Reflection and metacognition are central to the creative user experience. However, most HCI research on reflection focuses on clear, task-oriented goals such as to reflect on personal data or pedagogical outcomes. This contrasts with the open-ended and challenging to articulate goals of creative user experiences. For the first time, this workshop brings together interdisciplinary researchers, designers, educators, and artists across HCI, Cognitive Science, Design, AI, Learning Sciences, and Digital Art to examine reflection in creative interaction. The workshop will discuss themes, drawn from earlier discussions with HCI researchers and artists, on: how best to capture reflection in creative contexts, how to leverage the arts to support reflection for ethical change, and how to design creative AI that enhances – not hinders – critical thinking. By bringing interdisciplinary perspectives on reflection into discussion, the workshop will develop a guiding taxonomy for reflection in creative interaction to inform future creative practice and tool development.

The overturn of Roe v. Wade radically changed abortion access within the United States leaving women to navigate new financial, legal, and logistical challenges in managing their reproductive health needs. Reporting on findings from co-design workshops with participants from Indiana (a state with an abortion ban) and New York (where abortion is accessible), we investigate how women envision care in response to ongoing legal and medical uncertainty. Drawing together techno-feminist scholarship on care and reproductive health, in this paper we highlight several "entangled" design stories of anxiety and fear in navigating diminished healthcare services, as well as resistance and hope. Our findings prompt critical reflections for HCI on the role of health technology amid a world in which reproductive health, and medicine at large, is often a site of political contestation and conflict. Care-in-Retrograde re-orients a techno-utopian and future-oriented view of health technology to consider design work amid healthcare trajectories of disruption and reversal.

Social media platforms are deeply embedded in teenagers’ daily lives, shaping their identities, relationships, and leisure time while introducing risks such as social pressure, harmful content, and addiction. While attention capture mechanisms and dark patterns are increasingly recognized as contributors to the harm these platforms perpetuate, teenagers’ own experiences of harm remain underexplored. In this study, we report on analysis of eight interviews with participants aged 12–17, revealing how their desire to be a “normal teen” shapes their lives, how they experience and interpret harms, and how ecologies of use influence mitigation strategies. Our findings reveal that teenagers frequently attribute responsibility to themselves or other teens rather than the designed affordances of the platform. We contribute a detailed account of potential behavioral and attentional harms that further situates “what counts as harm” within contemporary technology governance debates, emphasizing the need for design alternatives that balance safety, agency, and meaningful engagement.

While human memory-aiding technologies often focus on preserving and sharing positive moments, people also revisit their emotionally complex memories, including both positive and negative emotions, to reflect, make sense of their past experiences, and achieve personal growth.This research investigates how digital technologies can support such reflective engagement with unpleasant memories.Through three interrelated studies, I explore (1) how individuals with different cognitive thinking styles, ruminators and reflectors, engage with technology during reflection on unpleasant memories, (2) how existing reflective technologies support or overlook these practices, and (3) how co-design workshops can reveal new design directions that support personal growth.Collectively, these studies aim to inform the design of emotionally aware technologies that support psychological well-being by enabling meaningful reflection on including unpleasant personal experiences.

As AI becomes increasingly embedded in daily life, people are turning to these systems for emotional and personal reasons more frequently. Drawing on critical interviews with 10 young adults, this study examines emerging patterns in how users perceive and navigate these interactions. Preliminary findings suggest that participants value AI’s accessibility and non-judgmental tone, especially when seeking emotional support. However, advice-seeking interactions revealed users’ concerns about overly agreeable responses, reduced objectivity, and cultural mismatch, prompting users to adopt their own evaluation strategies toward AI’s suggestions. The findings were briefly discussed in terms of future directions and implications.