AR application for distributed escape room play and evaluated it with 19 participants in eight groups. Findings show how participants dynamically appropriated multimodal communication channels and leveraged embodied interactions for coordination. However, they also faced challenges with maintaining situation awareness across spaces, balancing enforced collaboration with individual engagement, and ensuring equitable participation, particularly for remote or information-giving players. With these insights, we discuss design implications for creating more engaging and socially connected distributed and hybrid AR experiences through multimodal communication support, flexible embodied interaction, and equitable collaborative mechanisms.

Creative workflows increasingly rely on technological support, yet less is known about how creators navigate the complex collaborative ecosystems and what roles technology might play in supporting these ecosystems. We investigate podcast production as a case to understand collaborative creative practices and identify opportunities for future technology design. Through diary study and interviews with 14 podcast creators, we examine how teams navigate complex stakeholder ecosystems involving distributed teams, episodic guests, multi-tiered audiences, and networks. Our findings reveal three underlying tensions that lead to frictions in current collaborative creation practices: fragmentation vs. coherence in creative coordination, structure vs. spontaneity in live production, and intimacy vs. scale in listener engagement. We outline design opportunities for technology roles to address these tensions: a Story Architect synthesizing fragmented inputs while preserving accessibility, a Live Collaborator providing real-time support during work, and a Feedback Proxy simulating audience feedback at scale. This work contributes a rich empirical foundation for designing technology that reduces social coordination burden while preserving authentic creative relationships in collaborative creation.

When families live in the same home, they feel a sense of connection through the subtle, passive aspects of family life. Over distance, these passive aspects are hard to experience as most communication technologies support sharing conversations or activities. Through a research-through-design methodology, we explored the design of smart home technologies for passive co-presence over distance. Based on our design explorations, we arrived at an interaction space which includes the dimensions of Activity, Solitude, Synchronicity, and Spontaneity. Our research-through-design process additionally resulted in the design of two smart home systems. The There Chair employs the senses of touch and sight to passively display when a remote family member is sitting at the dining room table. The Fragrance Frame is a paired picture frame that detects when a remote family member is passing by their frame, and emits a scent reminiscent of togetherness. We reflect on our design decisions and propose considerations for future design.

Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a transformative technology to revolutionize education, socialization, and entertainment. However, alongside its promising applications, concerns about potential risks, particularly for young children, have surfaced. We conducted a survey and interview study with 55 parents and 67 children aged 7-13, to identify ethical concerns and design considerations for VR usage in youth populations. This study contributes to the HCI community by providing empirical insights into the ethical concerns surrounding children’s VR usage, as viewed from both children’s and their parents’ perspectives. These insights stem directly from their perceptions of the risks, benefits, and considerations associated with VR across various usage scenarios. Additionally, our research offers valuable design and research implications for the development of responsible VR practices that balance the advantages and potential risks for children and their families.

Virtual reality (VR) offers promise in education given its immersive and socially engaging nature, but it can pose challenges for educators when creating VR-specific content. VR videos can function as a new educational tool for VR content creation due to their creation affordability and user-friendliness. However, little empirical research exists on how educators utilize VR videos and associated pedagogy in real classes. Our research employed a contextual inquiry, through in-person interviews and online surveys with 11 instructors to gain actionable insights from envisioned teaching scenarios for VR videos that are informed by actual instructional practices. Our study aims to understand the factors that motivate instructors’ adoption of VR videos, identify challenges educators face when incorporating VR videos into instructional units, and examine pedagogical adjustments when integrating VR videos into teaching. Through empirical evidence, we provide design implications for the development of VR-based learning experiences across diverse educational contexts. Our study also serves as a practical case of how VR can be adopted and integrated into education.

Collaborative play not only provides entertainment but also nurtures connections and strengthens community ties. In family and intergenerational contexts, collaborative activities and play can engage family members in quality conversations and meaningful connections over distance. To explore participants' preferences, practices, and interaction dynamics when playing remotely, we conducted a design probe study with 15 groups of parents and children from 16 families. Our findings highlight both similarities and notable differences in the use of communication methods, workspaces, and objects between parents and children. Specifically, we observed distinct patterns in gestural and verbal communication and identified specific challenges encountered by children in a simulated remote setting. Our findings also revealed the dynamics of play sessions, particularly when co-located participants are involved, shedding light on the complexities of remote intergenerational communication and play. Our work contributes empirical insights into designing more effective and engaging remote collaborative platforms for families.

