After Taiwan’s legalization of same-sex marriage in 2019, LGBTQ+ communities continue to face hostility on social media. Using the lens of hermeneutical injustice and autonomy, we examine how technological conditions affect LGBTQ+ individuals’ identity exploration, narrative seeking, and community resilience. We conducted a multi-stage study with Taiwanese LGBTQ+ individuals, including in-depth interviews, participatory design workshops, and evaluation sessions. Participants described fragile yet creative strategies such as seeking validation in online interactions, reframing hostile content through theory, and relying on allies. Building on these insights, we designed and evaluated a retrieval-augmented, LLM-powered chatbot with four modes of interaction: reflection, validation, discussion, and allyship. Findings show that the system fosters hermeneutical autonomy by helping participants reframe hostile narratives, validate lived experiences, and scaffold identity exploration, while reducing the hermeneutical labor of navigating social media hostility. We conclude by outlining design implications for AI systems that advance hermeneutical autonomy through fluid self-representation, contextualized dialogue, and inclusive community participation.

Psychotherapy is crucial for managing cue-induced cravings. However, most research has focused on explicit drug cues that elicit intense cravings, and recreating such high-risk scenarios in practice can inadvertently heighten cravings afterward, making these approaches impractical or ethically problematic in real-world settings. To address this, we developed a cue-exposure technology probe system, VirtualCravingProbe, which integrates VR simulations with real-time biofeedback to enhance self-awareness in clinical drug psychotherapy. We conducted an exploratory study with twelve patients recovering from methamphetamine addiction using the VirtualCravingProbe system, generating design guidelines for future iterations of an integrated VR and biofeedback-assisted therapy tool. Results revealed qualitative evidence that real-time heart-rate monitoring in VR heightened patients’ awareness of triggers and their craving responses. These findings align with the CBT cognitive-triangle framework, which emphasizes the interplay of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Moreover, the system demonstrated potential to enrich patient–therapist dialogue and support the adoption of effective coping strategies.

Psychotherapy is vital for identifying and managing craving-triggering cues. In this study, we paired virtual reality (VR) drug-cue scenarios with physiological sensors to capture participants’ real-time responses. Qualitative interviews with nineteen patients and six therapists showed that contextual elements resembling past drug-use experiences reliably provoked cravings, while biofeedback data confirmed that VR effectively elicits measurable physical responses. Our findings further suggest that adjusting the completeness and fidelity of VR scenarios to match a patient’s recovery stage can manage craving intensity and prevent urges from persisting beyond each session. Therapists also see opportunities to integrate virtual reality into clinical practice to address challenges from prior sessions and enhance therapeutic outcomes. This paper offers concrete recommendations for developing clinically deployable VR scenarios and outlines implications for future research and therapeutic applications in drug treatment.

Shopping addiction is characterized by unrestrained repetitive purchasing behavior, negatively impacting one's financial stability and social welfare. This study sought to gain insights into the development of self-monitoring devices and data sharing schemes to assist in dealing with shopping addiction. In this two-phase study, the Bergen Shopping Addiction Scale was first used in the pre-study screening survey to identify individuals with a propensity toward shopping addiction. In the second phase, an online survey was conducted, comprising (1) a study introduction and consent form, (2) the main survey, and (3) follow-up demographic questions. Phase II involved 332 participants meeting this criterion and was conducted to examine behavioral tendencies, evaluate prior intervention experiences, and elicit user preferences pertaining to self-monitoring and data sharing. The majority of respondents expressed a preference for systems that facilitate the tracking of shopping behavior and enable data sharing with intimate partners. Based on these findings, we recommend three directions for the further development of support systems: 1) Reduce the burden of mood tracking; 2) Streamline mechanisms for sharing data with key support figures; and 3) Tailor intervention strategies in accordance with key addiction indicators.

