While Generative AI (GenAI) systems are designed primarily for individual use, it is increasingly integrated into collaborative work. Its impact, however, on collaboration dynamics, such as information flow, role negotiation, and decision-making, remains unclear. To investigate this, we conducted a qualitative study comprising observations and semi-structured interviews with a total of 27 higher education students through the lens of distributed cognition. Our findings show that in synchronous settings, shared use of GenAI supported transparency and mutual awareness, with the interaction space functioning as attentional anchors, shared memory, and negotiable contributions to group decisions. Instead, in asynchronous teamwork, GenAI was typically used individually, with outputs later introduced into discussions, reducing opportunities for negotiation. As such, we contribute empirical evidence on GenAI’s influence on collaborative dynamics and design considerations that position GenAI-Supported Cooperative Work (GSCW) as a bridge between Human–AI Interaction and CSCW.

The widespread digitalisation of critical civic services in contexts of economic austerity, neoliberalism, and the COVID-19 pandemic, has renewed focus in HCI on interventions to enable digital access for populations considered 'digitally excluded'.While digital inclusion (DI) practitioners play a critical role in this area, their perspectives remain under-explored in HCI.This paper reports on a series of asset-based engagements with digital inclusion practitioners in the North East of England.These engagements explored the values, assets, and needs comprising their practices and used these insights as design material to ideate strategies for future intervention.We contribute findings describing the complexities, contradictions, and diversity of digital inclusion practices and efforts.Based on these findings, we argue for a shift towards considering DI practice through the lens of care, and provide directions for future HCI research to support DI practitioners in doing care work.

There is increasing interest in how digitalisation variously impacts different socio-economic demographics’ ability to access, and realise benefits from, public services. Centring citizens’ lived experience in the identification of harms and benefits is critical for the evaluation of digital services, and more broadly for responsible innovation. Yet this poses significant challenges, particularly when engaging those living in precarious conditions. This paper reports on a study that engaged citizens living with poverty (n=76) to articulate harms arising from digitalisation in the context of an e-government social protection service. Interviews and surveys supported by speculative scenarios of ongoing changes helped surface and express citizen-centric harm characteristics within wider ecosystems before, during and after access, beyond a narrower service-lifecycle viewpoint. Drawing on the findings, we develop a taxonomy of harms and discuss how this can be utilised by HCI practitioners concerned with responsible innovation in digital welfare contexts.

Many people from diverse backgrounds are interested in learning programming independently and often share their experiences on social media platforms. Despite this, little is known about their specific self-regulation needs, which are crucial for achieving their learning goals. This study employed qualitative analyses to examine the textual narratives of individuals engaged in informal programming learning across four social media platforms: Twitter (X), YouTube comments, Reddit, and the DEV Community. The aim was to understand the self-regulation challenges they face in their informal, interestbased learning as articulated through their textual narratives and to pinpoint potential support mechanisms for self-regulation in this context. We extracted a purposive sample from these platforms, targeting posts rich in meaning or indicative of self-regulation, and then conducted a thematic analysis. Our findings indicate that learners require personal learning spaces that support three critical self-regulation aids: refining learning goals, resuming learning during spaced sessions, and supporting reflective practice throughout the learning process. Furthermore, we observed that informal learners generally lack specifically designed tools to support their self-regulation, relying instead on their varying skills and utilising diverse, non-specific tools. This gap unveils significant design opportunities to address the specific self-regulation needs of this underserved population of learners on social media. We discuss the potential of a storytelling-centric approach in design to address the identified issues for this population, which not only aids in sense-making from their learning experiences through reflection but also promotes social learning and engagement.

In Saudi Arabia, the lack of female role models and the absence of mentoring and support programmes have contributed to the limited progression of female graduates into STEM professions. In this study, we present a shift in the design of e-mentoring models for younger generations to enable less committed and more flexible relationships between mentors and mentees. Qudwa is an unplatformed STEM e-mentoring system designed to facilitate communication between female Saudi professional mentors and young female mentees through existing social media technologies and practices. The design of Qudwa is based on three design requirements: (1) flexibility and control; (2) integration of e-mentoring with daily used online tools; and (3) visibility. We show the potential of existing technologies and social media platforms to facilitate a new form of e-mentoring and conclude with several design recommendations. This work encourages further investigation into e-mentoring in the context of Saudi Arabia and similar contexts and examination of different applications of unplatforming.

