The platformisation of news is increasingly shaping young adults’ emotional wellbeing, presenting urgent challenges for HCI. Existing approaches prioritise control, visibility, and agency, neglecting the emotional and relational dimensions of everyday news encounters. Such frameworks tend to overlook how information encounters contribute to emotional strain, affective overload, and the need for self-care. In this study, we adopted a qualitative, context-sensitive methodology to explore how young adults engage with news in their daily lives, foregrounding the emotional experiences that accompany these interactions. Our findings reveal that information encounters are deeply entangled with emotional needs such as self-expression, self-preservation, care for others, and a relational dependence on personalisation algorithms. Our insights call for a reorientation toward emotionally aware, harm-reducing design that supports emotional resilience, fosters empathetic engagement, and promotes self-care in information encounters. This work contributes to ongoing conversations in HCI around affective computing and the ethics of personalisation in socio-technical systems.

Considering that silence has long been intertwined with ritual and spiritual practice, we explore how digital technology might support silence thereby allowing space for reflection, attunement, and meaning-making. How does the Chinese aesthetic concept of liubai(留白,“empty space”) open up new ways of designing for noticing and reflection? In this paper, we present lived experiences of shared silence and meditation within a one-month artist residency. By weaving together field study with interview data, first-person inquiry and artistic artefacts, we offer empirical insights at the intersection of art, spirituality, and HCI. Through this study, the residency became a site to both experiment with artistic practice and explore silence as a positive and creative practice for attentive noticing. We discuss dwelling in the in-between, the art of liubai in design, a technical inward turn, and posthuman perspectives to inform a design agenda for techno-spirituality with broader implications for future research in HCI.

Adolescent girls face significant mental health challenges during their transition to adulthood, often experiencing heightened stress from various sources. While various interactive technologies for self-disclosure had been explored to support stress relief, little is known about how to encourage stress-related self-disclosure through an embodied approach. This study presents a co-design workshop centred on Embodied Probes—a series of artefacts and activities incorporating embodied methods and technologies. During the workshop, nine participants aged 15-18 engaged with their bodies, expressed bodily sensations through tangible means, and designed embodied prototypes tailored to their personal needs for stress perception and relief. The workshop revealed insights into somatic symptoms, sources, and coping strategies for stress among adolescent girls, as well as how embodied methods can support their stress self-disclosure. This paper contributes to the HCI community by offering design implications on leveraging embodied technologies to support self-disclosure for young women’s mental well-being.

Non-profits such as voluntary and community-based (VC) organisations are facing increasing pressures to engage in data work to sustain themselves. They face challenges with practices, information systems and tools associated with capturing data for supporting service provision. Most recently, researchers working with VC organisations have turned to Feminist and Care discourses to envision alternatives to current socio-technical systems whereby their values and purposes do not match with those of non-profits, consequently pulling the latter away from their socially driven mission. We report on a longitudinal, collaborative study with a UK-based mental health peer support organisation that created innovative tools as a means of navigating current pressures to practice data work for the quantification of mental health service provision. We present findings from interviews conducted with our community partner and share how recovery work has informed careful data practices, offering recommendations for supporting data work in mental health recovery.

We present 'Resound', a Research through Design inquiry into alternative techno-spiritual practices of a UK Buddhist community, informed by a first-person and participatory approach with the members. In this pictorial we portray a moment of reflection as we consolidate our design work towards deployment with the community. We introduce the Resound Sphere, a materialisation of our learning and speculations to date, designed as a research product to empirically explore alternatives for how tangible interaction could mediate religious/spiritual practices. We contribute with the framing of a design space, the presentation of our design approach and artefact response to this design space.

Women from the Roma community experience significant health disparities during their pregnancy. Whilst Mobile Health (mHealth) technologies have the potential to improve antenatal care experiences and health outcomes, research on women from ethnically marginalised backgrounds in developed countries remains limited. We report on a series of Co-creation Workshops with 11 Roma women who have settled in the North of England. In this paper, we present thematic insights about their experiences and needs during pregnancy, and their perceptions and attitudes towards digital technologies to inform the design of culturally sensitive mHealth. We contribute to Human Computer Interaction (HCI) with new empirical research to discourses on Critical Digital Health, Intersectional HCI and Women-centred Design, highlight implications for design and encourage a more critical and intersectional design approach to accommodate better the experiences of ethnically marginalised groups whose needs arguably tend to be overlooked and stereotyped.

The broader adoption of social media platforms (e.g., TikTok), combined with recent developments in Generative AI (GAI) technologies has had a transformative effect on many peoples’ ability to confidently assess the veracity and meaning of information online. In this paper, building on recent related work that surfaced the social ways that young people evaluate information online, we explore the decision-making practices, challenges and heuristics involved in young adults’ assessments of information online. To do so, we designed and conducted a novel digital diary study, followed by data-informed interviews with young adults. Our findings uncover the information practices of young adults including the social and emotional motivations for ignoring, avoiding, and engaging with online information and the ways this is entangled with collaborative arrangements with algorithms as agents. In our discussion we bring these findings in close dialogue with work on information sensibility and contribute rich insights into young peoples’ information sensibility practices embedded within social worlds. Finally, we surface how such practices are attuned to prioritise wellbeing over convenience or other commonly associated sufficing heuristics.

