This work describes the iterative design and development of a Virtual Reality (VR) tool intended to explore how immersive technologies can support autistic adolescents when facing everyday situations characterised by uncertainty. We report the results of a co-design workshop with four psychologists specialised in neurodevelopmental intervention, which led to the creation of storyboards about uncertainty in a supermarket context. Results include sensory and social considerations in the simulation of uncertainty, as well as coping strategies and design implications for virtual environments with potential clinical relevance. These storyboards were used to develop a mid-fidelity prototype of a VR system. We then invited six autistic adolescents (aged 10-18) to interact with the prototype and act as expert advisors. Feedback data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and field observations. Our findings reveal that designing for autonomy in VR experiences is shaped by tensions related to individual, social, and interactive aspects. This work contributes to research on designing VR tools for autistic people by providing critical reflections on autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Imagining the future of HRI is crucial for anticipating ethical, social, and technological challenges. This paper proposes a Speculative News workshop procedure to engage high school students in discussion and reflection while creating the front page of a newspaper published in 2125. Results from 40 participants explored robotic imaginaries highlighting societal issues, human attitudes toward robots, and technological feasibility. The results open questions that expand HRI knowledge beyond artefacts and deep into societies. In conclusion, we reflect on how Speculative News can foster participatory and inclusive design.

It is our great pleasure to introduce this issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, which focuses on contributions from the research community on Supporting Group Work (GROUP). This thriving community is home to researchers within CSCW, HCI for practice-centered computing, sociotechnical studies, and interdisciplinary groups who provide theoretical, methodological, and/or conceptual contributions on collaborative technologies and practices. GROUP's research community vividly raises the awareness of dimensions of growing importance in our highly connected lives. The idea of caring through and with technology continues to be a rich and dynamic area for research, pointing to important challenges for elderly persons, parenting, and health. The increased availability of AI-based systems leads to the development of new practices that pose increasing issues for design and regulation. The domain of social media is especially concerned with fast-evolving practices and issues that raised major interest in our community. These aspects are also approached through design fiction as a way of futures-making. Workplace and hybrid work settings show also a central area where cooperation and teams are impacted. The research papers gathered in this issue account that we live in an unprecedentedly connected world, calling for more ethical reflections about the possibilities and caveats of digital technologies. The editorial board worked hard to organize this second submission round. The call for papers for this issue on GROUP attracted a total of 109 submissions from all over the world, of which 37 papers (34%) were accepted. This issue results from the dedicated volunteer effort of 36 members of the community who served as Associate Chairs (ACs) and 87 reviewers. They all lent their expertise and time to ensure high quality reviews and provide insightful feedback to all authors. The Editorial Board can be found on GROUP's track page. As Track Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing GROUP's contributions.

Critical data studies denounce that heteronormative formalisations of sex/gender identity obscure queer lives from datasets and computational processes. Since sex/gender categories cannot convey nonbinarity and multiplicity, this project addresses the inherent tension between queerness and systematisation with an anticategorical quantitative visual approach, combining psychometric scales with visualisations of the gender spectrum. Indeed, using queer and feminist methodologies, we propose a new data structure resulting from the codesign of an interactive visualisation of the gender spectrum, made in an iterative dialogue with gender-diverse people. Our contribution is twofold: an inclusive data structure for the self-assessment of sex/gender identity, and an interactive visualisation, acting as a critical design object, educational and counselling tool, and basis for data collection, annotation, and analysis. Although this project could both empower and harm sexual minorities, its originality is seeing nonbinarity and multiplicity not as appendices to a normative system, but as queering design principles.

