This qualitative study examines the experiences and concerns of neurodivergent people regarding AI chatbots. Based on 23 semi-structured interviews, we found that our neurodivergent participants used AI chatbots for a diverse range of applications, including therapy, communication, education, work, and planning. Participants’ chatbot use was mainly driven by motivations specific to their condition, such as supporting working memory, regulating emotions, and sustaining self-motivation. In addition to these benefits, participants noted tensions around AI’s role in promoting masking (which involves deliberate concealment of outwardly visible neurodivergent traits), privacy concerns, and its influence on social relations. We present implications grounded in neurodivergent users’ experiences with AI chatbots and raise critical questions about authenticity, privacy, and the broader impact on their social relationships.

HCI research increasingly advocates for fluid models of gender to better represent trans and gender diverse people. In many organizations, such flexibility must operate within regulatory, technical, and resource constraints. For example, public universities are legally required to report gender data using binary categories for compliance and oversight. To understand how inclusivity should be implemented under these conditions, we investigated trans and gender diverse people’s representational priorities within a public university’s information systems. Interviews with 23 participants revealed nuanced priorities on acceptable representational trade-offs. Participants preferred accurate representation in back-end systems and other unseen realms over inclusive user interfaces. They also desired agency in how their identities were grouped or simplified in contexts where categorical reduction was unavoidable. We argue for pragmatic notions of inclusivity that balance community values with organizational constraints. Implementing inclusivity in long-lived organizational systems requires discretion and restraint alongside affirming representational practices amid shifting sociopolitical landscapes.

Universities in North America often frame accessibility as an individual responsibility, emphasizing individualized accommodations for disabled students. However, these systems do not always align with students’ access needs, leaving them to take on additional labour. At a Canadian university, we interviewed 13 student activists and leaders of disability-related groups. We investigate how disabled students collectively address access frictions that emerge from institutional infrastructure; adopting community practices that work with, within, and around the university to address gaps. Using the concept of ’routine infrastructuring’, we demonstrate how student groups leverage technologies to mobilize and negotiate access needs through informal and formal practices as collective care infrastructure. We introduce the concept of ’counteractive frictions’, which are produced collectively to disrupt and provoke negotiation with institutions. We call for scholars and designers to rethink ’infrastructuring’ as adapting and maintaining, which masks the politics and generative potentialities of friction to re-imagine disability futures.

Emotional dysregulation is a core, yet often overlooked condition experienced by adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).While prior research has linked emotional dysregulation to various negative outcomes, self-report measures used to assess this condition may not effectively capture the emotional experiences of ADHD adults.Drawing on a critical disability studies perspective, we reviewed 27 self-report emotional dysregulation measures.We observed the use of normative language that could marginalize adults with ADHD.We also found that the measures do not assess the effectiveness of respondents' regulation strategies.We discuss how these limitations impact the development of socio-technical interventions in assistive technology and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). CCS Concepts• Social and professional topics → People with disabilities; • Human-centered computing → Accessibility theory, concepts and paradigms.

OBJECTIVE: To determine how much of the current biomedical literature would be flagged or require modification in relation to the presence of terms from leaked lists prepared by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Security Administration (NSA) in early 2025. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We searched PubMed (from 1996 to 2024) for all records that match at least one of the given terms, combined the terms and analyzed yearly and total frequency. RESULTS: At least 36.3% of all biomedical literature analyzed, representing more than 10 million records, would be flagged for review or modification with the given term lists. It is conservatively estimated that such term lists could impact more than 2.7 million biomedical publications over the next four years. DISCUSSION: Censorship of scientific findings and the use of term lists to judge the content of scientific materials could significantly impede scientific progress. CONCLUSION: Future research should investigate the long-term implications of, and interim strategies used to navigate, the imposition of censorship on the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge.

This paper examines the lived experience of implanted medical devices through the case of brain implants for epilepsy. These data-driven devices record brain signals to detect and interrupt seizures, introducing new forms of technology-mediated care. Drawing on interviews with 17 patients and caregivers, we examine how data-intensive implants reshape medical interactions and everyday life. Participants reported shifts in doctor-patient collaboration, including the integration of a new expert-an engineer responsible for device-related concerns-into clinical visits. The preparatory and ongoing work of data transfer posed challenges for participants who were low-income, aging, traveling, or busy. Participants expressed a strong desire to access implant data to better understand and manage their condition. They were satisfied with the device unless their medications and/or seizures increased. We discuss emerging considerations for collaborative care and design justice introduced by medical implants that, unlike wearables, deliver treatment and cannot be easily set aside.

