Teenage years are a critical period for shaping food practices and health behaviors, yet teens remain underrepresented in research on future food and health technologies. This paper reports on design fiction workshops where 20 teens speculated on artifacts such as health-tracking mirrors and food-making machines while reflecting on their eating habits and values. Our analysis shows how teens negotiate their human stances in a techno-centric world, balancing excitement about innovation with concerns over health, control, and responsibility. We contribute to HCI by: (1) identifying teen-specific design considerations for reflective healthy-eating technologies, highlighting “absence” as a protective affordance; (2) reframing food technologies for teens as sites of family care and playful identity work, opening a design space at the intersection of reflection and play; and (3) advancing methodological understanding of youth-centered design fiction by showing how dual-mode speculative workshops can move teen participants beyond solutionist or anti-solutionist positions toward grounded negotiation with sociotechnical systems.

Researchers are increasingly facilitating qualitative research studies online. While this has made research more accessible for participation, there have been notable encounters with “fraudulent” participants. By fraudulent, we refer to individuals who are deceptive about meeting the inclusion criteria, their identity, or experiences. Fraudulent participants have generated new challenges for researchers who have to interact 1:1 with these individuals, face ethical dilemmas on appropriate next steps, diagnose and prevent the issue from happening again, and deal with their own identity as a scholar. In this study, we interview 16 HCI researchers to understand and learn from their experiences. We contribute: (1) an understanding of how HCI qualitative researchers deal with fraudulent participants; (2) a guide for qualitative HCI researchers on how to handle fraudulence; and (3) a reflection on how the HCI research community might better improve our science and training efforts.

TikTok has gained immense popularity among teenagers, offering access to numerous user-generated content. Notably, food videos have emerged as a prominent theme on this short-form video social platform. The casual and enjoyable nature of short food videos on TikTok belies their potential influence on one of teenagers' most immediate and regular health practices--eating. Understanding how teenagers interact with these videos, their subsequent actions, and the resulting impact on their food practices and eating habits have the potential to provide insight into their broader lifestyle choices and their interactions within their social circles, including parents, friends, and other people online. By examining how teenagers use TikTok food videos online and offline, we gain a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between social media, teenage lifestyle, and social dynamics surrounding food practices. In this research, we conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with teenagers aged 13 to 19, investigating their consumption of TikTok food videos and the actions inspired by them. By examining the multifaceted influence of TikTok food videos from a temporal perspective, this study contributes to the reflections of teens' use of TikTok food videos and their inspired food practices in the short and long term, online and offline. We propose design and theoretical implications to support teenagers' health. These insights have the potential to extend to various contexts, helping educators, policymakers, and designers in fostering healthy lifestyles among teenagers.

This research explores how teenagers interacted with food-related TikTok content and how this influenced their eating behavior and practices. Using 186 surveys and five interviews, we show how teenagers think of healthy eating and what actions they took after being inspired by TikTok. We find that teenagers take inspiration from TikTok food content in different temporal stages, from immediately trying out new food items to long-term diet planning. We discuss potential design opportunities to support teenagers’ social use of TikTok food content in online and offline contexts.

In imagining a future where climate change forces more intimate relationships between humans and nature, social robots can be introduced to revolutionize the way humans understand and communicate with plants. Through the Double Diamond design method with plant owners, we uncovered dif-ferent perspectives of the plant caretaking process and designed a social agent that aids in plant caretaking while fostering a positive human-robot interaction. Then, based on our takeaways from the design process, we crafted a story of an individual who interacts with a future version of our robot who overcomes the language barrier between plants and humans.