The identity design of artificial agents carries growing ethical, psychological, and cultural weight, as ubiquitous language models and diverse robotic forms are blended into everyday use. However, structured approaches to designing coherent and interpretable artificial identities remain limited. To address urgent challenges in artificial identity design, including harmful stereotypes and deceptive practices, we introduce the Identity Design (ID) Framework and an accompanying research agenda. Drawing on emerging work on artificial identity in human-robot interaction and taking an interdisciplinary perspective, we propose twelve design principles across three levels: individual (recognisability, behavioural consistency, identity continuity, memory, persistent goals), group (membership signalling, social alignment, role clarity), and societal (benevolence, artificiality, social justice, transparency). The research agenda outlines open questions around the operationalisation and measurement of identity, social dynamics, and ethical considerations for identity design. Together, they lay the groundwork for future research and responsible practice in robotic, virtual, and multi-embodied agents.

When a person with dementia asks about a deceased partner’s health, caregivers and relatives are often unsure how to respond. These interactions involving reality disjunction are ethically and emotionally complex, with no universal ‘right’ answer. Reflecting on such interactions may help people better understand and navigate these situations. We explore how chatbots can complement humans in supporting such reflection. We designed three chatbots that support reflection through role-play, dilemmas, or analysis, and used them as probes in focus groups with 14 relatives and 10 caregivers of people with dementia. Findings reveal complementary strengths. Humans provide irreplaceable reflective support grounded in contextual, emotional, experiential, and relational involvement. Chatbots’ lack of human qualities offers unconstrained suggestions, evidence-based feedback, and emotionally distanced dialogue without relational consequences. We offer empirical insights into reflective support needs in dementia care and provide design implications for chatbots that complement rather than mimic human reflection.

HCI has explored voice assistant (VA) use across various social settings, highlighting their impact on personal and familial dynamics. Yet, the progressive domestication of these devices over time and their longer-term impact on relationships remain underexplored. We present findings from a three-year study of 30 households using interviews and diaries. Our analysis introduces the concept of a domestication calculus that captures how VAs find—or fail to find—a home over time through shifting spatial arrangements, relational roles, and household routines. Domestication unfolded not as a linear sequence of stages but as a dynamic process in which devices were either embedded into routines, withdrawn from use, or repurposed in response to changing circumstances. Across these trajectories, participants attributed four recurring roles to their VAs: (1) negotiators, (2) separators, (3) mediators, and (4) amplifiers of shared life. We conclude with implications for designing VAs that support long-term domestication.

Time is increasingly researched in HCI, yet design often remains tied to normative temporal constructs, e.g., clocks and calendars. This is especially limiting in dementia contexts, where temporal experience is altered. Existing approaches largely enforce normative time and overlook futures, prioritizing the past for people with dementia. To explore how people with dementia and their partners experience time, we designed the Temporal Snapshots probe for 12 participants to reflect on temporal subjectivity across past and future moments. The probe surfaced layered narratives. Participants articulated fluid temporal associations, anchored narratives to personally meaningful moments, and situated themselves within future and past trajectories. We contribute empirical insights into how couples experience subjective time, a dual temporal lens for HCI, design directions for reframing time in dementia contexts, and methodological reflections on researching temporality. We foreground time as relational and co-constructed, challenging assumptions of linearity and fixed orientation in interaction design.

Environmental crises demand HCI to shift from human-centered design to more-than-human (MTH) care. Current MTH care often focuses on singular species, overlooking the role of the place in which these care relations are situated. To address this, we turn to mycoremediation—bioremediation of soil and water with fungi. We present findings from a two-week living probe study where participants (N=12) placed and cared for a living mycelium composite in a place of their choosing. Our findings show that engaging with mycoremediation fostered stewardship, extended noticing of multispecies ecologies, and made distant places proximate. Participants’ relationships evolved from expecting feedback from the fungi (a dyadic model) towards attending to their relations with the broader place (a place-based ecological model). We contribute to Bio-HCI and MTH HCI with: 1) an empirical account of mycoremediation as a situated MTH care practice, and 2) design implications for living artifacts that foster affective, ecological connections in place.

