The overturn of Roe v. Wade radically changed abortion access within the United States leaving women to navigate new financial, legal, and logistical challenges in managing their reproductive health needs. Reporting on findings from co-design workshops with participants from Indiana (a state with an abortion ban) and New York (where abortion is accessible), we investigate how women envision care in response to ongoing legal and medical uncertainty. Drawing together techno-feminist scholarship on care and reproductive health, in this paper we highlight several "entangled" design stories of anxiety and fear in navigating diminished healthcare services, as well as resistance and hope. Our findings prompt critical reflections for HCI on the role of health technology amid a world in which reproductive health, and medicine at large, is often a site of political contestation and conflict. Care-in-Retrograde re-orients a techno-utopian and future-oriented view of health technology to consider design work amid healthcare trajectories of disruption and reversal.

We present a qualitative interview study that examines what happens when things do not go as planned with digital contraception. Through an analysis of 27 interviews with ongoing users of digital contraception at the time of the study, we convey participants’ accounts of their experiences regarding unplanned pregnancies or use of emergency contraception to avoid an unplanned pregnancy. Our analysis considers participants’ sense-making processes, and notably how they attended to questions of risk and responsibility. Finally, we depict how these participants came to continue using digital contraception after these experiences. Our study connects to ongoing conversations on technological failures in personal informatics and safety-critical systems. We emphasise that failure and success should not be used as a binary classification of long-term users’ relationships with self-tracking technology, which are intimate and critical. Rather, the sustained relation with an intimate technology is composed by several ‘failures’ which are interpreted, acted upon, and, ultimately, overcome.

Low levels of health literacy concerning Alzheimer's Disease and related dementias (ADRD) impact African American/Black communities access to appropriate ADRD care. Additionally, a legacy of mistrust in medical research due to systemic racism, has resulted in insufficient participation in ADRD clinical trials among African American/Black adults. This study explores the potential of generative AI to improve ADRD literacy and encourage participation in clinical trials among African American/Black older adults. We designed a mobile health intervention featuring AI-driven conversational agents - a chatbot and a voice assistant - specifically developed for this population. We tested the quality of the intervention using heuristics methodology adapted to the target population along with inputs from African American/ Black medical professionals and UX designers. Key findings highlight the unique needs of the African American/Black communities for culturally relevant content that is accessible to users with varying language levels and tailored to users' geographical location. Concerning the interaction, high levels of personalization and control over the interaction can promote the use of the tool, by minimizing complexity and maximizing accessibility. These findings show the novel contribution offered by our study in the domain of designing health technology with generative AI, particularly LLMS, for African American/Black communities.

Historically, transgender people of color (TPOC) have been silenced in white trans spaces for not fitting into transnormativity - the typical white, binary, skinny, and privileged image of trans people, and for raising concerns related to race, culture, and ethnicity. Social media and online communities serve as supportive spaces for transgender (shortened to trans) individuals; however, trans people of color require even more support combating systematic oppression, managing increased levels of discrimination, and navigating their cultural backgrounds. In order to understand how TPOC use social media, we explore the experiences of TPOC on Reddit. We used the Reddit API to obtain Reddit posts from four prominent transgender subreddits (r/ftm, r/mtf, r/trans, and r/Non-Binary) which included the phrase "people of color" or the abbreviation "POC", resulting in a total of 145 posts and 2867 comments. Thematic analysis was then used to identify three themes of discussion - alienation, support, and existing in physical spaces, which informed our design considerations. Experiences shared in the Reddit posts indicated that TPOC feel overshadowed by white trans individuals in online communities and desire to build connections with other TPOC both online and in person. We propose design recommendations for both Reddit as a platform and subreddit moderators that regulate online trans communities to encourage growing networks among TPOC, improve communication among users and moderators, and design spaces that center POC voices within subreddits, all of which provide a much more supportive online environment for TPOC.