Gambling addiction can have a profound impact on the mental and financial well-being of individuals and their families. This paper presents an in-depth study on the development of technologies aimed at promoting collaborative efforts between patients and family members to deal with gambling addiction. The study performed interviews with ten pairs of gambling-addicted patients with a family member, six patients without family participation, and four treatment experts. Thematic analysis was conducted from the perspectives of patients and family members with the aim of identifying key themes underlying the development of the three antecedents of Planned Behavioral Theory: attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. In accordance with the tenets of Prospect Theory, we sought to elucidate the process of attitude formation during editing and evaluation. We also analyzed opportunities and concerns in designing technologies to address gambling addiction. The identified themes provided a basis by which to assess design implications from the perspective of Planned Behavioral Theory. Our analysis revealed three directions for future development: 1) helping patients to make informed gambling decisions through rational editing and evaluation, as suggested by Prospect Theory (attitude level); 2) promoting communication within families to enhance mutual understanding and trust (subjective norm level); and 3) helping patients to develop personal capabilities, while providing a realistic impression of their progress (perceived behavioral control level).

Brainstorming, a creative activity that aims to generate ideas, plays a crucial part in problem-solving processes and is widely employed to explore innovative solutions across various contexts. It may suffer from repetitive results, inefficient time management, and stagnation in discussion. Seeing the rich opportunities of virtual reality (VR) in visualizing the environments, we propose to use (1) scene-switching and (2) creative visualization of time constraints to facilitate this process. The current study sought to explore the effects of these two factors on brainstorming performance in VR. By conducting a mixed-method study of 20 three-participant groups, we found that scene-switching and implicit time limitations can stimulate creativity, establish diverse atmospheres, and open up new conversations during brainstorming. Additionally, we provide suggestions for visualizing time constraints and various virtual environments based on research results.

Neurofeedback refers to the process of feeding a sensory representation of brain activity back to users in real time to improve a particular brain function, e.g., their focus and/or attention on a particular task. This study addressed the notable lack of research on methods used to visualize EEG data and their effects on the immersive quality of VR. We developed an algorithm to quantify focus, yielding a focus score. A pre-study with twenty participants confirmed its effectiveness in distinguishing between focused and relaxed mental states. Subsequently, we used this focus score to prototype a VR experience system visualizing the focus score in preconfigured manners, which was utilized in an exploratory study to assess the impact of different neurofeedback visualization methods on user engagement and focus in VR. Among all the visualization methods evaluated, the environmental scheme stood out due to its superior usability during task execution, its ability to evoke positive emotions through the visualization of objects or scenes, and its minimal deviation from user expectations. Additionally, we explored design guidelines based on collected results for future research to further refine the visualization scheme, ensuring effective integration of the focus score within the VR environment. These enhancements are crucial for designing neurofeedback visualization schemes that aim to boost participant focus in VR settings, offering significant insights into the optimization of such technologies.

Biases in Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems or their results are one important issue that demands AI explainability. Despite the prevalence of AI applications, the general public are not necessarily equipped with the ability to understand how the black-box algorithms work and how to deal with biases. To inform designs for explainable AI (XAI), we conducted in-depth interviews with major stakeholders, both end-users (n = 24) and engineers (n = 15), to investigate how they made sense of AI applications and the associated biases according to situations of high and low stakes. We discussed users’ perceptions and attributions about AI biases and their desired levels and types of explainability. We found that personal relevance and boundaries as well as the level of stake are two major dimensions for developing user trust especially during biased situations and informing XAI designs.

Good explanations help people understand hateful memes and mitigate sharing. While AI-enabled automatic detection has proliferated, we argue that quality-controlled crowdsourcing can be an effective strategy to offer good explanations for hateful memes. This paper proposes a Generate-Annotate-Revise workflow to crowdsource explanations and presents the results from two user studies. Study 1 evaluated the objective quality of the explanation with three measurements: detailedness, completeness, and accuracy, and suggested that the proposed workflow generated higher quality explanations than the ones from a single-stage workflow without quality control. Study 2 used an online experiment to examine how different explanations affect users' perception. The results from 127 participants demonstrated that people without prior cultural knowledge gained significant perceived understanding and awareness of hateful memes when presented with explanations generated by the proposed multi-stage workflow as opposed to single-stage or machine-generated explanations.

Drug addiction is a chronic condition, marked by compulsive drug use. In previous research, cue exposure and biofeedback technologies proved effective in drug psychotherapy sessions; however, the focus has generally been on the awareness of cravings and the identification of cues. There has been relatively little research on methods aimed at facilitating therapist-patient communication, particularly from a user-centered perspective. In this paper, we describe a qualitative technology probe study exploring the means by which patients identify cues and perceive cravings as well as the way that they communicate with therapists. Our analysis considers the difficulties in cue identification and craving perception, the interactions between the two, and the means by which these characteristics could impact the design of VR support systems in the future.