Organizations often send bulk emails to employees to make them aware of policy changes, organization plans, and events. Many of these emails, however, are long digests with many separate messages that waste employees' time and reduce their awareness. This study introduces CommTool--a prototype tool to help organizational communicators better understand their emails' performance and cost. We first interviewed 5 communicators and identified the need to measure the performance of each message within bulk email. Then we iteratively designed and deployed an organizational bulk email evaluation platform (CommTool), which enables communicators to get diverse message-level metrics such as reading time, relevance rate, comments, etc. We evaluated these designs through a 2-month field deployment with 5 communicators and 149 organization employees. We found that 1) the message-level metrics, such as reading time and relevance rate, helped communicators understand their audience and design bulk emails; 2) the cost and reputation metrics did not influence the organization leaders' decisions. We summarize with suggestions on designing organizational bulk email evaluation platforms that provide message-level performance and cost information.

Prior work has explored various technology designs to support intergenerational communications and connections through remote activities such as reading or play. However, few works have explored these technologies outside the family settings. In this work, we aimed to understand how technology can support social connectedness through remote activities, by investigating the use of a tablet-based AR system among older adult volunteers and students for remote reading. We developed the system based on insights from previous research, deployed the system in the field, and observed the use of the system over six months. With the data collected from the field, we present a rich description on the use of the system and the practices that emerged around its usage in a real-world setting. Our findings highlight the importance of supporting an engaging reading experience and context understanding for social connections with the technology design. We provide insights into how such technology can support intergenerational communication and foster social connectedness.

Siblings play a crucial and long-lasting role in family connections and relationships. However, with the older sibling transitioning out of their parental home, maintaining a close sibling relationship can be challenging, especially if siblings have a large age difference. We conducted a diary and interview study with nine families in China which have spaced siblings, to identify design opportunities for technology to better support their communication and connection needs. We contribute to the HCI community in three aspects. First, we contribute an empirical understanding of current communication patterns from distributed families with large age gap siblings in China. Second, we identify current facilitation roles, practices, and challenges regarding sibling relationships from different stakeholders’ perspectives. Last but not least, we present technological opportunities for supporting the large-gap sibling relationship, informing directions for future research and design for distributed families.

The spread of COVID-19 has encouraged the practice of using video conferencing for family doctor appointments. Existing applications and off-the-shelf devices face challenges in dealing with capturing the correct view of patients' bodies and supporting ease of use. We created Dr.’s Eye, a video conferencing prototype to support varying types of body exams in home settings. With our prototype, we conducted a study with participants using mock appointments to understand the simultaneous use of the camera and display and to get insights into the issues that might arise in real doctor appointments. Results show the benefits of providing more flexibility with a decoupled camera and display, and privacy protection by limiting the camera view. Yet, challenges remain in maneuvering two devices, presenting feedback for the camera view, coordinating camera work between the participant and the examiner, and reluctance towards showing private body regions. This inspires future research on how to design a video system for doctor appointments.

To better ground technical (systems) investigation and interaction design of cross-device experiences, we contribute an in-depth survey of existing multi-device practices, including fragmented workflows across devices and the way people physically organize and configure their workspaces to support such activity. Further, this survey documents a historically significant moment of transition to a new future of remote work, an existing trend dramatically accelerated by the abrupt switch to work-from-home (and having to contend with the demands of home-at-work) during the COVID-19 pandemic. We surveyed 97 participants, and collected photographs of home setups and open-ended answers to 50 questions categorized in 5 themes. We characterize the wide range of multi-device physical configurations and identify five usage patterns, including: partitioning tasks, integrating multi-device usage, cloning tasks to other devices, expanding tasks and inputs to multiple devices, and migrating between devices. Our analysis also sheds light on the benefits and challenges people face when their workflow is fragmented across multiple devices. These insights have implications for the design of multi-device experiences that support people’s fragmented workflows.