HCI researchers are increasingly interested in the evaluation of educational technologies in context, yet acknowledge that challenges remain regarding the logistical, material and methodological constraints of this approach to research [ 18 , 53 ]. Through the analysis of the authors’ contributed thematic research vignettes, the following article exposes the practical realities of evaluating educational technologies in school settings. This includes insights into the planning stages of evaluation, the relationship between the researcher and the school environment, and the impact of the school context on the data collection process. We conclude by providing an orientation for the design of HCI educational technology research undertaken in school contexts, providing guidance such as considering the role of modular research design, clarifying goals and expectations with school partners, and reporting researcher positionality.

Young refugees and asylum seekers (RAS) in the UK face barriers related to language and accessing formal schooling. While HCI research has focused on migration, less work has been done with young RAS and less so on how digital platforms may be used to support young RAS during times in which they are unable to access schooling. Through co-design workshops with young RAS in the UK, we explored social and contextual factors influencing their engagement in and experiences with digital tools to learn and develop their learning skills outside of school. Our findings highlight and nuance gender, culture and racism as factors that need to be accounted for when designing digital education tools for this population. More specifically, we detail how accounting for the aforementioned factors may inform the: (1) learning approaches that may underpin such technologies, (2) the timing and duration of digitally facilitated learning activities and (3) the platforms through which learning activities may be mediated. We argue that not accounting for these factors may result in reduced engagement and in propagating existing gender inequities. As such, our research contributes to a growing body of work focused on HCI, migration and education.

Previous research on programming education has mainly focused on formal learning environments and the programming communities of children and professionals, leaving the daily practices and learning needs of adult novices who learn to program informally online under-explored. This study aims to address this gap by providing a background that contextualizes the challenges and practices of adult novices learning informally online, with a particular emphasis on self-regulation. A scoping review methodology was employed to explore existing literature on this topic. Of 510 papers returned in the search, only 8 papers met the inclusion criteria for the review. The findings indicate a lack of research on how to support self-regulation in online informal programming learning settings. Additionally, it revealed that adult novices may face challenges such as loneliness, frustration, and uncertainty when learning informally online. It also highlights the potential importance of peer support, metacognitive skills, and self-efficacy in fostering learning in this population. The study presents a novel focus on the role of self-regulation in the context of informal online programming learning and differs from previous literature that largely focuses on formal learning settings. The findings have the potential to inform the field of computing education by shedding light on this population and their specific learning needs.

We introduce a novel data collection technique, Sketching Dialogue, which incorporates sketching as an integral part of the semi-structured interview process. This approach was evaluated and validated using two case studies involving 21 participants. Through the first case study, we demonstrate the value of Sketching Dialogue as an additional supportive artefact for interactive discussion in the interview setting. The second case study involved a process of other researchers applying the method within six different studies on a range of topics. We outline how Sketching Dialogue provided a more effective form of engagement with participants, especially regarding (personally) sensitive topics or where empathetic engagement was required. Through this work, we illustrate how sketching can enhance the quality of traditional research interviews for studies in human–computer interaction, in part due to its particularly flexible and accessible nature. Based on our experience, we also reflect upon the steps and practices needed to introduce a new qualitative research method to human–computer interaction researchers and designers.

Educational technologies offer benefits in the classroom but there are barriers to their successful integration, including teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and their skills and experience. Participatory Design (PD) approaches offer one way in which teachers can be directly involved in the design of classroom technologies, however PD processes alone fail to address the challenges of integrating technology within existing practices. In this paper we propose co-teaching as a novel form of co-design practice. We describe a two year longitudinal Co-Teaching project resulting in the development and use of three digital designs for the classroom. Using the TPACK model to guide our reflections we offer insights into the ways that co-teaching can support the design and integration of educational technologies. We suggest that co-teaching as a form of co-design practice offers a way to move teachers from passive adopters of technology to active participants in the design and integration of educational technologies.