Alzheimer's Disease and related dementia (ADRD) is prevalent in one in nine individuals age 65 or above, and it has a 65% higher risk of incidence for African American/Black adults. With an aging population in the United States and persisting healthcare inequities for African American/Black adults, our research aims to explore design requirements of a digital health platform for delivering culturally relevant content that informs African Americans/Black adults (45 years and older) about brain health and participation in clinical ADRD studies. We conducted seven focus groups (n = 44) to collect information on facilitators and barriers to brain health literacy and participation in clinical ADRD research, followed by seven participatory design workshops (n = 44) to collaboratively develop solutions for improving brain health literacy and participation in clinical ADRD research. Our findings provide insights into incorporating community into accessible, technological design for reducing brain health disparities for African American/Black adults.

Driven by the vision of future responsive environments, where everyday surroundings can perceive human behaviors and respond through intelligent robotic actuation, we propose Wizard of Props (WoP): a human-centered design workflow for creating expressive, implicit, and meaningful interactions. This collaborative experience prototyping approach integrates full-scale physical props with Mixed Reality (MR) to support ideation, prototyping, and rapid testing of responsive environments. We present two design explorations that showcase our investigations of diverse design solutions based on varying technology resources, contextual considerations, and target audiences. Design Exploration One focuses on mixed environment building, where we observe fluid prototyping methods. In Design Exploration Two, we explore how novice designers approach WoP, and illustrate their design ideas and behaviors. Our findings reveal that WoP complements conventional design methods, enabling intuitive body-storming, supporting flexible prototyping fidelity, and fostering expressive environment-human interactions through in-situ improvisational performance.

Epilepsy, a prevalent chronic neurological disorder, presents numerous challenges for people with epilepsy (PWEs) and their caregivers. They experience difficulties in receiving proper care and support due to stigma and misconceptions. Promoting public awareness in early education would be critical to reduce the stigma and to properly support them. We conducted 145 surveys and 21 interviews with teachers, school nurses, and parents of elementary and middle school students. While the participants exhibited slightly positive attitudes towards PWEs, we identified obstacles that hinder learning about epilepsy and seizure first aid: inadequate education and limited information sharing among school stakeholders. Moreover, there is a pressing need for age-appropriate education that considers the students' ages and perceptual levels. Considering the current limitations and needs, we propose potential implications for future information and communication technologies (ICTs) designs, including knowledge-sharing systems and an educational game aimed at enhancing epilepsy awareness and fostering collaborative care in elementary and middle school environments.

Music therapists (MT-BCs) use diverse technologies to provide evidence-based personalized interventions to a wide variety of people. Most studies on the technological practices of MT-BCs report a general overview of the tools they use in their daily work. This study offers an new way of understanding technologies used by MT-BCs, classified and situated in the phases of music therapy (MT) practice: Assessment, Treatment Planning, In-Session, Documentation and Evaluation. An online survey was sent to a mailing list of 1,951 board-certified music therapists (MT-BC), and we received 104 responses. Results support distinct functions in technological practices between each of the phases of MT, revealing categories of notetaking and data entry that characterize planning, documentation and evaluation tasks, and a wider diversity of technology configurations in assessment and in-session work. We end by discussing design implications for HCI researchers and designers of music technologies for health, as well as HCI-MT design collaboration to better support the work of the MT-BC community.

Public stigma on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) affects the physical and psychological wellbeing of those living with the condition in a severe way. There is work around the design of technology for medication adherence and HIV treatment. Yet, there is still a lack of empirical research that investigates how people could cope with stigma more effectively using technology. Thus, we obtained data from co-design workshops conducted remotely from the U.S. with 25 people living with HIV. Our findings foreground key needs and values via the discussion of features and functionality of speculative co-designed technologies that would allow people to leverage key stigma coping strategies. Based on these insights, we forward design implications for social media, which is the most common type of technology that people living with HIV currently use to cope with public stigma.

Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disease. People with epilepsy (PWE) and their caregivers face several challenges related to their epilepsy management, including quality of care, care coordination, side effects, and stigma management. The sociotechnical issues of the information management contexts and challenges for epilepsy care may be mitigated through effective information management. We conducted 4 focus groups with 5 PWE and 7 caregivers to explore how they manage epilepsy-related information and the challenges they encountered. Primary issues include challenges of finding the right information, complexities of tracking and monitoring data, and limited information sharing. We provide a framework that encompasses three attributes - individual epilepsy symptoms and health conditions, information complexity, and circumstantial constraints. We suggest future design implications to mitigate these challenges and improve epilepsy information management and care coordination.

Millions of Americans forego medical care due to a lack of non-emergency transportation, particularly minorities, older adults, and those who have disabilities or chronic conditions. Our study investigates the potential for using timebanks—community-based voluntary services that encourage exchanges of services for “time dollars” rather than money—in interventions to address healthcare transportation barriers to seed design implications for a future affordable ridesharing platform. In partnership with a timebank and a federally qualified healthcare center (FQHC), 30 participants completed activity packets and 29 of them attended online workshop sessions. Our findings suggest that promoting trust between drivers and riders requires systems that prioritize safety and reliability; yet, there were discrepancies in the ability of the timebank and FQHC to moderate trust. We also found that timebank supports reciprocity, but healthcare transportation requires additional support to ensure balanced reciprocity. We explain these findings drawing from network closure and trust literature. Finally, we contribute design implications for systems that promote trust and facilitate relational over transactional interactions, which help to promote reciprocity and reflect participants’ values.

Recent research on creativity support tools (CST) adopts artificial intelligence (AI) that leverages big data and computational capabilities to facilitate creative work. Our work aims to articulate the role of AI in supporting creativity with a case study of an AI-based CST tool in fashion design based on theoretical groundings. We developed AI models by externalizing three cognitive operations (extending, constraining, and blending) that are associated with divergent and convergent thinking. We present FashionQ, an AI-based CST that has three interactive visualization tools (StyleQ, TrendQ, and MergeQ). Through interviews and a user study with 20 fashion design professionals (10 participants for the interviews and 10 for the user study), we demonstrate the effectiveness of FashionQ on facilitating divergent and convergent thinking and identify opportunities and challenges of incorporating AI in the ideation process. Our findings highlight the role and use of AI in each cognitive operation based on professionals’ expertise and suggest future implications of AI-based CST development.

The rise of ridesharing platforms has transformed traditional transportation, making it more accessible for getting to work and accessing grocery stores and healthcare providers, which are essential to physical and mental well-being. However, such technologies are not available everywhere. Additionally, there is a scarcity of HCI work that investigates how vulnerable populations such as rural-dwelling people with HIV face and overcome transportation barriers. To extend past research, we conducted 31 surveys and 18 interviews with people living with HIV (22 surveys, 14 interviews) and their case coordinators (9 surveys, 4 interviews) in rural areas. Contrary to past research, we found that the use of alternative vehicles, extensive support networks, and nonprofit health organizations facilitated transportation. However, distance, the lack of trust and infrastructure, stigma, and other cultural underpinnings made popular forms of urban transportation unappealing. We contextualize our findings with prior research and contribute implications for future research and design.

Movement is one of the key elements in virtual reality (VR) and significantly influences user experience. In particular, walking-in-place is a method of supporting movement in a limited space, and many studies are being conducted on its effective support. However, most studies have focused on forward movement despite many situations in which backward movement is needed. In this paper, we present the development of a prediction model for forward/backward movement while considering a user's orientation and the verification of the model's effectiveness. We built a deep learning-based model by collecting sensor data on the movement of the user's head, waist, and feet. We developed three realistic VR scenarios that involve backward movement, set three conditions (controller-based, treadmill-based, and model-based) for movement, and evaluated user experience in each condition through a study of 36 participants. As a result, the model-based condition showed the highest sensory sensitivity, effectiveness, and satisfaction and similar cognitive burden compared with the other two conditions. The results of our study demonstrated that movement support through modeling is possible, suggesting its potential for use in many VR applications.