Research on gender, identity, and technology has focused on designing individual systems for inclusivity, that is, examining how systems can represent transgender, nonbinary, gender non-conforming, and other gender diverse identities in affirming ways. Less is known about how infrastructures -that is, multiple loosely connected and long-lived systems-can be made inclusive. This gap is critical to address as systems rarely operate in isolation and infrastructures are pervasive in contemporary organizations. For example, universities maintain separate systems for applications, admissions, housing, and course management that only occasionally communicate with each other. This paper steps towards addressing this gap by examining the challenges gender diverse people face in navigating such complex infrastructures. Through a qualitative study consisting of 20 interviews, we find that participants encountered challenges unique to interconnected systems-such as slow and inconsistent updates to personal information and unexpected leaks of outdated information-that together created a perpetual risk of being misgendered by both systems and other users. To navigate such challenges, participants used workarounds such as seeking help from organizational insiders, piloting identity changes on a small scale, engaging in small acts of resistance, and strategically choosing which battles to fight. Participants expressed several goals for inclusive infrastructures: quick and consistent personal data updates; transparency around non-inclusive design decisions; safe and contextual data sharing practices; and community education to facilitate broader cultural change. We discuss novel insights on identity, representation, and inclusion, and present design implications to better support gender diverse people in technical infrastructures.

Access to and understanding one's medical history is crucial to maintaining long-term care. As adolescents and young adults childhood cancer survivors age, they must transition and transfer their health care from their pediatric to an adult care institution. In this study, we provide empirical evidence reporting on the after-cancer treatment experiences of childhood cancer survivors through their transition. We report findings from 24 semi-structured interviews with adolescent and young adult cancer survivors participating in a childhood cancer survivorship program that prepares them for adult care. Our findings reveal three parts of their after-cancer treatment experience: the assumption of responsibility for their complex care needs and medical information and the overall transfer and maintenance of the continuity of their care to an adult clinician. Our findings suggest that survivors may play an essential yet unrecognized role in the patient hand-off. Thus, we introduce patient-mediate handoffs and suggest design opportunities.

Research in accessibility and assistive technology often assumes that technology is within easy reach, that is, people with disabilities are able to obtain technologies so long as they are accessible. As a result, less is understood about the challenges that people with disabilities face in obtaining technology in the first place and how they work around these challenges. We reduce this gap by examining the technology access challenges of people with visual impairments in India in the context of digital banking. Through a qualitative study consisting of 30 interviews, we find that participants routinely encountered social and technical challenges that made it difficult to access and use digital banking. To address these challenges, people with visual impairments engaged in advocacy work which consisted of five dimensions: 1) creating awareness, 2) demonstrating competence, 3) escalation, 4) gathering support, and 5) seeking sighted help. We expand on the idea of advocacy as a form of access work performed by people with visual impairments to secure and maintain access to digital banking.

This special issue builds on and expands HCI’s engagement with historical approaches, questioning our field’s ontological orientations and offering new methods for examining the past. The set of articles featured reinvigorates questions on whose technological labor matters, how we might challenge the racist and misogynistic consequences of HCI’s inter-disciplinary inheritances, and offer new modes of liberatory world-making. Taken together, this collection serves as an act of reclamation of the lineage of our field, providing resources and guidance for a more just present and future.

When studying identity transitions, interview participants can find it difficult to reflect on their transitions and recall specific details related to past experiences. We present a new approach to enable participant reflection on past identity transitions, and a means to fill in blanks by eliciting data that may not otherwise come up: showing participants sentiment visualizations of their social media data. After detailing our methods of constructing sentiment visualizations, we discuss our experiences using them in a study on gender transition. For most participants, the visualizations elicited substantial reflection, and enabled recalling forgotten data and new interpretations of transition experiences. We guide researchers on how to use this method when studying other identity transitions; this may be especially powerful for marginalized people who undergo substantial identity changes. This article proposes a way to uncover participants’ personal histories, which can help HCI researchers to better understand and support marginalized people’s experiences.

Ableist microaggressions are subtle forms of discrimination that disabled people experience daily, perpetuating inequalities and maintaining their ongoing marginalization. Despite the importance of understanding such harms, little work has been done to examine how disabled people are discriminated against online. We address this gap by investigating how disabled people experience ableist microaggressions on social media and how they respond to and cope with these experiences. By conducting interviews with 20 participants with various disabilities, we uncover 12 archetypes of ableist microaggressions on social media, reveal participants’ coping mechanisms, and describe the long-term impact on their wellbeing and social media use. Lastly, we present design recommendations, re-evaluating how social media platforms can mitigate and prevent these harmful experiences.

The goal of this study was to examine the work practices of behavioral health professionals with a view towards designing interactive systems to support their work. We conducted a qualitative workplace study, including in situ observations and semi-structured interviews, in a multidisciplinary clinic treating pediatric feeding disorders. This paper contributes a detailed characterization of clinicians' work practices and conducts a comparative analysis of three types of work: treatment, record management, and preparation work. We found that clinicians have a preference for taxing over tedious work. For example, they experience real-time data collection as more taxing but less tedious than retroactive data entry. Design efforts should balance the tension between addressing the taxing (data collection during meals) versus the tedious (manually entering data into spreadsheets). Although addressing the taxing improves within-routine efficiency, addressing the tedious improves overall morale. Further, we hypothesize that there is a rewarding or unrewarding quality to work that is dictated in part by its social, temporal, and clinical characteristics. We discuss conceptual and design implications for supporting clinical work, and highlight considerations unique to behavioral health.