Peer support through social media has been shown to have significant potential to improve health care outcomes. Despite this, very little is understood about how to design a social media-based peer support system. We use the model of unplatformed design to structure a multi-phase design process of a WhatsApp-based peer support system, with and for participants undergoing extreme weight loss as part of a health care intervention into diabetes management. From a mixed-methods evaluation of a three-month deployment of the system and reflections upon the design process we explore the value of the model in facilitating the expression of authentic peer support, and identify how the unique characteristics of unplatformed design allowed for the creation of a peer support system that was responsive to participants’ existing everyday use of social media technologies.

Technical interventions in socio-technical systems are often portrayed overly positively but can also have undesirable consequences which can directly impact adoption and sustainability. Systematically identifying what might go wrong is not straightforward. This paper presents the iterative development, including an early validation trial, of an HCI-focused collaborative brainstorming approach to identify deviations from design intent that harm people. The established Hazard and Operability Study (HAZOP) guide word based method, not applied before in a HCI context beyond safety-critical systems despite extensive use in other disciplines, has been adapted and applied. Motivated by the need to enumerate impacts of technology on marginalised individuals and their communities, and utilising the lead author's previous experience, a more human-orientated ‘HCI HAZOP’ was investigated. Using two feasibility studies and two pilot studies, the adapted method has been trialled, evaluated and refined. The studies' findings demonstrate the usefulness of the method identifying undesirable consequences, even by novel practitioners without any prior training. The paper presents the adaption as a methodological contribution, an application of ‘HCI HAZOP’ through studies using scenario-based design artifacts identifying limitations and benefits, and guidance materials for use by other researchers.

Social media is seen as a powerful driver of change for language teaching and learning. Many studies have looked at the use and adoption rates of social media in language education, but studies that take a more fine-grained understanding of the differences between individual features of social media and how they are perceived by learners and teachers are rare. We present an analysis of the results of two workshops in a UK university that illustrate disparities between how individual features of social media are used generally, and how they are used for educational purposes between learners and teachers of languages. To understand the underlying perceptions of and attitudes towards features of social media we performed an inductive thematic analysis of discussion data generated at the workshops. From this we surface three themes: social media as distinct language type; navigating appropriateness; and prioritizing authentic communication flow. From these themes, we offer four design recommendations for practitioners and researchers who wish to incorporate social media in language teaching. These recommendations are: pay attention to specific features of social media and model authentic use; create learner-led and learner-owned spaces; create structured pathways to authentic social media use; and incorporate social media in assessment.

Using existing social media technologies as a resource for design offers significant potential for sustainable and scalable ways of coordinating participation. We look at three exemplar projects in three distinct domains that have successfully coordinated participation through the configuration and augmentation of existing social media technologies: participatory future forecasting, participatory health research, and connectivist learning. In this paper we conceptualise social media technologies as material for design, that is, as the raw material with which coordinated participation is realized. From this we develop a model that proposes four material qualities of social media technologies, morphology, role, representation of activity and permeability, and point to how they can be productively employed in the design of coordination of participation.

Little research has explored how mobile-learning technologies could be used by students to produce interactive artefacts during project-based learning processes. Following a design-based approach, we report on engagements spanning classroom and outdoor learning with students (ages 6-13) and teachers from three different UK schools and a summer school of Travelling Showchildren. Working within the time constraints of each context, we deployed a variety of configurations of a project-based mobile learning (PBML) framework intended to support the production of student-designed mobile-learning activities. We contribute insights gained from these engagements, including how mobile technologies can harness students' existing desire for independence and how they can be configured to leverage the physical and social attributes of place and community as learning resources. We argue for further exploration of the potential roles for mobile technologies within project-based learning, and contribute our PBML framework with recommendations for its re-configuration in response to contextual constraints.