Music therapists provide critical, evidence-based care to a diverse range of clients. However, despite their active role in empowering individuals affected by disability, stigma, grief, and trauma, music therapists remain understudied by the HCI community. We present the results of a mixed methods study of 10 interviewees and 20 survey respondents in the U.S., all of whom are practicing music therapists. Our results show that music therapists engage in technology-aided practices such as making personalized connections with clients, assisting in identity formation, encouraging musicking (music-making), and preserving legacies. Results also show that music therapists face key challenges such as environmental, societal, and financial constraints, including high workload, lack of awareness of the value of music therapy among the general community, and limited access to secure technologies for remote client care. In light of these challenges, we present a set of design implications for creating future technologies for music therapists. This work diverges from previous studies on music therapy technologies, which focus largely on interventions with music therapy clients, by highlighting the often-neglected perspectives from music therapists.

There are over three million people living with epilepsy in the U.S. People with epilepsy experience multiple daily challenges such as seizures, social isolation, social stigma, experience of physical and emotional symptoms, medication side effects, cognitive and memory deficits, care coordination difficulties, and risks of sudden unexpected death. In this work, we report findings collected from 3 focus groups of 11 people with epilepsy and caregivers and 10 follow-up questionnaires. We found that these participants feel that most people do not know how to deal with seizures. To improve others' abilities to respond safely and appropriately to someone having seizures, people with epilepsy and caregivers would like to share and educate the public about their epilepsy conditions, reduce common misconceptions about seizures and prevent associated stigma, and get first aid help from the public when needed. Considering social stigma, we propose design implications of future technologies for effective delivery of appropriate first aid care information to bystanders around individuals with epilepsy when they experience a seizure.

People living with HIV experience a high level of stigma in our society. Public HIV-related stigma often leads to anxiety and depression and hinders access to social support and proper medical care. Technologies for HIV, however, have been mainly designed for treatment management and medication adherence rather than for helping people cope with public HIV-related stigma specifically. Drawing on empirical data obtained from semi-structured interviews and design activities with eight social workers and 29 people living with HIV, we unpack the ways in which needs for privacy and trust, intimacy, and social support create tensions around key coping strategies. Reflecting on these tensions, we present design implications and opportunities to empower people living with HIV to cope with public HIV-related stigma at the individual level.

The experience of grief and death is an inevitable part of life. Grief, a natural response to death, can be a challenging and emotionally taxing journey. Bereaved individuals often feel lost in a fog, unaware of resources available to them and unsure of which resources could be useful for supporting their healing process. Complicated grief, a more intense form of grief that extends beyond six months following the death of a loved one, presents both a unique challenge and a design opportunity for the HCI community. In this work, we present the results of a survey and interview study on the technological practices of complicated grievers. Based on themes found in the data, we propose a new model for complicated grief in the digital age, consisting of the following phases: Fog, Isolation, Exploration, Immersion, and Stabilization. We then present a set of design considerations for designers seeking to create tools for complicated grievers navigating their unique grief journeys.

Researchers in HCI have typically relied on face to face (FtF) methods for recruitment and data collection in their research with people living with HIV, whereas social scientists have adopted computer-mediated approaches to address concerns about data validity and access to this stigmatized population. In this paper, we use the asynchronous remote community (ARC) research method to leverage HCI instruments in an online format. ARC successfully engaged people living with HIV in terms of participation and retention by providing a safe space to discuss their experiences. By expanding on past ARC studies, we contribute to an ongoing conversation about defining ARC and working towards increased data validity -- especially in stigmatized communities.

The widespread adoption of home robots shows a high demand for in-home assistance. Since single women account for a large proportion of the Chinese population, it is important to design home robots to support their lives at home. This study aims to explore the possible design features of home robots to support single women in China. Interviews and an online survey were used to gauge user perception and expectations of home robots. Our research reveals the unique lifestyle preferences of single women in China and how home robots could be designed to support their needs. We discuss our findings and design implications based on three aspects: lifestyle, intelligence, and sense, to inspire better robot design for women.

