Stakeholder-informed prioritization (SIP) is a lightweight technique designed to help child-involved groups quickly understand and prioritize research and design directions. However, outcomes of short prioritization discussions can vary with group composition. In this paper, we deployed SIP with 34 groups of children and parents (N = 94) at a large community event, focusing on how group composition, including group type (family-based vs. child-based) and familiarity (mixed-familiarity vs. fully familiar), shapes SIP experiences. Results suggest that child-based groups were associated with higher satisfaction, more active child participation, smaller in-group range in comfort, satisfaction, and participation level, and more verbal reasoning. Fully familiar groups reported higher comfort and showed more verbal reasoning and less facilitator involvement, while mixed-familiarity groups showed a smaller in-group range in participation levels. We discuss implications for designing and facilitating child-involved group prioritization sessions and provide practical guidance for using SIP as a rapid method in early-stage research.

Developing research indicates that teenagers have been integrating generative AI chatbots into their social lives through various ways—from enlivening group chats to nurturing intimate companionships. However, we know little about how these AI chatbots may shape the interactions between teenagers themselves and their close friends, despite the important consequences adolescent peer friendships have on social functioning in adulthood. To develop our understanding of this critical area, we conducted a speculative enactment and interview study with 47 teenagers aged 13-19 to understand teenagers’ views of AI chatbot use in the context of navigating consequential friendship interactions. After enacting speculative scenarios involving their own close friend, participants’ reflections highlighted distinct perceptions about the meaning of friendship, human effort, and interpretations of acceptable AI use. We discuss considerations for the impact of AI chatbots on teens’ social development and present design implications to support teenagers’ relationship autonomy and active social learning.

Creative workflows increasingly rely on technological support, yet less is known about how creators navigate the complex collaborative ecosystems and what roles technology might play in supporting these ecosystems. We investigate podcast production as a case to understand collaborative creative practices and identify opportunities for future technology design. Through diary study and interviews with 14 podcast creators, we examine how teams navigate complex stakeholder ecosystems involving distributed teams, episodic guests, multi-tiered audiences, and networks. Our findings reveal three underlying tensions that lead to frictions in current collaborative creation practices: fragmentation vs. coherence in creative coordination, structure vs. spontaneity in live production, and intimacy vs. scale in listener engagement. We outline design opportunities for technology roles to address these tensions: a Story Architect synthesizing fragmented inputs while preserving accessibility, a Live Collaborator providing real-time support during work, and a Feedback Proxy simulating audience feedback at scale. This work contributes a rich empirical foundation for designing technology that reduces social coordination burden while preserving authentic creative relationships in collaborative creation.

Families make key decisions about whether and how Virtual Reality (VR) enters children's lives, but their priorities rarely shape the research agendas and accountability structures that guide what is studied and built. We examine children's and families' views on (1) which knowledge is most needed to support decisions about children's home VR use, (2) which advances, tools, and content should be prioritized, and (3) which actors they see as responsible for addressing these priorities. We first conducted a secondary analysis of prior interviews with children and guardians to distill a structured set of family-perceived alternatives for home VR use. We then engaged 46 child-involved groups (84 children, 40 guardians) to collaboratively prioritize the perceived importance of these alternatives and assign responsibility to different actors. We found that families prioritized knowledge about VR's effects on brain development and behavior as the most needed, viewing it as the underlying mechanisms with downstream consequences for other effects. They treated safety monitoring as a prerequisite that should not depend solely on parental control, and ranked safety above affordability, comfort, and visual realism. This work contributes to the VR community by offering a children- and family-informed VR research agenda, along with insights into who families believe should be responsible for addressing these priorities.

As technology plays a growing role in children's lives, incorporating their perspectives is crucial for shaping future research and design.This paper introduces a lightweight technique, called Stakeholder-Informed Prioritization (SIP), designed to help childinvolved groups quickly get informed about and prioritize research and design directions.We demonstrate the use of SIP through a case study focused on Virtual Reality (VR), a technology that is rapidly gaining popularity among younger users but remains underexplored from their point of view.We piloted SIP with 34 groups of children (aged 8 to 18) and their families during a community event.Our results show that participants in these groups can successfully complete SIPs and are generally satisfied with the results.

This workshop will convene researchers and stakeholders to share their work on and discuss research on extended reality (XR) technologies for children, including identifying risks, opportunities, and ethical guidelines.The workshop builds on prior child-computer interaction research on XR technologies, as well as prior SIGs and workshops focused on ethics.Our goal is to discuss state-of-the art research on XR technologies and outline ethical concerns and future research challenges.

Online health communities (OHCs) offer the promise of connecting with supportive peers. Forming these connections first requires finding relevant peers—a process that can be time-consuming. Peer recommendation systems are a computational approach to make finding peers easier during a health journey. By encouraging OHC users to alter their online social networks, peer recommendations could increase available support. But these benefits are hypothetical and based on mixed, observational evidence. To experimentally evaluate the effect of peer recommendations, we conceptualize these systems as health interventions designed to increase specific beneficial connection behaviors. In this paper, we designed a peer recommendation intervention to increase two behaviors: reading about peer experiences and interacting with peers. We conducted an initial feasibility assessment of this intervention by conducting a 12-week field study in which 79 users of CaringBridge.org received weekly peer recommendations via email. Our results support the usefulness and demand for peer recommendation and suggest benefits to evaluating larger peer recommendation interventions. Our contributions include practical guidance on the development and evaluation of peer recommendation interventions for OHCs.

