As Generative AI (GenAI) expands into spaces children inhabit, their early exposure to GenAI marks a crucial stage in shaping lifelong trajectories with these emerging technologies. This paper focuses on the often under-explored importance of parents’ GenAI adoption. Knowing that parents can play a key role in scaffolding children’s GenAI use, we examined potential sources of inequality in parental attitudes and adoption of GenAI. Specifically, we tested whether the urban-rural divide functions as a structural barrier to GenAI adoption amongst parents. We conducted a nationally representative survey of 2,826 parents in the United States urban (N = 2,398) and rural (N = 428), and analyzed differences in GenAI adoption, perception and use across geographic context. Rural parents adopted GenAI at nearly half the rate of urban parents, a gap that persisted after controlling for household income and educational attainment. Multivariate modeling indicates that geography served as the strongest predictor in our model of AI adoption in our sample (OR = 1.80). Critically, this disparity appeared to be influenced not by differences in engagement or perceived risk but by lower perceived usefulness. We used Van Dijk’s concept of motivational access, one defined not by access or skill, but by meaning-making and motivated adoption to further understand these barriers and argue that standard diffusion approaches, awareness campaigns, and device provision are insufficient. We propose that closing this divide for both parents and children requires interventions targeted towards parental concerns and builds perceived usefulness from the ground up: co-design processes embedded in rural community contexts, AI demonstrations anchored to locally recognizable use cases (farming, rural healthcare, vocational learning), and parent-facing features that help caregivers see themselves as capable mediators of their children’s AI experiences.

Existing research has explored various methods to support people with noise sensitivity (PWNS), from desensitization therapies to technological solutions. However, there is a gap in systems that identify and monitor characteristics of noise sensitivity experiences to help PWNS and their companions better understand their condition and make informed management decisions. To fill this gap, we developed AudioBuddy, an app with sensing and tracking features designed to promote awareness between PWNS and their companions. We tested AudioBuddy as a technological probe over a two-week field deployment. Our results show that AudioBuddy can support awareness of how sounds and environments influence the psychophysiological states of PWNS, aiding in understanding noise sensitivity experiences. Nonetheless, technical limitations impacted the depth of awareness participants could attain. We discuss challenges and opportunities for future systems to facilitate awareness among PWNS and their companions.

Family health informatics tools can help support well-being with shared data tracking. Prior work typically focused on shared data review, but often in specific moments, like bedtime, or centered on caregiving of children or elderly members. To investigate how tracking can support mutual health collaboration between family members pervasively across daily contexts, we designed and deployed FamilyBloom, a glanceable smartwatch and home display system for mood and goal tracking. Twelve families with both neurotypical and ADHD members used FamilyBloom for three months on average. Our findings reveal how family-centered tracking created collaboration opportunities and tensions across multiple ecological systems: individual self-regulation, collaborations within family dynamics, involvement of care networks with varying trust levels, institutional school constraints and cultural stigma, and temporality of regular routines and crisis periods. We discuss an ecosystem-aware approach to family informatics, wherein design can attend to how families navigate multiple contexts while sustaining family-level collaboration.

Schoolchildren in the United States are increasingly exposed to Educational Technologies (EdTech) , many of which are or will be infused with AI. Despite this growing integration, there is limited understanding of the current perceptions and attitudes toward EdTech with AI among parents, teachers, and teens. To address this gap, we conducted a mixed-method study involving an A/B experiment through an online survey with 3,051 participants and complemented by focus group discussions with 80 participants. Providing a comprehensive snapshot of AI perception in education in 2024, our findings indicate that participants, particularly teachers, may hold more negative perceptions of our AI-powered EdTech mock-up compared to the one powered by human tutors. Based on these insights, we discuss the future of EdTech regarding the current perceptions. This research contributes to an empirical understanding of the perceptions and attitudes toward AI in K-12 education, providing valuable insights through a comprehensive national survey and in-depth focus group sessions.

This work in progress describes the preliminary evaluation of a design concept for a digital game, Enchanted Forest, designed to support children's self-regulation in noisy and overstimulating environments.A small evaluation session conducted with four children revealed that to support their self-regulation needs, the digital game should include story lines that are goal-oriented with clear outcomes, allow social interactions with other players or ingame avatars for peer support, and the ability to customize personal avatars or the game environment to make it their own.These design features could allow more connectedness and motivation for using the game and aid in self-regulation goals. CCS Concepts•

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) affects millions of individuals worldwide, significantly impacting their academic, social, and professional lives.ADHD students in higher education have faced difficulties with time management, organization, focus, and emotional regulation, which impact their academic performance.Through an analysis of discussions within a Reddit community for ADHD university students, we found that accommodations and general study strategies are often inadequate for them.Instead, they develop and share collaborative, community-based strategies to support their academic success, which include (1) participating in diverse forms of co-presence or body doubling for accountability and focus while studying; (2) engaging in active collaborative support with social partners to manage emotions and distractions, and (3) leveraging community-based support for remembering deadlines, staying accountable, and fostering a sense of belonging.We conclude with a discussion of these strategies with respect to literature on co-presence and design considerations for future assistive technologies and accommodations for ADHD students.