People's identities change during life transitions, e.g., studying abroad. They bring everyday objects that embody memories and reflect their identities during such moves. To assist in these transitions, we ask how people's human identities could be influenced by their objects through an artificial agent. This paper presents an exploratory research-through-design study around how people undergoing life transitions experience conversing with their everyday objects through a chatbot. Drawing on a two-week field deployment and interviews with 12 participants, we contribute (1) a conceptualization of 'trans-embodiment' describing the asynchronous imagination of object and human identities on the chatbot, (2) empirical evidence of the resulting emotional and reflective experiences, and (3) three types of object identities for designing conversational agents that role-play objects. Our contributions sum up to triangulating human-agent-object identity as trans-embodiment in supporting life transitions.

As Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers increasingly conduct studies involving populations with stigmatised identities, more researchers must focus on creating conversational spaces where participants feel comfortable discussing their experiences. This study unpacks how and why HCI researchers engage in self-disclosure to facilitate such spaces. We share eight autoethnographic personal stories of key moments when we disclosed or concealed personal information in our HCI studies with diverse participant groups (people with dementia, victims of online romance scams, children with autism, and North Korean defectors). Through analysing these stories, we found that these decisions were shaped by various goals: creating a welcoming environment, demonstrating credibility, establishing common ground, reducing stigma, and directing the interview’s focus. The acts of disclosure or concealment affected the interactions with participants, the collected data, and the well-being of the researcher and participant. We argue that greater awareness, reflection, guidance, and sharing are needed regarding self-disclosure in HCI research and offer a reflexive guide to help researchers prepare for and reflect on their self-disclosure practices. By making these practices visible and open to discussion, we aim to make researcher-participant interactions in sensitive settings more ethical, effective, and transparent. • HCI researchers dynamically disclose/conceal personal information with stigmatised groups. • Researchers differ in the who/what/when/why(not)/how of their self-disclosure. • HCI lacks awareness, guidelines, and transparency for researcher self-disclosure. • Reflexivity around self-disclosure is needed for ethical and effective research.

Informed consent is essential for ethical research, but applying it in technology research involving people with dementia can be challenging. We conducted interviews with researchers, participants with dementia, and data stewards to explore these challenges and strategies for obtaining consent. Using communication theory, we examined how linear, dynamic, and contextual communication elements influence consent practices. Our findings show that relying too much on one-way information transfer creates problems in conveying information, documenting agreements, monitoring ongoing consent, and improving the consent processes. However, dynamic, context-sensitive strategies, such as paraphrasing information, fostering personal relationships, and designing supportive environments, can turn consent into a collaborative and inclusive process. We offer practical recommendations and reflective questions to improve consent conversations in dementia research and suggest future directions for more dynamic consent materials. By reframing consent as a dynamic and contextual process, we aim to make technology research in sensitive settings more ethical and inclusive.

Intertemporal reflection, flexibly thinking forward and backward in time, is vital for one's future planning.Yet, cultivating intertemporal reflection about encountering difficult futures, e.g., developing a progressive cognitive condition like dementia, can be challenging.We assessed people's attitudes towards dementia following conversing with a chatbot presented as either neurotypical or simulating dementia symptoms.While neither the chatbot's presentation nor the framing of participants' future selves impacted attitudes toward dementia, it influenced participants' experiences.When framed as future selves, the chatbot evoked a strong emotional connection, leading to reflection on aging, particularly with the chatbot simulating dementia symptoms.Participants interacting with the chatbot framed as a stranger with simulated symptoms often felt frustrated, especially when they had a task-oriented mindset.Chatbots can be promising tools for prompting reflections on challenging futures, such as dementia, although their effectiveness varies due to the tensions between simulated cognitive decline and expectations for effective communication.

