Participation is important to Human–Computer Interaction; yet, there are few empirical accounts of how it can be enacted in practice when working with at-risk communities under safety and precarity concerns. This paper offers an account of a six-year, community-led collaboration with an organization supporting individuals affected by forced marriage in Switzerland, centered on the design, development, and handover of a digital self-help tool. Rather than centering the artifact, we use its creation as an analytic lens to examine how design justice principles were enacted and negotiated through concrete decisions, boundaries, and compromises within a highly sensitive, care-centered context. Our account illustrates how justice-oriented participation can be sustained through rights-based and trust-negotiated forms of engagement, even when participation is necessarily uneven, selective, unsafe, or time-limited. This paper contributes process-level insights for HCI researchers and practitioners designing with at-risk communities, foregrounding shared decision-making, community ownership, and responsible handover within existing ecologies of care.

Although HCI research indicates that lived experiences should be considered in technologies for type 1 diabetes (T1D) management, technologies and prevailing concepts for “successful” management continue to focus narrowly on metrics for improving blood glucose, rather than a holistic understanding of life with T1D. T1D shapes every aspect of life, including personal priorities, values, and needs, making it highly personal and manifesting in different practices. We conducted semi-structured interviews, a 5-day diary study, and a workshop with 10 individuals with T1D to elicit and reflect on different ways of living with T1D. Based on these accounts, we conceptualize self-management styles as a multidimensional construct spanning seven dimensions: values and prioritization, planning, risk-taking, rhythm of care, openness to experiment and learn, engagement in tracking, and success definitions. We contribute an account of these dimensions that designers can use as a lens for developing T1D technologies that support personal ways of living with T1D, foregrounding lived experience and outlining implications for HCI research.

This study examines how digital awareness content on social media and other platforms is perceived by individuals affected by gender-based violence, focusing on its role in recognizing abuse and initiating early help-seeking. Drawing on 63 survey responses and 12 interviews with individuals who self-identified as having experienced GBV, we analyze how participants described, reflected on, and engaged with awareness content. Our findings show that such content often served as an entry point for processing experiences and building recognition, while also carrying risks of retraumatization and emotional overload when poorly designed. Participants emphasized that recognition and information-seeking are gradual, nonlinear processes shaped by emotional readiness and informal supports, yet much current awareness content overlooks this reality, pushing immediate reporting rather than supporting the slow work of sense-making. This work contributes to HCI by offering trauma-informed design strategies for awareness content and platforms that foster recognition and respect user agency.

This paper presents a feminist autoethnographic critique of technology and research on gender-based violence, grounded in my lived experience and current work as an HCI researcher engaged in community-led design on forced marriage and broader gender-based violence. Through chronological narratives, I recount encounters with digital technologies during help-seeking, from early online searches to the quiet work of rebuilding life, alongside reflections from my position as a researcher embedded in my own community and observing how HCI engages with it. These accounts reveal how digital interventions often fail to align with the realities of those affected, whether by prematurely pushing legal solutions, vanishing after research funding, or reinforcing harmful labels such as “victim.” I argue for HCI approaches that sustain tools beyond prototypes, translate research into practice, and attend to language and power, calling for research and design that begins with those most impacted: not spoken for, but speaking.

Third sector organizations that address gender-based violence often rely on makeshift tools to manage complex, emotionally intensive casework. Although digital systems promise structure, most fail to support the narrative, relational, and time-sensitive nature of frontline support. This paper presents the design, development, and deployment of CaseCompass, a digital case management system co-created with the Competence Center against Forced Marriages, a national NGO in Switzerland. The project emerged from a long-term, trust-based collaboration and foregrounded organizational priorities, care practices, and long-term sustainability. Rather than treating the tool as the endpoint, we use its creation as a lens to examine how participation can be structured under severe time and capacity constraints, and how design decisions can serve as infrastructural care. We contribute to feminist and social justice-oriented HCI by offering a detailed case study of community-led infrastructuring within a small NGO, articulating strategies for structuring participation under constraints, and framing sustainability as an active practice of care, responsibility, and justice.