Globally, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have had to adapt to rapid digital changes, a shift accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.In Kenya, this transition has involved a significant move towards digital management tools.While many had already experienced marked digitalization over the last few decades, they completed this work differently from their European and North American counterparts.This study explores how Kenyan SMBs continue to navigate these changes and considers the potential of Generative AI in this context.Applying the concept of socio-tecture-which emphasizes social networks, relational business practices, and employees as knowledge producers-we analyze how these elements influence SMB operations in Nairobi.We highlight how socio-tecture affects business performance and growth, and discuss how an Afro-centric strengths-based approach might offer unique opportunities and challenges with the influx of new technologies like Generative AI.

Research on understanding and supporting the experiences of people with noise sensitivity (PWNS) and their challenges is limited within HCI. Therefore, we build on prior work to understand the challenges they consider and what technological solutions they create to support them. Through eight participatory design workshops involving PWNS and their carers, we considered their needs and challenges and how technology can be designed to support their well-being. Results indicate that wearable and mobile technology can facilitate awareness of sensory triggers and impacts on their well-being. Further, enabling both self and collaborative regulation is also necessary, especially as end users seek independence or interdependence with those around them to manage their experiences. We identified three tensions for designing technology to support PWNS and their sensory experiences.

Noise sensitivity results in a range of experiences, from small annoyances to extreme pain in response to sound. While anyone can experience it, many neurodivergent people report this sensory processing challenge. Novel technologies can help people with noise sensitivity (PWNS) manage their sensitivities. We conducted an interview study with 21 PWNS and 9 caregivers over three months to understand their management and regulation practices and opportunities for technology-mediated support. We found that awareness is a salient factor that influences both management and regulation practices. Based on their awareness, people primarily use avoidance and sound masking approaches or engage in personal coping strategies such as journaling, setting boundaries, and alerting others to regulate. We build on prior research on interdependence, mutual care, and collaborative work to situate the concept of joint awareness to foster collaborative management and regulation for noise sensitivity. Then, we discuss the role of awareness in noise sensitivity management and regulation and provide design principles for the creation of future technology to support noise sensitivity awareness, management, and regulation.

Family informatics often uses shared data dashboards to promote awareness of each other’s health-related behaviors. However, these interfaces often stop short of providing families with needed guidance around how to improve family functioning and health behaviors. We consider the needs of family co-regulation with ADHD children to understand how in-home displays can support family well-being. We conducted three co-design sessions with each of eight families with ADHD children who had used a smartwatch for self-tracking. Results indicate that situated displays could nudge families to jointly use their data for learning and skill-building. Accommodating individual needs and preferences when family members are alone is also important, particularly to support parents exploring their co-regulation role, and assisting children with data interpretation and guidance on self and co-regulation. We discuss opportunities for displays to nurture multiple intents of use, such as joint or independent use, while potentially connecting with external expertise.

Children who are noise sensitive may be easily distracted, experience discomfort, and react with negative emotions in the presence of loud or sudden sounds and in environments where they cannot control the noise; this can impact their ability to regulate their emotions. Therefore, implementing effective regulation strategies is necessary to support noise-sensitive children. Assistive technology has been shown to be an effective tool for supporting children and self-regulation. By conducting co-design sessions with noise-sensitive children, we will better understand how we might design an assistive application to support emotion regulation in noise-sensitive children. In this work in progress, we present the initial findings of two pilot co-design sessions and considerations for conducting co-design sessions with children who are noise sensitive.

Noise sensitivity is challenging for many people and particularly prevalent for autistic people. In an effort to understand these experiences from the perspective of autistic people and the opportunities for assistive technologies to support noise-sensitive people, we analyzed the posts and responses of noise-sensitive autistic people and their allies in two online forums. These forums were intentionally chosen for their inclusion and centering of autistic people’s experiences as we strove to understand this space from their perspective. Our analysis of both original discussion forum posts about noise sensitivity and comments in response to them reveal three themes: sharing experiences of noise sensitivity, managing noise sensitivity, and disclosing autism. Our work contributes a foundational understanding of the lived experiences of autistic people who are noise-sensitive and the implications for the design of assistive technology to support noise sensitivity.