Collaboration comes in many forms. How relevant stakeholders collaborate at the scale of a system deserves scholarly attention because their practices may differ from traditional teams like dyads or small groups. This study investigates how stakeholders of a local produce supply-and-demand system, namely experts, farmers, sellers, and consumers, in Taiwan collaborate and communicate for information as a case to illustrate how they depend on one another for information collaboration in the system. Using qualitative in-depth interview, we found that stakeholders had diverse collaboration goals within the system and encountered challenges in acquiring information from one another. In addition to establishing a holistic understanding of stakeholders' individual and collective practices in the system of produce supply-and-demand, we propose several design suggestions to address the needs and challenges we identified.

Smartphone addiction refers to the problematic use of smartphones, which can negatively impact one’s quality of life and even health. We conducted a two-week technology probe study to explore the use of technologies aimed at improving smartphone addiction among seven dyads of adolescents and their parents. Interviews conducted during and after the probe study revealed that manually reporting lifestyle and well-being data could provide motivation to improve one’s lifestyle and well-being by moderating phone use. Sharing smartphone use data with parents was also shown to head off negative communication loops and foster opportunities to overcome the smartphone addiction.

Technology abuse among adolescents refers to the problematic use of technology devices, and the negative impact it can have on lifestyle and one's physical and mental health. This paper reports on in-depth interviews with 15 dyads of adolescent patients, their parents, and four experts with the objective of unraveling the issue of technology abuse. We conducted qualitative analysis aimed at unpacking the contextual factors affecting technology abuse, and differences between adolescents and their parents pertaining to this issue. Our discussions led us to formulate solutions to technology abuse: (1) motivating adolescents by sending timely reminders and providing interactive micro-incentives; (2) promoting communication between adolescents and their parents by sharing usage data related to device usage; and (3) incorporating social supports to complement parental support, while fulfilling the adolescent's social needs. This paper provides valuable insights into the design of technological solutions aimed at mediating technology abuse.

Question-answering systems are becoming increasingly popular in Natural Language Processing, especially when applied in smart factory settings. A common practice in designing those systems is through intent classification. However, in a multiple-stage task commonly seen in those settings, relying solely on intent classification may lead to erroneous answers, as questions rising from different work stages may share the same intent but have different contexts and therefore require different answers. To address this problem, we designed an interactive dialogue system that utilizes contextual information to assist intent classification in a multiple-stage task. Specifically, our system incorporates user’s utterances with real-time video feed to better situate users’ questions and analyze their intent.

Maintaining an awareness of one’s well-being and making work-related decisions to achieve work-life balance is critical for flexible long-hour workers. In this study, we propose that social sensing could address bottlenecks in worker’s awareness, interpretation of the informatics, and subsequent behavioral change. We conducted a four-week technology probe study by recruiting flexible long-hour professional drivers (Taxi and Uber drivers) and their significant others to use a social sensing prototype which collects data from the drivers and shares it with their partners as well as incorporates partners’ observations. We interviewed them before and after the probe study and found that while technological sensing was able to increase drivers’ awareness of their well-being status and intention to modify behaviors. The “social sensing” design was able to further shape such awareness or intention into action, highlighting the potential of using the sociotechnical approach in promoting work-life balance among long-hour workers.

Informal interactions are a key element of group work, and many theoretical frameworks and systems have been developed to understand and support these conversations in distributed workgroups. In particular, systems used in several recent experiments provided information about others' current activities so that their availability for conversation could be assessed, and interruptions could be timed strategically. One issue with these experimental systems, though, is that many do not notify the observed party that these observations are taking place. There is reason to believe that such notification could be valuable to users, and that it could alter observers' behavior. Moreover, factors such as the perceived urgency of the interruption could affect willingness to violate social norms in gathering information. We report on an experiment assessing the impact of perceived visibility and task urgency on awareness checking behavior. Results suggest that people check more often when they believe their partners do not know they are checking, and more often when the task is time-constrained than when it is not.