Knowledge workers face increasing challenges in managing numerous digital tasks, often leading to long task lists that distract from completing the most important ones.We present AIRbar, a task management tool designed to enhance Awareness, I ntention, and Retrospection (AIR) in daily task management.AIRbar prompts workers to prioritize a maximum of three daily tasks, displays them in an always-on glanceable widget, and facilitates end-of-day reflection to improve task completion and self-awareness.In a 4-week field study with 35 participants, we found that AIRbar increased task completion rates, improved focus and motivation, and positively influenced perceptions of work processes.These findings suggest that limiting the number of tasks and ensuring continuous visibility of priorities can address key challenges in modern task management, providing actionable insights for designing future task management systems.

PDF inaccessibility is an ongoing challenge that hinders individuals with visual impairments from reading and navigating PDFs using screen readers.This paper presents a step-by-step process for both novice and experienced users to create accessible PDF documents, including an approach for creating alternative text for mathematical formulas without expert knowledge.In a study involving nineteen participants, we evaluated our prototype PAVE 2.0 by comparing it against Adobe Acrobat Pro, the existing standard for remediating PDFs.Our study shows that experienced users improved their tagging scores from 42.0% to 80.1%, and novice users from 39.2% to 75.2% with PAVE 2.0.Overall, fifteen participants stated that they would prefer to use PAVE 2.0 in the future, and all participants would recommend it for novice users.Our work demonstrates PAVE 2.0's potential for increasing PDF accessibility for people with visual impairments and highlights remaining challenges. CCS Concepts• Human

Since the COVID-19 Pandemic, the knowledge workplace has seen a dramatic transition from collocated-first to hybrid or fully-remote arrangements, the implications of which are yet to be fully understood. One of the biggest unknowns is how remote team communication impacts the individual worker, especially in consideration of personality type. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of remote workplace interactions on productivity and wellbeing, and how these effects are moderated by extraversion. The study lasted for 2-3 months and involved 60 knowledge workers. The data was analyzed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. We present novel findings on how remote communication affects individuals differently depending on the type of interaction, interaction agent, and personality of the individual, showing that the impact of communication on workers is far from straightforward. We contextualize these findings with an in-depth analysis of communication patterns and experiences in the remote workplace, adding to existing literature. Finally, we present suggestions for a more individualized communication approach in industry and future research.

Self-management of type 1 diabetes (T1D) involves multiple factors, frequent anticipation of changes in blood glucose, and complex decision-making. ML-based blood glucose predictions (BGP) may be valuable in supporting T1D management. However, it may be difficult for people with T1D to integrate BGP into their decision-making due to prediction uncertainty and interpretation. In this study, we investigate the lived experience of people with T1D focusing on their needs and expectations in using apps that provide BGP. We designed MOON-T1D, an app that shows simulated BGP and conducted a five-day study using the Experience Sampling Method coupled with semi-structured interviews with 15 individuals with T1D who used MOON-T1D. A reflexive thematic analysis of our data revealed implications for the design and use of BGP, including the complex role of emotions and trust surrounding predictions, and ways in which BGP may ease or complicate T1D management.

People with visual impairments use assistive technology, e.g., screen readers, to navigate and read PDFs. However, such screen readers need extra information about the logical structure of the PDF, such as the reading order, header levels, and mathematical formulas, described in readable form to navigate the document in a meaningful way. This logical structure can be added to a PDF with tags. Creating tags for a PDF is time-consuming, and requires awareness and expert knowledge. Hence, most PDFs are left untagged, and as a result, they are poorly readable or unreadable for people who rely on screen readers. STEM documents are particularly problematic with their complex document structure and complicated mathematical formulae. These inaccessible PDFs present a major barrier for people with visual impairments wishing to pursue studies or careers in STEM fields, who cannot easily read studies and publications from their field. The goal of this Ph.D. is to apply artificial intelligence for document analysis to reasonably automate the remediation process of PDFs and present a solution for large mathematical formulae accessibility in PDFs. With these new methods, the Ph.D. research aims to lower barriers to creating accessible scientific PDFs, by reducing the time, effort, and expertise necessary to do so, ultimately facilitating greater access to scientific documents for people with visual impairments.

