Mental health and well-being research increasingly recognizes the potential of data to support preventative care and foster meaningful sensemaking. However, traditional health data visualizations often overlook emotional depth, contextual relevance, and lived experiences. In response, four HCI researchers conducted a 35-day field study, examining their well-being data as participants and co-designers to reimagine their relationship with self-tracking technologies and health data representations. Grounded in participatory, soma-inspired, and design fiction principles, this study encouraged participants to move beyond passive data consumption through creative experimentation, embedding personal experiences and collaborative exploration to challenge conventional representations and reimagine well-being through design. The findings demonstrate how collaborative sensemaking can reframe well-being interventions as creative processes that empower individuals’ lived experiences. By foregrounding reflection and shared interpretation, this work contributes to the discourse on how creative explorations with biodata redefine our relationship with wearable technology, highlighting the role of trust in understanding sensitive data collaboratively.

Mental health concerns significantly impact one-third of university students, with digital tools increasingly recognised as potential support for prevention and treatment. However, few studies adequately address the transition from research to practical application in mental health-related interventions, integrating multidisciplinary design methodologies and understanding students' sociocultural contexts within real-world healthcare environments. Here we present the outcomes of a process of co-design and validation of a digital mental health intervention in a university setting. We draw on findings from (1) design cycles and (2) validation workshops of a digital intervention to identify preferences of engagement and ethical responsibility for real-world applicability. Our findings emphasise the importance of involving end-users and clinicians throughout the process to improve existing support systems for students' well-being, challenge stigma, and promote context-sensitive mental health care in academia. This approach highlights the importance of designing digital mental health interventions that are both ethical and inclusive, thereby enhancing individual, community, and institutional resilience. We build on prior research by proposing design opportunities to enhance receptivity to digital interventions in university settings, contributing to responsible innovation in this field.

Abstract Intersectionality within HCI is often only considered when it is made the topic of the study itself. Whether or not this should be the case is debated, as scope is often something researchers try to outline. This paper argues that reflexivity offers a particularly important solution when it comes to Intersectional HCI combined with the observing, analysing and understanding the impact on interactions between users and the technology, as well as the interactions between the teams building the software. This paper calls for all researchers to consider how race, gender and other protected characteristics may affect their research even when these are not the topics being researched, and to share this data in publication. To facilitate this, this paper presents a series of prompts in the form of usable cards, to aid researchers in carrying out reflective practices.