The energy cost of developing and deploying Generative AI (GenAI) models has exploded with their mass adoption, as has the ensuing carbon emissions. The climate impact of this is currently unknown. In Human-Computer Interaction, GenAI models are rarely trained but often used. Based on detailed review of 282 papers, we estimate this footprint from energy consumption of the total use of GenAI for CHI 2024 research as between 10,769.63 and 10,925.12 kg CO2e - equal to driving a car for more than 100,000 km. We show that in CHI research, GenAI is most often used for Prototyping, Evaluation & User studies, and that Data Collection and Fine-tuning models incurs the highest CO2st.1 We find that CHI submissions are unlikely to report GenAI use transparently, which makes precise calculations difficult. By measuring the usage of a subset of the papers on local hardware, we obtain estimations of the energy consumption and carbon footprint. Based on this evidence, we discuss and demonstrate ways to mitigate the issues of GenAI carbon footprint and lack of transparency.

Creative practitioners rely on tools to capture and manage ideas as a foundational aspect of their work. However, we have little knowledge about how idea management practices vary in different creative domains. Combining insights from qualitative surveys ( N \(\sim\) 200) and follow-up in-depth interviews ( n \(\sim\) 60) with creative professionals from four domains (interaction design, research, music, and graphics) of creative work, we report on (1) how ideas are externalized in practitioners’ archives, (2) what they consider important when choosing tools to capture ideas, and (3) how these tool collections resemble and differ from each other. Our cross-domain study demonstrates that participants’ tool use reflects idea capture characteristic needs as well as domain-specific views about the creative process. We conclude with a discussion about capturing as an externalizing activity, practitioners’ use of the term ideas , and four suggestions for directions in the design of creativity support tools.

The underrepresentation of women in IT has been a long-standing issue. Research has shown that women’s first experience with computing education is vital in shaping their perception of the field and their perception of who “belongs” to it. In this Danish case study, we examine gender representation in the subject Informatics, which is the first mandatory, formal introduction to computing education for many students in Denmark. Across 25% of all Danish HHX high schools, we assess the teaching materials on parameters of gender representation in pronouns, names, images, audio/video material, and potential role models. Our results suggest an overall underrepresentation of women in textual and audio/video material, but not in images. We also find an overall absence of female role models, and a tendency for the materials to feature younger female role models than their male counterparts. We conclude with concrete recommendations for authors and publishers of teaching materials for ICT on the high school level.

When humans are exposed to environmental and physical stressors, cognitive performance is degraded. Even though several studies have examined the effect of various stressors individually, there are limited studies comparing the impact of different types. This study examined the effects of Heat, Noise, and Alcohol on cognitive performance during two programming tasks to quantify the impact of stressors on novice programmers. The experiment enrolled N=100 university student volunteers for a between-subjects experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions (M=25): a room with at 38 °C (100 °F), a room with conversational noise around 80 dBA, a blood alcohol content of 1.0‰, or a base condition. Two programming tasks were administered: one analysis task (reading programs) and one synthesis task (writing programs), taking about half an hour to complete in total. Short-term exposure to heat appears to not significantly affect neither reading nor writing programs; conversational noise significantly impacts analytical tasks but not synthesis tasks; while alcohol significantly worsens performance in both analytical and synthesis tasks. To provide a tangible summary for decision-makers able to influence conditions for novice programmers, an approximated comparison is provided, which “translates” negative cognitive effects of heat, noise, and alcohol to one another.

Creativity is often highlighted as one of the most relevant competencies or skills of the 21st century. Teaching about theoretical underpinnings of creativity has therefore become relevant in numerous fields, from computer science to business management. If we consider creativity as a literacy, like writing or programming, it is important that people from different backgrounds can learn about the basic creativity concepts and how these might be manifested in practice. This article presents the design rationale of The Creativity Game, a simple online game intended to teach the player about some of the very basic properties or concepts in creativity theory: exploration, value, novelty, constraints, and transformation. The Creativity Game is a prototype presented here to spark conversation about how we teach creativity theory in a tangible way.

This paper explores redirection of activity as an intervention strategy for self-regulation online. We conducted an explorative study (N = 19) of the browser extension Aiki, which redirects a user from a self-defined ‘time-wasting’ website to an online platform for learning programming (Sololearn, Codecademy, or Udemy). Based on quantitative measures alone, using Aiki decreased the participants’ time spent on time-wasting websites on average, and increased programming knowledge. However, several users ended up avoiding their time-wasting websites entirely when Aiki was active, or they discontinued the use of the extension after ‘the novelty wore off’. Based on these effects, we qualitatively explored the user experiences and identified four challenges and four opportunities for using redirection of activity as an intervention strategy for self-regulation of time management in a browser. Our results suggest that this intervention strategy is promising, but careful design is necessary to strike an optimal balance between independence and regulation.

