Patient-controlled data-sharing systems are increasingly promoted as a way to empower patients with greater autonomy over their health data. Yet it remains unclear how different stakeholders, especially patients and health system leaders, perceive the benefits and challenges of enabling granular control over the sharing of de-identified medical data for research. To address this gap, we developed a high-fidelity prototype of a patient-controlled, web-based consent platform and conducted a two-phase mixed-methods study: semi-structured interviews with 16 health system leaders and a survey with 523 patient participants. While both groups appreciated the potential of such a platform to enhance transparency and autonomy, their views diverged in meaningful ways. Leaders viewed transparency and granular control through the lens of informed consent and institutional ethics, whereas patients interpreted these factors as safeguards against potential risks and uncertainties. Our findings underscore critical tensions such as individual control and research integrity. We offer design implications for building trustworthy, context-aware systems that support flexible granularity, provide ongoing benefit‑centered transparency, and adapt to diverse literacy and privacy needs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to fundamentally change the way people engage in computer programming. Agent-based modeling (ABM) has become ubiquitous in natural and social sciences and education, yet no prior studies have explored the potential of LLMs to assist it. We designed NetLogo Chat to support the learning and practice of NetLogo, a programming language for ABM. To understand how users perceive, use, and need LLM-based interfaces, we interviewed 30 participants from global academia, industry, and graduate schools. Experts reported more perceived benefits than novices and were more inclined to adopt LLMs in their workflow. We found significant differences between experts and novices in their perceptions, behaviors, and needs for human-AI collaboration. We surfaced a knowledge gap between experts and novices as a possible reason for the benefit gap. We identified guidance, personalization, and integration as major needs for LLM-based interfaces to support the programming of ABM.

Pregnancy brings physical, emotional, and economic challenges for expectant parent(s), close relatives, and friends. Existing technology support, including tracking technology, largely targets pregnant people and ignores other stakeholders. We therefore lack an understanding of how to approach designing collaborative pregnancy tracking technology. To understand how people collaborate around pregnancy tracking and wish to do so, we interviewed 13 pregnant people and 11 non-pregnant stakeholders in the U.S., including partners, friends, and grandparents-to-be. We find that people collaborate for goals like social bonding and jointly managing various pregnancy data. Stakeholders collaborated by either dividing up data types or collectively monitoring the same information. We also identify tensions and challenges, such as pregnant people’s privacy concerns and stakeholders’ varied levels of interest in tracking. In light of socio-cultural norms and stakeholders’ distinctive roles around pregnancy, we point to opportunities for designing collaborative technology that aligns with as well as challenges socio-cultural practices around pregnancy tracking.

Pregnancy is a significant but stressful life transition, requiring effort from multiple stakeholders including expectant parents, family members, and friends to navigate. Existing work has primarily focused on understanding and supporting the technology use of pregnant people, neglecting other stakeholders' needs and participation. We therefore consider how pregnancy tracking apps both improve and interfere with the reconfiguration of social relationships caused by pregnancy, drawing on insights from family sociology to examine how these relationships evolve over pregnancy and the transition to parenthood. We reviewed the features of 20 pregnancy tracking apps, and analyzed 4,709 public reviews of them, finding that stakeholders used apps to bond with one another around the excitement of pregnancy, build a prenatal relationship with the fetus, and co-manage pregnancy-related logistical tasks. We find that not accounting for fetal demographics and users' identities, along with socio-cultural norms around gender and parenting roles, often inhibit these collaborative practices. We therefore suggest designing collaborative pregnancy tracking technology that considers both inclusiveness and specificity regarding stakeholders' different roles and relationships to pregnancy.

