AI systems are increasingly shaping everyday life through data capture and reasoning processes that often remain difficult for children to grasp. This paper presents ShadowAI, a playful, metaphorical, and creative system designed to support children’s AI literacy in informal learning environments. It comprises the Shadow Capture Box and ShadowStories. Drawing on the metaphor of AI as a “ghost” that hides within the shadow of data, and on the benefits of creative making that makes AI concepts tangible, engaging, and personally meaningful. ShadowAI invites children to create play-doh artefacts whose shadows are captured and interpreted, generating images, narratives, and staged visualisations of AI reasoning. Rather than offering conceptual explanations of AI, the system uses ambiguity, family interaction, and discussion to help children critically engage with how AI observes, interprets, and reasons from partial input, while reflecting on data and agency.

AI systems increasingly shape everyday life through data capture and reasoning processes that often remain difficult to grasp, existing as ghosts within the shadows of data. This demo paper presents ShadowAI, an experiential AI system comprising the Shadow Capture Box and ShadowStories. Participants craft play-doh artefacts whose shadows are captured as silhouettes, and interpreted by GPT-4o which is embedded within ShadowStories through a structured prompt pipeline. This includes Shadow Parsing, Concept Proposal, Image Prompt, Story Outline, and Final Story, which are displayed as staged reasoning visualisations alongside DALL·E 3 illustrations and GPT-4o-generated narratives. Rather than relying on technical explanation alone, ShadowAI uses shadow play, creative making, and intentional ambiguity to support experiential encounters with how AI interprets. The resulting outputs may be surprising, erroneous, or absurd, prompting curiosity, shared reflection, and critical discussion about AI as an ambiguous and fallible simulation assembled from human-created data.

This poster presents a pilot study exploring the relationship between clay and AI, as both a making material and a design method. Drawing on aspects of research through design, clay and a short set of prompts were distributed to participants to engage with in their own time and space. They articulated their experience with clay in relation to AI: asking AI what to make, comparing AI-suggested objects with self-directed ones, and exploring whether there are meaningful parallels between working with clay and working with AI. Early findings suggest themes around AI and legibility, the gap between AI pattern recognition and human making intention, and broader themes around posture, attention and clay as emotional regulator. The work invites a perspective around Creativity for Change, offering some early insights in to how embodied making practices together with AI can open new possibilities for creative participation.

In this work we present our system for teaching practical geology field skills through a combination of 360° video, photogrammetry, and virtual content. The system was evaluated with first- and second-year undergraduate geoscience students to determine if it was effective in teaching practical skills that could be transferred to the real world. Second-year students who had performed the task before saw a significant improvement in their abilities, however this improvement was absent in the first-year students, suggesting the tool may be more effective for revision rather than first-time learning. We discuss these findings and their implications for future virtual training tools, as well as the challenges in developing and deploying such systems in a university environment.

Though virtual reality has repeatedly seen usability improvements through higher fidelity headsets, interacting with small objects has remained an issue due to a reduction in visual acuity. Given the current uptake of virtual reality platforms and the range of real world applications that they may be used for, it is worth considering how such interactions can be accounted for. We propose three techniques for improving the usability of small objects in virtual environments: i) expanding them in place, ii) showing a zoomed-in twin above the original object, and iii) showing a large readout of the object's current state. We conducted a study comparing each technique's usability, induced presence, and effect on short-term knowledge retention in a VR training scenario that simulated the common geoscience exercise of measuring strike and dip. Participant feedback highlighted the need for this research, however simply scaling the area of interest may not be enough to improve the usability of information-bearing objects, while displaying this information in large text format can make tasks faster to complete at the cost of reducing the user's ability to transfer knowledge they've learned to the real world. We discuss these results and their implications for the design of future virtual reality experiences.

COVID-19 has heavily impacted our lives. To date, the ongoing pandemic continues to cause dramatic societal changes and raises shared sentiments of uncertainty for our future. As such, however, COVID-19 provides opportunities to explore futures through speculative research. Here, we gamify the story completion method (SCM) to explore futures post-COVID and ask 37 participants to play a day in the life of Sal in a post-COVID future. The game asks participants to describe what Sal sees, hears, or does throughout a day based on multiple story stems. Our analysis reveals narratives of post-COVID futures as business as usual, back to basics, or everyday chaos. Notably, these narratives raise concerns about privacy loss and increased militarization, but also envision futures post-COVID that reclaim stronger bond with nature and family. We discuss the lessons learned from gamifying the SCM and the temporal implications of performing speculative research during evolving dramatic events.

In online marketplaces, an increasing number of producers depend on search and recommendation systems to connect them with consumers to make a living. In this talk, we discuss how these systems will need to evolve from the traditional formulations by incorporating the producer value into their objectives. Jointly optimizing the ranking functions behind these systems on both consumer and producer values is a new direction and raises many technical challenges. To overcome these, we lay out an end-to-end solution and present the results of applying this solution on Facebook Marketplace.