Abundant research has investigated gender differences from the perspective of the individual, but little research has explored gender differences from a group perspective. This paper presents a survey-based quantitative exploration of gender differences when$N=138$students working in smaller (3 students) groups that are either men-majority (WMM) or men-only (MMM). The study was conducted during four weeks of CS1 project work, and the investigation focused on student struggle, task division, group satisfaction, and course outcomes. We observed four significant gender differences: (i) Many women students express a lack of confidence early in the project work, as do many men students that are part of mixed-gender (WMM) groups, but not men that are part of men-only (MMM) groups; (ii) In men-majority groups, women perform more ‘non-technical’ tasks than men (e.g., analysis, design, and report editing); and (iii) women students in men-majority groups are less satisfied with several aspects of the group work than men students in the same groups. These findings add to our understanding of group dynamics and collaboration (including what to avoid and where to pay extra attention) when assigning projects in smaller groups in computing education.

Research ideas are pivotal in research practice. While research domains, topics, and methods are often outlined by specific research fields, the process of capturing and developing research ideas is less categorical. Conceiving and developing research ideas requires continuous creative thinking, usually supported by various different tools, each more or less carefully selected by a researcher to fulfill a specific purpose. In this paper, we investigate the creative work practices of academic researchers, with a focus on the workflows and tools they employ to manage ideas. Through a qualitative survey (n=51) and in-depth interviews (n=18) with researchers from a wide range of fields, we identify and describe typical processes of managing research ideas, different types of research ideas (a research question or problem, a method, a hypothesis or antithesis, and a theory), properties of good research ideas, as well as potentials for tools and technology to support idea management for researchers.

We present a long-term study of how university students experienced teaching/learning activities throughout the Covid-19 pandemic in Denmark1. We collected data through questionnaires from N=365 students enrolled in the "Introduction to Database Systems" course during four consecutive semesters (Spring 2020 to Fall 2021). The two years span the entire period of the pandemic’s interruption of normal on-site teaching, until restrictions were completely lifted in Denmark. The study investigates student preferences for online versus onsite teaching, and identifies the advantages of both, as well as changes in preferences throughout the pandemic. Quantitatively, the results demonstrate a preference for on-site over online teaching which was more pronounced for exercise classes than for lectures. Qualitatively, the study identifies several advantages of both online and on-site teaching; including a more engaging learning environment and better teacher-student interaction for on-site lectures, and flexibility and self-paced learning for online teaching. The primary changes identified were an increased sense of being able to focus online and a decrease in ease of asking questions online towards the later stages of the pandemic. Finally, we highlight the opportunity for universities to provide hybrid models of teaching, in order to care for diverse student preferences and needs.

Philine Zeinert, Nanna Inie, Leon Derczynski. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.

This paper presents and evaluates Aiki, a simple browser extension designed to redirect a user to a learning platform for a fixed amount of time before accessing websites defined as ’procrastination’ or ’time-wasting’ websites. The goal of the extension is to enable the user to exchange time spent on pages they believe contribute less to their own productivity for microlearning activities, defined as small or short-term learning activities. The paper describes the design and development of Aiki and evaluates the extension with a group of n = 10 participants studying the Danish language. Based on a two-week study, we conclude that this type of extension, even in its preliminary version, has the potential to improve language skills in a lightweight manner and that redirection is an important alternative to blocking for procrastination management.

Reading academic literature in digital formats is becoming more and more of a normalcy for students, but designers of reading support tools do not share common, metrics for evaluating such tools. This paper introduces our work in developing an evaluation form which we call the aRSX (active Reading Support IndeX). The aRSX-form is a quantitative means for evaluating whether a specific software or hardware tool supports active, academic reading in a way that resonates with personal user experience and learning preferences-in other words; whether the tool is practical and pleasant to use for the student who consumes academic literature. The paper presents the first and second iterations of the aRSX evaluation survey based on a preliminary exploratory experiment with 50 university students. The paper also describes how the evaluation form can be developed and used by designers of reading support tools.

This article presents a grounded theory analysis based on a qualitative study of professional interaction designers ( n = 20) with a focus on how they use tools to manage design ideas. Idea management can be understood as a subcategory of the field personal information management, which includes the activities around the capture, organization, retrieval, and use of information. Idea management pertains to the management and use of ideas , a particular type of information, as part of creative activities. The article identifies tool-supported idea management strategies and needs of professional interaction designers, and discusses the context and consequences of these strategies. Based on our analysis, we identify a conceptual framework of 10 strategies which are supported by tools: saving, externalizing, advancing, exploring, archiving, clustering, extracting, browsing, verifying, and collaborating . Finally, we discuss how this framework can be used to characterize and analyze existing and novel idea management tools.

The aim of the workshop is to examine and discuss how computers can support, enrich, and transform collaborative creative processes. By exploring and combining methodological, theoretical, and design-oriented perspectives, we wish to examine the implications, potentials, and limitations of different approaches to providing digital support for collaborative creativity. Participation in the workshop requires participants to actively document and identify salient themes in one or more examples of computer-supported collaborative creativity, and the resulting material will serve as the empirical grounding for workshop discussions.

Design ideas are commonly used as an indicator of success of design methods and processes. Yet it is very rarely defined what precisely constitutes "an idea", and how such an idea manifests itself to the researcher. This paper presents an examination of design idea definitions based on a thorough study of 75 research contributions. We construct a typology of seven definitions of design ideas. The purpose of the typology is to offer shared definitions and descriptions of design ideas to design and creativity researchers, aiding a higher degree of specificity when studying and analyzing the emergence of ideas in design processes.