Workplace mentorship is critical for career advancement, sense of belonging, and well-being. However, historically marginalized groups face barriers to effective mentorship including misaligned commitments, difficulty establishing comfort with mentors, and relationship persistence. We explore how 3D virtual environment (VE) counterspaces, or spaces that center the well-being of marginalized people, can circumnavigate these barriers and generate dedicated environments for workplace mentorship. We present Mentorship Garden: a digital counterspace designed to facilitate mentorship communication around commitments, goals, progress, and well-being. We deployed Mentorship Garden with 10 mentor-mentee pairs, recruited from DEI mentoring programs at a large global company, and interviewed them about their experiences. Overall, Mentorship Garden provided a relaxing space for participants to engage in rituals supporting historically marginalized individuals via mentorship, but revealed potential challenges in seamlessly integrating it in the workplace. We discuss design implications for creating virtual mentorship counterspaces in the workplace and opportunities for future research.

Young people are major consumers of Augmented Reality (AR) tools like Pokémon GO, but they rarely engage in creating these experiences. Creating with technology gives young people a platform for expressing themselves and making social connections. However, we do not know what young people want to create with AR, as existing AR authoring tools are largely designed for adults. To investigate the requirements for an AR authoring tool, we ran eight design workshops with 17 young people in Argentina and the United States that centered on young people's perspectives and experiences. We identified four ways in which young people want to create with AR, and contribute the following design implications for designers of AR authoring tools for young people: (1) Blending imagination into AR scenarios to preserve narratives, (2) Making traces of actions visible to foster social presence (3) Exploring how AR artifacts can serve as invitations to connect with others, and (4) Leveraging information asymmetry to encourage learning about the physical world.

Hybrid options at conferences, which support in-person and remote attendance, have increasingly become the norm in order to broaden participation and promote sustainability. However, hybrid conferences are challenging, where in-person and remote attendees often have disjoint, parallel experiences with limited opportunity to interact with each other. To explore the potential for facilitating social interaction between in-person and remote conference attendees, we designed and built SocialMiXR, a research prototype that uses WebXR technologies to align the physical and virtual worlds into one hybrid space for socialization. We deployed SocialMiXR in a three-day field study with 14 in-person and remote attendees of an engineering conference. Our qualitative results demonstrate that participants felt they were together in the same conference experience, and formed meaningful connections with each other. At the same time, they faced difficulties balancing different realities and capabilities given their separate contexts. We discuss implications for the design of hybrid social experiences at conferences.

Digital avatars are an important part of identity representation, but there is little work on understanding how to represent disability. We interviewed 18 people with disabilities and related identities about their experiences and preferences in representing their identities with avatars. Participants generally preferred to represent their disability identity if the context felt safe and platforms supported their expression, as it was important for feeling authentically represented. They also utilized avatars in strategic ways: as a means to signal and disclose current abilities, access needs, and to raise awareness. Some participants even found avatars to be a more accessible way to communicate than alternatives. We discuss how avatars can support disability identity representation because of their easily customizable format that is not strictly tied to reality. We conclude with design recommendations for creating platforms that better support people in representing their disability and other minoritized identities.

A central challenge of social computing research is to enable people to communicate expressively with each other remotely. Augmented reality has great promise for expressive communication since it enables communication beyond texts and photos and towards immersive experiences rendered in recipients' physical environments. Little research, however, has explored AR's potential for everyday interpersonal communication. In this work, we prototype an AR messaging system, ARwand, to understand people's behaviors and perceptions around communicating with friends via AR messaging. We present our findings under four themes observed from a user study with 24 participants, including the types of immersive messages people choose to send to each other, which factors contribute to a sense of immersiveness, and what concerns arise over this new form of messaging. We discuss important implications of our findings on the design of future immersive communication systems.

The rise of consumer augmented reality (AR) technology has opened up new possibilities for interventions intended to disrupt and subvert cultural conventions. From defacing corporate logos to erecting geofenced digital monuments, more and more people are creating AR experiences for social causes. We sought to understand this new form of activism, including why people use AR for these purposes, opportunities and challenges in using it, and how well it can support activist goals. We conducted semi-structured interviews with twenty people involved in projects that used AR for a social cause across six different countries. We found that AR can overcome physical world limitations of activism to convey immersive, multilayered narratives that aim to reveal invisible histories and perspectives. At the same time, people experienced challenges in creating, maintaining, and distributing their AR experiences to audiences. We discuss open questions and opportunities for creating AR tools and experiences for social change.

The CSCW community has a history of designing, implementing, and evaluating novel social interactions in technology, but the process requires significant technical effort for uncertain value. We discuss the opportunities and applications of "piggyback prototyping", building and evaluating new ideas for social computing on top of existing ones, expanding on its potential to contribute design recommendations. Drawing on about 50 papers which use the method, we critically examine the intellectual and technical benefits it provides, such as ecological validity and leveraging well-tested features, as well as research-product and ethical tensions it imposes, such as limits to customization and violation of participant privacy. We discuss considerations for future researchers deciding whether to use piggyback prototyping and point to new research agendas which can reduce the burden of implementing the method.

