Emotional closeness (EC) is central to family relationships, however in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) it is often regarded as self-evident, invoked through adjacent constructs such as connection or co-presence. This ambiguity is particularly limiting for remote relationships between young children (aged 4-8 years) and their older relatives, where developmental asymmetries and generational roles shape how EC unfolds. To clarify how EC is understood in this specific intergenerational context, we conducted a scoping review of 30 papers (2010 - 2025) examining how EC is defined, evaluated, and technologically mediated. Our analysis reveals three key patterns: reliance on self-report evaluations, a persistent interaction-closeness assumption, and under-exploration of embodied and cultural framings. We synthesise a multidimensional definition of EC comprising Affective Expression, Relational Practices, Embodied Presence, and Cultural Belonging. We conclude with implications for HCI, including the need for multimodal and longitudinal methods and technologies that support multi-dimensional, culturally grounded, and meaningful intergenerational connection.

Unlike any previous generation, children's lives are now highly datafied, tracked, and digitally monitored.They are increasingly vulnerable to data collection from seemingly innocuous toys and devices with cameras, sensors, voice recognition, and geolocation.Yet, children typically lack awareness or control over these data exchanges, as consent is usually given by adult caregivers (who may also lack data literacy).Despite regulatory improvements, interdisciplinary approaches remain crucial to empowering children to understand, value, and manage their personal data.How can the IDC community involve children in the design and use of their personal data?This workshop unites experts to explore current practices.1 CCS Concepts• Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and privacy; • Human-centered computing → Interaction design 1 This workshop merged with "Towards a Research Agenda for Including Children and their Care Ecosystems in HCI" to run a joint workshop: Grasping Data Together: Interdisciplinary Agendas for Engaging Children and their Care Ecosystems with their personal data

Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research prioritises children's participation in the design process to inform design outcomes, while less attention is paid to framing design problems. Our study explores how children aged 4-5 years can better understand complex environmental problems through our storying-roleplay approach, a co-design method aimed at shifting children's thinking from absolutist views toward thinking about relationships, interdependence and win-win solutions. The method involves eliciting children's stories, creating characters, designing probes and engaging in roleplay to collaboratively reframe complex problem space. This research contributes to current discussions on children and environmental sustainability in CCI by: (i) introducing storying-roleplay as a method to co-design with young children to develop skills for better understanding complex problems, (ii) fostering children's participation in the earlier stages of design process and (iii) highlighting the potentials for co-designing relational technologies with young children.

The rise of generative AI presents new opportunities for the understanding and practice of self-care through its capability to generate varied content, including self-care suggestions via text and images, and engage in dialogue with users over time. However, there are also concerns about accuracy and trustworthiness of self-care advice provided via AI. This paper reports our findings from workshops, diaries, and interviews with five researchers and 24 participants to explore their experiences and use of generative AI for self-care. We analyze our findings to present a framework for the use of generative AI to support five types of self-care, – advice seeking, mentorship, resource creation, social simulation, and therapeutic self-expression – mapped across two dimensions – expertise and modality. We discuss how these practices shift the role of technologies for self-care from merely offering information to offering personalized advice and supporting creativity for reflection, and we offer suggestions for using the framework to investigate new self-care designs.

We present phenology circles, a method to deepen relations human and more-than-human in the backstage of participatory design processes. To illustrate the method, we reflect on over two years of activity in an online, global gardening community of practice (our phenology circle) initiated to coordinate and communicate with participants in the backstage of our research. Related to our research aims, the community was initiated to attune ourselves to the rhythms and interrelations of other species and between one another. Through this approach, we better understood interaction and deepened relations between humans and the more-than-human (e.g., plants, animals, spirits). The community (N=42) has shared over 1,200 images and textual posts regarding thoughts about the environment, concerns, and experiences. Reflecting on activity of eight core members, we identified shifts from scientific-natured posts to imbue sentience and storytelling, making possible a variety of cross-cultural and symbiotic encounters to appear in our online site and fostering community to encounter and embrace difference. Phenology circles illuminate more-than-human concerns intertwined with different human values and beliefs. We discuss the value of science, sentience and storytelling, reflect on facilitation, and illustrate a design pathway that links the backstage to frontstage design activities.