Challenges associated with ADHD affect children’s daily routines and response to environmental stimuli, and support from parents is helpful in managing and overcoming behavior regulation challenges. Positive reinforcement is increasingly integrated into family technologies for teaching regulation skills, but typically support specific co-located activities. To better understand how technology can support co-regulation within families with ADHD children, we deployed CoolTaco, a smartwatch and phone system to support collaboration in creating tasks, gaining points for achieving them, and redeeming rewards. Ten families with ADHD children used CoolTaco in their daily routines. By qualitatively analyzing family interviews and usage logs, we find that smartwatches can help provide pervasive regulation support to children, but the division across devices and parent-child roles interfere with developing independence. We discuss how technology should support co-regulation while also fostering future self-regulation, such as by guiding children in goal setting and helping them reflect on progress and achievements.

Access to and understanding one's medical history is crucial to maintaining long-term care. As adolescents and young adults childhood cancer survivors age, they must transition and transfer their health care from their pediatric to an adult care institution. In this study, we provide empirical evidence reporting on the after-cancer treatment experiences of childhood cancer survivors through their transition. We report findings from 24 semi-structured interviews with adolescent and young adult cancer survivors participating in a childhood cancer survivorship program that prepares them for adult care. Our findings reveal three parts of their after-cancer treatment experience: the assumption of responsibility for their complex care needs and medical information and the overall transfer and maintenance of the continuity of their care to an adult clinician. Our findings suggest that survivors may play an essential yet unrecognized role in the patient hand-off. Thus, we introduce patient-mediate handoffs and suggest design opportunities.

Children with ADHD can experience a wide variety of challenges related to self-regulation, which can lead to poor educational, health, and wellness outcomes. Technological interventions, such as mobile and wearable health systems, can support data collection and reflection about health status. However, little is known about how ADHD children interpret such data. We conducted a deployment study with 10 children, aged 10 to 15, for six weeks, during which they used a smartwatch in their homes. Results from observations and interviews during this study indicate that children with ADHD can interpret their own health data, particularly at the moment. However, as ADHD children develop more autonomy, smartwatch systems may require alternatives for data reflection that are interpretable and actionable for them. This work contributes to the scholarly discourse around health data visualization, particularly in considering implications for the design of health technologies for children with ADHD.

Some neurodivergent people prioritize visual details over the “big picture”. While excellent attention to detail has many advantages, some contexts require the rapid integration of global and local information. A local processing style can be so strong that local details interfere with the fluid integration of global information required for processing of information rapidly displayed on user interfaces. This disconnect between context of an interaction and processing style can be termed local interference. Personalization of visual stimuli can promote a more accessible computing experience. We describe how technological interventions can support shifting of visual attention from local to global features to make them more accessible. We present two empirical studies. One study with one autistic adult revealed a significant shift in eye gaze fixation, and the other study with 20 autistic children revealed filters that visually emphasize primary aspects encouraged more global comments about the image content.

Adolescent and young adult childhood cancer survivors experience health complications, late or long-term biomedical complications, as well as economic and psychosocial challenges that can have a lifelong impact on their quality-of-life. As childhood cancer survivors transition into adulthood, they must learn to balance their identity development with demands of everyday life and the near- and long-term consequences of their cancer experience, all of which have implications for the ways they use existing technologies and the design of novel technologies. In this study, we interviewed 24 childhood cancer survivors and six caregivers about their cancer survivorship experiences. The results of our analysis indicate that the challenges of transitioning to adulthood as a cancer survivor necessitate the development and management of multiple societal, relational, and personal boundaries, processes that social computing technologies can help or hinder. This paper contributes to the empirical understanding of adolescent and young adult cancer survivors’ social experiences. We further contribute sociotechnical design provocations for researchers, designers, and community members to support survivors.

HCI researchers have been gradually shifting attention from individual users to communities when engaging in research, design, and system development. However, our field has yet to establish a cohesive, systematic understanding of the challenges, benefits, and commitments of community-collaborative approaches to research. We conducted a systematic review and thematic analysis of 47 computing research papers discussing participatory research with communities for the development of technological artifacts and systems, published over the last two decades. From this review, we identified seven themes associated with the evolution of a project: from establishing community partnerships to sustaining results. Our findings suggest that several tensions characterize these projects, many of which relate to the power and position of researchers, and the computing research environment, relative to community partners. We discuss the implications of our findings and offer methodological proposals to guide HCI, and computing research more broadly, towards practices that center communities.

People living with dementia as well as dementia caregivers are finding new ways to provide and receive support online. The emerging use of social media platforms-such as TikTok, Clubhouse, and Facebook-by people with dementia and dementia caregivers enables new forms of sharing about stigmatized, poorly understood, and often under-discussed experiences. Building on prior work focused on formal support groups, we report findings from an interview study of how people living with dementia and dementia caregivers provide and receive social support through emerging online spaces and communities. Our analysis reveals that both groups cultivate new online spaces for sharing about the experience of dementia while also navigating tensions surrounding public disclosure of lived experiences, advocacy, education, and the ability to protect and keep private elements of life experiences. We discuss how these groups cultivate online spaces across platforms and contribute to ongoing ethical debates about consent in online communities. We conclude with questions that guide future work on emerging online spaces for supporting people living with dementia and caregivers of people living with dementia.