It is our great pleasure to introduce this issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, which focuses on contributions from the research community on Supporting Group Work (GROUP). This thriving community is home to researchers within CSCW, HCI for practice-centered computing, sociotechnical studies, and interdisciplinary groups who provide theoretical, methodological, and/or conceptual contributions on collaborative technologies and practices. GROUP's research community vividly raises the awareness of dimensions of growing importance in our highly connected life, as exemplified by the papers included in this issue. Information sharing and moderation in and across groups and formal organisations continue to call for complex research questions. Collaborative practices that have been the object of concern in GROUP become revisited through the lenses of new technologies, as illustrated by the papers investigating recommender systems and conversational agents in collaborative contexts. More than ever, the Internet is acknowledged as a space for social relationships, see for instance the case of dating apps or mom's chat group in this issue. Reflecting on our densely computing supported practices, ethics for research and design become an essential topic for consideration. The editorial board worked hard to organize this first submission round. The call for papers for this issue on GROUP attracted a total of 31 submissions from all over the world, of which 8 papers (25.8 %) were accepted. This issue results from the dedicated volunteer effort of 23 members of the community who served as Associate Chairs (ACs). They all lent their expertise and time to provide insightful feedback to all authors. The Editorial Board can be found on GROUP's track page. As Track Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing GROUP's contributions.

The design of robust and trustworthy Generative AI (GenAI) requires a deep understanding of the agencies emerging from human interactions with them. To contribute to this goal, we retrospectively studied an art project involving a visual artist, a computer scientist, an artistic director, and a generative model (GPT-2). The model was fine-tuned with trip reports describing the experience of eating psychedelic mushrooms. Building on agential realism, we analysed the co-performance between the artist and the model as their agency moved along the choreographer-performer continuum. Results reveal ontological surprises, leading to the proposal of entangled authorship to de-individualise the production of knowledge from a More Than Human perspective. The paper illustrates how art can expose different forms of relationships, challenging the idea of GenAI as just a tool that simplifies or replaces human labour. We conclude by emphasising the transformational potential of GenAI for novel modes of engagement between humans and machines.

Abstract Scholars across Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) increasingly focus on the topic of care when investigating data-driven technologies in contexts of re-humanizing technology design and usage. Previous studies have shown how care work eludes complex bureaucratic systems shaped by data, digitalization, and a restrictive political agenda. This research aims to understand how asylum stakeholders enact care as an aspect of asylum casework, while navigating what is largely acknowledged by NGOs, nation states, and the EU to be a broken asylum system (von der Leyen). We investigate care as a relational aspect of casework in which knowledge and technology of the implicated caseworker and asylum seeker are attuned to one another in a way that takes the unaccountable into account (following Mol 2010). We add to studies of care in CSCW by empirically expanding the research sites of care and data work. In this multi-sited ethnographically informed study, we conducted interviews (n = 19) and 160 h of observational studies amongst: 1) Danish Red Cross care workers; 2) Danish Refugee Council legal counsellors; and 3) Danish Immigration Service case officers. We contribute empirically grounded insights into the meanings of care in a datafied asylum context. We find that care is enacted by caseworkers in moments of ambivalence, translation, and attentiveness to “new substantial information” relevant for asylum decision-making. We find that these relational aspects of care in asylum casework impact the production of data about the asylum seeker. We end with a discussion of how a care perspective increases our sensitivity as CSCW researchers towards understanding the conditions for producing quality data and documentation in casework.

Abstract According to recent legislative initiatives, non-consensual pornography is a crime in several countries and social media providers have a duty to provide their users easy to use mechanisms to report abuses. In this paper, we analyse the state of the art of the interfaces for reporting non-consensual pornography from the victim’s perspective. Firstly, we analysed 45 content sharing platforms where aggressors might post non-consensual pornography. The analysis identified three distinct interaction styles for reporting the crime: Scriptum (a text-field where the user verbally describes the abuse), Bonam (a multilayered menu that includes a correct option), and Malam (a multilayered menu that does not include a correct option). Secondly, we conducted a within-subject study to evaluate the experience elicited by these interaction styles. Participants (N = 39) were given a scenario and asked to report six blurred images as non-consensual pornography using a medium-fidelity prototype. The results exposed complex trade-offs between clarity, efficiency, and distress among the different interaction styles. These trade-offs open foundational research directions transcending boundaries between human-computer interaction and multimedia studies and interfacing computer science research with the law.