Disability assessment processes are complex and stressful, with claimants finding it challenging to prepare an effective account of their disabilities to support their claim. This project focuses on a disability benefit called Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which is received by millions of people with disabilities in the UK. We present a multi-stage exploratory investigation into how lifelogging could help address the challenges claimants have in accessing disability benefits. In the first study, benefit advisors participated in interviews and workshops to inform the design of PIP Kit, a highly customisable prototype elicitation diary to help disability claimants articulate their experiences. In the second study, PIP Kit was trialled by benefit claimants whilst making their actual PIP claims. We found that PIP Kit helped empower claimants in understanding the claim process and assisted in building arguments for their claims. We also have identified clear principles for supporting disability benefit claimants with technological interventions.

Following the decline of pupil engagement in compulsory computing education (K-12) in the UK, advocates have called for further research into computing-specific pedagogies. Aiming for an improvement in pupil engagement, the subsequent report explores the viability of the applied Design Studio approach in K-12 computing education. We report on two case studies involving two 12-week curricula co-developed and delivered between researchers and teachers for four Year 8 classes in a secondary school in England. Common to both case studies were the design brief, desk crit, design review, presentation and portfolio elements proposed by Koutsabasis et al, with the key difference being a change in scope and structure of the challenge presented to pupils. Our findings demonstrate the need for a well-structured, personalizable and challenge-driven Design Studio approach, which showed evidence of improved pupil resilience and confidence, while engaging reluctant pupils. We conclude with a proposed model for applying Design Studios in K-12 computing education, to support educators aiming to adopt project-driven computing pedagogy in the classroom.

WhatsApp, as the world's most popular messaging application, offers significant opportunities for improving the reach and effectiveness of engagement projects. In collaboration with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) we designed WhatFutures, a collaborative future forecasting engagement for global youth using WhatsApp. WhatFutures was successfully deployed with 487 players across 5 countries (Kenya, Bulgaria, Finland, Australia and Hong Kong) to inform strategic change within the IFRC. Based on our analysis of the activity - including 16,100 messages, 95 multimedia artifacts, and a post-engagement survey - we present a reflection upon the design decisions underpinning WhatFutures and identify how decisions made around group structures, processes and externalization of outputs influenced engagement and data quality. We conclude with the wider implications of our findings for the design of engagements that best utilize the affordances of existing messaging applications.

The state of computing education in the UK is described as "patchy and fragile" with universities tasked to provide further support to schools. However, little guidance exists towards the provision of this support. To explore the development of university-school partnerships, we present findings of an extended educational engagement coordinated by Newcastle University, as part of the national "Create, Learn and Inspire with the micro:bit and the BBC" initiative. Following an action research approach, we explore the experiences of undergraduate students, schoolteachers and an educational broker through the process, including recruitment, content development, and delivery of over 30 computing lessons by nine undergraduates. We identify a number of design considerations towards the development of High Opportunity Progression Ecosystems for the improvement of computing education, such as student identity, workload model,and process visibility. We then discuss the potential role of technology in infrastructuring support for university-school partnerships

The underrepresentation of women in the STEM workforce is a global issue. In Saudi Arabia, women constitute 48% of undergraduates in STEM, but their participation in STEM careers remains particularly low. We explored the current state of e-mentoring, and the potential for co-designing to enhance e-mentoring experiences for youth in the Saudi context. We report on how we sought to understand the opportunities, barriers and requirements of e-mentoring for young women in Saudi Arabia through (1) the application of a traditional programme of STEM e-mentoring, (2) workshops on the redesign of e-mentoring, and (3) a co-design activity as the first phase of an alternative e-mentoring process. The study demonstrated that the traits of the participants’ generation had a major effect on the findings; more so than cultural norms. This means that the findings have wider implications than just within the Saudi context. We identify a number of recommendations for designing e-mentoring programmes for young women and teenagers, including un-platforming traditional approaches to e-mentoring and the inclusion of co-design activities as a first step in the e-mentoring process.