Encounters with virtual agents currently lack the haptic viscerality of human contact. While digital biosignal communication can medi-ate such virtual social interactions, how artifcial haptic biosignals infuence users personal space during Virtual Reality (VR) experi-ences is unknown. Designing vibrotactile heartbeats and thermally-actuated body temperature, we ran a within-subjects study (N=31) to investigate feedback (Thermal, Vibration, Thermal+Vibration, None) and agent stories (Negative, Neutral, Positive) on objective and subjective interpersonal distance (IPD), perceived arousal and comfort, presence, and post-experience responses. Findings showed that thermal feedback decreased objective but not subjective IPD, whereas vibrotactile heartbeats (signaling agent's closeness) increased both while heightening arousal and discomfort. Agents stories did not afect IPD, arousal, or comfort. Our qualitative fndings shed light on signal ambiguity and presence constructs within VR-based haptic stimulation. We contribute insights into artifcial biosignals and their infuence on VR proxemics, with cautionary considerations should the boundaries blur between physical and virtual touch.

Environmental sustainability is increasingly important, and actions on “digital sustainability” are expanding to reduce energy consumption from digital infrastructures. As many digital services today have extensive user bases, exploring sustainable design features holds significant potential for reducing environmental impact. However, further exploration of foundational research is still necessary to enable broader and more effective adoption of digital sustainability in design practice. This study focuses on understanding important considerations when encouraging more designers, especially those with limited expertise in sustainability-oriented design, to integrate sustainable practices into digital services—acknowledging that embracing unfamiliar approaches presents natural challenges. We conducted design workshops and debriefing interviews with user experience (UX) designers unfamiliar with design for sustainability to explore their early encounters with sustainable interaction design (SID) in the context of digital infrastructure energy reduction. Our study provides insight into designers’ initial perceptions and challenges with sustainable design and discusses opportunities for their broader engagement.

Communication can become challenging for people with dementia due to language, speech, discourse, and memory impairments. Although recent developments in Human-Computer Interaction have addressed some of these communication challenges, little is known about how they affect the self-presentation of people with dementia in everyday interactions. To understand this connection, we conducted interviews with sixteen people with dementia, six spouses, and fourteen formal caregivers. Our qualitative data revealed that people with dementia’s presentation of competence, politeness, engagement, and reality are altered by communication challenges, which can impact their self-esteem, interactions, and relationships. Our study highlights the need for developing technologies that can enhance mutual understanding and acceptance of people with dementia’s evolving presentation of self. Additionally, policy changes are required to reduce the stigma associated with communication challenges to foster social inclusion.

Gratitude is a moral emotion that demonstrates our appreciation of altruism.In psychology, feeling grateful is linked to an increase in well-being, yet there is a lack of HCI research on if gratitude can be cultivated through and with conversational agents.We quantitatively studied whether a chatbot can increase people's gratitude (N ¼ 133), as well as its influence on people's positive and negative emotions.Compared to the control condition, a chatbot that shared gratitude interventions significantly enhanced people's gratitude and positive emotions, while lowering negative emotions.Interestingly, people's experience of gratitude differed from other positive emotions: Simple positive emotions, like joy, can go up while reported gratitude decreases.We share qualitative observations on how gratitude can be a complex emotional experience, encompassing positive and negative emotions, such as finding relief in admitting to a chatbot about one's sadness over friendship during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Multilingual speakers tend to interleave two or more languages when communicating. This communication strategy is called code-mixing, and it has surged with today’s ever-increasing linguistic and cultural diversity. Because of their communication style, multilinguals who use conversational agents have specific needs and expectations which are currently not being met by conversational systems. While research has been undertaken on code-mixing conversational systems, previous works have rarely focused on the code-mixing users themselves to discover their genuine needs. This work furthers our understanding of the challenges faced by code-mixing users in conversational agent interaction, unveils the key factors that users consider in code-mixing scenarios, and explores expectations that users have for future conversational agents capable of code-mixing. This study discusses the design implications of our findings and provides a guide on how to alleviate the challenges faced by multilingual users and how to improve the conversational agent user experience for multilingual users.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted many business activities to non-face-to-face activities, and videoconferencing has become a new paradigm. However, conference spaces isolated from surrounding interferences are not always readily available. People frequently participate in public places with unexpected crowds or acquaintances, such as cafés, living rooms, and shared offices. These environments have surrounding limitations that potentially cause challenges in speaking up during videoconferencing. To alleviate these issues and support the users in speaking-restrained spatial contexts, we propose a text-to-speech (TTS) speaking tool as a new speaking method to support active videoconferencing participation. We derived the possibility of a TTS speaking tool and investigated the empirical challenges and user expectations of a TTS speaking tool using a technology probe and participatory design methodology. Based on our findings, we discuss the need for a TTS speaking tool and suggest design considerations for its application in videoconferencing.