This paper presents nature fictions, a co-design approach that seeks to highlight relations between people and nonhuman stakeholders in the process of imagining sustainable futures. The work was situated in gardens, to explore nature relations in gardener's immediate surroundings and to imagine ways of combating the adverse effects human activities have on the Earth's natural systems. Our study involved design workshops with 15 gardeners, who engaged with different prompts (phenology wheel, nature cards, and paper prototypes) to provoke relational thought for creating nature fictions. Through this process, we identified three design spaces that illustrate the relevance of the nature fictions approach: 1) Community building through awareness and collaboration around nature, 2) Multispecies care in the garden, and 3) Creating balance in public spaces – From the garden to society. We discuss key tensions and anxieties, and opportunities for each design space, and we reflect on working with nature fictions and more-than-human thought.

Abstract Sleep studies suggest that exams, jobs, and technologies keep teens up at night, but little research exists to engage teens in reflecting on their own sleep. We designed a set of cards and a web-based app ‘SleepBeta’ to support reflection by inviting teens to ask questions, explore, track, and experiment with sleep and related technology and lifestyle habits. Through card sorting, we invited teens to identify technology and lifestyle habits they wished to track. SleepBeta let teens track various habits and sleep whilst visualizing interrelationships between these data. Twelve teens and 11 parents participated in interviews before and after a 3-week field trial of SleepBeta. Our findings highlighted four distinct modes of reflection: reflection in preparation, reflection in action, reflection upon revisiting data, and reflection through social interaction. We discuss how our findings provide sensitizing concepts that reframe reflection from a post hoc activity with personal data, to an ongoing process that starts before technologies are used to generate data. We highlight design opportunities for scaffolding reflection in preparation, and we reflect on design choices that give teens control over their data.

Urban life is increasingly disconnected from nature. How might we design for greater awareness of the life around us? We present a study of an Internet of Things (IoT) device, the Ambient Birdhouse, and sensors to learn what kinds of interactions and media supported participants’ attention to local nature, and the sharing and exploration of nature data. Eight participants used the system and took part in individual interviews and group discussions. We found that diverse media and its reproductions and transformations (remediation), presented entry points for different kinds of users to engage with nature data. Notably, ambient acoustic media presented a means of both analytic sense-making and sensitizing users to nature. Patterns of sharing illuminated relational networks, as well as the affordances and challenges of different media. We contemplate how remediation impacts engagement with both nature and nature data and what this means for the design of IoT systems.

In recent work, design researchers have sought to ensure that people with disabilities are engaged as competent and valued contributors to co-design. Yet, little is known about how to achieve this with adults with severe intellectual disabilities. Navigating design in the context of complex care practices is challenging, charged with uncertainty, and requires sustained effort of methodological and affective adjustments. To establish a respectful co-design relationship and enrich participation, we turn to Active Support (AS), an evidence-based strategy for engaging adults with severe intellectual disabilities. We present a reflective account of long-term field work that utilized the four aspects of AS, a) every moment has potential; b) graded assistance; c) little and often; d) maximizing choice and control. We discuss how these principles contribute to deepening HCI methods by ensuring interactional turns for adults with severe disabilities, revealing their unique competences, thereby shaping design direction and providing design insight.

HCI has historically provided little support for moving from fieldwork insights or theories to design outcomes. Having witnessed many students struggle and then justify their designs with a form of marketing hype, we developed a supporting approach of “field theories”. A field theory is a working theory about salient interactions in a particular domain and sensitizing concepts in order to frame design investigations. It is presented visually in a field theory diagram to support succinct communication and critique. Studying use of design prototypes that have been informed by a field theory helps to reflect upon and refine the theory. In this paper we present examples from our HCI classes and reflections based on interviews with students. We discuss how field theories offer an orientation in the spirit of a ‘bricoleur’ who harnesses elements of theory and practice to produce deeper understandings and more fitting outcomes for the task at hand.