The design of wearable applications supporting children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD) requires a deep understanding not only of what is possible from a clinical standpoint but also how the children might understand and orient towards wearable technologies, such as a smartwatch. Through a series of participatory design workshops with children with ADHD and their caregivers, we identified tensions and challenges in designing wearable applications supporting the self-regulation of children with ADHD. In this paper, we describe the specific challenges of smartwatches for this population, the balance between self-regulation and co-regulation, and tensions when receiving notifications on a smartwatch in various contexts. These results indicate key considerations-from both the child and caregiver viewpoints-for designing technological interventions supporting children with ADHD.

Social computing provides a variety of challenges and opportunities for people who are experiencing cognitive decline. Following a recent diagnosis of dementia, older adults sometimes engage in online communities designated for people with dementia. In this work, we analyzed all original posts from a seven-year period on a forum for persons with dementia to understand 1) who posts in this forum and 2) what kinds of social support posters seek to gain from this engagement. Our analyses indicate that, in addition to people with dementia, a variety of dementia-related stakeholders create original posts in this forum. Our results suggest that seeking and offering social support are key activities for all forum users, not just those with dementia for whom the forum was designated. Given these findings, we offer design implications for online spaces for vulnerable communities, with a focus on design that allows for external stakeholder participation while still maintaining the privacy and safety of vulnerable members of the community.

In this work, we apply an activity theory lens to analyze nonvisual computing for blind and low-vision computer users. Our analysis indicates major challenges for users in translating the activities they are working towards into specific tasks to be completed in a system comprehensible manner. Specifically, blind and low-vision students learning to use accessible technologies struggled with organizing their activities, tracking the history and status of their operations, and understanding how the system was acting underneath these interactions. We discuss how activity-centered design can be applied to nonvisual interfaces to better match user behavior in a computational system.

Children with autism often have sensory processing differences that can lead to a myriad of challenges, including difficulty with awareness of how their bodies occupy physical space. Natural User Interfaces (NUI) can help augment therapies to support these children. We developed DanceCraft, a whole-body interface to augment dance therapy for children with autism. In a pilot study, we deployed DanceCraft to nine homes for one week for children with autism to use. We received feedback on both the system's central activity (dance), as well as elements of its design and set up, offering lessons to guide future field deployments of such systems.

From the white cane to the smartphone, technology has been an effective tool for broadening blind and low vision participation in a sighted world. In the face of this increased participation, individuals with visual impairments remain on the periphery of most sight-first activities. In this paper, we describe a multi-month public-facing co-design engagement with an organization that supports blind and low vision outrigger paddling. Using a mixed-ability design team, we developed an inexpensive cooperative outrigger paddling system, called CoOP, that shares control between sighted and visually impaired paddlers. The results suggest that public design, a DIY (do-it-yourself) stance, and attentiveness to shared physical experiences, represent key strategies for creating assistive technologies that support shared experiences.

Contemporary American experiences of death and mourning increasingly extend onto social network sites, where friends gather to memorialize the deceased. That "everyone grieves in their own way'' may be true, but it forecloses important questions about how people evaluate these expressions, their relationship to others who are grieving, and impacts on their own experiences of grief. Drawing from mixed-methods research conducted over five years, we describe how individuals position themselves within and evaluate expressions of networked grief. We start by identifying five orientations -- reinforcing, supporting, transferring, objecting, and isolating -- that describe how individuals evaluate actions of grievers, position themselves relative to the network, and act when they encounter grief. We then describe factors and tensions that influence how individuals arrive at these orientations. Based on our findings, we argue that the design of social media can be sensitized to diverse needs by adopting a situated perspective within a dynamic post-mortem network.

We draw on a qualitative study of homeowners who engage in do-it-yourself (DIY) home repair and introduce "home worlds" as a conceptual lens to understand how interactions with the home as a built environment (local and mechanical engagements with its material components) are situated in broad, diffuse, and constraint-rich social worlds. A "home worlds" perspective challenges domestic computing inquiries to adopt a broader orientation when considering a home's users and requirements; our case of home repair, in particular, provokes us to consider the home as embedded in communities and framed in relation to the precarious constraints of everyday life. We discuss how these insights open up new avenues for future research and design of collaborative domestic computing technologies. ?