Today’s youth lives in a world deeply intertwined with AI, which has become an integral part of everyday life. For this reason, it is important for youth to critically think about and examine AI to become responsible users in the future. Although recent attempts have educated youth on AI with focus on delivering critical perspectives within a structured curriculum, opportunities to develop critical thinking competencies that can be reflected in their lives must be provided. With this background, we designed an informal learning experience through an AI-related exhibition to cultivate critical thinking competency. To explore changes before and after the exhibition, 23 participants were invited to experience the exhibition. We found that the exhibition can support the youth in relating AI to their lives through critical thinking processes. Our findings suggest implications for designing learning experiences to foster critical thinking competency for better coexistence with AI.

Future robots are expected to be autonomous actors, even capable of moral reasoning. Yet how they can provide transparent explanations while being socially intelligent during morally relevant interactions deserves a close examination. Our mixed-methods lab study on a human-robot moral debate on the footbridge dilemma showed that quantitatively, a robot’s perceived competence was significantly higher with transparency cues (additional information presented on a screen). The robot’s perceived warmth and mind were not influenced by transparency cues, but they did significantly change over time (pre- vs. post-debate). The change in the robot’s perceived mind and social attributes after the debate correlated with people’s trust in the robot; transparency cues did not correlate with trust. Qualitatively, the robot was described to be logical, unemotional, and intentional in making moral decisions; participants focused on its gaze and speech. While transparency may help in theory, if people do not observe relevant cues while attributing intentionality to the robot and its gaze, transparency cues may not be useful during critical decision-making though the robot can seem competent. We discuss the implications and call for broadening the notion of transparency to investigate how robots can be transparent communicators by appealing to both cognition and affect in morally sensitive interactions.

As artificial intelligence (AI) has become prevalent in users’ daily lives, it is becoming critical for HCI designers to envision and design future human-AI interactions. Recent studies have highlighted the importance of exploring user-centered future design directions before implementing a technology in users’ lives. However, it is challenging for HCI designers to envision the societal impact of future technology that does not exist and understand potential users’ perceptions. Therefore, to comprehensively envision future human-AI interactions and their impact and elicit potential users’ perceptions of the future technologies, we created high-fidelity illustrations with designers and illustrators for immersive experience. Subsequently, through an online exhibition of these illustrations, we derived potential users’ perceptions, expectations, and concerns about the future. Based on our findings, we explored user-centered considerations for implementing AI in users’ daily lives through elaborately articulated human-AI interactions.