Non-profit approaches in the sharing economy are proliferating in everyday life (e.g., tool libraries, food sharing collectives). They focus on promoting social, economic, and ecological sustainability within local communities. However, prior research uncovered emergent challenges of these communities that prevent their endurance and growth. Despite growing academic interest in studying these communities, designers found it difficult to effectively adopt newly generated knowledge in practice. Addressing the research-practice gap, we developed a translational resource for design practitioners to conceptualize new value-added features for supporting technologies in the sharing economy context. Specifically, we synthesized emergent challenges in non-profit sharing economy communities and key social and environmental sustainability efforts in design research into a familiar format for designers – the card-based toolkit to support generative design activities. Beyond introducing the toolkit, we offer a “how-to” guide for its adoption in collaborative settings.

Software developers, like other information workers, continuously switch tasks and applications to complete their work on their computer. Given the high fragmentation and complexity of their work, staying focused on the relevant pieces of information can become quite challenging in today's window-based environments, especially with the ever increasing monitor screen-size. To support developers in staying focused, we conducted a formative study with 18 professionals in which we examined their computer based and eye-gaze interaction with the window environment and devised a relevance model of open windows. Based on the results, we developed a prototype to dim irrelevant windows and reduce distractions, and evaluated it in a user study. Our results indicate that our model was able to predict relevant open windows with high accuracy and participants felt that integrating visual prominence into the desktop environment reduces clutter and distraction, which results in reduced window switching and an increase in focus.

Many non-profit peer-to-peer exchange arrangements and profit-driven, multi-sided online marketplaces leverage underutilized resources, such as tools, to optimize their use to capacity. They often rely on a digital platform in pursuit of their social aspirations and/or economic objectives. We report on a field study of a local sharing community that employs a set of stickers illustrating different household items, typically placed on community members' mailboxes, along with complementary digital tools. The stickers are used to communicate the availability of resources among neighbors to facilitate social encounters and to encourage sustainable use and re-use of shared resources. Through in-depth qualitative interviews with sixteen participants, we describe the opportunities and limitations of this approach to peer-to-peer exchange. We offer insights for designers of resource sharing communities into facilitating face-to-face encounters and the online interactions needed to support them.

The evaluation of research artefacts is an important step to validate research contributions. Sub-disciplines of HCI often pursue primary goals other than usability, such as Sustainable HCI (SHCI), HCI for development, or health and wellbeing. For such disciplines, established evaluation methods are not always appropriate or sufficient, and new conventions for identifying, discussing, and justifying suitable evaluation methods need to be established. In this paper, we revisit the purpose and goals of evaluation in HCI and SHCI, and elicit five key elements that can provide guidance to identifying evaluation methods for SHCI research. Our essay is meant as a starting point for discussing current and improving future evaluation practice in SHCI; we also believe it holds value for other subdisciplines in HCI that encounter similar challenges while evaluating their research.

The meaning we attribute to another's actions significantly impact our subsequent behaviors and interactions towards that person. Distributed teams often combine native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) and are particularly prone to making attribution errors. Language difficulties place NNS under a higher cognitive load, potentially leading NS to make inaccurate attributions of NNS. We conducted an exploratory laboratory study to investigate the attributions NS and NNS form about each other in multiparty videoconferencing. Our findings revealed significant mismatches in NS' attributions of NNS behavior, but no significant mismatch in NNS' attributions of NS behavior. Due to cognitive overload stemming from language challenges, NNS were only able to engage in "compromised" impression management during the task. Yet, NS were relatively unaware of how profoundly language difficulties impacted NNS' behaviors. Our findings identify opportunities for technology support for NS-NNS interactions, particularly with regards to impression construction and impression management.

Global virtual teams experience intercultural conflict. Yet, research on how Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) tools can mitigate such conflict is minimal. We conducted an experiment with 30 Japanese-Canadian dyads who completed a negotiation task over email. Dyads were assigned to one of three conditions: C1) no feedback; C2) automated language feedback of participant emails based on national culture dimensions; and C3) automated language feedback (as in C2), and participants' shared self-reflections of that feedback. Results show Japanese and Canadian partners interpreted the negotiation task differently, resulting in perceptions of intercultural conflict and negative impressions of their partner. Compared to C1, automated language feedback (C2) and shared self-reflections (C3) made cultural differences more salient, motivating participants to empathize with their partner. Shared self-reflections (C3) served as a meta-channel to communication, providing insight into each partner's intentions and cultural values. We discuss implications for CMC tools to mitigate perceptions of intercultural conflict.