Social communication frequently includes nuanced nonverbal communication cues, including eye contact, gestures, facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice. This type of communication is central to face-to-face interaction, but can be challenging for children and adults with autism. Innovative technologies can provide support by augmenting human-delivered cuing and automated prompting. Specifically, immersive virtual reality (VR) offers an option to generalize social skill interventions by concretizing nonverbal information in real-time social interactions. In this work, we explore the design and evaluation of three nonverbal communication applications in immersive VR. The results of this work indicate that delivering real-time visualizations of proximity, speaker volume, and duration of one's speech is feasible in immersive VR and effective for real-time support for proximity regulation for children with autism. We conclude with design considerations for therapeutic VR systems.

In a mixed methods study of parents and teens (n=200), 87% (n=174) of participants used language consistent with smartphone addiction narratives when asked about their smartphone feelings and use. Mental health researchers and clinicians do not consistently agree about whether smartphone addiction exists nor what it would look like if it does. Our goal in this study was to explore the patterns of responses that people invoked when talking about the role of smartphones in their lives and the lives of those around them. Responses suggested that both parents and teens are aware of and potentially influenced by a narrative that smartphones are addictive and can lead to negative, though largely undefined, consequences. We examine potential origins of this narrative, including media coverage, and examine the critical need for a deeper examination in the CSCW community of how this narrative could be influencing well-being, sense of self, and sensemaking around smartphone use.

Maker culture values fabrication and production in both the digital and physical realms as well as the sharing of resources. As such, maker culture provides an opportunity to be democratic and inclusive. Likewise, spaces that stem from maker culture, such as makerspaces, provide the same opportunity for inclusion, even for those with disabilities. Autcraft is a community that supports children with autism and is centered on a Minecraft virtual world that embodies maker culture. The Autcraft community's unique form of maker culture supports self-expression, sociality, and learning for children with autism by providing structure in a virtual space, allowing for and enabling creating and sharing. In this paper, we explore design implications for the creation of inclusive spaces for making and self-expression in the future based on intensive fieldwork in the Autcraft community.

Overselectivity is a learning challenge that is largely unaddressed in the assistive technology community. Screening and intervention, done by specialists, is time-intensive and requires substantial training. Little to no treatments are available to the broader population of preliterate, minimally verbal individuals. In this work, we examine the impact of an iPad game based on the tenets of behavioral therapy to mitigate overselectivity. We developed software-based techniques and evaluated the system using established methods from the field of Special Education. We present the results of a deployment in a special education school that demonstrates that an assistive tablet game is a feasible means of addressing overselectivity, and we present generalizable technological features drawn from evidenced-based therapies to consider in future assistive technologies. We suggest that designers of assistive technology systems, particularly those who address physical, cognitive, and behavioral difficulties for preliterate AAC users, should consider overselectivity as a potential co-occurring condition.

People with autism are at risk for social isolation due to differences in their perception and engagement with the social world. In this work, we aim to address one specific concern related to socialization the understanding, awareness, and use of interpersonal space. Over the course of a year, we iteratively designed and tested a series of concepts for supporting children with autism in perceiving, understanding, and responding to physical proximity with other people. During this process, we developed ProCom, a prototype system for measuring proximity without requiring instrumentation of the environment or another person. We used a variety of low and high fidelity prototypes, culminating in ProCom, to assess the feasibility, utility, and challenges of this approach. The results of these iterative design engagements indicate that wearable assistive technologies can support people in developing awareness of physical proximity in social settings. However, challenges related to both personal and collective use remain

Deploying novel technologies requires the coordinated efforts of the research team, research participants, and a variety of community members and project stakeholders. To ensure that the project is completed successfully, these disparate groups of people engage in articulation work, which is the meta-work that supports the use of collaborative systems. In this paper, we examine the articulation work surrounding the deployment of systems that have found limited long-term adoption: assistive technology. Specifically, we examine three research deployments of a collaborative game for children with autism. Analysis of the articulation work performed during these studies demonstrates how research deployments of technologies create conditions in which stakeholders must take on additional roles to make the deployment work. By understanding the articulation work surrounding deployment studies engendered in this role fluidity, we can improve both research design and the analysis of data emergent from these studies.

In this paper, we examine stigma related to class identity online through an empirical examination of Elite University Class Confessions (EUCC). EUCC is an online space that includes a Facebook page and a surrounding sociotechnical ecosystem. It is a community of, for, and about low-income and first generation students at an elite university. By bringing in a community that learns and engages with users' socioeconomic struggles, EUCC engenders unique restorative properties for students experiencing class stigma. EUCC's restorative properties foster new ways of understanding one's stigmatized identity through meaning- making interactions in a networked sociotechnical system. We discuss how EUCC's design shapes the nature of user interactions around class stigma, and explore in depth how people experience stigma differently through the restorative properties of EUCC.