HCI aspires to achieve equitable outcomes in our sociotechnical interventions. Prior work suggests that improved evaluation and reporting of intervention disparities can help achieve more equitable outcomes. We analyzed socioeconomic disparities in hybrid and online-only local support communities by quantitatively operationalizing the access-adoption-adherence-effectiveness (AAAE) framework. The hybrid intervention demonstrated statistically significant socioeconomic status (SES)-based disparities in adoption of community's asynchronous online platform, while the online-only intervention demonstrated statistically significant disparities in access and adherence to synchronous online classes. Our findings suggest that disparities in earlier elements of the framework ''pipeline'' may mask later disparities due to survivorship bias, highlighting the importance of comprehensively examining the four elements of the framework. Using the example of a parenting education community, we reflect on using the AAAE framework as a rigorous tool to evaluate a sociotechnical intervention's disparities, avoid survivorship bias, identify the most pertinent support needed, and aid efforts toward sustained and equitable outcomes.

Online(-only) friendships have become increasingly common in daily lives post-COVID despite debates around their mental health benefits and equivalence to ''real'' relationships. Previous research has reflected a need to understand how online friends engage beyond individual platforms, and the lack of platform-agnostic inquiry limits our ability to fully understand the dynamics of online friendship. We employed an activity-grounded analysis of 25 interviews on lived experiences of close online friendship spanning multiple years. Our findings present unique challenges and strategies in online friendships, such as stigma from real-life circles, an ambivalent relationship with online communities, and counter-theoretical reappropriations of communication technology. This study contributes to HCI research in online communities and social interface design by refocusing prior impressions of strong vs. weak-ties in online social spaces and foregrounding time-stable interactions in design for relationship maintenance through technology. Our work also promotes critical reflection on biased perspectives towards technology-mediated practices and consideration of online friends as an invisible marginalized community.

How does online anonymity impact the perceived effectiveness of person-centered recovery support messages? In online health communities, privacy preferences can be at odds with community goals for diversity, similar others, and effective support exchange. Prior work has shown how the multifaceted concept of identity plays an important role in support-seeking behaviors, but its effects concerning support providers are still unclear. Through a mixed-methods controlled online experiment, we demonstrate the effects of different facets of anonymity and person-centeredness in comments on their perceived effectiveness. We found that in instances of low person-centered support, the presence of in-group identity disclosures had the strongest effect on facilitating positive support outcomes. We contextualize our findings with an analysis of participants' motivations for individual support preferences related to person-centered, social identity disclosures, and recovery practices. Finally, we discuss the implications for the design of supporting diverse support preferences in online recovery communities.

Online community research routinely poses minimal risk to individuals, but does the same hold true for online communities? In response to high-profile breaches of online community trust and increased debate in the social computing research community on the ethics of online community research, this paper investigates community-level harms and benefits of research. Through 9 participatory-inspired workshops with four critical online communities (Wikipedia, InTheRooms, CaringBridge, and r/AskHistorians), we found researchers should engage more directly with communities' primary purpose by rationalizing their methods and contributions in the context of community goals to equalize the beneficiaries of community research. To facilitate deeper alignment of these expectations, we present the FACTORS (Functions for Action with Communities: Teaching, Overseeing, Reciprocating, and Sustaining) framework for ethical online community research. Finally, we reflect on our findings by providing implications for researchers and online communities to identify and implement functions for navigating community-level harms and benefits.

Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a transformative technology to revolutionize education, socialization, and entertainment. However, alongside its promising applications, concerns about potential risks, particularly for young children, have surfaced. We conducted a survey and interview study with 55 parents and 67 children aged 7-13, to identify ethical concerns and design considerations for VR usage in youth populations. This study contributes to the HCI community by providing empirical insights into the ethical concerns surrounding children’s VR usage, as viewed from both children’s and their parents’ perspectives. These insights stem directly from their perceptions of the risks, benefits, and considerations associated with VR across various usage scenarios. Additionally, our research offers valuable design and research implications for the development of responsible VR practices that balance the advantages and potential risks for children and their families.

Virtual reality (VR) offers promise in education given its immersive and socially engaging nature, but it can pose challenges for educators when creating VR-specific content. VR videos can function as a new educational tool for VR content creation due to their creation affordability and user-friendliness. However, little empirical research exists on how educators utilize VR videos and associated pedagogy in real classes. Our research employed a contextual inquiry, through in-person interviews and online surveys with 11 instructors to gain actionable insights from envisioned teaching scenarios for VR videos that are informed by actual instructional practices. Our study aims to understand the factors that motivate instructors’ adoption of VR videos, identify challenges educators face when incorporating VR videos into instructional units, and examine pedagogical adjustments when integrating VR videos into teaching. Through empirical evidence, we provide design implications for the development of VR-based learning experiences across diverse educational contexts. Our study also serves as a practical case of how VR can be adopted and integrated into education.

Close relationships are irreplaceable social resources, yet prone to high-risk conflict. Building on findings from the fields of HCI, virtual reality, and behavioral therapy, we evaluate the unexplored potential of retrospective VR-embodied perspective-taking to fundamentally influence conflict resolution in close others. We develop a biographically-accurate Retrospective Embodied Perspective-Taking system (REPT) and conduct a mixed-methods evaluation of its influence on close others’ reflection and communication, compared to video-based reflection methods currently used in therapy (treatment as usual, or TAU). Our key findings provide evidence that REPT was able to significantly improve communication skills and positive sentiment of both partners during conflict, over TAU. The qualitative data also indicated that REPT surpassed basic perspective-taking by exclusively stimulating users to embody and reflect on both their own and their partner’s experiences at the same level. In light of these findings, we provide implications and an agenda for social embodiment in HCI design: conceptualizing the use of ‘embodied social cognition,’ and envisioning socially-embodied experiences as an interactive context.