With the growing adoption of smart home technologies, inhabitants are faced with the challenge of making sense of the data that their homes can collect to configure automated behaviors that benefit their routines. Current commercial smart home interfaces usually provide information on individual devices instead of a more comprehensive overview of a home's behavior. To reduce the complexity of smart home data and integrate it better into inhabitants' lives, we turned to the familiar metaphor of a calendar and developed our smart home interface Casalendar. In order to investigate the concept and evaluate our goals to facilitate the understanding of smart home data, we created a prototype that we installed in two commercial smart homes for a month. The results we present in this paper are based on our analysis of user data from questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, participant-driven audio and screenshot feedback as well as logged interactions with our system. Our findings exposed advantages and disadvantages of this metaphor, emerging usage patterns, privacy concerns and challenges for information visualization. We further report on implications for design and open challenges we revealed through this work.

Interacting with smart homes and Internet of Things devices is still far from being a seamless experience as there are often many different interfaces involved. Due to the improvements of speech recognition and synthesis, voice-based agents are becoming more common to give users a unified interface to different individual systems. These agents often exhibit human-like personality traits, such as responding in a humorous way or showing caring behavior in reminders. We are exploring this approach in the context of smart homes and home automation. Should a smart home have a proactive or passive personality? Should it try to socialize with inhabitants? What personality traits do people consider desirable or undesirable? To learn more about this design space, we created two variants of a usage scenario of a domestic routine in a smart home to demonstrate different personality trait combinations. Forty-one participants experienced the scenario and provided feedback about the designs. In this paper, we report findings about participants' preferences, how they responded to the proactive and social behavior our prototype demonstrated and implications for the design of agent-based interfaces in the home.

Despite significant progress in sustainable HCI towards theoretical frameworks to guide design, there is a gap between theory and practice, so that the impact of such frameworks is limited. As an initial exploration in bridging the theory-practice gap, we conducted a study using one well-established design framework, the Attachment Framework, to evaluate its applicability in use. We conducted a comparative study with 14 designers to explore the effect of the Attachment Framework on design, and evaluated their designs with 10 design experts using a set of six design criteria. Our results indicated a positive effect on the criterion of novelty, with mixed effects on attachment, presentation, aesthetics, usefulness, and feasibility. We contribute a set of challenges in the application of design frameworks to practice and offer a critical reflection on how researchers can more effectively communicate sustainable HCI design frameworks to practitioners.

Despite the availability of computer-based alternatives both for desktop and touch screen systems, a number of cooperative work processes still commonly rely on simple paper sticky notes. In this paper, we present the first in-depth investigation of the real-world practices of people who use paper-based affinity diagrams and similar clustering processes in their work, in order to identify challenges and requirements for technology support. Findings from retrospective and artifact-based interviews with 13 participants suggest ways in which the rich interactions and material affordances offered by paper are key to the process. Instead of seeking to replicate interactions with paper on a screen, simpler transfer of information between the physical and digital worlds has the potential to address many of the most pressing problems experienced in practice. We describe different types of technology integration and augmentation, with preliminary recommendations for different situations.

We present findings from a qualitative study with 28 participants of the dyadic intercultural communication tensions professionals experience in Face-to-Face (FTF) and Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) workplace interactions. We identify four categories of intercultural communication tensions that emerged most frequently in our dataset including range of emotional expression, level of formality, "fixed" versus flexible appointments and task versus social-orientation. We discuss how these tensions manifested in FTF and CMC media and unravel the ways media supports or hinders intercultural communication. We present the adaptations participants made to mitigate such tensions and offer implications for design. Our findings demonstrate that the most frequently occurring intercultural communication tensions manifested in both FTF and CMC, regardless of the medium used. This indicates that cultural communication challenges will persist no matter the medium, highlighting the opportunity for technologies to better support workplace intercultural communication.