Those with disabilities have long adopted, adapted, and appropriated collaborative systems to serve as assistive devices. In this paper, we present the results of a digital ethnography in a Minecraft virtual world for children with autism, specifically examining how this community has used do-it-yourself (DIY) making activities to transform the game into a variety of assistive technologies. Our results demonstrate how players and administrators "mod" the Minecraft system to support self-regulation and community engagement. This work highlights the ways in which we, as researchers concerned with accessible and equitable computing spaces, might reevaluate the scope of our inquiry, and how designers might encourage and support appropriation, enhancing users' experience and long-term adoption.

During face-to-face conversations, adults with autism frequently use atypical rhythms and sounds in their speech (prosody), which can result in misunderstandings and miscommunication. SayWAT is a Wearable Assistive Technology that provides feedback to wearers about their prosody during face-to-face conversations. In this paper, we describe the design process that led to five design guidelines that governed the development of SayWAT and present results from two studies involving our prototype solution. Our results indicate that wearable assistive technologies can automatically detect atypical prosody and deliver feedback in real time without disrupting the wearer or the conversation partner. Additionally, we provide suggestions for wearable assistive technologies for social support.

Digital artifacts on social media can challenge individuals during identity transitions, particularly those who prefer to delete, separate from, or hide data that are representative of a past identity. This work investigates concerns and practices reported by transgender people who transitioned while active on Facebook. We analyze open-ended survey responses from 283 participants, highlighting types of data considered problematic when separating oneself from a past identity, and challenges and strategies people engage in when managing personal data in a networked environment. We find that people shape their digital footprints in two ways: by editing the self-presentational data that is representative of a prior identity, and by managing the configuration of people who have access to that self-presentation. We outline the challenging interplay between shifting identities, social networks, and the data that suture them together. We apply these results to a discussion of the complexities of managing and forgetting the digital past.

Traditional face-to-face social interactions can be challenging for individuals with autism, leading some to perceive and categorize them as less social than their typically-developing peers. Individuals with autism may even see themselves as less social relative to their peers. Online communities can provide an alternative venue for social expression, enabling different types of communication beyond face-to-face, oral interaction. Using ethnographic methods, we studied the communication ecology that has emerged around a Minecraft server for children with autism and their allies. Our analysis shows how members of this community search for, practice, and define sociality through a variety of communication channels. These findings suggest an expansion in how sociality has traditionally been conceptualized for individuals with autism.

Social computing technologies, such as social networking sites (SNSs), often privilege people who fit within expected, static categories. Thus, users embarking on major identity changes, such as gender transition, often encounter stress when using SNSs to interact with their online social networks. To address this problem and reflect on the design of SNSs and other social computing systems, we present the results of a comprehensive online survey of transgender and gender non-conforming SNS users. Our findings indicate that although Facebook can be a stressful place for gender transition due to difficulties of transition disclosure, support from one's Facebook network can help to mitigate some of this stress. We examine Facebook both as a site of stress and as a site of support. Better understanding the relationships between stress, disclosure, and support on SNSs for these particular users can inform technology design that will benefit people who struggle with navigating a wide range of major identity changes online.

The use of online games and virtual worlds is becoming increasingly prominent, particularly in children and young adults. Parents have concerns about risks their children might encounter in these online spaces. Parents dynamically manage the boundaries between safe and unsafe spaces online through both explicit and implicit means. In this work, we use empirical data gathered from a digital ethnog-raphy of a Minecraft server, Autcraft, to explore how par-ents of children with autism continually create a "safe" virtual world through both implicit and explicit means. In par-ticular, we demonstrate how their actions in these spaces define and produce "safety," shedding light on our theoreti-cal understanding of child safety in online spaces.

This paper extends research on the giving and inheriting of digital artifacts by examining social network site accounts post-mortem. Given the important role that social network sites play in online bereavement practices, we conducted a series of in-depth qualitative interviews to explore issues around inheritance and post-mortem data management of Facebook accounts. We found that participants focused less on ownership of the data, and instead on the duties and potential conflicts associated with maintaining an account post-mortem. Subsequently, we argue for 'stewardship' as an alternative to inheritance for framing post-mortem data management practices. Analysis of post-mortem data management activities highlights how stewards are accountable and responsible to the deceased and various survivors. However, weighing competing responsibilities is complicated by varied relationships with disparate survivors, as well as the inability to consult with the deceased. Based on our findings, we claim that post-mortem solutions need to account for the needs of stewards in addition to those of the deceased and survivors. We suggest that a model of stewardship better accounts for the interpersonal responsibilities that accompany online data than inheritance alone.

The HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s fundamentally changed sexual practices of men who have sex with men (MSM) in the U.S., including increased usage of sexual health-related (SHR) language in personal advertisements. Analyzing online personal ads from Craigslist, we found a substantial increase in SHR language, from ~23% in 1988 to over 53% today, echoing continuing concern about rising HIV rates. We argue that SHR language in Craigslist ads can be used as a sensor to provide insight into HIV epidemiology as well as discourse among particular communities. We show a positive significant relationship between prevalence rate of HIV in an ad's location and use of SHR language in that location. Analysis highlights the opportunity for SHR information found in Craigslist personal ads to serve as a data source for HIV prevention research. More broadly, we argue for mining large-scale user-generated content to inform HCI design of health and other systems, and explore use of such data to examine temporal changes in language to facilitate improved user-interface design.

