Autistic livestreamers use platforms like Twitch for social connection, self-expression, and community, but these spaces also impose ongoing social and emotional demands. Prior work has documented these experiences, but less is known about what autistic creators themselves envision for the tools and platforms they use. We address this gap through a Research through Design (RtD) co-design study with three autistic Twitch streamers, using speculative artefacts as discussion prompts to explore how participants reasoned about potential livestreaming technologies. Across three co-design activities, we identify three overarching tensions shaping autistic streaming practice: Expression versus Misinterpretation and Harm; Public Participation versus Control and Moderation; and Sustainable Practice versus Finite Energy. Our co-designers surfaced constraints, trade-offs, boundaries, and hesitations toward automation, and concerns about managing viewer expectations. This work contributes an account of co-design as a reflective practice with autistic livestreamers, showing how speculative artefacts can surface values, limits, and design reasoning around livestreaming technology.

We present perspectives from 10 autistic Twitch streamers regarding their experiences as livestreamers and how autism uniquely colors their experiences. Livestreaming offers a social online experience distinct from in-person, face-to-face communication, where autistic people tend to encounter challenges. Our reflexive thematic analysis of interviews with 10 participants showcases autistic livestreamers’ perspectives in their own words. Our findings center on the importance of having streamers establishing connections with other, sharing autistic identities, controlling a space for social interaction, personal growth, and accessibility challenges. In our discussion, we highlight the crucial value of having a medium for autistic representation, as well as design opportunities for streaming platforms to onboard autistic livestreamers and to facilitate livestreamers communication with their audience.

We interviewed 10 autistic livestreamers to understand their motivations for livestreaming on Twitch. Our participants explained that streaming helped them fulfill social desires by: supporting them in making meaningful social connections with others; giving them a safe space to practice social skills like “small talk”; and empowering them to be autistic role models and to share their true selves. This work offers an early report on how autistic individuals leverage livestreaming as a beneficial social platform while struggling with audience expectations.

Many instructors in computing and HCI disciplines use hands-on activities for teaching and training new skills. Beyond simply teaching hands-on skills like sketching and programming, instructors also use these activities so students can acquire tacit skills. Yet, current video-conferencing technologies may not effectively support hands-on activities in online teaching contexts. To develop an understanding of the inadequacies of current video-conferencing technologies for hands-on activities, we conducted 15 interviews with university-level instructors who had quickly pivoted their use of hands-on activities to an online context during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on our analysis, we uncovered four pedagogical goals that instructors have when using hands-on activities online and how instructors were unable to adequately address them due to the technological limitations of current video-conferencing tools. Our work provides empirical data about the challenges that many instructors experienced, and in so doing, the pedagogical goals we identify provide new requirements for video-conferencing systems to better support hands-on activities.

We present a mixed-methods study of viewers on their practices and motivations around watching mukbang — video streams of people eating large quantities of food. Viewers' experiences provide insight on future technologies for multisensorial video streams and technology-supported commensality (eating with others). We surveyed 104 viewers and interviewed 15 of them about their attitudes and reflections on their mukbang viewing habits, their physiological aspects of watching someone eat, and their perceived social relationship with mukbangers. Based on our findings, we propose design implications for remote commensality, and for synchronized multisensorial video streaming content.

We built a chatbot system–Audience Bot–that simulates an audience for novice live streamers to engage with while streaming. New live streamers on platforms like Twitch are expected to perform and talk to themselves, even while no one is watching. We ran an observational lab study on how Audience Bot assists novice live streamers as they acclimate to multitasking–simultaneously playing a video game while performing for a (simulated) audience.

Based on an analysis of 49 popular contemporary video games, we develop a descriptive framework of visual interaction cues in video games. These cues are used to inform players what can be interacted with, where to look, and where to go within the game world. These cues vary along three dimensions: the purpose of the cue, the visual design of the cue, and the circumstances under which the cue is shown. We demonstrate that this framework can also be used to describe interaction cues for augmented reality applications. Beyond this, we show how the framework can be used to generatively derive new design ideas for visual interaction cues in augmented reality experiences.

Remote collaborators working together on physical objects have difficulty building a shared understanding of what each person is talking about. Conventional video chat systems are insufficient for many situations because they present a single view of the object in a flattened image. To understand how this limited perspective affects collaboration, we designed the Remote Manipulator (ReMa), which can reproduce orientation manipulations on a proxy object at a remote site. We conducted two studies with ReMa, with two main findings. First, a shared perspective is more effective and preferred compared to the opposing perspective offered by conventional video chat systems. Second, the physical proxy and video chat complement one another in a combined system: people used the physical proxy to understand objects, and used video chat to perform gestures and confirm remote actions.

We present an observational study of physical prototype critique that highlights some of the challenges of communicating physical behaviors and materiality at a distance. Geographically distributed open hardware communities often conduct user feedback and peer critique sessions via video conference. However, people have difficulty using current video conferencing tools to demonstrate and critique physical designs. To examine the challenges of remote critique, we conducted an observational lab study in which participants critiqued pairs of physical prototypes (prosthetic hands) for a face-to-face or remote collaborator. In both conditions, participants' material experiences were an important part of their critique, however their attention was divided between interacting with the prototype and finding strategies to communicate `invisible' features. Based on our findings, we propose design implications for remote collaboration tools that support the sharing of material experiences and prototype critique.

Geo-data sets are built for use in geographical information systems (GIS). The data is modeled to suit the needs of data entry and visual representations. They are optimized for simplicity and speed of modification. These models do not lend themselves to efficiently produce enterprise reports. Hence, Geo-data sets can be very challenging to query and analyze. In this paper, we create a data warehouse (DW) for a geo-dataset to facilitate report generating processes. A data warehouse is attractive as the main repository of an organization's historical data and is optimized for reporting and analysis. For better understanding of the developed architecture, we cover the data warehouse construction process as well as the enterprise data model