Persuasive technology to motivate healthy behavior is a growing area of research within HCI and ubiquitous computing. The emergence of commercial wearable devices for tracking health- and fitness-related activities arguably represents the first widespread adoption of dedicated ubiquitous persuasive technology. The recent ubiquity of commercial systems allows us to learn about their value and use in truly "in the wild" contexts and understand how practices evolve over long-term, naturalistic use. We present a study with 30 participants who had adopted wearable activity-tracking devices of their own volition and had continued to use them for between 3 and 54 months. The findings, which both support and contrast with those of previous research, paint a picture of the evolving benefits and practices surrounding these emerging technologies over long periods of use. They also serve as the basis for design implications for personal informatics technologies for long-term health and fitness support.

A considerable amount of research has been carried out towards making long-standing smart home visions technically feasible. The technologically augmented homes made possible by this work are starting to become reality, but thus far living in and interacting with such homes has introduced significant complexity while offering limited benefit. As these technologies are increasingly adopted, the knowledge we gain from their use suggests a need to revisit the opportunities and challenges they pose. Synthesizing a broad body of research on smart homes with observations of industry and experiences from our own empirical work, we provide a discussion of ongoing and emerging challenges, namely challenges for meaningful technologies, complex domestic spaces, and human-home collaboration. Within each of these three challenges we discuss our visions for future smart homes and identify promising directions for the field.

Rapid depletion of fossil fuels and water resources has become an international problem. Urban residential households are among the primary consumers of resources and are deeply affected by resource shortages. Despite the global nature of these problems, most of the solutions being developed to address these issues are based on studies done in the developed world. We present a study of energy, water and fuel conservation practices in urban India. Our study highlights a culture of deep conservation and the results raise questions about the viability of typical solutions such as home energy monitors. We identify new opportunities for design such as point-of-use feedback technologies, modular solutions, distributed energy storage, harnessing by-products and automated load shifting.

Research in sustainable HCI has repeatedly pointed to the need for encouraging longer use of technology as part of the solution for stemming the tide of e-waste. Ways of achieving this goal remain elusive, however. We build upon previous research that considers the role of personal attachment in object ownership, and how this attachment might be leveraged to encourage longer use. We conducted a personal inventories study with 17 households in Switzerland, and use the findings to support and expand Odom et al.'s framework of attachment categories. We subsequently provided this framework to 3 designers and asked them to design novel technologies that encourage attachment. This exercise shed light on how they drew insight and inspiration from the framework, and how they integrated it into their design processes and design thinking.

The traditional paper-based affinity diagram is a powerful tool for collaborative qualitative data analysis, but the present paper-based process has limitations. In this work we describe how users work with paper-based affinity diagrams as uncovered through a set of interviews with professionals who use the method. We also present an early prototype system to provide computer support for paper-based affinities.

The retention of old electronic devices is a practice of importance to sustainability and ubicomp. In this research, we aim to understand people's reasons for keeping out-of-use electronic devices. Using the Personal Inventories qualitative method we conducted 17 in-home visits to learn what technologies people keep and explore their relationships with out-of-use technologies. We identify various reasons for keeping devices that build upon existing work on electronics and sustainability.

The proliferation of social networking sites and mobile technology allows us to check on our friends and family, follow what experts in our field think, or simply 'check-in' online. While in many ways advantageous, the ability to be constantly connected is significantly affecting our offline interaction behavior. People sharing a table today might ignore each other for stretches at a time in order to interact with far-away friends through mobile technology instead. The goal of this workshop is to examine how we can build technologies that promote offline interactions. We plan to discuss how offline interactions can be spurred within different social groups and different settings through currently available devices and technologies. We also plan to explore how such technologies can be built and used for different types of offline engagement (e.g., playful vs. serious). The workshop aims to establish a community interested in computer mediated offline interaction.

