As domestic environments are increasingly required to meet diverse and changing human needs within constrained spaces, physical reconfigurability offers a promising solution. We developed a full-scale, manipulable room prototype as an exploratory co-design instrument, enabling participants to bodily explore and reflect on reconfigurable living spaces. Through 12 sessions with 30 participants involving brainstorming, bodystorming, and interviews, we identified spatial design patterns and elicited perspectives on reconfigurable domestic environments. Our findings contribute a design pattern catalogue for reconfigurable spaces, alongside insights into the lived experience of reconfigurability. We also discuss design principles, three affordance-based design dimensions that capture value tensions: empowering vs. restrictive, utilitarian vs. hedonic, and futuristic vs. practical, as well as lessons from co-design with a room-scale prototype. We demonstrate agile, room-scale prototyping as a methodological approach for spatial HCI research, advancing toward human-computer habitation, where interactive systems become inhabited built environments that support human values, creativity, and autonomy.

Dental clinics can be challenging sensory environments, creating discomfort and stress, especially for neurodivergent individuals with Sensory Processing Disorder. Interactive environmental systems offer potential to transform these spaces, providing adaptable, sensory-inclusive experiences. However, the design space for environment-based interventions in dental settings remains largely unexplored. To address this, we conducted in-depth 2-hour co-design sessions with 13 neurodivergent participants to explore environment-based strategies to meet diverse sensory needs. We identified five core design goals for inclusive dental environments: experience transformation, distraction, exposure management, restoration, and social facilitation. Our technology-agnostic design catalogue can inform multiple implementation approaches, including projection mapping, ambient displays, and responsive physical elements. We contribute design patterns for interactive environmental systems, methodological insights for participatory design with neurodivergent communities, and demonstrate how tangible materials serve as proxies for environmental interventions, with implications for Augmented Reality system design. This study advances inclusive design practices and highlights co-designing with neurodivergent individuals.

Eye contact between strangers, even fleeting, can spark interaction and foster connection, happiness, and belonging. Yet in public spaces, such encounters are often suppressed by “civil inattention,” with many people absorbed in their phones. We explore how reconfiguring the ambient environment with MirrorBot, a mobile robot with adaptive mirrors, can encourage social encounters by subtly redirecting glances. By shifting reflections between self- and mutual recognition, MirrorBot invites serendipitous eye contact, shared awareness, and low-stakes engagement. In a controlled 2×2 between-subjects study with 90 participants (45 dyads) across four conditions (MirrorBot, Bot-only, Mirror-only, and Control), we found that MirrorBot led participants to initiate conversation more often, feel greater closeness and togetherness, and have more enjoyable interactions. Our findings position robots not only as social agents but as socio-spatial interfaces that choreograph sight lines and shared attention in physical space, opening new possibilities for technologies that cultivate human connection in public life.

Providing mental health support for loved ones across a geographic distance creates unique challenges for the remote caregivers, who sometimes turn to online communities for peer support. We qualitatively analyzed 522 Reddit threads to understand what drives remote caregivers' online help-seeking behaviors and the responses they receive from the community. Their purposes of posting included requesting guidance, expressing emotions, and seeking validation. Community responses included providing emotional support, suggesting informational strategies, and sharing personal experiences. While certain themes in posts (emotional toll, monitoring symptoms, and prioritizing caregiver well-being) are shared across remote and non-remote contexts, remote caregivers' posts surfaced nuanced experiences. For example, they often rely on digital cues, such as voice, to interpret care receivers' well-being while struggling with digital silence during crises. We discuss the need for supporting communication and information sharing between remote caregivers and receivers, care coordination for crisis management, and design recommendations for caregiver communities.