As cities grow, their people become increasingly distanced from nature except within private and public green spaces. Sensing technologies provide a means to harness curiosity about the animals living in these spaces, and possibly also connect interest to care. Yet little is known as to how people may use these technologies, or the implications for human-nature relations. To learn more, we gave commercial camera traps to ten adult participants to understand how they explored their gardens, what they wanted to learn, and what they did with this knowledge. We discovered trade-offs between control and care; the usefulness of different media and mystery; the temporalities of engaging in natural sensing practice; and a prevalence of sharing media within households. We discuss design for convivial cohabitation with the creatures in our garden. This research contributes to better human-nature relations through citizen sensing, as well as HCI for urban biodiversity conservation.

This paper investigates how making activities and participation in makerspaces supports the wellbeing and empowerment of women, particularly in making domains that are typically male-dominated. We spent six months undertaking participant observations in a women-only makerspace that runs workshops aimed at teaching women skills in using power tools and woodwork. We conducted contextual interviews with 12 workshop attendees as well as with the makerspace founder and lead instructor. Through the lens of feminist HCI and legitimate peripheral participation, we present trajectories of participation within a women-only makerspace - from beginning as a peripheral participant to becoming a competent and confident maker. We found that through structured workshops in a women-only space that actively teach making skills, the women-only makerspace works to transform the current makerspace landscape so more women can engage with these spaces and participate within them. We contribute three core qualities to foster participation: women-only but without a 'feminist' label, configuring a formal and collaborative learning environment, and reification through artefacts. Collectively these work towards new configurations of makerspaces for women that enable their participation within them, and we detail how such configurations work to create trajectories for women's participation.

Women can face barriers to participation in universal makerspace environments and are consequently underrepresented within them. Further, women have historically been excluded from learning and working with particular types of materials, such as wood. To explore how we might address these inequalities in regards to both access to makerspaces and to diverse materials, we present the wooden quilt probe. Through this probe we aimed to 1) create a makerspace environment specifically for women where they could engage with materials and tools traditionally found in more male-dominated craft environments, and 2) facilitate the sharing of stories and experiences with other women within the community center where this work took place. We contribute a rich understanding of the stories and experiences of women from the community center, and discuss the implications of the work for Interaction Design: how designers can contribute towards diversifying makerspace environments that enable women's participation within them, the benefits of intertwining storytelling and making, and the boundaries around sharing personal narratives.

In this paper, we present a case study of the iterative design of TalkingBox, a communication device designed with a person with a severe cognitive disability and his support network. TalkingBox combines graphic symbols with tangible technology to foster the use of symbolic communication by leveraging the person's strength and interest in memory matching games. In the course of designing, trialing and iterating the TalkingBox, we discovered that the design supported not only the development of symbolic communication, but also revealed new interests and strengths of our participant. TalkingBox highlighted opportunities for interactions with peers, revealed new skills in visual discrimination, and evidenced interests. These could, in turn, support staff and family to adapt their support. More importantly, TalkingBox had become a living portfolio presenting our participant with severe disability through the lens of their strengths. We discuss opportunities for research through co-design to open new avenues for future communication technologies.

Expressing one's thoughts and feelings is a fundamental human need - the basis for communication and social interaction. We ask, how do minimally-verbal children on the autism spectrum express themselves? How can we better recognise instances of self-expression? And how might technologies support and encourage self-expression? To address these questions, we undertook co-design research at an autism-specific primary school with 20 children over one school year. This paper contributes six Modalities of Self-Expression, through which children self-express and convey their design insights. Each modality of self-expression can occur across two different dimensions (socio-expressive and auto-expressive) and can be of a fundamental or an integrative nature. Further, we contribute the design trajectory of a tangible ball prototype, the ExpressiBall, which - through voice, sounds, lights, and motion sensors - explores how tangible technologies can support this range of expressive modalities. Finally, we discuss the concept of Self-Expression by Design.