The Global South has seen a proliferation of e-governance initiatives aimed at digitizing governmental service delivery. However, paper continues to remain the primary medium of bureaucracy. During ethnographic fieldwork at the CM Helpline, a state-wide e-governance initiative in central India, we observed that even tech-savvy bureaucrats who fully supported both the initiative and its paper-to-electronic transition ensured that paper continues to persist in abundance. Drawing upon scholarship from HCI, anthropology, and science & technology studies, we theorize this contradiction to uncover the circulations of power between people, paper, and electronic systems. We suggest that designers should recognize that new systems often disempower existing actors. The process of transition should integrate new systems into the existing ecosystem and plan for the graceful retirement of older technologies. In addition to machine errors, systems should be resilient to human errors. Finally, new systems should attend to sociocultural and historical specificities.

An understanding of medical diagnosis as it is practiced is essential for those seeking to support it using intelligent systems. Through the case of epilepsy, we show that diagnosis is a situated, relational, and evolving process that accounts for information well beyond the patient's physiology, even for physiological phenomena like seizures. Through observations and interviews with neurologists, we show that the meaning of brainwaves and other physiological data depends upon a range of patient-specific and contextual factors, such as age, comorbidities, and mealtimes. Further, we show that diagnosis is partly determined by social factors such as the activities of caregivers and other clinicians, and environmental factors such as faulty electrical wiring. Additionally, diagnostic classifications can evolve in response to new information: events that were once considered seizures can be reinterpreted as clinically irrelevant and vice versa. We contribute a broader sociotechnical perspective to literature on intelligent decision making in healthcare and discuss implications for the design of decision support systems that can better support the work of medical diagnosis.

Qualitative researchers perform an important and painstaking data annotation process known as coding. However, much of the process can be tedious and repetitive, becoming prohibitive for large datasets. Could coding be partially automated, and should it be? To answer this question, we interviewed researchers and observed them code interview transcripts. We found that across disciplines, researchers follow several coding practices well-suited to automation. Further, researchers desire automation after having developed a codebook and coded a subset of data, particularly in extending their coding to unseen data. Researchers also require any assistive tool to be transparent about its recommendations. Based on our findings, we built prototypes to partially automate coding using simple natural language processing techniques. Our top-performing system generates coding that matches human coders on inter-rater reliability measures. We discuss implications for interface and algorithm design, meta-issues around automating qualitative research, and suggestions for future work.

ICTD benefits from being a broad multidisciplinary field that unites researchers from a wide range of domains attempting to understand the role of ICTs in the context of social, economic and political development. As a new field of study, however, ICTD continuously grapples with epistemological differences and varying (and often evolving) notions of what counts as development, and there still exists a significant gap in outlining where the current boundaries of this field lie. In this paper we present "Missing Pieces," an ongoing research project with the primary aim of uncovering the constitution, development, growth and impact of ICTD. Through in-depth quantitative and qualitative analyses of the distribution of participation in and impact of ICTD research across places, people, institutions, organizations and funding agencies, this project will look beyond just trends, and instead focus on finding the missing pieces, i.e. what, or rather who is being left out.

Helping citizens to resolve grievances is an important part of many e-governance initiatives. In this paper, we examine two contemporary initiatives that use ICTs to help citizens resolve grievances in central India. One system is a state-run call center (the CM Helpline), while the other is an independent citizen journalism service (CGNet Swara). Despite similarities in their high-level goals, approach, and geographies served, the systems have key differences in their use of technology, their level of transparency, and their relationship to government. Using qualitative interviews, field immersions, and other data, we analyze how these differences impact the experiences of citizens, officials, and the intermediaries between them. We synthesize our observations into a set of recommendations for the design of future ICT-enabled grievance redressal systems.

CGNet Swara is a voice-based platform for citizen journalism, launched in rural India in 2010. Since then, CGNet Swara has logged over 575,000 phone calls, over 6,900 published stories, and 287 reports of specific problems that were solved via the system. In this paper, we characterize the ongoing impact of CGNet Swara using a mixed-methods approach that includes 70 interviews with contributors, listeners, moderators, journalists, officials, and other actors. Our analysis also draws on the content of published posts, two focus groups, and a 9-day field immersion. Our results highlight personal narratives of the transformative benefits CGNet Swara has brought to rural communities. While the resolution of grievances is the most visible impact, we also uncover a diverse portfolio of other impacts connected to contributing and listening to the platform, as well as opportunities to further enhance impact. Our work contributes to the dialogue surrounding the impact of ICTD projects, especially those that span multiple years.