In this paper, we describe results from fieldwork conducted at a social services site where the workers evaluate citizens' applications for food and medical assistance submitted via an e-government system. These results suggest value tensions that result - not from different stakeholders with different values - but from differences among how stakeholders enact the same shared value in practice. In the remainder of this paper, we unpack the distinct and conflicting interpretations or logics of three shared values - efficiency, access, and education. In particular, we analyze what happens when social services workers have ideas about what it means to expand access, increase efficiency, and educate the public that conflict with the logics embedded in the e-government system. By distinguishing between overarching values and specific logics, we provide an analytic framework for exploring value tensions as values are enacted in practice.

Situated displays can support behavior management for children with behavioral challenges. However, existing tools are often static, rarely engaging, and tend to focus only on individual behavior. In this work, we designed and deployed a situated display to support teamwork and cooperation in children with behavioral challenges. We evaluated this tool in two classrooms of a public school specializing in behavioral interventions with 28 children over four weeks. The results of this work demonstrate that situated displays focused on collective behavioral performance can support reflection on individual performance, improve behavior for students with behavioral challenges, as well as encourage teamwork and cooperative behavior in classrooms. These results also indicate a variety of issues to be considered when designing situated displays for these environments, including considerations for the representation of ambiguity and failure as well as the relationship between novelty and engagement.

Multimodal and natural user interfaces offer an innovative approach to sensory integration therapies. We designed and developed SensoryPaint, a multimodal system that allows users to paint on a large display using physical objects, body-based interactions, and interactive audio. We evaluated the impact of SensoryPaint through two user studies: a lab-based study of 15 children with neurodevelopmental disorders in which they used the system for up to one hour, and a deployment study with four children with autism, during which the system was integrated into existing daily sensory therapy sessions. Our results demonstrate that a multimodal large display, using whole body interactions combined with tangible interactions and interactive audio feedback, balances children's attention between their own bodies and sensory stimuli, augments existing therapies, and promotes socialization. These results offer implications for the design of other ubicomp systems for children with neurodevelopmental disorders and for their integration into therapeutic interventions.

In this article, we present the results of a study examining challenges related to access and trust for nutrition assistance outreach workers and suggest design implications for these challenges. Outreach workers are e-government intermediaries who assist clients with accessing and using e-government online applications, systems, and services. E-government intermediaries are not typical end users; they use e-government systems on behalf of clients, and as such their challenges differ from those of primary users. We detail social and technical aspects of these challenges to develop a nuanced understanding of access and trust in the ecosystems surrounding e-government systems. First, we describe how the practical accomplishment of access involves multiple stakeholders, actors, and practices. Second, we highlight how trust emerges through the e-government intermediaries’ work to project themselves as professional and competent through their technical practice. Last, we propose design implications sensitive to both the social and technical aspects of these challenges.

In this article, we describe the design process and principles used in the development of Estrellita, a tool to support parents of preterm infants to track health data. We tested Estrellita in the homes of seven families for 4 months while following seven additional families without Estrellita. The feedback from this trial, including in-depth interviews, surveys, and log analyses, sheds light on how parents can use a mobile data collection tool to enhance their problem-solving processes about their own health and that of their infants, as well as to share with others who support them in this care. In addition to presenting the design of a recording technology for preterm infants and its use in a real-life setting, the results of this research provide a deep understanding of how technology can and should be used to support home care of at-risk patients, in which data capture may be essential.

We present the results of an empirical study of elementary school classrooms and show how these results informed the design of a mobile web application for teachers to manage "digital economies" in their classrooms. A Classroom Economy is a program that aims to teach financial literacy while encouraging focus and on task behavior. The Digital Economy captures transaction data as students participate in a Classroom Economy, replacing paper-based transactions and record keeping. The design of the Digital Economy application builds on our own prior work in which we partnered with teachers to collaboratively design ubiquitous computing technologies for classrooms. Our design is based on our analysis of classroom observations, interviews with teachers, design workshops and a usability study of a prototype application. We consider three major guidelines for designing for classrooms: classroom flow, individual assessments, and peer groups. We describe the negotiation of these guidelines when designing for the management and curriculum goals of teachers. This case study demonstrates how guidelines that emerged from the design research process were negotiated in the development of this financial literacy tool for classrooms.