Wearable technologies offer potential in supporting assessment of lower limb movements in video consultations, which otherwise are challenging to assess. Yet there remains a limited understanding of how such technologies can be used to improve video consultations in a hospital setting and how they contribute to the clinician-patient interactions over a distance. In this article, we report on the findings of the field evaluation of a wearable technology— SoPhy. SoPhy consists of a pair of sensor embedded socks that capture the lower limb movements of a patient and a web-interface to visualise these movements for the remote physiotherapist. Our study demonstrates that SoPhy helped the physiotherapist in identifying the subtle differences in patients’ movements across all six phases of a consultation. SoPhy increased the confidence of the physiotherapist and guided more accurate assessment of the patients. SoPhy visualisation enhanced the overall clinician-patient communication and offered a better understanding of the therapy goals to the patients. Using the characteristics of the visualisations, patients were able to plan specific goals. We discuss how SoPhy helped in addressing challenges in video consultations experienced by a physiotherapist, and beyond that, how it enabled collective reflection between therapist and patient.

Young adults with intellectual disability are keen users of social media. However, there is little understanding about how their skills and participation in social media might be leveraged to support further skills development. Employing a participatory approach through workshops with eleven participants and interviews with eight parents, we investigated what skills young adults desire and how they might be able to leverage their participation in YouTube and Facebook to develop these skills. We found that young adults want to develop social skills of such as playing sports or learning languages, but that leveraging social media participation to do this goes beyond their typical use, and requires both collaborative support and accessible design. Based on these findings, we propose and discuss a collaboration-in-the-loop framework that integrates support through personal networks and an accessible user interface design. We conclude with a reflection on designing to leverage participation, interests and competencies to support people with intellectual disability.

Existing methods for researching and designing to support relationships between parents and their adult children tend to lead to designs that respect the differences between them. We conducted 14 Position Exchange Workshops with parents and their adult children, where the child has left home in recent years, aiming to explicate and confront their positions in creative and supportive ways. We designed three co-design methods (Card Sort for Me & You, Would I Lie to You? and A Magic Machine for You) to support participants to explore, understand, empathize, and design for each other. The findings show that the methods facilitated understanding, renegotiating, and reimagining their current positions. We discuss how positions can help consider both perspectives in the design process. This paper seeks to contribute (1) how the notion of positions enables generating understandings of the relationship, and (2) a set of methods influenced by position exchange, empathy, and playful engagement that help explore human relationships.

Existing co-design methods support verbal children on the autism spectrum in the design process, while their minimally-verbal peers are overlooked. We describe Co-Design Beyond Words (CDBW), an approach which merges existing co-design methods with practice-based methods from Speech and Language Therapy which are child-led and interests-based. These emphasise the rich detail that can be conveyed in the moment, through recognising occurrences of, for example, Joint Attention, Turn Taking and Imitation. We worked in an autism-specific primary school over 20 weeks with ten children, aged 5 to 8. We co-designed a playful prototype, the TangiBall, using the three iterative phases of CDBW; the Foundation Phase (preparation for interaction), the Interaction Phase (designing-and-reflecting in the moment) and the Reflection Phase (reflection-on-action). We contribute a novel co-design approach and present moments of interaction, the micro instances in design in which minimally-verbal children on the spectrum can convey meaning beyond words, through their actions, interactions, and attentional foci. These moments of interaction provide design insight, shape design direction, and reveal unique strengths, interests, and abilities.

Digital technologies to support children on the autism spectrum often offer predefined content for modelling, communicating and training. However, children may not relate to the content, and it may not match their own personal interests and motivations. This paper investigates the use of MyWord, an interest-based, child-led technology, as an exploratory probe. This audio-visual dictionary app supports a child to build their own personalised catalogue of favourite words, images and audio over time. We undertook a field study over two school terms in an autism-specific primary school with 12 minimally-verbal children aged 5 to 8 and their teachers and speech therapists. Findings indicate that creating dictionary entries involved processes of personal choice, representation of the self and interests, and dynamic action and play. Use of personally and contextually relevant words enhanced engagement, interaction and self-expression. We contribute a novel, flexible, interest-based technology, and reflections on its use in autism-specific school contexts. We highlight the importance of the child's lived experience and holistic child-led approaches to technology design.