Contact tracing, a major way to curb COVID-19 and other epidemics, has been employed worldwide, with human interviewing and proximity tracing technology as two major approaches. While previous research has contributed some understanding of people's perspectives on contact tracing technology, much of this is based in single countries or regions where technology has been deployed. To understand how culture influences people's perceptions toward human tracing and digital tracing, we replicated a mixed-methods survey study conducted in the U.S. in South Korea and compared participants' perspectives. South Korean participants preferred digital tracing to human tracing, contrasting with the U.S. context where no strong preference was observed. We discuss how observed differences in perspective align and contrast with the country's typical cultural dimensions, such as high power distance, informing the perspective that human tracing will have greater accuracy. We emphasize the need for culturally designing contact tracing technology to highlight personal benefits regardless of cultural dimensions, and leverage technology to support social interaction in human tracing.

Persuasive features are often used in food journaling apps to help people reach various personal goals. Our understanding of persuasive design in food journaling apps has primarily been built from studying and designing apps in Western contexts. However, varied cultural perceptions around journaling goals, such as healthy eating and weight management, suggest that the design of persuasive features may differ across cultures. We therefore investigate how culture influences the use of persuasive techniques in Chinese food journaling apps and consequently people's journaling experiences. Through reviewing features of Chinese apps and interviewing people who have used them, we find that some Chinese apps heavily emphasize body shape, and people's motivations for journaling and desires for journaling apps similarly focus more on body shape than diet. We discuss tensions and opportunities for food journaling apps which align with or account for cultural norms while challenging unhealthy or problematic aspects of them.

Various contact tracing approaches have been applied to help contain the spread of COVID-19, with technology-based tracing and human tracing among the most widely adopted. However, governments and communities worldwide vary in their adoption of digital contact tracing, with many instead choosing the human approach. We investigate how people perceive the respective benefits and risks of human and digital contact tracing through a mixed-methods survey with 291 respondents from the United States. Participants perceived digital contact tracing as more beneficial for protecting privacy, providing convenience, and ensuring data accuracy, and felt that human contact tracing could help provide security, emotional reassurance, advice, and accessibility. We explore the role of self-tracking technologies in public health crisis situations, highlighting how designs must adapt to promote societal benefit rather than just self-understanding. We discuss how future digital contact tracing can better balance the benefits of human tracers and technology amidst the complex contact tracing process and context.

Studies of personal informatics systems primarily examine people's use or non-use, but people often leverage other technology towards their long-term behavior change processes such as social platforms. We explore how tracking technologies and social platforms together help people build healthy eating behaviors by interviewing 18 people who use Chinese food journaling apps. We contribute a Model of Socially Sustained Self-Tracking in personal informatics, building on the past model of Personal Informatics and the learning components of Social Cognitive Theory. The model illustrates how people get advice from social platforms on when and how to track, transfer data to and apply knowledge from social platforms, evolve to use social platforms after tracking, and occasionally resume using tracking tools. Observational learning and enactive learning are central to these processes, with social technologies helping people to gain deeper and more reliable domain knowledge. We discuss how lapsing and abandoning of tracking can be viewed as evolving to social platforms, offering recommendations for how technology can better facilitate this evolution.

What makes a city meaningful to its residents? What attracts people to live in a city and to care for it? Today, we might see such questions as concerns for HCI, given the emerging agendas of smart and connected cities, IoT, and ubiquitous computing: city residents' perceptions of and attitudes towards smart city technologies will play a role in technology acceptance. Theories of "placemaking" from humanist geography and urban planning address themselves to such concerns, and they have been taken up in HCI and urban informatics research. This theory offers ideas for developing community attachment, heightening the legibility of the city, and intensifying lived experiences in the city. We add to this body of research with an analysis of several initiatives of City Yeast, a community-based design collective in Taiwan that proposes the metaphor of fermentation as an approach to placemaking. We unpack how this approach shapes their design practice and link its implications to urban informatics research in HCI. We suggest that smart cities can also be pursued by leveraging the knowledge of city residents and helping to facilitate their participation in acts of perceiving, envisioning, and improving their local communities, including but not limited to smart and connected technologies.