We report on the design of ThinkActive - a system to encourage primary aged school children to reflect on their own personal activity data in the classroom. We deployed the system with a cohort of 30 school children, over a six-week period, in partnership with an English Premier League Football club's health and nutrition programme. The system utilizes inexpensive activity trackers and pseudonymous avatars to promote reflection with personal data using an in-situ display within the classroom. Our design explores pseudonymity as an approach to managing privacy and personal data within a public setting. We report on the motivations, challenges, and opportunities for students, teachers, and third-party providers to engage in the collection and sharing of activity data with primary school children.

The potential for mobile technology to support bespoke learning activities seamlessly across learning contexts has not been fully realized. We contribute insights gained from four months of field studies of place-based mobile learning in two different contexts: formal education with a primary school and informal, community-led learning with volunteers in a nearby park. For these studies we introduced ParkLearn: a platform for creating, sharing and engaging with place-based mobile learning activities through seamless learning experiences. The platform enables the creation of easily configurable learning activities that leverage the targeted learning environment and mobile devices' hardware to support situated learning. Learners' uploaded responses to activities can be viewed and shared via a website, supporting seamless follow-up classroom activities. By supporting creativity and independence for both learners and activity designers, ParkLearn promoted a sense of ownership, increased engagement in follow-up activities and supported the leveraging of physical and social communal learning resources.

User identification on interactive surfaces is a desirable feature that is not inherently supported by existing technologies. We have conducted an extensive survey of existing identification techniques, which led us to formulate a unified model for user identification. We start by introducing this model that (1) classifies existing user identification approaches in five categories according to the identification technology, (2) identifies eight characteristic identification system parameters, and (3) proposes a way for visualizing the system's characteristics as points on a radar chart to allow for quick comparison and contrast between systems. This model is then used to present our survey of existing user identification approaches and visualize their characteristics, highlighting their strengths and limitations. The model also makes it possible to visually represent requirements of systems that require user identification, identify existing approaches that can meet an application's requirements, and help report on and evaluate new approaches to user identification systematically.

Group Spinner is a digital visual tool intended to help teachers observe and reflect on children's collaborative technology-enhanced learning activities in the classroom. We describe the design of Group Spinner, which was informed by activity theory, previous work and teachers' focus group feedback. Based on a radar chart and a set of indicators, Group Spinner allows teachers to record in-class observations as to different aspects of group learning and learning behaviors, beyond the limited knowledge acquisition measures. Our exploratory study involved 6 teachers who used the tool for a total of 23 classes in subjects ranging from Maths and Geography to Sociology and Art. Semi-structured interviews with these teachers revealed a number of different uses of the tool. Depending on their experience and pedagogy, teachers considered Group Spinner to be a valuable tool to support awareness, reflection, communication, and/or planning.

We present the design, deployment and evaluation of three configurations of an online learning activity for would-be social innovators and activists, with the aim of understanding the factors that are critical to the design of an infrastructure to support such communities of learners. Our research was inspired and motivated by the example of SOLEs (self-organised learning environments) and builds upon the experiences of early connectivist MOOCs (massive open online courses). Our configurations were used to deliver three pilot courses on the topic of Sustainable Development, in partnership with United World Colleges (an organisation of international schools). Our work is distinctive in putting a focus on civic engagement and the autonomy of student learners throughout the course. Our primary design goals were to enable activist empowerment, self-organized learning, and the creation of social bonds to facilitate a lasting and self-sufficient international activist community. We base our analysis on a sample of 114 active learners and 33 mentors; including data from 223 applications, 705 Facebook posts, 48 participant survey responses and a variety of quantitative metrics.