Technologies to support children with autism tend to use predefined content to enhance specific skills, such as verbal communication or emotion recognition. Few mobilise the child's own (often very specific) interests, strengths and capabilities. Digital technologies offer opportunities for children to personalise learning with their own content, following their own interests and enabling their self-expression. This project sought to engage children to record and express their own interests within their contexts of support - the home and the classroom. The vehicle for self-expression was an audio-visual calendaring app called MeCalendar. Implementation was kept open-ended to allow teachers to use it in ways that best fit with their existing embedded practices. In this paper we report on how the prototype has been appropriated in two classrooms by teachers in an autism-specific school setting with children aged 6 to 7. Our contribution is an understanding of how technologies for self-expression led to enhanced verbal communication, positive reinforcement through video modelling, engagement in class tasks and enhanced social interaction. Children appropriated the design in unimagined ways, leading them to self-scaffold and to catalyse their confidence in social interaction and self-expression. Teachers played an integral role in appropriating the design in the classroom, specifically through their in-depth knowledge of each child and their individual needs, strengths and interests.

Physiotherapists are increasingly using video conferencing tools for their teleconsultations. Yet, the assessment of subtle differences in body movements remains a challenge. To support lower limb assessment in video consultations, we present SoPhy, a wearable technology consisting of a pair of socks with embedded sensors for patients to wear; and a web interface that displays information about range of weight distribution, foot movement, and foot orientation for physiotherapists in real-time. We conducted a laboratory study of 40 video consultations, in which postgraduate physiotherapy students assessed lower limb function. We compare assessment with and without SoPhy. Findings show that SoPhy increased the confidence in assessing squats exercise and fewer repetitions were required to assess patients when using SoPhy. We discuss the significance of SoPhy to address the challenges of assessing bodily information over video, and present considerations for its integration with clinical practices and tools.

While the idea of "celebratory technologies" during family mealtimes to support positive interactions at the dinner table is promising, there are few studies that investigate how these technologies can be meaningfully integrated into family practices. This paper presents the deployment of Chorus - a mealtime technology that orchestrates the sharing of personal devices and stories during family mealtimes, explores related content from all participants' devices, and supports revisiting previously shared content. A three-week field deployment with seven families shows that Chorus augments family interactions through sharing contents of personal and familial significance, supports togetherness and in-depth discussion by combining resources from multiple devices, helps to broach sensitive topics into familial conversation, and encourages participation from all family members including children. We discuss implications of this research and reflect on design choices and opportunities that can further enhance the family mealtime experience.

Strong user engagement with digital technologies for behaviour change is often taken as a precursor to their longer-term efficacy. We critically examine this assumption through a qualitative study of a smoking cessation app, called NewLeaf, which allows quitters to swap personal stories. The study examined what influenced people to engage or disengage with NewLeaf, and how the app was deployed in quit attempts during a four week trial. Several properties of swapped stories were reported to promote engagement, including: authenticity, currency, contextualization of advice, and evoking a sense of community. But while the resulting engagement was sometimes productive in supporting quitting, other trajectories of use were observed involving counterproductive engagement, and a surprising pattern of productive disengagement especially among stronger quitters. We discuss how this analysis of different trajectories problematizes any simple interpretation of user engagement as an early indicator of success for behaviour change technologies.

This paper investigates the challenges of bodily communication during video-based clinical consultations. While previous works describe the lack of eye contact and gestures over video, it is unclear how these limitations impact the course of a clinical consultation, particularly in a domain like physiotherapy where the focus is on improving body movements and functioning. To contribute to this understanding, we conducted observations of 10 naturally occurring video and face-to-face consultations for physiotherapy. We found that clinicians rely on a variety of incidental bodily cues and fine-details of body movements to assess and examine the patient. These bodily cues were noticeable during face-to-face consultations; however, a variety of bodily cues got missed over video. Consequently, video consultations became conversational where the clinicians used verbal conduct to get a fair understanding of the patient's health. To guide design of future video consultation systems, we reflect on our understanding as 4 design sensitivities: Visual Acuity, Field-of-view, Clinical Asymmetries, and Time Sequence.