Speech-enabled smart speakers are common devices used for numerous tasks in everyday life. While speech-enabled technologies are widespread, using one’s voice as a computing modality introduces new accessibility challenges for people with speech disfluencies such as stammering (also known as stuttering). This paper investigates the smart speaker user experiences of people who stammer over three weeks. We conducted diary studies and semi-structured interviews with 11 individuals to identify their daily routines, difficulties with successful interactions, and strategies to overcome these barriers. Our analysis demonstrates key factors such as device location, its affordances, and the structure of commands had a strong impact on user experience. Participants highlighted different linguistic strategies to try and overcome interaction difficulties and discussed the potential of using smart speakers for speech and language therapy. We emphasise the need to further understand the experiences of people who stammer in smart speaker design to increase their accessibility.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced workers around the world to switch their working paradigms from on-site to video-mediated communication. Despite the advantages of videoconferencing, diverse circumstances have prevented people from focusing on their work. One of the most typical problems they face is that various surrounding factors distract them during their meetings. This study focuses on conditions in which remote workers are distracted by factors that disturb, interrupt, or restrict them during their meetings. We aim to explore the various problem situations and user needs. To understand users’ pain points and needs, focus group interviews and participatory design workshops were conducted to learn about participants’ troubled working experiences over the past two years and the solutions they expected. Our study provides a unified framework of distracting factors by which to understand causes of poor user experience and reveals valuable implications to improve videoconferencing experiences.

Following the success of the first edition of Robo-Identity, the second edition will provide an opportunity to expand the discussion about artificial identity. This year, we are focusing on emotions that are expressed through speech and voice. Synthetic voices of robots can resemble and are becoming indistinguishable from expressive human voices. This can be an opportunity and a constraint in expressing emotional speech that can (falsely) convey a human-like identity that can mislead people, leading to ethical issues. How should we envision an agent's artificial identity? In what ways should we have robots that maintain a machine-like stance, e.g., through robotic speech, and should emotional expressions that are increasingly human-like be seen as design opportunities? These are not mutually exclusive concerns. As this discussion needs to be conducted in a multidisciplinary manner, we welcome perspectives on challenges and opportunities from variety of fields. For this year's edition, the special theme will be “speech, emotion and artificial identity”.

We present a vision for conversational user interfaces (CUIs) as probes for speculating with, rather than as objects to speculate about. Popular CUIs, e.g., Alexa, are changing the way we converse, narrate, and imagine the world(s) to come. Yet, current conversational interactions normatively may promote non-desirable ends, delivering a restricted range of request-response interactions with sexist and digital colonialist tendencies. Our critical design approach envisions alternatives by considering how future voices can reside in CUIs as enabling probes. We present novel explorations that illustrate the potential of CUIs as critical design material, by critiquing present norms and conversing with imaginary species. As micro-level interventions, we show that conversations with diverse futures through CUIs can persuade us to critically shape our discourse on macro-scale concerns of the present, e.g., sustainability. We reflect on how conversational interactions with pluralistic, imagined futures can contribute to how being human stands to change.

As robots may take a greater part in our moral decision-making processes, whether people hold them accountable for moral harm becomes critical to explore. Blame and punishment signify moral accountability, often involving emotions. We quantitatively looked into people’s willingness to blame or punish an emotional vs. non-emotional robot that admits to its wrongdoing. Studies 1 and 2 (online video interaction) showed that people may punish a robot due to its lack of perceived emotional capacity than its perceived agency. Study 3 (in the lab) demonstrated that people were neither willing to blame nor punish the robot. Punishing non-emotional robots seems more likely than blaming them, yet punishment towards robots is more likely to arise online than offline. We reflect on if and why victimized humans (and those who care for them) may seek out retributive justice against robot scapegoats when there are no humans to hold accountable for moral harm.

Abstract Cryptocurrencies are proliferating as instantiations of blockchain, which is a transparent, distributed ledger technology for validating transactions. Blockchain is thus said to embed trust in its technical design. Yet, blockchain’s technical promise of trust is not fulfilled when applied to the cryptocurrency ecosystem due to many social challenges stakeholders experience. By investigating a cryptocurrency chatbot (Brokerbot) that distributed information on cryptocurrency news and investments, we explored social tensions of trust between stakeholders, namely the bot’s developers, users, and the bot itself. We found that trust in Brokerbot and in the cryptocurrency ecosystem are two conjoined, but separate challenges that users and developers approached in different ways. We discuss the challenging, dual-role of a Brokerbot as anobject of trustas a chatbot while simultaneously being amediator of trustin cryptocurrency, which exposes the social-technical gap of trust. Lastly, we elaborate on trust as a negotiated social process that people shape and are shaped by through emerging ecologies of interlinked technologies like blockchain and conversational interfaces.