We present the results of a study of e-NABLE, a distributed, collaborative volunteer effort to design and fabricate upper-limb assistive technology devices for limb-different users. Informed by interviews with 14 stakeholders in e-NABLE, including volunteers and clinicians, we discuss differences and synergies among each group with respect to motivations, skills, and perceptions of risks inherent in the project. We found that both groups are motivated to be involved in e-NABLE by the ability to use their skills to help others, and that their skill sets are complementary, but that their different perceptions of risk may result in uneven outcomes or missed expectations for end users. We offer four opportunities for design and technology to enhance the stakeholders' abilities to work together.

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) affords new opportunities for people with disabilities to participate in the workforce. However, little research has investigated how people with disabilities access and perform work through ICT. This paper presents a study of how people with disabilities, particularly those who are wheelchair users, perform online crowd work in China. We highlight an online crowd work practice that is highly embedded in social relationships that are developed through ICT over time. We call this socially embedded work to distinguish it from previous studies describing online crowd work as being devoid of social relationships. Our study uncovers the unique developmental dynamics of the online crowd work community self-organized by wheelchair users in China. Findings suggest that an ecosystem that focuses on fostering social relationships among the stakeholders can potentially address the wide range of issues of online crowd work reported in current crowd work literature.

Contributing to research on social activism as a form of collective action, we report on Diba, a sizable group of Chinese nationalists, who overcame the Great Firewall in order to troll Taiwan's political leadership. Diba's political activism can be characterized as negotiating a tension between two seemingly opposed goals. On the one hand is their construction of a pro-PRC message using the tactics of Internet subcultures (memes, trolling, etc.), but toned down to meet standards of civility. On the other hand, by collectively breaching the Great Firewall and establishing Facebook accounts, the group transgressed PRC technical and legal norms, which were designed to prevent unsanctioned collective action. We argue that the Diba Expedition exemplifies the coordinated use of a complex, transnational social media ecology to support and produce a mass-scale event and newsworthy spectacle, loosened if not severed from state control, and a discursively innovative polysemous message targeted at diverse international audiences: civilized trolling.

Understanding the impacts and consequences of information and communications technology in local communities through theoretical and practical approaches has long been studied. Among different types of technologies, mobile technology suggests new opportunities for community informatics because a growing number of people across different age groups have adopted smartphones, which have become an indispensable part of people's daily lives. Because mobile technology transcends the limitations of time and place, it expands the ways of accessing and interacting with local community information and lowers the barrier to participation. In this paper, we present our ongoing initiatives in community informatics including digital cultural heritage and local volunteer efforts mediated by mobile technology. We highlight how mobile technology, together with increased mobility, immediacy and social presence, shows a significant influence on local communities with respect to community identity, awareness and participation and also social support networks.

The emergence of social media has had a significant impact on how people communicate and socialize. Teens use social media to make and maintain social connections with friends and build their reputation. However, the way of analyzing the characteristics of teens in social media has mostly relied on ethnographic accounts or quantitative analyses with small datasets. This paper shows the possibility of detecting age information in user profiles by using a combination of textual and facial recognition methods and presents a comparative study of 27K teens and adults in Instagram. Our analysis highlights that (1) teens tend to post fewer photos but highly engage in adding more tags to their own photos and receiving more Likes and comments about their photos from others, and (2) to post more selfies and express themselves more than adults, showing a higher sense of self-representation. We demonstrate the application of our novel method that shows clear trends of age differences as well as substantiates previous insights in social media.