Global warming, and the climate change it induces, is an urgent global issue. One remedy to this problem, and the focus of this paper, is to motivate sustainable energy usage behaviors by people. One approach is the development of technologies that provide real-time, continuous feedback of energy usage. However, there is one problem - most tech-nologies use a one-size-fits-all solution, providing the same feedback to differently motivated individuals at different stages of readiness, willingness and ableness to change. In this paper, we synthesize a wide range of motivational psychology literature to develop a motivational framework based on the Transtheoretical (aka Stages of Behavior Change) Model. For each stage, we state the mo-tivational goal(s), and recommendation(s) for how technol-ogies can reach these goals. Each goal and recommendation is supported by a rationale based on motivational literature. Each recommendation is supported by a simple textual example illustrating one way to apply the recommendation.

Questions about the effectiveness of increasingly ubiquitous video technology in law enforcement have prompted an examination of the practices surrounding this technology. We present the results of a multi-site study aimed at understanding the use of video in several phases of law enforcement, from crime prevention and response to investigation and prosecution. Our findings show that while video has provided numerous benefits to law enforcement agencies, in many cases the technology either fails to support key facets of work or introduces new tasks that present an additional burden to workers. We discuss the need to incorporate human experience and tacit knowledge, operator engagement, and the greater ecosystem of work into video deployments.

Social television applications have emerged as a potentially valuable convergence of media and communication, but questions remain about the utility and nature of the communication experiences they will provide. We present our study of STV3, an application that adds freeform text and voice chat capabilities to the conventional television-viewing experience. We conducted an in-depth field study of STV3 to understand how friends integrate communication through social television into their lives. Our results reveal users' choices of communication modality, their topics of conversation, and the sense of connectedness that was fostered through their use of STV3. Our findings indicate that participants overwhelmingly preferred text chat to voice chat, and that they often communicated about topics unrelated to the television content.

We present a qualitative study of mobile phone ownership, replacement and disposal practices geared towards identifying design opportunities towards sustainable mobile phone interfaces. Our work investigates how people understand the lifespan of their phones, what factors, such as style, service contracts, and functionality, affect how they attribute value to their phones, and their awareness and actions regarding mobile phone sustainability. Our findings reveal the complexity of the actions and decision-making processes involved in phone ownership and replacement. We use these findings to present open areas for sustainable interaction design and generate seed ideas for designs and services to provoke thought and further exploration towards more sustainable mobile phone interfaces and practices.

We report on a field evaluation of a prototype social television system (Social TV) that incorporates lightweight messaging as well as ambient awareness of user presence on the system. This evaluation was conducted over a two-week period and involved the participation of ten households. Participants appreciated the ability to see their buddies' presence on the system, the ability to see or suggest the programs they were currently watching, and the ability to send short messages to one another. The presence facilities available in Social TV also allowed participants to learn more about one another's TV viewing habits and preferences, and fostered a sense of connectedness between them. However, they also felt constrained by the limitations of the communication options available to them and demanded free-form text or voice chat to be able to fully express themselves.

Instant messaging (IM) in the workplace has proven to be a valuable tool for facilitating informal communication. Its benefits, however, are generally limited to times when users are in front of their computers. Because so much work takes place while people are mobile within their workplace, we sought to extend the benefits of IM beyond people's personal machines and into publicly accessible groupware. We first conducted a study of large display groupware applications (LDGAs) to understand the affordances that large displays offer for groupware, and the factors surrounding their adoption. We developed the IM Here system for shared IM on large displays using the lessons learned from the study. In this paper, we present the findings of our LDGA study, the design of IM Here and the preliminary results of our evaluation of IM as a public resource for workgroups.

The majority of systems using public displays to foster awareness have focused on providing information across remote locations or among people who are loosely connected and lack awareness of each other's activities or interests. We have, however, identified many potential benefits for an awareness system that displays information within a small, co-located group in which the members already possess some awareness of each other's activities. By using "Semi-Public Displays," public displays scoped for small groups, we can make certain types of information visible in the environment, promoting collaboration and providing lightweight information about group activity. Compared to designing for large, loosely connected groups, designing for Semi-Public Displays mitigates typically problematic issues in sustaining relevant content for the display and minimizing privacy concerns. We are using these applications to support and enhance the interactions and information that group members utilize to maintain awareness and collaborate.