Brief eye contact with strangers can foster connection, belonging, and positive affect, yet such moments are often scarce in public spaces. This paper investigates how a spatially situated robot can reshape the visual field of a shared space to influence how strangers notice and respond to one another. We present MirrorBot, a mobile robot equipped with two actuated mirrors that dynamically redirect reflections to reshape sightlines between people. In a study with 32 strangers in 16 pairs in a waiting-room setting, MirrorBot elicited patterns such as low-stakes icebreaking, nonverbal synchrony, joint sensemaking, asymmetric engagement, and avoidance. Participants also attributed multiple roles to the robot, such as mediator, observer, magnifier, or disrupter, revealing that its social meaning was fluid and co-constructed. Our work extends HRI by showing that robots can act not only as conversational partners but also as spatial mediators, curating opportunities for human–human connection through the reconfiguration of spatial relationships

While robots are traditionally envisioned as physical entities that move through, sense, and act upon the environment, a new category is emerging: the inhabitable robot, or "robot-room," which redefines human-robot interaction by immersing us within the robot itself. As a first step in exploring this novel design space, we developed a full-scale, rapid-prototyped robot-room—not a simulation or scale model—and conducted a co-design study with 30 participants. Inside this immersive space, participants explored new forms of human-robot interaction, engaging their perceptual faculties for "knowing spaces." Our findings inform our ongoing development of a fully operational robot-room and offer valuable insights into expanding the concept of human-robot interaction to one of human-robot cohabitation.

Family members and close friends often step in to provide crucial emotional and practical support to individuals with mental health conditions, even from far away. While much of the existing research on mental health support focuses on those living in the same household, remote supporters' unique practices and challenges remain underexplored. To fill this gap, we interviewed 22 individuals who provide remote support for family and friends with mental health conditions. Remote supporters face significant challenges, including difficulties in maintaining open communication and coordinating care from a distance, struggles with preserving well-being and boundaries, inadequate institutional support, and social stigma. Our findings also highlight specific expectations for technology-facilitated support, pointing to design opportunities that can improve both the practices and well-being of remote supporters.

Central to the human experience is establishing a connection with individuals who are unfamiliar with one another—strangers. We describe results from a field study that deployed SocialStools , a socio-spatial interface with mixed-reality experience, to support ice-breaking between strangers in a public space. Synthesizing existing social psychology theories, we propose a human behavior framework with distinct, interconnected behavioral components, and then apply this framework as an instrument to analyze the “ice-breaking” process amongst 81 strangers assigned to 27 groups using SocialStools . Our analysis identifies recurring behavioral patterns that demonstrate the fluid and emergent nature of interpersonal spatial adjustments, emphasizing the dynamic aspects of proxemics. Our contributions are the results of our empirical field study with a socio-spatial interface that advances our understanding of how strangers interact when uninstructed, and a theory-based, behavioral framework—an analytical instrument to examine the dynamic experience of ice-breaking.

Videoconferencing (VC) has become a prominent and normalized mode of professional and personal communication, introducing universally experienced challenges such as reduced non-verbal cues and "Zoom Fatigue." But People who stutter (PWS) encounter these obstacles with extra hurdles as existing VC technologies often rely on assumptions about speech patterns that don’t accommodate stuttering. Leveraging and driven by the unique insights and experiences of PWS on VC, we conducted a two-phase co-design study with PWS to explore and reflect on the design space for inclusive and empowering VC technologies from their perspectives. Our findings present a broad design space for tools that support PWS before, during, and after VC, focusing on aspects such as supporting self-disclosure, educating non-stuttering audiences, and promoting personal reflection for long-term self-growth. While many design ideas by our participants embody universal value to all VC users, some carry an activism approach that proactively disrupts existing communication flows and norms to redistribute the power between stuttering and non-stuttering speakers in VC meetings. This work contributes to a thorough analysis of the design space and empowering PWS to be drivers and designers of inclusive VC experiences.

Existing videoconferencing (VC) technologies are often optimized for productivity and efficiency, with little support for the “soft side” of VC meetings such as empathy, authenticity, belonging, and emotional connections. This paper presents findings from a 15-month long autoethnographic study of VC experiences by the first author, a person who stutters (PWS). Our research shed light on the hidden costs of VC for PWS, uncovering the substantial emotional and cognitive efforts that other meeting attendants are often unaware of. Recognizing the disproportionate burden on PWS to be heard in VC, we propose a set of design implications for a more inclusive communication environment, advocating for shared responsibility among all, including communication technologies, to ensure the inclusion and respect of every voice.