Timebanking is a service-based community currency, built on the principle that everyone's time is valued equally. It has potential for community building and reenergizing neighborhoods, but it faces several adoption challenges. We report on the largest investigation of timebanking practices to date by analyzing a combination of service exchange records from the three largest hOurworld timebanks with over 3,500 members with 33,000 completed service exchanges, and a survey of 446 members of over 120 hOurworld timebanks. Our findings suggest that the ideal of 'equal time, equal value' that is at the foundation of timebanking is a source of tension between members with instrumental versus idealistic and altruistic motivations. We suggest that future peer-to-peer systems must incorporate different rewards and incentives in order to accommodate users with different motivations.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have recently experienced rapid development and garnered significant attention from various populations. Despite the wide recognition of MOOCs as an important opportunity within educational practices, there are still many questions as to how we might satisfy students' needs, as evidenced by very high dropout rates. Researchers lack a solid understanding of what student needs are being addressed by MOOCs, and how well MOOCs now address (or fail to address) these needs. To help in building such an understanding, we conducted in-depth interviews probing student motivations, learning perceptions and experiences towards MOOCs, paying special attention to the MOOC affordances and experiences that might lead to high drop rates. Our study identified learning motivations, learning patterns, and a number of factors that appear to influence student retention. We proposed that the issue of retention should be addressed from two perspectives: retention as a problem but also retention as an opportunity.

The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) paradigm has developed rapidly and achieved significant attention from a broad range of populations. However, many people who enroll in MOOCs do not have successful learning experiences. For example, some studies suggest that the relatively weak feelings of community and meager opportunities for collaboration may be contributing to a high dropout rate in MOOCs. In light of such problems, we are exploring new design features that could support enhanced social interactions, collaborative learning and feelings of community. We present our design ideas through a set of activity design scenarios, along with an analysis of possible benefits and negative consequences of our design.

Commercial peer-to-peer service exchange businesses, such as AirBnB, Lyft and TaskRabbit, are expanding rapidly, but their non-profit counterparts are lagging behind. We conducted a field study of the most prominent of these, timebanking; a system in which 'time dollars' are earned and spent by people providing services for and receiving them from each other. Our study exposed problems with the very metaphor of banking itself, which deter participation. In this paper we discuss how these problems can be tackled with user experience design for systems supporting timebanking. Our design ideas emphasize the personal and social benefits of participation, and avoid such unappealing concepts as debt and neediness that the timebanking metaphor falls afoul of.

One goal of local communities is to create and reinforce community identity by connecting residents to their local heritage. Technologies have enabled and facilitated the creation and consumption of digitized history content provided by official history institutions as well as individuals. Although much research has been conducted to understand technical and social aspects of digital cultural heritage, little empirical research has investigated how people perceive, experience, and interact with community content that is socially generated and tied to locations, particularly with respect to building community heritage. To address this, we developed a mobile application called Lost State College (LSC) and conducted a user study with 34 local residents. The study results indicate that meaningful historic places evoked special attention from the participants, and that those who have lived in the community longer tended to contribute more to the community heritage effort. Participants utilized social features as a way of learning local history, reflecting personal experiences and stories, and co-creating rich layers of local history information from their perspectives.

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are commonly used to disseminate up-to-date news information, but they also contain a lot of noise and irrelevant content. The contents of social media platforms are typically filtered by followship or friendship oriented relationships, and is almost always driven by trending news topics at the national scale, making it difficult for users to gather useful information that is most pertinent to a local community context. Research has utilized content analysis techniques to gain insights on the sentiment expressed about political topics on social media sites. However, there has been little attempt to understand how users would perceive this information if opinions and sentiments about news topics were externalized and made aware to them. We designed Community Poll, a smartphone application that aggregates local news feeds with relevant tweets about the local news topics. A Public Attitude Meter is calculated based on the sentiment score of the tweets for each of the local news topic presented in the system. We conducted a 2-week deployment with 16 users about their perception of the system. The users reported that Community Poll helps them digest locally relevant news topics, and quickly gather public opinions associated with the topics. They reported that being aware of public sentiment encouraged them to more actively participate in discussions on social media. Curiosity about a score-based representation is an important element that drove them to consume local news topics that they wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to. Interestingly, although being aware of public sentiment served to reaffirm people’s positions on the local topics, users expressed concerns about how sentiment awareness might bias other people’s judgments regarding news topics.