Tangible artifacts and embodied experiences are central to religious and spiritual (R/S) practices, and many HCI researchers and interaction designers highlight the importance of materiality and physicality in design. In this review paper, we bring these perspectives together and examine 44 examples of R/S tangible interactive artifacts (TIAs) from academia, art, industry, and R/S communities to understand their specifics and guide future HCI research and design. We analyze these artifacts and map out a design space for R/S TIAs by matching identified characteristics of R/S TIAs with a framework from the study of material religion. The descriptive and generative R/S TIA Design Space covers insights into bodies, things, places, practices, and backgrounds. This paper offers a novel contribution to HCI research on the value and importance of tangibility and embodiment in technology-mediated practices in R/S contexts and serves as a source for future R/S TIA creation and research.

Applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the domain of Personal Health Informatics (PHI) offer potential avenues for personalised treatment and support for people living with long-term conditions, however, they also present a number of ethical challenges. Whilst participatory approaches can help mitigate concerns by actively involving healthcare professionals, patients, and other stakeholders in design and development, these are constrained by the limits of epistemic standpoints and the risks posed by extrapolation from individuals to groups. In this paper we draw upon interviews with stakeholders involved in Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) care, including clinicians, insurance providers and pharmaceutical industry representatives, to map intentions and ethical considerations for developing PHI tools for people living with HIV. Whilst treatment efficacy for HIV has improved patient quality of life and life expectancy, management and care is complicated by knowledge gaps about what living and ageing with HIV entails. We investigate how the critical concept of epistemic injustice can inform the design of data-driven technologies intended to address these gaps, helping orient expert perspectives within the broader structures and socio-historical influences that shape them. This is of particular importance when designing for marginalized populations such as people with HIV (i.e. who may experience social stigma and be under-resourced, managing multiple conditions), helping to identify and better account for fundamental ethical considerations such as equity.

Supportive digital technologies for the community practice of Faith remain relatively under-explored in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). We report on interviews with 12 members of a Buddhist community in the UK who self-organized and used video-conferencing tools to remain connected to their faith community during the COVID-19 pandemic, aiming to understand how they adopted online tools for their practice while shaping new collective experiences. Findings from Reflexive Thematic Analysis were combined with autoethnographic insights from the first author, also a community member. We evidence qualities of the practice that were valued by participants before and during the pandemic, and the limitations of existing tools and screen-based interactions. We contribute empirical insights on mediated religious and spiritual practice, advancing HCI discourses on Techno-Spirituality, Tangible Embodied Interaction, Soma Design and More-than-Human Worlds. We further develop design considerations for enriching spiritual experiences that are meaningful to practitioners in communities of faith.

We report on a Diary Study investigating daily practices of Self-care by seven UK adults living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), to understand their routines, experiences, needs and concerns, informing Self-care technology design to support living well. We advance a developing HCI literature evidencing how digital tools for self-managing health do not meet the complex needs of those living with long-term conditions, especially those from marginalised communities. Our evaluation of using a Self-care Diary as Design Probe responds to calls to study Self-care practices so that future digital health tools are better grounded in lived experiences of managing multi-morbidity. We contribute to HCI discourses including Personal Health Informatics, Lived Informatics and Reflection by illuminating psychosocial challenges for practicing and self-reporting on Self-care. We offer design implications from a Critical Digital Health perspective, addressing barriers to technology use related to trust, privacy, and representation, gaining new significance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper argues how a more reflective design practice that embraces critical discourses can transform interactive exhibition design and therefore the museum visiting experience. Four framing arguments underpin our exhibition design making: the value of materiality, visiting as an aesthetic experience, challenging the authorized voice, and heritage as a process. These arguments were embodied through design, art and craft practice into one interactive exhibition at a house museum. We draw from our design process discussing the implications that adopting an approach informed by critical heritage debates has on exhibition design and suggest three sensitizing concepts (polyvocal narratives, dialogical interaction, interweaving time and space) bridging the practice of interactive exhibition design and critical heritage theory.

This research explores design opportunities where tangible interaction enables new ways to engage visitors with the stories and artefacts on display, not in a museum as such, but within a house museum -- a particular type of heritage site where I noticed little attention from the field of interaction design. The work sits between the fields of design (e.g. exhibition design), heritage, and technology (e.g. HCI) and it investigates how the approach to designing for house museums may be different than for conventional museums. This research unfolds through a designerly approach to explore the potential of tangible interaction by means of a series of design interventions where art and design practices (e.g. creation of interpretive object), technology (e.g. tangible technologies embedded within object) and historical content (e.g. evocative narrative) are connected together to prompt visitors' personal, tangible and multi-sensory engagement at a house museum. This research is at an early stage (begun in October 2015), thus this paper presents an initial analysis of literature to frame the research, the motivations and context behind the project, the methods to achieve the goals of the study and future work plans.