This paper describes the design of "ArmSleeve", a patient monitoring system to support occupational therapists in their upper limb rehabilitation work with stroke patients. Occupational therapists can provide rehabilitation in clinics, but they have limited insights into how much their patients use their affected arm and hand in daily life, which is critical for effective recovery to occur. Our work addresses this problem through three interrelated studies: (1) interviews with therapists to examine their current rehabilitation practices; (2) the design of the "ArmSleeve Sensor" to monitor a patient's upper limb movement; and (3) the design and evaluation of the "ArmSleeve Dashboard" to visualize this information for therapists. The findings show the importance of collecting objective data to assess exercise and activities outside therapy, but also a lack of contextual information to interpret this data. We discuss considerations for how to address this issue through patient engagement as well as considerations for designing wearable sensor technology that is usable in everyday life.

This paper joins the ubiquitous computing scholarship that investigates the use of technologies in collocated shared settings like family mealtime. Family mealtimes are an important site for fostering togetherness, sharing everyday experiences, and nurturing familial ties. While technologies, especially television and personal devices are often criticized for disrupting the social aspects of mealtimes, they are widely available and commonly used nevertheless. In this paper, we explore this tension and present a novel system TableTalk, which transforms personal devices into a communal shared display on the table to enrich mealtime interactions and experience. Our field study shows that TableTalk does not undermine togetherness, but supports familial expectations and experiences by stimulating conversation, reminiscing, bonding, education, and socializing. We discuss how technology that is sensitive to the needs of family interactions can augment the commensal experience and reflect on design choices and opportunities that contribute, rather than disrupt, family mealtimes.

This article examines familial interactions, which are mediated through information and communication technologies, during domestic mealtimes. We seek to understand how technologies are used and negotiated among family members and the influence of technology on commensality. We conducted an observational study of six families. The findings showed how technologies are integrated into the mealtime activities. Our study identifies domestic circumstances where background technologies are raised to the foreground, visible devices are hidden, unwanted distractions become desired, and ordinary technologies are integrated into mealtime experiences. We identify four patterns of arrangement between technologies and family members during mealtimes, and we discuss how technologies contribute to mealtime satiety and commensality. Finally, we present implications of our findings and directions for technological advancements focusing on the social and celebratory nature of family mealtimes.

Photography is now a highly automated activity where people enjoy phototaking by pointing and pressing a button. While this liberates people from having to interact with the processes of photography, e.g., controlling the parameters of the camera or printing images in the darkroom, we argue that an engagement with such processes can in fact enrich people's experience of phototaking. Drawing from fieldwork with members of a film-based photography club, we found that people who engage deeply with the various processes of phototaking experienced photography richly and meaningfully. Being able to participate fully in the entire process gave them a sense of achievement over the final result. Having the opportunity to engage with the process also allowed them to learn and hone their photographic skills. Through this understanding, we can imagine future technologies that enrich experiences of photography through providing the means to interact with photographic processes in new ways.

Social interaction can be a powerful strategy for persuasive technology interventions, yet many users are reluctant to engage with others online because they fear pressure, failure and shame. We introduce the 'ambivalent socialiser', a person who is simultaneously keen but also reluctant to engage with others via social media. Our contribution is to identify four approaches to introducing sociality to ambivalent socialisers: structured socialising, incidental socialising, eavesdropping and trace sensing. We discuss the rationale for these approaches and show how they address recent critiques of persuasive technology. Furthermore, we provide actionable insights for designers of persuasive technology by showing how these approaches can be implemented in a social media application.

Research on social network sites has examined how people integrate offline and online life, but with a particular emphasis on their use by friendship groups. We extend earlier work by examining a case in which offline ties are non-existent, but online ties strong. Our case is a study of bodybuilders, who explore their passion with like-minded offline 'strangers' in tightly integrated online communities. We show that the integration of offline and online life supports passion-centric activities, such as bodybuilding.