Collaborative play not only provides entertainment but also nurtures connections and strengthens community ties. In family and intergenerational contexts, collaborative activities and play can engage family members in quality conversations and meaningful connections over distance. To explore participants' preferences, practices, and interaction dynamics when playing remotely, we conducted a design probe study with 15 groups of parents and children from 16 families. Our findings highlight both similarities and notable differences in the use of communication methods, workspaces, and objects between parents and children. Specifically, we observed distinct patterns in gestural and verbal communication and identified specific challenges encountered by children in a simulated remote setting. Our findings also revealed the dynamics of play sessions, particularly when co-located participants are involved, shedding light on the complexities of remote intergenerational communication and play. Our work contributes empirical insights into designing more effective and engaging remote collaborative platforms for families.

Prior work has explored various technology designs to support intergenerational communications and connections through remote activities such as reading or play. However, few works have explored these technologies outside the family settings. In this work, we aimed to understand how technology can support social connectedness through remote activities, by investigating the use of a tablet-based AR system among older adult volunteers and students for remote reading. We developed the system based on insights from previous research, deployed the system in the field, and observed the use of the system over six months. With the data collected from the field, we present a rich description on the use of the system and the practices that emerged around its usage in a real-world setting. Our findings highlight the importance of supporting an engaging reading experience and context understanding for social connections with the technology design. We provide insights into how such technology can support intergenerational communication and foster social connectedness.

Integrating music into Computer Science (CS) education can stimulate children’s creativity, change the stereotypical perspective of CS, and encourage women, ethnic or cultural minorities involved in the Computer Science area. In this paper, we use Augmented Reality (AR) technology to design a tangible programming system - AR-MPro for children, acting as a bridge between programming and music. It allows children to create customized AR effects to visualize music with low-cost materials by constructing tangible program sequences. AR-MPro is expected to broaden participation in computing, and be more intuitive, intriguing and instructional to enrich children’s creating and programming experiences.

Large age differences and geographic distance between siblings can often hinder the development of close relationships, as they may have different social circles and schedules. Younger siblings may also have limited access to digital technology, which can further complicate communication and interaction between them. In this paper, we developed two technology probes, Haptic Bubble and Emoji Board. Both of these systems utilize embodied interaction, which has been shown to be an effective way to engage children in remote communication. Our work focused on three main goals through the development and preliminary study: the system design goal involved testing the feasibility of the embodied design approach, the empirical goal was to collect information on how siblings use embodied communication technology and the design goal was to inspire new kinds of technology to support large gap siblings’ needs.

This workshop will convene researchers and stakeholders to share their work on and discuss participatory approaches to the ethics of emerging technologies for children. The workshop builds on prior discussions in the community, which have identified significant challenges in addressing ethical issues related to emerging technologies given that they are still under development, and it is difficult to predict how they may be used. Our goal is to build on the familiarity the community has with participatory methods and apply them to considering the ethics of emerging technologies, thus giving stakeholders, including children, a voice in these considerations.

Virtual Reality (VR) has a noteworthy educational potential by providing immersive and collaborative environments. As an alternative but cost-effective way of delivering realistic environments in VR, using 360-degree videos in immersive VR (VR videos) received more attention. Although many studies reported positive learning experiences with VR videos, little is known about how collaborative learning performs on VR video viewing systems. In this study, we implemented two collaborative VR video viewing modes based on the way of group video control, synchronized or shared (Sync mode) and non-synchronized or individual (Non-sync mode) video control, against a conventional VR video viewing setting (Basic mode). We conducted a within-subject study (N = 54) in a lab-simulated remote learning environment. Our results show that collaborative VR video modes (Sync and Non-sync mode) improve users’ learning experiences and collaboration quality, especially with shared video control. Our findings provide directions for designing and employing collaborative VR video tools in online learning environments.

Siblings play a crucial and long-lasting role in family connections and relationships. However, with the older sibling transitioning out of their parental home, maintaining a close sibling relationship can be challenging, especially if siblings have a large age difference. We conducted a diary and interview study with nine families in China which have spaced siblings, to identify design opportunities for technology to better support their communication and connection needs. We contribute to the HCI community in three aspects. First, we contribute an empirical understanding of current communication patterns from distributed families with large age gap siblings in China. Second, we identify current facilitation roles, practices, and challenges regarding sibling relationships from different stakeholders’ perspectives. Last but not least, we present technological opportunities for supporting the large-gap sibling relationship, informing directions for future research and design for distributed families.

Affective computing (AC), a field that bridges the gap between human affect and computational technology, has witnessed remarkable technical advancement. However, theoretical underpinnings of affective computing are rarely discussed and reviewed. This paper provides a thorough conceptual analysis of the literature to understand theoretical questions essential to affective computing and current answers. Inspired by emotion theories, we proposed the function-component-representation (FCR) framework to organize different conceptions of affect along three dimensions that each address an important question: function of affect (why compute affect), component of affect (how to compute affect), and representation of affect (what affect to compute). We coded each paper by its underlying conception of affect and found preferences towards affect detection, behavioral component, and categorical representation. We also observed coupling of certain conceptions. For example, papers using the behavioral component tend to adopt the categorical representation, whereas papers using the physiological component tend to adopt the dimensional representation. The FCR framework is not only the first attempt to organize different theoretical perspectives in a systematic and quantitative way, but also a blueprint to help conceptualize an AC project and pinpoint new possibilities. Future work may explore how the identified frequencies of FCR framework combinations may be applied in practice.

lmmersive virtual reality (VR) technologies can produce powerful illusions of being in another place or inhabiting another body, and theories of presence and embodiment provide valuable guidance to designers of VR applications that use these illusions to "take us elsewhere." However, an increasingly common design goal for VR experiences is to develop a deeper awareness of the internal landscape of one's own body (i.e., interoceptive awareness); here, design guidelines and evaluative techniques are less clear. To address this, we present a methodology, including a reusable codebook, for adapting the five dimensions of the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) conceptual framework to explore interoceptive awareness in VR experiences via qualitative interviews. We report results from a first exploratory study (n=21) applying this method to understand the interoceptive experiences of users in a VR environment. The environment includes a guided body scan exercise with a motion-tracked avatar visible in a virtual mirror and an interactive visualization of a biometric signal detected via a heartbeat sensor. The results provide new insights on how this example VR experience might be refined to better support interoceptive awareness and how the methodology might continue to be refined for understanding other "inward-facing" VR experiences.