Xenophobia, a form of hatred directed at foreigners, immigrants, and sometimes even people who are just perceived as foreigners, has been flooding social media in recent political climates. In order to capture language related to foreigners and those perceived-as-foreigners (F&PAF) we present the 7-scale Xenophobia Meter, ranging from anti– to pro- F&PAF sentiments with examples and application rationale. We also publish a dataset of over 7,000 tweets labeled according to this meter, from 11 U.S.-based accounts that are on the forefront of defining the rhetoric related to immigration and policy. We apply a number of models to automatically identify xenophobic and F&PAF-related language. We also present findings from qualitative interviews with human annotators about their labeling experiences. While we find xenophobia is a complex social phenomenon to identify by both humans and machine learning algorithms, we hope that our work inspires researchers, policymakers, and the public to learn about xenophobia and to make efforts to shift the rhetoric and policies toward allyship, equity and inclusion.

Mindfulness, a practice of bringing attention to the present non-judgmentally, has many mental and physical well-being benefits, especially when practiced consistently. Many technologies, such as mobile apps, live streams, virtual reality environments, and wearables, have been invented to support solo or group mindfulness practice. In this paper, we present findings from an interview study with 20 experienced mindfulness practitioners about their everyday mindfulness practices and technology use. Participants identify the benefits and challenges of developing long-term commitment to mindfulness practice. They employ various strategies, such as brief mindfulness exercises, social accountability, and guidance from teachers, to sustain their practice. While conflicted about technology, they adopt and appropriate a range of technologies in their practice for reminders, emotion tracking, connecting with others, and attending online sessions. They also carefully consider when to use technology, when and how to limit its use, and ways to incorporate technology as an object for mindfulness. Based on our findings, we discuss expanding the definition of mindfulness and the tension between supporting short- and long-term mindfulness practice. We also propose a set of design recommendations to support everyday mindfulness, including through the lens of metaphor, reappropriating non-mindfulness technology, and bringing community support into personal practice.

Mindfulness practice has many mental and physical well-being benefits. With the increased popularity of live stream technologies and the impact of COVID-19, many people have turned to live stream tools to participate in online meditation sessions. To better understand the practices, challenges, and opportunities in live-stream meditation, we conducted a three-month autoethnographic study, during which two researchers participated in live-stream meditation sessions as the audience. Then we conducted a follow-up semi-structured interview study with 10 experienced live meditation teachers who use different live-stream tools. We found that live meditation, although having a weaker social presence than in-person meditation, facilitates attendees in establishing a practice routine and connecting with other meditators. Teachers use live streams to deliver the meditation practice to the world which also enhances their practice and brand building. We identified the challenges of using live-stream tools for meditation from the perspectives of both audiences and teachers, and provided design recommendations to better utilize live meditation as a resource for mental wellbeing.

Many digital technologies have been invented to support mindfulness, the practice of bringing attention to the present moment without judgment. While most technologies focus on mindfulness meditation training for novices, in this paper, we explore designing technology to support everyday mindfulness activities for people with varying levels of experience. Through 9 magic machine workshops, 30 mindfulness practitioners explored and reflected on their personal experiences of everyday mindfulness, and generated designs that support their daily practice. Our findings identified six categories of designs conceptualized by our participants: everyday objects, physical spaces, wearables, metaphorical art, companions, and toys. We further analyze the practitioners’ thought processes and considerations for designs that support everyday mindfulness, such as eliciting and regulating emotion and associating mindfulness with routine daily activities. Finally, we discuss the implications of designing individualized mindfulness products and the potential of using co-design magic machine workshops to explore a practical design space.