Digital communication is often brisk and automated. From auto-completed messages to "likes," research has shown that such lightweight interactions can affect perceptions of authenticity and closeness. On the other hand, effort in relationships can forge emotional bonds by conveying a sense of caring and is essential in building and maintaining relationships. To explore effortful communication, we designed and evaluated Auggie, an iOS app that encourages partners to create digitally handcrafted Augmented Reality (AR) experiences for each other. Auggie is centered around crafting a 3D character with photos, animated movements, drawings, and audio for someone else. We conducted a two-week-long field study with 30 participants (15 pairs), who used Auggie with their partners remotely. Our qualitative findings show that Auggie participants engaged in meaningful effort through the handcrafting process, and felt closer to their partners, although the tool may not be appropriate in all situations. We discuss design implications and future directions for systems that encourage effortful communication.

With the growing ubiquity of wearable devices, sensed physiological responses provide new means to connect with others. While recent research demonstrates the expressive potential for biosignals, the value of sharing these personal data remains unclear. To understand their role in communication, we created Significant Otter, an Apple Watch/iPhone app that enables romantic partners to share and respond to each other’s biosignals in the form of animated otter avatars. In a one-month study with 20 couples, participants used Significant Otter with biosignals sensing OFF and ON. We found that while sensing OFF enabled couples to keep in touch, sensing ON enabled easier and more authentic communication that fostered social connection. However, the addition of biosignals introduced concerns about autonomy and agency over the messages they sent. We discuss design implications and future directions for communication systems that recommend messages based on biosignals.

Although people frequently seek mentoring or advice for their career, most mentoring is performed in person. Little research has examined the nature and quality of career mentoring online. To address this gap, we study how people use online Q&A forums for career advice. We develop a taxonomy of career advice requests based on a qualitative analysis of posts in a career-related online forum, identifying three key types: best practices, career threats, and time-sensitive requests. Our quantitative analysis of responses shows that both requesters and external viewers value general information, encouragement, and guidance, but not role modeling. We found no relation between the type of requests and features of responses, nor differences in responses valued by requesters versus external viewers. We present design recommendations for supporting online career advice exchange.

We explore the potential for expressive biosignals, or displays of sensed physiological data as social cues, to influence perceptions of a member of a stigmatized group. In a between-subjects experiment (N=62) participants read a fictional interview with a drug addict in prison, and rated their empathy and closeness with the interviewee. Participants were randomly assigned to read either 1) the transcript of the interview by itself, 2) the transcript with a text description of the interviewee's heart rate, or 3) the transcript with a graph of the interviewee's heart rate. Results demonstrate that providing information about heart rate can increase empathy in terms of emotional perspective-taking. Additionally, visualizing the heart rate as a graph, as opposed to text, can increase closeness. We discuss the implications of these results and present suggestions for future directions.

We are exploring the concept of expressive biosignals: leveraging wearable technologies to introduce sensed physiological data as cues for social perception. Biosignals can help us achieve a deeper understanding of each other by revealing or clarifying the psychological processes that underlie our subjective experience. We conducted an exploratory study investigating expressive biosignals, comparing the influence of a variety of brain activity visualizations on impression formation. Results revealed that while participants readily infer emotional and cognitive states from visualized brain activity, the ambiguity of the data can lead to diverse perceptions and interpretations. Participants also expressed concerns that the observation of another individual's data during interaction might be invasive or distracting. We present a set of design considerations addressing issues of interpretability, integration, and privacy of biosignals in interpersonal contexts.

A new kind of online movement has emerged on social media: identity hashtag movements, through which individuals share "selfies" and personal stories to elucidate the experiences of marginalized social groups. These movements have the potential to counteract bias and enable social justice, but are enacted in a forum rife with identity and boundary management concerns. To understand this type of movement, we present a qualitative study of #ILookLikeAnEngineer, a hashtag created to challenge engineering stereotypes. We interviewed 32 people, including participants and non-participants of the movement, about their experiences with the hashtag. We found that personally identifiable participation promoted feelings of empowerment and strengthened connections within the marginalized community. At the same time, the personal and professional identity focus raised ambiguity about the boundaries of the collective and the movement's ability to change stereotypes. We discuss implications for online collective action and the use of social media for addressing stereotypes.

Motion capture remains a popular and widely-used method for animating virtual characters. However, all practical applications of motion capture rely on motion editing techniques to increase the reusability and flexibility of captured motions. Because humans are proficient in detecting and interpreting subtle details in human motion, understanding the perceptual consequences of motion editing is essential. Thus in this work, we perform three experiments to gain a better understanding of how motion editing might affect the emotional content of a captured performance, particularly changes in posture and dynamics, two factors shown to be important perceptual indicators of bodily emotions. In these studies, we analyse the properties (angles and velocities) and perception (recognition rates and perceived intensities) of a varied set of full-body motion clips representing the six emotions anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. We have found that emotions are mostly conveyed through the upper body, that the perceived intensity of an emotion can be reduced by blending with a neutral motion, and that posture changes can alter the perceived emotion but subtle changes in dynamics only alter the intensity.