VR has received increased attention as an educational tool and many argue it is destined to influence educational practices, especially with the emergence of the Metaverse. Most prior research on educational VR reports on applications or systems designed for specified educational or training objectives. However, it is also crucial to understand current practices and attitudes across disciplines, having a holistic view to extend the body of knowledge in terms of VR adoption in an authentic setting. Taking a higher-level perception of people in different roles, we conducted a qualitative analysis based on 23 interviews with major stakeholders and a series of participatory design workshops with instructors and students. We identified the stakeholders who need to be considered for using VR in higher education, and highlighted the challenges and opportunities critical for VR current and potential practices in the university classroom. Finally, we discussed the design implications based on our findings. This study contributes a detailed description of current perceptions and considerations from a multi-stakeholder perspective, providing new empirical insights for designing novel VR and HCI technologies in higher education.

Prior research has highlighted opportunities for technology to better support the tabletop game experience in offline and online settings, but little work has focused on the social aspect of tabletop gaming. We investigated the social and collaborative aspects of tabletop gaming in the unique context of “social distancing” during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic to shed light on the experience of remote tabletop gaming. With a multi-method qualitative approach (including digital ethnography and in-depth interviews), we empirically studied how people appropriate existing technologies and adapt their offline practices to play tabletop games remotely. We identify three themes that describe people's game and social experience during remote play: creating a shared tabletop environment (shared space), enabling a collective understanding (shared information and awareness), and facilitating a communal temporal experience (shared time). We reflect on challenges and design opportunities for a better experience in the age of remote collaboration.

Targeting the right group of workers for crowdsourcing often achieves better quality results. One unique example of targeted crowdsourcing is seeking community-situated workers whose familiarity with the background and the norms of a particular group can help produce better outcome or accuracy. These community-situated crowd workers can be recruited in different ways from generic online crowdsourcing platforms or from online recovery communities. We evaluate three different approaches to recruit generic and community-situated crowd in terms of the time and the cost of recruitment, and the accuracy of task completion. We consider the context of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the largest peer support group for recovering alcoholics, and the task of identifying and validating AA meeting information. We discuss the benefits and trade-offs of recruiting paid vs. unpaid community-situated workers and provide implications for future research in the recovery context and relevant domains of HCI, and for the design of crowdsourcing ICT systems.

Although expressive writing has proved to be beneficial on physical, mental, and social health of individuals, it has been restrained to lab-based experimental studies. In the real world, individuals may naturally engage with expressive writing when dealing with difficult times, especially when facing a tough health journey. Health blogging may serve as an easy-to-access method for self-therapy, if spontaneous expressive writing occurs. However, many posts may not be expressive enough to provide the therapeutic power. In this study, we build a Gaussian naive Bayes model to detect expressive writing in an online health community, CaringBridge. Because we lack full text data as training data, we use a method to learn model parameters from meta-analysis of the literature. The classifier reaches reasonable accuracy on the test set annotated by the authors. We also explore factors that may influence users' spontaneous expressive writing. We find gender, health condition, author type, and privacy settings can affect individuals' spontaneous expressive writing. Finally, we reflect on our methodology and results and provide design implications for online health communities.

Online technologies offer great promise to expand models of delivery for therapeutic interventions to help users cope with increasingly common mental illnesses like anxiety and depression. For example, "cognitive reappraisal" is a skill that involves changing one's perspective on negative thoughts in order to improve one's emotional state. In this work, we present Flip*Doubt, a novel crowd-powered web application that provides users with cognitive reappraisals ("reframes") of negative thoughts. A one-month field deployment of Flip*Doubt with 13 graduate students yielded a data set of negative thoughts paired with positive reframes, as well as rich interview data about how participants interacted with the system. Through this deployment, our work contributes: (1) an in-depth qualitative understanding of how participants used a crowd-powered cognitive reappraisal system in the wild; and (2) detailed codebooks that capture informative context about negative input thoughts and reframes. Our results surface data-derived hypotheses that may help to explain what types of reframes are helpful for users, while also providing guidance to future researchers and developers interested in building collaborative systems for mental health. In our discussion, we outline implications for systems research to leverage peer training and support, as well as opportunities to integrate AI/ML-based algorithms to support the cognitive reappraisal task. (Note: This paper includes potentially triggering mentions of mental health issues and suicide.)

Examining the values inherent in papers published at IDC provides a lens to our research community and informs the path of future research needs and opportunities. We conducted a content analysis of the values expressed in all full IDC papers between 2011 and 2019 and a survey with the first authors of 20% of these papers. We examine the types of IDC research contributions, the qualities and behaviors the research seeks to support in children, the role of the child and other stakeholders in the design process, the theories that inform IDC research, and the criteria that guide the technical design choices. We discuss the research contributions and the core value trends over the past two decades of IDC full published papers. We also present the ethical considerations central to the surveyed authors' work. Based on our analysis, we discuss implications and opportunities for future contributions, such as explicit attention to inclusivity in research, encouraging multidisciplinary collaborations, and expanding the qualities our community aims to support in children. These qualities include: focusing on children's sense of autonomy, agency, and empowerment; and children's participation in research as active creators of technology.

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are characterized by an inability to decrease a substance use (e.g., alcohol or opioids) despite negative repercussions. SUDs are clinically diagnosable, hazardous, and considered a public health issue. Sponsorship, a specialized type of peer mentorship, is vital in the recovery process and originates from 12-step fellowship programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA). To investigate sponsorship relationship practices and to identify design opportunities for digitally-mediated peer support, we conducted 27 in-depth interviews with members of AA and NA. We identified five key sponsorship relationship practices relevant for designing social computing tools to support sponsorship and recovery: 1) assessing dyadic compatibility, 2) managing sponsorship with or without technology, 3) establishing boundaries, 4) building a peer support network, and 5) managing anonymity. We identify social computing and digitally-mediated design opportunities and implications.