Interacting with strangers can be beneficial but also challenging. Fortunately, these challenges can lead to design opportunities. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of a socio-spatial interface, SocialStools, that leverages the human propensity for embodied interaction to foster togetherness between strangers. SocialStools is an installation of three responsive stools on caster wheels that generate sound and imagery in the near environment as three strangers sit on them, move them, and rotate them relative to each other. In our study with 12 groups of three strangers, we found a sense of togetherness emerged through interaction, evidenced by different patterns of socio-spatial movements, verbal communication, non-verbal behavior, and interview responses. We present our findings, articulate reasons for the cultivation of togetherness, consider the unique social affordances of our spatial interface in shifting attention during interpersonal communication, and provide design implications. This research contributes insights toward designing cyber-physical interfaces that foster interaction and togetherness among strangers at a time when cultivating togetherness is especially critical.

Public concern related to a policy may span a range of topics. As a result, policy discussions struggle to deeply examine any one topic before moving to the next. In policy deliberation research, this is referred to as a problem of topical coherence. In an experiment, we curated the comments in a policy discussion to prioritize arguments for or against a policy proposal, and examined how this curation and participants' initial positions of support or opposition to the policy affected the coherence of their contributions to existing topics. We found an asymmetric interaction between participants' initial positions and comment curation: participants with different initial positions had unequal reactions to curation that foregrounded comments with which they disagreed. This asymmetry implies that the factors underlying coherence are more nuanced than prioritizing participants' agreement or disagreement. We discuss how this finding relates to curating for coherent disagreement, and for curation more generally in deliberative processes.

Many smallholder coffee farmers in Latin America join cooperatives for increased access to global markets. This requires them to understand their costs relative to a complex sustainable coffee production process. To that end, we designed CalcuCafé, a web-based application for cooperative technicians and coffee farmers to calculate a farmer's costs of coffee production. We iteratively developed and evaluated CalcuCafé's design with members of two coffee cooperatives in Peru. Our research uncovered different expectations about the application between technicians and farmers, stemming from differing backgrounds, goals, and perspectives. Learning to use the application in a group setting helped overcome these differences and facilitated collaboration, resulting in a strong buy-in for the application. Our paper contributes a research and design effort to support smallholder coffee farmers, an underrecognized group at the intersection of HCI for sustainable agriculture and HCI for development.

Inspired by policy deliberation methods and iterative writing in crowdsourcing, we developed and evaluated a task in which newcomers to an online policy discussion, before entering the discussion, generate prompts that encourage existing commenters to engage with each other. In an experiment with 453 Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) crowd workers, we found that newcomers can often craft acceptable prompts, especially when given guidance on prompt-writing and balanced opinions between the comments they synthesize. However, crafting these prompts had little effect on the quality of comments they posted to a simulated discussion forum following the prompt task, as measured by the reasoning and topic coherence of comments. Our results inform best practices and pose questions for the design of discussion systems, both in general and for online policy discussion in particular.

Online crowd labor markets often address issues of risk and mistrust between employers and employees from the employers' perspective, but less often from that of employees. Based on 437 comments posted by crowd workers (Turkers) on the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) participation agreement, we identified work rejection as a major risk that Turkers experience. Unfair rejections can result from poorly-designed tasks, unclear instructions, technical errors, and malicious Requesters. Because the AMT policy and platform provide little recourse to Turkers, they adopt strategies to minimize risk: avoiding new and known bad Requesters, sharing information with other Turkers, and choosing low-risk tasks. Through a series of ideas inspired by these findings-including notifying Turkers and Requesters of a broken task, returning rejected work to Turkers for repair, and providing collective dispute resolution mechanisms-we argue that making reducing risk and building trust a first-class design goal can lead to solutions that improve outcomes around rejected work for all parties in online labor markets.