Expressiveness, which we define as the extent to which rich and complex intent can be conveyed through action, is a vital aspect of many human interactions. For instance, paint on canvas is said to be an expressive medium, because it affords the artist the ability to convey multifaceted emotional intent through intricate manipulations of a brush. To date, touch devices have failed to offer users a level of expressiveness in their interactions that rivals that experienced by the painter and those completing other skilled physical tasks. We investigate how data about hand movement -- provided by a motion sensor, similar to those found in many smart watches or fitness trackers -- can be used to expand the expressiveness of touch interactions. We begin by introducing a conceptual model that formalizes a design space of possible expressive touch interactions. We then describe and evaluate Expressy, an approach that uses a wrist-worn inertial measurement unit to detect and classify qualities of touch interaction that extend beyond those offered by today's typical sensing hardware. We conclude by describing a number of sample applications, which demonstrate the enhanced, expressive interaction capabilities made possible by Expressy.

Cross-cultural learning has gained increased interest and importance within school curricula in recent years. Schools are using technology to accumulate resources for cross-cultural learning, which has predominantly been pre-prepared videos, documentaries, photos and textual information available online. In this paper we describe the engagement with video technology on mobile smartphones by three migrant families who were tasked with developing cross-cultural resources over the course of six weeks. The resources developed were then used as a learning resource in a classroom and feedback was taken from the teacher. Our study has established that mobile phones particularly smartphones are an accessible, evocative and affordable avenue to aid in the development of cross-cultural resources alongside building stronger parental engagement in schools. The study contributes an expansion of knowledge in research areas that seek to use video technology on mobile phones to build cross-cultural resources for learning and strengthen home-school and school-home communication.

We describe the learner-centered design of an application for collocated collaborative writing on digital tabletops. Learning writing is an activity that is traditionally undertaken as a non-collaborative, non-visuospatial activity. We demonstrate how framing writing as a visuospatial manipulation of elements of writing sub-tasks can promote collaboration. While collaborative visuospatial activities lend themselves to digital tabletops in particular, not all activities naturally translate into such tasks. Our application allows for (or supports) writing as a collaborative task, as well as providing a platform for students to learn extended writing. We describe the mapping between the design principles used, and the pedagogical and thinking theories that are incorporated into the design. The design is described at each iteration, including the associated user studies, and we conclude with a discussion of more widely applicable design implications. This research shows how traditional non-collaborative learning activities can, using visuospatial representations, be reconfigured as collocated collaborative learning activities.

This paper presents the results and experiences of a six-week deployment of multiple digital tabletops in a school. Dillenbourg's orchestration framework was used both to guide the design and analysis of the study. Four themes, which directly relate to the design of the technology for the classroom, out of the 15 orchestration factors are considered. For each theme, we present our design choices, the relevant observations, feedback from teachers and students, and we conclude with a number of lessons learned in the form of design recommendations. The distinguishing factors of our study are its scale (in terms of duration, number of classes, subjects, and teachers), and its 'in-the-wild' character, with the entire study being conducted in a school, led by the teachers, and using teacher-prepared, curriculum-based tasks. Our primary contributions are the analysis of our observations and design recommendations for future multi-tabletop applications designed for and deployed within the classroom. Our analyses and recommendations meaningfully extend HCI's current design understandings of such settings.

We consider the role and design of digital technologies in play therapy settings with young children. Through an aggregation of the researcher and practitioner literature, and results of discussions with therapists and counselors, we propose a set of design requirements for digital technologies that support non-directive play within a play therapy context. We explore how to design for these complex requirements through the development and evaluation of Magic Land, a set of four play therapy applications for an interactive tabletop. Based on our experiences we recommend that designers create digital interactive toys, which create opportunities for play that would not normally be possible within the traditional play therapy environment.

Attribute gates are a new user interface element designed to address the problem of concurrently setting attributes and moving objects between territories on a digital tabletop. Motivated by the notion of task levels in activity theory, and crossing interfaces, attribute gates allow users to operationalize multiple subtasks in one smooth movement. We present two configurations of attribute gates; (1) grid gates which spatially distribute attribute values in a regular grid, and require users to draw trajectories through the attributes; (2) polar gates which distribute attribute values on segments of concentric rings, and require users to align segments when setting attribute combinations. The layout of both configurations was optimised based on targeting and steering laws derived from Fitts' Law. A study compared the use of attribute gates with traditional contextual menus. Users of attribute gates demonstrated both increased performance and higher mutual awareness.