Finding a date or a spouse online is usually considered an individualistic endeavor in Western cultures. This presents a challenge for collectivist non-Western cultures such as Saudi Arabia where choosing a spouse is viewed as a union of two families with parents of both spouses being heavily involved. Our work aims to investigate how Saudi Arabian parents view the utilization of technology by their young adults to seek potential spouses online. We report our findings of interviews conducted with 16 Saudi Arabian parents (8 fathers, 6 mothers and 1 couple). We generate qualitative themes that provide insights about how parents wanted to preserve their values, integrate technology into the traditional process and protect their young adults from potential harms. These themes lead to implications for designing suitable marital matchmaking technologies in Saudi Arabia and opportunities for future work.

Online health communities offer the promise of support benefits to users, in particular because these communities enable users to find peers with similar experiences. Building mutually supportive connections between peers is a key motivation for using online health communities. However, a user's role in a community may influence the formation of peer connections. In this work, we study patterns of peer connections between two structural health roles: patient and non-professional caregiver. We examine user behavior in an online health community---CaringBridge.org---where finding peers is not explicitly supported. This context lets us use social network analysis methods to explore the growth of such connections in the wild and identify users' peer communication preferences. We investigated how connections between peers were initiated, finding that initiations are more likely between two authors who have the same role and who are close within the broader communication network. Relationships---patterns of repeated interactions---are also more likely to form and be more interactive when authors have the same role. Our results have implications for the design of systems supporting peer communication, e.g. peer-to-peer recommendation systems.

Instrumental support is critical for patients and family caregivers facing life-threatening illnesses, injuries, or chronic conditions (e.g., cancer). We partner with CaringBridge.org—a prominent online health community for journaling about health crises—to conduct a study of instrumental support in the following two phases: a content analysis of 641 journal updates; and a survey of 991 users. Quantitative results show that: (1) patients and family caregivers prefer to receive different types of support than their care networks prefer to provide; (2) people generally have more trust in their closest social connections than acquaintances or businesses to provide instrumental support; and (3) users rate “prayer support” as the most important support category to them. Building on these results, we discuss design implications to accommodate divergent preferences and to expand instrumental support networks. We also discuss the need for future work to empower family caregivers and to support spirituality, an understudied topic in HCI.

Youth content creators have been under-researched on video platforms such as Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, etc. In order to better understand the ways that technology could support youth as content creators we conducted a 30-week series of workshops with an intergenerational design team including pre-teen youth and undergraduate designers-in-training. Qualitative analysis of workshop videos and notes revealed underlying challenges in video creation related to the social dynamics of creating videos in groups. In line with previous work, we note that a primary motivation for using social media is to spend time with friends. We found that existing video technology reveals opportunities and challenges to support the collaboration and interaction that motivates youth creators. We offer illustrative designs of potential collaborations in video sharing technology and propose that some of the concerns of youth social media use could be addressed by incorporating more opportunities for social creation.

Community intergenerational mentorship offers an opportunity to address older adults' social isolation while providing valuable one-on-one or small group learning experiences for elementary school students. Current organizations that support this kind of engagement focus on in-person visits that place the burden of logistics and transportation on the older adult. However, as older adults become less independent while aging, coming to schools in person becomes more challenging. We present a qualitative analysis of current intergenerational mentorship practices to understand opportunities for technology to expand access to this experience. We highlight elements critical for building successful mentorship: the importance of relationship building between older adults and children during mentoring activities, the skills mentors acquired to carry out mentoring activities, and support needed from teachers and schools. We contribute a rich description of current intergenerational mentorship practices and provide insights for opportunities for novel HCI technologies in this context.

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is the largest grassroots peer support group for any health condition. While AA meeting attendance is particularly important for people who are newly sober, newcomers often have trouble finding meetings because of a lack of global up-to-date meeting list due to preference for regional autonomy in AA's organizational structure. Detection of regional webpages containing meetings and extraction of day, time, and address of meetings from those pages are essential steps in making the information available and up-to-date in a global meeting list. However, varied structure of the webpages and the meetings pose challenges in achieving the goal with traditional information retrieval methods. In this paper we propose HAIR: a semi-automated human-aided information retrieval technique and explore its potential to solve this problem. We describe future directions in developing this critical tool and discuss major implications of our work in pointing to the importance of context-specific rather than context-agnostic semi-automated in-formation retrieval techniques by conceptualizing the proposed methods and results in a broader context.

Group projects are an essential component of teaching user interface (UI) design. We identified six challenges in transferring traditional group projects into the context of Massive Open Online Courses: managing dropout, avoiding free-riding, appropriate scaffolding, cultural and time zone differences, and establishing common ground. We present a case study of the design of a group project for a UI Design MOOC, in which we implemented technical tools and social structures to cope with the above challenges. Based on survey analysis, interviews, and team chat data from the students over a six-month period, we found that our socio-technical design addressed many of the obstacles that MOOC learners encountered during remote collaboration. We translate our findings into design implications for better group learning experiences at scale.

The pervasive availability of voice assistants may support children in finding answers to informational queries by removing the literacy requirements of text search (e.g., typing, spelling). However, most such systems are not designed for the specific needs and preferences of children and may struggle with understanding the intent of their questions. In our investigation, we observed 87 children and 27 adults interacting with three Wizard-of-Oz speech interfaces to arrive at answers to questions that required reformulation. We found that many children and some adults required help to reach an effective question reformulation. We report the common types of reformulations (both effective and ineffective ones). We also compared three versions of speech interfaces with different approaches to referring to itself (personification) and to the participant (naming personalization). We found that children preferred personified interfaces, but naming personalization did not affect preference. We connect our findings to implications for design of speech systems for families.