Prior research has highlighted opportunities for technology to better support the tabletop game experience in offline and online settings, but little work has focused on the social aspect of tabletop gaming. We investigated the social and collaborative aspects of tabletop gaming in the unique context of “social distancing” during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic to shed light on the experience of remote tabletop gaming. With a multi-method qualitative approach (including digital ethnography and in-depth interviews), we empirically studied how people appropriate existing technologies and adapt their offline practices to play tabletop games remotely. We identify three themes that describe people's game and social experience during remote play: creating a shared tabletop environment (shared space), enabling a collective understanding (shared information and awareness), and facilitating a communal temporal experience (shared time). We reflect on challenges and design opportunities for a better experience in the age of remote collaboration.

Artificial intelligence algorithms have been used to enhance a wide variety of products and services, including assisting human decision making in high-stake contexts. However, these algorithms are complex and have trade-offs, notably between prediction accuracy and fairness to population subgroups. This makes it hard for designers to understand algorithms and design products or services in a way that respects users' goals, values, and needs. We proposed a method to help designers and users explore algorithms, visualize their trade-offs, and select algorithms with trade-offs consistent with their goals and needs. We evaluated our method on the problem of predicting criminal defendants' likelihood to re-offend through (i) a large-scale Amazon Mechanical Turk experiment, and (ii) in-depth interviews with domain experts. Our evaluations show that our method can help designers and users of these systems better understand and navigate algorithmic trade-offs. This paper contributes a new way of providing designers the ability to understand and control the outcomes of algorithmic systems they are creating.

Examining the values inherent in papers published at IDC provides a lens to our research community and informs the path of future research needs and opportunities. We conducted a content analysis of the values expressed in all full IDC papers between 2011 and 2019 and a survey with the first authors of 20% of these papers. We examine the types of IDC research contributions, the qualities and behaviors the research seeks to support in children, the role of the child and other stakeholders in the design process, the theories that inform IDC research, and the criteria that guide the technical design choices. We discuss the research contributions and the core value trends over the past two decades of IDC full published papers. We also present the ethical considerations central to the surveyed authors' work. Based on our analysis, we discuss implications and opportunities for future contributions, such as explicit attention to inclusivity in research, encouraging multidisciplinary collaborations, and expanding the qualities our community aims to support in children. These qualities include: focusing on children's sense of autonomy, agency, and empowerment; and children's participation in research as active creators of technology.

Youth content creators have been under-researched on video platforms such as Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, etc. In order to better understand the ways that technology could support youth as content creators we conducted a 30-week series of workshops with an intergenerational design team including pre-teen youth and undergraduate designers-in-training. Qualitative analysis of workshop videos and notes revealed underlying challenges in video creation related to the social dynamics of creating videos in groups. In line with previous work, we note that a primary motivation for using social media is to spend time with friends. We found that existing video technology reveals opportunities and challenges to support the collaboration and interaction that motivates youth creators. We offer illustrative designs of potential collaborations in video sharing technology and propose that some of the concerns of youth social media use could be addressed by incorporating more opportunities for social creation.

Community intergenerational mentorship offers an opportunity to address older adults' social isolation while providing valuable one-on-one or small group learning experiences for elementary school students. Current organizations that support this kind of engagement focus on in-person visits that place the burden of logistics and transportation on the older adult. However, as older adults become less independent while aging, coming to schools in person becomes more challenging. We present a qualitative analysis of current intergenerational mentorship practices to understand opportunities for technology to expand access to this experience. We highlight elements critical for building successful mentorship: the importance of relationship building between older adults and children during mentoring activities, the skills mentors acquired to carry out mentoring activities, and support needed from teachers and schools. We contribute a rich description of current intergenerational mentorship practices and provide insights for opportunities for novel HCI technologies in this context.

The pervasive availability of voice assistants may support children in finding answers to informational queries by removing the literacy requirements of text search (e.g., typing, spelling). However, most such systems are not designed for the specific needs and preferences of children and may struggle with understanding the intent of their questions. In our investigation, we observed 87 children and 27 adults interacting with three Wizard-of-Oz speech interfaces to arrive at answers to questions that required reformulation. We found that many children and some adults required help to reach an effective question reformulation. We report the common types of reformulations (both effective and ineffective ones). We also compared three versions of speech interfaces with different approaches to referring to itself (personification) and to the participant (naming personalization). We found that children preferred personified interfaces, but naming personalization did not affect preference. We connect our findings to implications for design of speech systems for families.