Abstract Civic technologies have the potential to support participation and influence decision-making in governmental processes. Digital participatory budgeting platforms are examples of civic technologies designed to support citizens in making proposals and allocating budgets. Investigating the empirical case of urban biking activists in Madrid, we explore how the design of the digital platform Decide Madrid impacted the collaborative practices involved in digital participatory budgeting. We found that the design of the platform made the interaction competitive, where individuals sought to gain votes for their single proposals, rather than consider the relations across proposals and the larger context of the city decisions, even if the institutional process rewarded collective support. In this way, the platforms’ design led to forms of individualistic, competitive, and static participation, therefore limiting the possibilities for empowering citizens in scoping and self-regulating participatory budgeting collaboratively. We argue that for digital participatory budgeting platforms to support cooperative engagements they must be revisable and reviewable while supporting accountability among participants and visibility of proposals and activities.

For over a quarter century, GROUP has offered a premier yet intimate and welcoming venue for agenda-setting, diverse research. Although the traditional focus of the conference is on supporting group work, it has expanded to include research from computer-supported cooperative work, sociotechnical studies, practice-centered computing, human-computer interaction, computersupported collaborative learning, participatory technology design, and other related areas. The work presented in this issue embodies that interdisciplinary ethos. Papers in this issue cover a wide range topics, from human-AI collaboration, to collaboration in virtual reality, to perceptions of privacy and security, to the myriad impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The application domains are similarly wide ranging, from health data, to civic engagement, to educational settings, to government provision of social services. Similar to the 2021 issue, this issue also continues the tradition of design fiction at GROUP. This issue of PACM:HCI brings you papers from the planned 2022 ACMConference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP 2022). Typically, the GROUP conference occurs every two years. However, research developments do not necessarily follow conference deadline cycles. Thus, the GROUP conference offers authors the opportunity to submit to multiple waves. The first wave of papers for this conference were published in July 2021 in Volume 5 of PACM:HCI, and papers from this current issue were first submitted in May 2021. Both of these sets of papers published as part of the planned GROUP 2022 conference were authored and reviewed during the COVID-19 pandemic. These papers represent commendable volumes of hard work and resilience, not just from the authors, but also from the reviewers, the program committee, and the conference organizers. Additionally, the pandemic forced a major change to the conference at which these papers will be presented.

No abstract available.

In the digital age, the fields and professions related to computing are having an unprecedent impact on our lives, and on societies. As computing becomes integrated in fundamental ways in healthcare [10,11], labor markets [2,4], and political processes [3,6], questions about who participates and takes decisions in developing digital technologies are becoming increasingly crucial and unavoidable [7].

Open Design is an emerging area of research that seeks to connect and extend the culture of making, social innovation, open-source software, and open-source hardware. A cornerstone for Open Design is to broaden participation in technology innovation by allowing people to use and contribute to publicly shared resources. Makerspaces are important access points to share and contribute to these resources. However, prior to entering the physical door of a makerspace, makerspaces’ social media presence serve as the ‘front door’ for Open Design activities. In this paper, we examine different ‘front doors’ of Open Design, asking: What are the characteristics that produce makerspaces’ social media presences, and how do these representations shape potential access to Open Design activities? We manually collected and qualitatively analyzed 500 public posts on the Facebook sites of five makerspaces in Copenhagen, Denmark. By choosing the same geographical area, we were able to explore the characteristics of makerspaces’ social media presences for the same potential population of Open Design participants. Our analysis identifies three main characteristics of makerspaces’ social media presence, which together shape access to Open Design activities, namely reach, transparency, and discourse. The display of these characteristics produce openness and availability in unique ways, and is constitutive for how Open Design activities are produced online. In this paper, we do not argue for or against specific social media representations. Instead, we argue that the specificities and differences between makerspaces’ social media presences in the same geographical region have the strength of producing different identities across spaces, allowing for a broader definition and potential participation in Open Design.

Inclusion in computer science education and profession is a debated topic in recent feminist HCI literature. To enable inclusion in computer science, we must find new ways to create opportunities for broadening the narrative of computing embracing diversity. In this paper, we present GRACE, an interactive installation, which combines history, crafts, and digital technology. The installation creates an opportunity for multiple people to engage into discussions around inclusion in computer science, thus facilitates open discussion of perspectives beyond predominant narratives of computing.