Substance use disorders, such as alcoholism and drug addiction, are a widespread and hazardous public health issue. Technology designed for the needs and values of people in recovery may be able to supplement traditional treatment options, enhance long-term abstinence maintenance, and create new opportunities for social support. We conducted a series of participatory design workshops with women in recovery from substance use disorders to identify design opportunities for supportive technologies that align with the specific values, practices and traditions of the recovery community. Through a data-driven inductive qualitative analysis, we identify five major themes that may be addressed with technology: 1) supporting twelve-step traditions and practices, 2) management of restlessness and moments of crisis, 3) agency and control over privacy and personal safety, 4) tracking progress and maintaining motivation, and 5) constructing a new normal. We connect these themes to specific implications for design.

Websites and applications that match and connect individuals for romantic purposes are commonly used in the Western world. However, there have not been many previous investigations focusing on cultural factors that affect the adoption of similar technologies in religiously conservative non-Western cultures. In this study, we examine the socio-technical and cultural factors that influence the perceptions and use of matchmaking technologies in Saudi Arabia. We report the methods and findings of interviews with 18 Saudi nationals (nine males and nine females) with diverse demographics and backgrounds. We provide qualitatively generated insights into the major themes reported by our participants related to the common approaches to matchmaking, the current role of technology, and concerns regarding matchmaking technologies in this cultural con-text. We relate these themes to specific implications for designing marital matchmaking technologies in Saudi Arabia and we outline opportunities for future investigations.

As the third most popular social network among millennials, Snapchat is well known for its picture and video messaging system that deletes content after it is viewed. However, the Stories feature of Snapchat offers a different perspective of ephemeral content sharing, with pictures and videos that are available for friends to watch an unlimited number of times for 24 hours. We conduct-ed an in-depth qualitative investigation by interviewing 18 participants and reviewing 14 days of their Stories posts. We identify five themes focused on how participants perceive and use the Stories feature, and apply a Goffmanesque metaphor to our analysis. We relate the Stories medium to other research on self-presentation and identity curation in social media.

Internet of Things (IoT) frequently involves conflicting interactions between devices and features that must be resolved to a single system state. The problem of feature interaction (FI) resolution has been investigated in Software Engineering through approaches that focus on verifiability but usually do not include the user in the evaluation. This paper bridges the gap between IoT approaches in HCI and Software Engineering by applying qualitative methods to understanding users' mental models of one representative FI resolution mechanism. Our contributions are in identifying common mental model errors and biases and how these may inform future IoT systems and research.

People in recovery from substance use disorders seek peer support through online health communities like InTheRooms.com (ITR). This community provides the unique opportunity to study video-mediated health peer support online, as it hosts over 100 weekly video meetings for fellowships like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). We describe two synergistic investigations of participants' use, perceptions, and tensions around video meetings on ITR: an online questionnaire, and in-depth inter-views with active site members. We discuss four themes that may be important to other peer-support health communities: opportunities for video-mediated support, synergy with face-to-face contact, challenge of transparency of norms, and the importance of constructive moderation.

Expressive writing has been shown to improve physical, mental, and social health outcomes for patients struggling with difficult diagnoses. In many online health communities, writing comprises a substantial portion of the user experience, yet little work has explored how writing itself affects user engagement. This paper explores user engagement on CaringBridge, a prominent online community for writing about personal health journeys. We build a survival analysis model, defining a new set of variables that operationalize expressive writing, and comparing these effects to those of social support, which are well-known to benefit user engagement. Furthermore, we use machine learning methods to estimate that approximately one third of community members who self-identify with a cancer condition cease engagement due to literal death. Finally, we provide quantitative evidence that: (1) receiving support, expressive writing, and giving support, in decreasing magnitude of relative impact, are associated with user engagement on CaringBridge, and (2) that considering deceased sites separately in our analysis significantly shifts our interpretations of user behavior.

Mediated Social Touch (MST) technologies focus on enhancing a communication experience by sensing, transmitting, and simulating social touch between remote partners. With interest in developing MST technologies continuing to grow, it is important to create standardized methods for measuring the effect of these novel systems. We designed and validated a 9-item questionnaire to measure the "Social Disfordance" of Mediated Social Touch, with three scales that focus on Social Discomfort, Communicational Expressiveness, and Need for Additional Consideration. A high degree of "social disfordance" of an MST system signifies that it may not provide the appropriate social affordances for mediating touch in a particular context. The development of the Social Disfordance of Mediated Social Touch (SDMST) instrument included a systematic literature review, expert feedback, and think-out-loud piloting. Its refinement included an exploratory factor analysis with a subsequent reduction of questions and scales. We report its psychometric properties, including metrics of inter-item reliability, convergent validity, test-retest reliability, and concurrent validity, confirming that these properties are sufficient for future use. We conclude with examples of scoring, appropriate use, and a discussion of the limitations.

How do individuals in twelve-step fellowships like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) interpret and enact "anonymity?" In this paper, we answer this question through a mixed-methods investigation. Through secondary analysis of interview data from 26 participants and an online questionnaire (N=285) we found three major interpretations of anonymity among AA and NA members: "unidentifiability," "social contract," and "program over individual." While unidentifiability has been the focus of computing investigations, the other interpretations provide a significant and novel lens on anonymity. To understand how and when the unidentifiability interpretation was most likely to be enacted, we conducted a quantitative analysis of traces of activity in a large online recovery community. We observed that members were less likely to enact "unidentifiability" if they were more connected to the particular community and had more time in recovery. We provide implications for future research on context-specific anonymity and implications for design in online recovery spaces and similar sensitive contexts.