Often, attention to “community” focuses on motivating core members or helping newcomers become regulars. However, much of the traffic to online communities comes from people who visit only briefly. We hypothesize that their personal characteristics, design elements of the site, and others' activity all affect the contributions these "one-timers" make. We present the results from an experiment asking Amazon Mechanical Turk (“AMT”) workers to comment on the AMT participation agreement in a discussion forum. One-timers with stronger ties to other Turkers or feelings of trust for Amazon are more likely to leave more --- but shorter and less relevant --- comments, while those with higher self-efficacy leave longer and more relevant comments. The phrasing of prompts also matters; a general appeal for personally-reflective contributions leads to comments that are less relevant to community discussion topics. Finally, activity matters too; synchronous activity begets responses, while pre-existing content tends to suppress them. These findings suggest design moves that can help communities harness this “long tail” of contribution.

In this paper, we explore blind people's motivations, challenges, interactions, and experiences with visual content on Social Networking Services (SNSs). We present findings from an interview study of 11 individuals and a survey study of 60 individuals, all with little to no functional vision. Compared to sighted SNS users, our blind participants faced profound accessibility challenges, including the prevalence of photos without sufficient text descriptions. To overcome the challenges, they developed creative strategies, including using a variety of methods to access SNS features (e.g., opening the mobile site on a desktop browser), and inferring photo content from textual cues and social interactions. When strategies failed, participants reached out for help from trusted friends, or avoided certain features. We discuss our findings in the context of CSCW research and SNS accessibility as a design value. We highlight the social significance of photo interactions for blind people and suggest design practices.

When crime analysts collaborate to solve crime cases, they need to share insights in order to connect the clues, identify a pattern, and attribute the crime to the right culprit. We designed a collaborative analysis tool to explore the value of implicitly sharing insights and notes, without requiring analysts to explicitly push information or request it from each other. In an experiment, pairs of remote individuals played the role of crime analysts solving a set of serial killer crimes with both partners having some, but not all, relevant clues. When implicit sharing of notes was available, participants remembered more clues related to detecting the serial killer, and they perceived the tool as more useful compared to when implicit sharing was not available.

We present a qualitative study of 13 farm families who intentionally merge their home and work lives. This is in contrast to most families studied in CSCW, who are urban/ suburban, white-collar and often dual-income, where the goal is to balance separate home and work spheres. We analyze the farm families' coordination practices along three dimensions -- space, time, and roles -- and contrast their experiences to what is known in CSCW about family coordination practices. Through this, we reveal blind spots in CSCW's study of and support for family coordination toward building better tools to support such activities. We emphasize considering co-location rather than assuming geographic distribution across life spheres, the value of natural rhythms in understanding and supporting family life, and how taking on simultaneous roles can be viewed as a life goal rather than a source of conflict.

Many sophisticated tools have been developed to help analysts detect patterns in large datasets, but the value of these tools' individual features is rarely tested. In an experiment in which participants played detectives solving homicides, we tested the utility of a visualization of data links and a notepad for collecting and organizing annotations. The visualization significantly improved participants' ability to solve the crime whereas the notepad did not. Having both features available provided no benefit over having just the visualization. The results raise questions about the potential constraints on the usefulness of intelligence analysis tools.

A number of conceptual metaphors have been previously suggested for identity management, including, for example, theatre stage, onion layers, and identity segments. Based on an analysis of 30 in-depth interviews with Second Life residents, we examine the extent to which these metaphors can be used to explain experiences of social relationships in and across virtual and material worlds. The data suggest that these metaphors are relevant to social interactions in and across virtual and material environments: individuals perform on a stage to and with others, they gradually reveal layers of themselves, and they distinguish between segments of their identity in different social situations. At the same time, these metaphors do not explain all experiences, pointing to future research on virtual environments, social relationships, and identity management.

For many first-year college students in their late teen years, communicating with parents provides crucial social support. When going to college involves moving away from home for the first time, students and their parents must rely on technologies to keep communication channels open. We studied the ways in which college freshmen communicate with their parents and the various communication technologies they use. Interviews with nineteen first-year students at a major United States university revealed insights into students' perspectives of their communication and relationships with parents. We found students to use a variety of tools to connect with their parents and identified some considerations they make when choosing tools. Furthermore, the use of these communication tools played a significant role in mediating students' social and emotional closeness with, and independence from, their parents. We conclude by discussing technical and social implications for social support of students and student-parent relationships.