Critical design is gaining momentum in interaction design, yet little CSCW research has focused on articulating the cooperative potentials of critical design artefacts. We address this gap by reflecting upon a design project aimed at overturning the prevailing narrative regarding dyslexia in Italy. The adversarial propositions embedded in our critical design artefacts challenged the description of dyslexia as a learning disorder putting forward the view of a learning difference. These artefacts demonstrated their capacity to bridge heterogeneous social worlds (those of teachers, children, and parents) into one cooperative entity and mobilise cooperative activism. The contribution to CSCW is two-fold. Firstly, we introduce the cooperative potentials of critical design artefacts; secondly, we propose critical design as a strategy for researchers engaging with cooperative activism.

This article addresses the issue of retrieval result diversification in the context of social image retrieval and discusses the results achieved during the MediaEval 2013 benchmarking. 38 runs and their results are described and analyzed in this text. A comparison of the use of expert vs. crowdsourcing annotations shows that crowdsourcing results are slightly different and have higher inter observer differences but results are comparable at lower cost. Multimodal approaches have best results in terms of cluster recall. Manual approaches can lead to high precision but often lower diversity. With this detailed results analysis we give future insights on this matter.

In this paper we propose a new dataset, Div400, that was designed to support shared evaluation in different areas of social media photo retrieval, e.g., machine analysis (re-ranking, machine learning), human-based computation (crowdsourcing) or hybrid approaches (relevance feedback, machine-crowd integration). Div400 comes with associated relevance and diversity assessments performed by human annotators. 396 landmark locations are represented via 43,418 Flickr photos and metadata, Wikipedia pages and content descriptors for text and visual modalities. To facilitate distribution, only Creative Commons content was included in the dataset. The proposed dataset was validated during the 2013 Retrieving Diverse Social Images Task at the MediaEval Benchmarking Initiative for Multimedia Evaluation.

In this work, we present a fashion-focused Creative Commons dataset, which is designed to contain a mix of general images as well as a large component of images that are focused on fashion (i.e., relevant to particular clothing items or fashion accessories). The dataset contains 4810 images and related metadata. Furthermore, a ground truth on image's tags is presented. Ground truth generation for large-scale datasets is a necessary but expensive task. Traditional expert based approaches have become an expensive and non-scalable solution. For this reason, we turn to crowdsourcing techniques in order to collect ground truth labels; in particular we make use of the commercial crowdsourcing platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). Two different groups of annotators (i.e., trusted annotators known to the authors and crowdsourcing workers on AMT) participated in the ground truth creation. Annotation agreement between the two groups is analyzed. Applications of the dataset in different contexts are discussed. This dataset contributes to research areas such as crowdsourcing for multimedia, multimedia content analysis, and design of systems that can elicit fashion preferences from users.

In this paper we propose and evaluate UX_Mate, a non-invasive system for the automatic assessment of User eXperience (UX). In addition, we contribute a novel database of annotated and synchronized videos of interactive behavior and facial expressions. UX_Mate is a modular system which tracks facial expressions of users, interprets them based on pre-set rules, and generates predictions about the occurrence of a target emotional state, which can be linked to interaction events. The system simplifies UX evaluation providing an indication of event occurrence. UX_Mate has several advantages compared to other state of the art systems: easy deployment in the user's natural environment, avoidance of invasive devices, and extreme cost reduction. The paper reports a pilot and a validation study on a total of 46 users, where UX_Mate was used for identifying interaction difficulties. The studies show encouraging results that open possibilities for automatic real-time UX evaluation in ecological environments.

Over the last few years, several services and platforms for scientific production and dissemination have appeared (e.g. scholarly search engines, digital libraries, blogs, social networks, and conference management systems). Yet, these services are really fragmented and, in some cases, lack critical

This paper introduces Behand. Behand is a new way of interaction that allows a mobile phone user to manipulate virtual three-dimensional objects inside the phone by gesturing with his hand. Behand provides a straightforward 3D interface, something current mobile phones do not offer, and extends the phone's input and display space. The 3D direct manipulation paradigm makes it intuitive for people of all cultural backgrounds. It is ergonomically appropriate and technically feasible. A user evaluation of the concept was carried out, showing that users find the concept "useful", "innovative" and "fun" and there are no acceptability issues. Please refer to the video accompanying this paper for a video prototype of Behand.