Mediated social touch technologies aim to transmit the sense of touch between two or more physically distributed partners. Previous work in CSCW has focused mostly on vibrotactile actuation, though there is also significant recent interest in exploring a wider variety of haptic actuation modalities. In this paper, we explore Shape Memory Alloys as a novel means for constriction and heat activation. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by implementing the SqueezeBands system, which augments social gestures over videochat with haptic actuation. We describe an evaluation of the system with 57 pairs of participants, collaborating on tasks either high or low emotional salience. Our results demonstrate that SqueezeBands encourage greater and more diverse demonstrations of touch and that they may be particularly appropriate for easing mental and physical demand in high emotion tasks. We end with a discussion of the opportunities and challenges in leveraging Shape Memory Alloy actuation for mediated social touch.

Online user-generated video sharing communities, such as YouTube, are becoming more popular than conventional studio-produced content. These communities provide every user with the opportunity to create and promote their own video content---a compelling venue for children and teenagers to share their stories and voices. In this study, we investigate the practices of youth video creators on YouTube. To do so, we conducted a content analysis of the audience engagement practices of 100 youth author channels, comparing them to adult and professional YouTubers when appropriate. We found that most youth authors are aware of and actively engage with their imaginary or real audiences on YouTube. They emulate the conversational and audience engagement practices seen in professional quality YouTube channels, but may not have the video editing or other meta-content skills or experience to do so. Based on our findings, we point to a number of implications for future research and design in this space.

Families are becoming more culturally heterogeneous due to a rise in intermarriage, geographic mobility, and access to a greater diversity of cultural perspectives online. Investigating the challenges of cross-cultural parenting can help us support this growing demographic, as well as better understand how families integrate and negotiate advice from diverse online and offline sources in making parenting decisions. We interviewed parents from 18 families to understand the practices they adopt to meet the challenges of cross-cultural parenting. We investigated how these families respond to conflicts while integrating diverse cultural views, as well as how they utilize the wealth of parenting resources available online in navigating these tasks. We identify five themes focused on how these families find and evaluate advice, connect with social support, resolve intra-family tensions, incorporate multicultural practices, and seek out diverse views. Based on our findings, we contribute three implications for design and translations of these implications to concrete technology ideas that aim to help families better integrate multiple cultures into everyday life.

What kinds of content do children and teenagers author and share on public video platforms? We approached this question through a qualitative directed content analysis of over 250 youth-authored videos filtered by crowdworkers from public videos on YouTube and Vine. We found differences between YouTube and Vine platforms in terms of the age of the youth authors, the type of collaborations witnessed in the videos, and the significantly greater amount of violent, sexual, and obscene content on Vine. We also highlight possible differences in how adults and youths approach online video sharing. Specifically, we consider that adults may view online video as an archive to keep precious memories of everyday life with their family, friends, and pets, humorous moments, and special events, while children and teenagers treat online video as a stage to perform, tell stories, and express their opinions and identities in a performative way.

As CSCW creates and investigates technologies for social communication, it is important to understand the emotional benefits and costs of these systems. We propose the Affec-tive Benefits and Costs of Communication Technologies (ABCCT) questionnaire to supplement traditional qualita-tive methods of understanding communication media. We discuss the pilots of this survey with 45 children and 110 adults measuring the inter-item reliability of this instru-ment. We present the results of interviews with 14 children and 14 adults, which help confirm that the ABCCT measures the same constructs that may emerge through interview investigations. Finally, we demonstrate that the ABCCT is sensitive enough to discriminate between differ-ent communication technologies and has shown promise in some of its early adoption. Though the ABCCT is not with-out limitations, it may provide a way to compare technolo-gies in field deployments, draw findings across investiga-tions, and quantify the impact of specific design decisions.

Autism is characterized by language delays and difficulties in social interactions. Remote synchronous communication technologies may provide children with autism with new opportunities to practice social interaction when in-person interaction may not be possible. We conducted an empirical investigation, asking children with autism to interact with a teacher using two different videochat prototypes. We found that the teachers were able to engage the children in social interactions using videochat, using certain techniques to draw the children away from distractions or fixations. We describe the effective strategies used by the teachers and discuss opportunities and challenges in using a traditional video-conferencing layout compared to an alternative side-by-side layout.

Building social support networks is crucial both for less-independent individuals with autism and for their primary caregivers. In this paper, we describe a four-week exploratory study of a social network service (SNS) that allows young adults with autism to garner support from their family and friends. We explore the unique benefits and challenges of using SNSs to mediate requests for help or advice. In particular, we examine the extent to which specialized features of an SNS can engage users in communicating with their network members to get advice in varied situations. Our findings indicate that technology-supported communication particularly strengthened the relationship between the individual and extended network members, mitigating concerns about over-reliance on primary caregivers. Our work identifies implications for the design of social networking services tailored to meet the needs of this special needs population.

Twelve-step fellowships are the most common long-term maintenance program for recovery from alcoholism and addiction. Informed by six months of participatory observation of twelve-step fellowship meetings and service structure, I conducted in-depth interviews with twelve members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) about the role of technology in recovery. I found that there are a number of tensions in how technology is perceived and adopted. As technology and twelve-step fellowships interact, issues of anonymity, identity, consensus, access, unity, autonomy, and physical presence are foregrounded. I relate these findings to the broader research landscape and provide implications for future design in this space.

Finding the right person to ask for help is a difficult task within a large enterprise. While there are a few studies detailing practices for finding an expert often in the context of an expertise locator system, there are fewer studies on workplace practices and challenges for finding a person who can help, especially independent of any particular technology. We conducted a two-part study of helper-finding activities with 36 enterprise workers, representing different job roles and levels of experience. First, we present a taxonomy of workplace helper-finding needs that involves tasks, topics, and helper selection criteria, developed by analyzing two weeks of participant diaries describing helper-finding problems. Second, we present the results of follow-up interviews with each participant, focusing on helper-finding challenges in the workplace. Finally, we present design implications for systems aimed at supporting helper-finding in the workplace.