This paper examines the relationship between experiences of busyness in everyday life and the use of productivity tools, including planners, calendars and to-do lists. Field study findings demonstrate that American individuals across a demographic range have internalized a cultural emphasis of busyness as a moral value to construct positive identities as busy individuals. At the same time, they struggle with a sense of conflict around busyness, reflected in real-life experiences of clashing priorities, fantasies of downtime, and struggles with anxiety, guilt, and loss of control. Our findings also point to the ways digital and non-digital productivity tools are embedded in experiences and coping practices around busyness. Grounded in our observations we propose design principles for productivity tools that support users' identities as busy people but also address some of the perils of the American busyness ethic.

While most collaboration technologies are concerned with supporting particular tasks such as workflows or meetings, many work groups do not have the teamwork skills essential to effective collaboration. One way to improve teamwork is to provide dynamic feedback generated by automated analyses of behavior, such as language use. Such feedback can lead members to reflect on and subsequently improve their collaborative behavior, but might also distract from the task at hand. We have experimented with GroupMeter - a chat-based system that presents visual feedback on team members' language use. Feedback on proportion of agreement words and overall word count was presented using two different designs. When receiving feedback, teams in our study expressed more agreement in their conversations and reported greater focus on language use as compared to when not receiving feedback. This suggests that automated, real-time linguistic feedback can elicit behavioral changes, offering opportunities for future research.

Modern enterprises are replete with numerous online processes. Many must be performed frequently and are tedious, while others are done less frequently yet are complex or hard to remember. We present interviews with knowledge workers that reveal a need for mechanisms to automate the execution of and to share knowledge about these processes. In response, we have developed the CoScripter system (formerly Koala [11]), a collaborative scripting environment for recording, automating, and sharing web-based processes. We have deployed CoScripter within a large corporation for more than 10 months. Through usage log analysis and interviews with users, we show that CoScripter has addressed many user automation and sharing needs, to the extent that more than 50 employees have voluntarily incorporated it into their work practice. We also present ways people have used CoScripter and general issues for tools that support automation and sharing of how-to knowledge.

Although in-car GPS navigation technology is proliferating, it is not well understood how its use alters the ways people interpret their environment and navigate through it. We argue that GPS-based car navigation might disengage people from their surrounding environment, but also has the potential to open up novel ways to engage with it. We present an ethnographically-informed study with GPS users, showing evidence for practices of disengagement as well as new opportunities for engagement, illustrating our findings using rich descriptions from the field. Grounded in our observations we propose design principles for GPS systems that support richer experiences of driving. We argue that for a fuller understanding of issues of disengagement and engagement with the environment we need to move beyond a focus on the (re)design of GPS devices, and point to future directions of work that embrace a broader perspective.

Coordinating goals, schedules, and tasks among collaborators is difficult, and made even more so when there are disciplinary, geographic and institutional boundaries that must be spanned. Designing CSCW tools to support coordination in these settings, however, requires an improved under-standing of the constraints and conflicts that impede effective collaboration. We present findings from a study of distributed collaborations between academic surgeons and biomedical engineering researchers. These two groups differ significantly in their work priorities and institutional contexts, but are nonetheless able to work together and co-ordinate effectively. They accomplish this via human mediation, frequent ad hoc communication, and optimizing the use of their limited face-to-face interaction opportunities.

Effective communication in project teams is important, but not often taught. We explore how feedback might improve teamwork in a controlled experiment where groups interact through chat rooms. Collaborators who receive high feedback ratings use different language than poor collaborators (e.g. more words, fewer assents, and less affect-laden language). Further, feedback affects language use. This suggests that a system could use linguistic analysis to automatically provide and visualize feedback to teach teamwork. To this end, we present GroupMeter, a system that applies principles discovered in the experiment to provide feedback both from peers and from automated linguistic analysis.