Sex Robots are no longer science fiction and may soon be-come widespread. While much discussion has developed in academia on their moral and social impact, sex robots have yet to be examined from a critical design perspective and are under-explored in HCI. We use the Story Completion Method(SCM) to explore commonplace assumptions around futures with sex robots and discuss those from a critical design perspective. Thirty five participants completed a story stem of a human encountering a sex robot or vice-versa. Through thematic analysis, we show narratives of consumerist relation-ships between humans and sex robots, stories that describe sex robots as highly-efficient sex workers that (out)perform humans in routinal sex activities, and narratives that explore sex robots as empathetic and sentient beings. Our participant-created stories both reinforce and challenge established norms of sex robots and raise questions that concern responsible design and ethics in HCI. Finally, we show opportunities and limitations of using multiple-perspective story stems in SCM

Many consumer products are two-sided marketplaces, ranging from commerce products that connect buyers and sellers, such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Facebook Marketplace, to sharing-economy products that connect passengers to drivers or guests to hosts, like Uber and Airbnb. The search and recommender systems behind these products are typically optimized for objectives like click-through, purchase, or booking rates, which are mostly tied to the consumer side of the marketplace (namely buyers, passengers, or guests). For the long-term growth of these products, it is also crucial to consider the value to the providers (sellers, drivers, or hosts). However, optimizing ranking for such objectives is uncommon because it is challenging to measure the causal effect of ranking changes on providers. For instance, if we run a standard seller-side A/B test on Facebook Marketplace that exposes a small percentage of sellers, what we observe in the test would be significantly different from when the treatment is launched to all sellers. To overcome this challenge, we propose a counterfactual framework for seller-side A/B testing. The key idea is that items in the treatment group are ranked the same regardless of experiment exposure rate. Similarly, the items in the control are ranked where they would be if the status quo is applied to all sellers. Theoretically, we show that the framework satisfies the stable unit treatment value assumption since the experience that sellers receive is only affected by their own treatment and independent of the treatment of other sellers. Empirically, both seller-side and buyer-side online A/B tests are conducted on Facebook Marketplace to verify the framework.

HCI is increasingly working with 'vulnerable' people, yet there is a danger that the label of vulnerability can alienate and stigmatize the people such work aims to support. We report our study investigating the application of interaction design to increase rates of hate crime reporting amongst Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender young people. During design-led workshops, participants expressed ambivalence towards reporting. While recognizing their exposure to hate crime, they simultaneously rejected being identified as victim as implied in the act of reporting. We used visual communication design to depict the young people's ambivalent identities and contribute insights into how these fail and succeed to account for the intersectional, fluid and emergent nature of LGBT identities through the design research process. We argue that by producing ambiguously designed texts alongside conventional outcomes, we 'trouble' our design research narratives as a tactic to disrupt static and reductive understandings of vulnerability within HCI.

This paper analyses sexual health workers' 'talk' around their introduction of a digital platform to enhance a regionally managed condom distribution scheme for young people. In examining the discursive resources workers used in framing the sexual health service, their service users and digital technology, we argue that problematic ideologies around young people and sexuality were exercised and reproduced. Workers positioned themselves as the gatekeepers of young people's sexual health, who were in turn constructed as 'mischievous' and 'misguided', with technology having a corruptive role over what was considered to be 'healthy' and 'normal' sexual relationships. We suggest our findings indicate severe challenges in developing community-commissioned platforms alongside service providers, and questions how plausible user participation can be in attempting to conduct collaborative, participatory and engaged work in this context.

In this paper, we describe a user-centred design process, where we engaged with 58 adolescents over an 18-month period to design and evaluate a multiplayer mobile game which prompts peer-led interactions around sex and sexuality. Engagement with our design process, and response to our game, has been enthusiastic, highlighting the rich opportunities for HCI to contribute constructively to how HCI may contribute to sexual health in adolescents. Based on our experiences we discuss three lessons learnt: lightweight digital approaches can be extremely successful at facilitating talk among young people about sex; sharing control of the conversation between all stakeholders is a fair and achievable approach; even problematic interactions can be opportunities to talk about sex.

Researchers working in domains such as Research through Design and Feminist HCI have been questioning "dissemination practices" and their impact on our capacity to produce reflexive accounts of research in publications. This paper examines academic dissemination practices within HCI research communities from an institutional to individual level. We unpack the practice via a meta-review of recent literature published in CHI and other venues on 'What is HCI?'. We review the core text on this debate and other similar discussions on HCI methodologies and reflexive accounts of research in domains such as 'Research through Design' and 'Feminist HCI'. We highlight the importance of practicing reflexivity through dissemination and introduce 'Research Fictions' in the form of video essays and live performances, produced by the first author with her colleagues, based on their HCI submissions. Through experimenting with alternative dissemination formats, we argue that our exploratory processes engender a practice of reflexivity within a research lab.

Pornography is a substantial part of humans' everyday interaction with computers, yet to date the topic has been underconsidered by HCI. Here, we examine some of the common cultural ideals non-experts constructed of a "new" pornographic experience - Virtual Reality (VR) Porn - through use of the "Story Completion Method". Forty five participants completed a story stem about a male character who was about to have his "very first virtual reality porn experience". Through our analysis, we demonstrate a narrative of a "perfect", idealised sexual experience, as well as one which emphasised the imagined "precarious" and dangerous consequences around this technology use. We indicate how the stories reproduced ideals around heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity, suggesting an agenda of "Designing for Eroticism" as a tactic which could avoid such problematic discourses. We also suggest the opportunities and challenges presented through use of the "Story Completion Method".