The automatic extraction of metadata and other information from scholarly documents is a common task in academic digital libraries, search engines, and document management systems to allow for the management and categorization of documents and for search to take place. A Web-accessible API can simplify this extraction by providing a single point of operation for extraction that can be incorporated into multiple document workflows without the need for each workflow to implement and support its own extraction functionality. In this paper, we describe CiteSeerExtractor, a RESTful API for scholarly information extraction that exploits the fact that there is duplication in scholarly big data and makes use of a near duplicate matching backend. The backend stores previously extracted metadata and avoids extracting metadata from a document if it has already been extracted before. We describe the design, implementation, and functionality of CiteSeerExtractor and show how the duplicate document matching results in a difference of 8.46% in the time required to extract header and citation information from approximately 3.5 million documents compared to a baseline.

Being aware of local community information is critical to maintaining civic engagement and participation. The use of online news and microblog content to create and disseminate community information has long been studied. However, interactions in the online spaces dedicated to local communities tend to only garner very limited usage, and people often do not consider microblog content as a meaningful source of local community information. Local News Chatter (LNC) was designed to address these challenges by augmenting local news feeds with microblog content and presenting them in a tag cloud that displays news topics of varying popularity with different tag sizes. Our study with 30 local residents highlights that LNC increases the visibility of hyperlocal community news information and successfully utilizes microblog as an additional information layer. LNC also increases one’s community awareness and shows the potential for leveraging community knowledge as a deliberation platform for local topics.

Geographically distributed work has become a popular way to work. Past CSCW research has shown that remote workers rely on innovative communication platforms but still face challenges being remote. Research has also provided organizational and managerial strategies to bridge the distance gap. Our study in contrast investigates how individuals develop strategies to cope with the daily challenges of working remotely and alone, and what managers can do to help them. We interviewed seventeen individuals involved in remote work about their experiences, identifying unique challenges and their workarounds. Our interview results suggest that, although people may work alone, the process of conducting distributed work is actually very social. Individual remote workers establish a unique kind of work rhythm, visibility management for evaluation, social support infrastructure, and personal connection as a part of their coping strategies to balance their professional and personal lives.

Previous research has shown that diversity within distributed collaborative teams can lead to innovation, but trust must exist for the open expression of innovative ideas and establishment of idea credibility. Initial trust is pivotal for distributed teams where team members have never met face-to-face and have only a very limited time to accomplish a task. Our goal is to determine if knowing specific information about other team members could enhance initial trust and improve productivity and satisfaction in idea generation and idea evaluation sessions. In an experiment, we showed that cognitive and affective trust could be successfully enhanced by presenting relevant information elements, such as domain expertise and personal hobbies, and could have positive effects on the quality and quantity of ideas in idea generation sessions as well as the satisfaction of the participants with the rating result in idea evaluation sessions. However, participants receiving personal information often misconstrue this as professional competency. We also describe gender differences observed in the idea generation sessions and discuss how to better design future systems for supporting idea generation and idea evaluation activities.

Collaborative brainstorming can be a challenging but important part of creative group problem solving. Mind-mapping has the potential to enhance the brainstorming process but has its own challenges when used in a group. We introduce GroupMind, a collaborative mind-mapping tool that addresses these challenges and opens new opportunities for creative teamwork, including brainstorming. We present a semi-controlled evaluation of GroupMind and its impact on teamwork, problem solving and collaboration for brainstorming activities. GroupMind performs better than using a traditional whiteboard in both interaction group and nominal group settings for the task involving memory recall. The hierarchical mind-map structure also imposes important framing effects on group dynamics and idea organization during the brainstorming process. We also present design ideas to assist in the development of future tools to support creative problem solving in groups.