Generative AI (genAI) is increasingly being integrated into children’s everyday lives, not only through screens but also through so-called “screen-free” AI toys. These toys can simulate emotions, personalize responses, and recall prior interactions, creating the illusion of an ongoing social connection. Such capabilities raise important questions about how children understand boundaries, agency, and relationships when interacting with AI toys. To investigate this, we conducted two participatory design sessions with eight children ages 6 - 11 where they engaged with three different AI toys, shifting between play, experimentation, and reflection. Our findings reveal that children approached AI toys with genuine curiosity, profiling them as social beings. However, frequent interaction breakdowns and mismatches between apparent intelligence and toy-like form disrupted expectations around play and led to adversarial play. We conclude with implications and design provocations to navigate children’s encounters with AI toys in more transparent, developmentally appropriate, and responsible ways.

Teens today are increasingly drawn to emotionally responsive AI systems, often called AI companions. As these technologies grow in popularity, families face new questions about mediating teens’ interactions with them. Traditional mediation strategies, such as monitoring or restriction, often fall short when interactions are private, emotionally persuasive, and relational. In this study, we examine how families, parents and teens, can jointly explore, interpret, and negotiate the use of AI companions together. We conducted a four-week study with 11 families with teens aged 13–15, centered on Character.AI and structured around activities that progressed from joint exploration to teen independent use. Our findings show that co-exploration fostered family connection, supported joint calibration of AI behaviors and limits, gave parents real-time insight into teens’ decision-making, and prompted families to reassess their assumptions about AI companions. We conclude with implications and recommendations for designing parental-mediation tools that help scaffold healthy teen-AI companion use.

Taking and sharing photos is a routine practice in childcare institutions, used to document children’s learning, communicate with families, and support marketing. These practices are typically regulated through consent forms, the institutional mechanism for authorizing photography and media use. While prior research has examined parents’ photo-taking and sharing, little is known about consent in institutional childcare, where formal policies and non-parental figures (e.g., staff and administrators) shape children’s privacy in distinct ways. To investigate this, we analyzed 42 consent forms and conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with parents, educators, and administrators in U.S.-based childcare institutions. Our findings reveal that consent forms serve as procedural, one-time agreements rather than meaningful safeguards. Parents navigate consent pragmatically amidst structural precarity and power asymmetries, while staff performs the unseen labor of consent enforcement. We conclude with implications for reimagining consent and designing usable institutional mechanisms that support children’s privacy and safety in practice.

Care work is always already unequal. It involves looking after others’ physical, psychological, emotional, and developmental needs. Paid care work tends to be conducted in private spaces, lack regulation, and reproduce unequal dynamics between clients and workers. These conditions lead to porous boundaries, a permeability experienced by workers between care and work, professional and personal, and private and public (sectors and spheres). Drawing on interviews with 16 workers who find work using Care.com, we argue that the porous boundaries of care work are reified in new ways through the design and use of emerging digitally mediated matching platforms. This has particular impacts for ranking personhood, reducing worker safety, and increasing atomization. In contrast, we find benefits in the forum-like structure and visible, interactive conversations of other platforms used to access childcare work. We end with a discussion of porousness by design and the trouble of locating design within worker platforms.

Amidst the shift towards digital news media, the news consumption behavior of the blind and visually impaired (BVI) has undergone significant changes. Despite extensive prior work in HCI and Accessibility literature around digital media accessibility for the BVI community – digital news consumption practices among BVI individuals remain inadequately explored. This study focuses on digital news consumption practices among BVI individuals in India. We conducted semi-structured interviews and contextual inquiry with 17 participants, revealing diverse motivations rooted in social mobility and belongingness. Participants disclosed navigational barriers, such as dynamic advertisements, and consequently relied on volunteer-driven ad-free newspapers as a stopgap. While news source preferences were shaped by interface accessibility, factors like neutrality and coverage played a crucial role too. Our findings highlight the need for a nuanced understanding of BVI users’ experiences and inform implications and recommendations for designing accessible digital news platforms.