The digitization of mental health care holds promises of affordable and ubiquitously available treatment, e.g., with conversational agents (chatbots). While technology can guide people to care for themselves, we examined how people can care for another being as a way to care for themselves. We created a self-compassion chatbot (Vincent) and compared between caregiving and care-receiving conditions. Care-giving Vincent asked participants to partake in self-compassion exercises. Care-receiving Vincent shared its foibles, e.g., embarrassingly arriving late at an IP address, and sought out advice. While self-compassion increased for both conditions, only those with care-receiving Vincent significantly improved. In tandem, we offer qualitative data on how participants interacted with Vincent. Our exploratory research shows that when a person cares for a chatbot, the person's self-compassion can be enhanced. We further reflect on design implications for strengthening mental health with chatbots.

Recent research shows that how we respond to other social actors depends on what sort of mind we ascribe to them. In this article we examine how perceptions of a virtual agent's mind shape behavior in human-agent negotiations. We varied descriptions and communicative behavior of virtual agents on two dimensions according to the mind perception theory:agency (cognitive aptitude) andpatiency (affective aptitude). Participants then engaged in negotiations with the different agents. People scored more points and engaged in shorter negotiations with agents described to be cognitively intelligent, and got lower points and had longer negotiations with agents that were described to be cognitively unintelligent. Accordingly, agents described as having low agency ended up earning more points than those with high agency. Within the negotiations themselves, participants sent more happy and surprise emojis and emotionally valenced messages to agents described to be emotional. This high degree of described patiency also affected perceptions of the agent's moral standing and relatability. In short, manipulating the perceived mind of agents affects how people negotiate with them. We discuss these results, which show that agents are perceived not only as social actors, but as intentional actors through negotiations.

In this paper, we present a dyadic conversation dataset involving topics related to moral emotions which are ethically relevant. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first dataset where the main focus is moral emotions. This dataset also focuses on speaker-listener reactions during a dyadic conversation. Although some of the currently available datasets contain dyadic conversations, they were not conceived with the idea of focusing on the speaker-listener setup. Thus making it difficult to use them to study reactions related to speakers and listeners. Some preliminary analyses of the data are presented as well as our thoughts on future work related to this dataset.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution become a major global topic around, and as a result, universities in Korea have been carrying out structural reforms in preparation of a highly technological future. Engineering colleges, particularly, are participating in the reform by supporting interdisciplinary education programs that combine knowledge and experience across a variety of areas. This study attempts to examine the effects of interdisciplinary education for engineering students by observing students' competencies before and after the program. We studied the effects of education over three years, finding improvements in competencies due to interdisciplinary education every year. Among the 12 competencies we developed, leadership significantly improved during all five semesters. Analytical thinking, interpersonal competency: professional attitude, global mindedness, and creative attitudes also improved across numerous semesters. Future studies can elaborate on competencies based on our findings. Further research is needed on the development of interdisciplinary courses and teaching methods aiming to improve competencies.

Our moral conscience as the “inner light” that guides us shines brighter during moments of ethical conflicts, when we notice a tension between our many oughts and/or wants. We present the first analyses on speech related stress and affect in accounts of moral conflicts. For our exploratory study, we started with interviews on moral and immoral events at work with entrepreneurs. Qualitative analysis revealed that interviewees do share personal moral conflicts without researchers probing for them. Quantitative analysis showed quiet and even toned voice features when discussing moral conflicts, and speech was laced with emotively positive and negative words, though more negative words were used. Moreover, we find promising results on our automatic classification experiment using speech features. How and what moral conflicts people deliberate on in real-life may be pertinent to future research in affective computing, as well as applications for decision-making support, ethical competences coaching, therapy, and healthy moral selfhood.