We deployed the ShareTable - a system that provides easy-to-initiate videochat and a shared tabletop task space - in four divorced households. Throughout the month of its use, the families employed the ShareTable to participate in shared activities, share emotional moments, and communicate closeness through metaphorical touch. The ShareTable provided a number of advantages over the phone and was easier to use than standard videoconferencing. However, it did also introduce concerns over privacy and new sources of conflict about appropriate calling practices. We relate our findings to the larger research landscape and present implications for future work.

Expertise selection is the process of choosing an expert from a list of recommended people. This is an important and nuanced step in expertise location that has not received a great deal of attention. Through a lab-based, controlled investigation with 35 enterprise workers, we found that presenting additional information about each recommended person in a search result list led the participants to make quicker and better-informed selections. These results focus attention on a currently understudied aspect of expertise location--expertise selection--that could greatly improve the usefulness of supporting systems. We also asked participants to rate the type of information that might be most useful for expertise selection on a paper prototype containing 36 types of potentially helpful information. We identified sixteen types of this information that may be most useful for various expertise selection tasks.

Remote play over videochat may increase opportunities for social interaction for children who are geographically separated from their preferred playmate or who live beyond walking-distance from their friends. We investigated how currently available videochat technologies may be used for remote play and the role of visual and physical structure in supporting pretend and narrative play between children. We invited 10 pairs of children to play with three videochat prototypes: phone-to-phone, phone-to-laptop, and laptop-to-laptop. Consistent with previous research, we found that laptop-to-laptop videochat was better for pretend play. However, our findings were different from previous work in that we found some evidence that laptop-to-laptop videochat may also be better at supporting narrative play and is higher-rated by children in terms of preference.

Explicitly examining the values held by a research community provides a tool in which participants can define its culture, conduct informed research, and reflect on their design process. We conducted a content analysis of the values expressed in the full text of IDC papers between 2002 and 2010, as well as a survey of the first authors of these papers. We discuss the types of contributions IDC papers make, the behaviors and qualities they seek to support in children, the audience for which IDC designs, the role of the child in creating these designs, the theories and models that inform this research, and the criteria that inform IDC's technical design choices. Based on our findings, we discuss trends, core values, and implications for the community and highlight opportunities for future IDC contributions.

Parents and children in families living with regular separation due to work develop strategies to manage being apart. We interviewed 14 pairs of parents and children (ages 7 -- 13) from work-separated families to understand their experiences and the strategies that they use to keep their family together. Parents focus on combining scheduled synchronous and spontaneous asynchronous communication to maintain a constant presence in the life of the child. Children, on the other hand, focus on other sources of support, on other activities, and on the eventual reunion. Both the remote parent and the child rely heavily on a collocated adult to maintain aware-ness and contact. We compare work-separated families with other types of separation and highlight opportunities for new designs.

In designing communication technology for children, it is important to understand the affective benefits and costs introduced by a particular medium. We present an Affective Benefits and Costs of Communication Technologies Questionnaire appropriate for use with native English-speaking children aged 8--10. We discuss the iterative design and testing of the survey instrument and provide the current survey items.

We present an empirical investigation of video-mediated free play between 13 pairs of friends (ages 7 and 8). The pairs spent 10 minutes playing with each of four different prototypes we developed to support free play over videoconferencing. We coded each interaction for the types of play and the amount of social play observed. The children in our study were largely successful in playing together across videoconferencing, though challenges in managing visibility, attention, and intersubjectivity made it more difficult than face-to-face play. We also found that our prototypes supported some types of play to varying degrees. Our contribution lies in identifying these design tradeoffs and providing directions for future design of video-mediated communication systems for children.

While supporting family communication has traditionally been a domain of interest for interaction designers, few research initiatives have explicitly investigated remote synchronous communication between children and parents. We discuss the design of the ShareTable, a media space that supports synchronous interaction with children by augmenting videoconferencing with a camera-projector system to allow for shared viewing of physical artifacts. We present an exploratory evaluation of this system, highlighting how such a media space may be used by families for learning and play activities. The ShareTable was positively received by our participants and preferred over standard videoconferencing. Informed by the results of our exploratory evaluation, we discuss the next design iteration of the ShareTable and directions for future investigations in this area.

Divorce affects a significant number of children and parents. In this work, I discuss the challenges that these families may face and present two systems that may help address some of these challenges. Finally, I highlight the expected contributions of this work.

Learning computing with respect to the context of its use has been linked in previous reports to student motivation in introductory Computer Science (CS) courses. In this report, we consider the role of context in a second course. We present a case study of a CS2 data structures class that uses a media computation context. In this course, students learn data structures and object-oriented (OO) programming through a pervasive narrative about how real media professionals use data structures to model the real world and to construct the digital images, sounds, and animations with which the students are familiar in their daily lives. We found that context played a different role in a second course than in a first course. We found evidence that some students did not need context to appreciate computing, but we also found evidence that context can help students get engaged with the material that they otherwise do not find interesting. In particular, the narrative aspect of a context may help students in relating the elements of the course and may even help with learning.

Learning computing with respect to the context of its use has been linked in previous reports to student motivation in introductory CS courses. In this report, we consider the role of context in a second course. We present a case study of a CS2 data structures class that uses a media computation context. In this course, students learn data structures and object-oriented programming through a pervasive narrative about how real media professionals use data structures to model the real world and to construct the digital images, sounds, and animations with which the students are familiar in their daily lives. We found that context played a different role in a second course than in a first course. We found evidence that some students did not need context to appreciate computing, but we also found evidence that context can help students get engaged with the material that they otherwise do not find interesting. In particular, the narrative aspect of a context may help students in relating the elements of the course and may even help with learning.