The increasing platformization of healthcare services in India, in the wake of COVID-19, has resulted in huge demand for home phlebotomy. However, there is a limited understanding of the impact of digitization on home phlebotomists' workflows. To address this gap, we conducted 26 semi-structured interviews with home phlebotomists, riders, and patients, supplemented by observations of the entire workday of 3 phlebotomists. We found that home phlebotomists' technology-mediated workflows are organized in ways that enable them to build strong support networks of human infrastructure, helping them negotiate and optimize their daily workflows. Moreover, while the digitization of their workflows resulted in continued surveillance, it empowered them to justify their decisions and present evidence of work when needed. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for equitable platform work and the future of platformized health and conclude with design recommendations for telehealth platforms offering home phlebotomy services.

Videoconferencing usage has surged in recent years, but current platforms present significant accessibility barriers for the 430 million d/Deaf or hard of hearing people worldwide. Informed by prior work examining accessibility barriers in current videoconferencing platforms, we designed and developed Jod, a videoconferencing platform to facilitate communication in mixed hearing groups. Key features include support for customizing visual layouts and a notification system to request attention and influence behavior. Using Jod, we conducted six mixed hearing group sessions with 34 participants, including 18 d/Deaf or hard of hearing participants, 10 hearing participants, and 6 sign language interpreters. We found participants engaged in visual layout rearrangements based on their hearing ability and dynamically adapted to the changing group communication context, and that notifications were useful but raised a need for designs to cause fewer interruptions. We provide insights for future videoconferencing designs and conclude with recommendations for conducting mixed hearing studies.

The Air Quality Index (AQI) is a set of numerical, color-coded metrics used to communicate air pollution levels. AQI data is available through a variety of mediums such as mobile apps, websites and public displays. However, the information communicated through these may not be easily interpretable to everyone. Especially when scientific data and associated representations are used to convey information to communities whose shared knowledge and practices are significantly different from Western scientific contexts. We discuss findings from a qualitative study conducted in Delhi, India to understand how residents across both low- and high-resourced communities, assess their personal risk around air pollution and the safety measures they take to mitigate that risk. We reveal incompatibilities between the air-quality information displayed in digital platforms and whether that information is interpretable for people with different cultural sensitivities. We conclude with design implications for improving the interpretability and relevance of air quality interfaces.

India has been witnessing a steady increase in smartphone penetration since 2016 after Reliance Jio introduced inexpensive internet plans. Much of HCI research in the Global South has been conducted before smartphones became more widespread. More recent work on smartphone use in India has been either domain-focused or studied specific features. In this work, we investigate how emergent users from low-income communities in India currently use their smartphones, and what they use them for. We draw on semi-structured interviews with emergent smartphone users across rural and urban India demonstrating their experiences and challenges related to low- textual and digital literacy, infrastructure, privacy, and motivations of use. Our findings revealed that while there is a lack of understanding of basic features such as accounts and passwords, there is sophisticated use spanning user-generated media, remote education, skilling, etc. We close with recommendations for future research and design for emergent smartphone users.

Women’s safety in public spaces has become a prime concern in India. Much of the academic and non-academic efforts have focused on developing technology-mediated solutions such as mobile apps and helplines for combating harassment experiences. However, there is an acute understanding of women’s perceptions and desires around these technological solutions. In this work, we investigate women’s perceptions around technological interventions dedicated to safety, the nature of support they seek from technology, and the characteristics they desire technology to embody to offer support. We draw on interviews with women across urban areas of India, demonstrating how they currently navigate unsafe experiences and also unpack their desires around technological solutions encompassing precautionary, reactionary, and healing support for navigating public spaces in the future. Finally, we conclude with implications focusing on the need for embedded technological solutions and going beyond victim-centric approaches to design technology for safety.

Care workers are increasingly using digital technology in their daily lives, for monitoring, financial compensation, training, coordination, and more. State and corporate actors have invested significant resources to enable this digital shift, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, care work has remained chronically underpaid, and continues to rely on women from minoritized and marginalized backgrounds. Our paper examines how care workers carefully navigate digitization, precarity, and complex social relationships, in an attempt to care for their communities and each other. We analyze the emerging digital ecosystem for frontline health workers in India during the COVID-19 pandemic where these dynamics have been highly visible. Our research draws attention to four interconnected ways in which workers practiced care, by directing their efforts towards survival, resilience, advocacy, and/or resistance. We suggest these also as care orientations that can be adopted by researchers and practitioners, to critically reflect on and direct technology design towards enabling more caring futures, for (and with) workers and communities.