In this paper, we describe a mobile system to support youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) learn about and track healthy hygiene behaviors, HygieneHelper. This mobile application was developed as the result of a multi-year action research project with six school districts and two county agencies all focused on using mobile technologies to help teens and young adults develop skills for independent living and employment. HygieneHelper includes multi-media learning modules, an interactive customizable interface for tracking and monitoring progress on hygiene routines, and prompting and feedback from a virtual coach.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often characterized by a deficit in social skills, including the ability to interview successfully for jobs, a key hurdle to be overcome for independent living. One effective way that individuals with ASD can learn and retain valuable life skills is through the use of video modeling. Peer video modeling focuses on individuals imitating models similar to themselves (i.e., physical characteristics, age, ethnicity, gender, etc.), and self-modeling focuses on watching oneself successfully completing tasks. In this paper, we describe the design of VidCoach, a mobile application built to support both peer modeling and self-modeling for individuals with ASD. VidCoach can aid adolescents in work transition programs with learning and retaining job interview skills, and we present a scenario that highlights how a user might interact with VidCoach in this particular context. We conclude with a brief overview detailing our current work focused on evaluating the VidCoach application and a discussion of the potential for VidCoach to extend beyond our job-interviewing scenario to involve learning and retaining life skills in other areas.

Based on an 18-month qualitative study that included the creation and testing of design considerations and a prototype location-based information system (LBIS), this research provides empirical insight into the daily practices of a wide variety of individuals working to address food insecurity in one U.S. county. Qualitative fieldwork reveals that nonprofit organizations in the food assistance ecology engage in location-based information practices that could be enhanced by the design of a LBIS. Two practices that would benefit from a collaborative LBIS are 1) practices of matching in which nonprofit workers help individuals who are seeking assistance to food resources and 2) practices of distribution in which nonprofit workers help organizations access and deliver food resources to clients. In order to support such practices across organizations the cooperative design component of this research suggests that an LIBS should: support the role of intermediaries who engage in practices of matching and distribution; provide interactive mapping tools that match resources to need; enable organizations to control visibility over specific data; and document work and impact. This research further suggests that designers should explore the wide variety of spatial patterns that must align and overlap such that ecologies of nonprofit organizations might synergistically work together to address pressing social needs.

Gas sensors have the potential to assist cooking by providing feedback on the cooking process and by further automating cooking. In this work, we explored the potential use of gas sensors to monitor food during the cooking process. Focusing on dry cooking, we collected gas emissions using 13 sensors during trials in which food was cooked to various degrees of doneness. Using decision tree classifiers, we were able to predict doneness for waffles and popcorn with 73% and 85% accuracy, respectively. We reflect on the potential reasons for this variation and the ways in which gas sensors might reliably be used in ubicomp applications to support cooking.

In this article, we describe the origins, use, and efficacy of a contextualized method for evaluating mobile and ubiquitous computing systems. This technique, which we called paratyping, is based on experience prototyping and event-contingent experience sampling and allows researchers to survey people in real-life situations without the need for costly and sometimes untenable deployment evaluations. We used this tool to probe the perceptions of the conversation partners of users of the Personal Audio Loop, a memory aid with the potential for substantial privacy implications. Based on that experience, we refined and adapted the approach to evaluate SenseCam, a wearable, automatic picture-taking device, across multiple geographic locations. We describe the benefits, challenges, and methodological considerations that emerged during our use of the paratyping method across these two studies. We describe how this method blends some of the benefits of survey-based research with more contextualized methods, focusing on trustworthiness of the method in terms of generating scientific knowledge. In particular, this method is a good fit for studying certain classes of mobile and ubiquitous computing applications but can be applied to many types of applications.

In this paper, we present the results of a study of the work practices of food assistance outreach workers. We introduce the construct of service mediation, which includes the technical, social, and knowledge labor practices involved in enabling access to and use of an e-government service. We explore the service mediation activities of outreach, technological assistance, providing knowledge, and ongoing engagement. These activities bring to light how successful service relationships involve fostering a process, bridging relationships, and providing broader scaffolding. The results of our research highlight the role service mediation plays in the use of services and service technologies in information-rich organizations. This research extends previous conceptualizations of mediation by documenting how mediators support broader service processes for their clients, transform potential beneficiaries into clients, and engage in long term assistance. Therefore, this work moves beyond prior conceptualizations of mediation that concentrate solely on enabling access and use of specific technologies.

MOSOCO is a mobile assistive application that uses augmented reality and the visual supports of a validated curriculum, the Social Compass, to help children with autism practice social skills in real-life situations. In this paper, we present the results of a seven-week deployment study of MOSOCO in a public school in Southern California with both students with autism and neurotypical students. The results of our study demonstrate that MOSOCO facilitates practicing and learning social skills, increases both quantity and quality of social interactions, reduces social and behavioral missteps, and enables the integration of children with autism in social groups of neurotypical children. The findings from this study reveal emergent practices of the uses of mobile assistive technologies in real-life situations.

Smell can be used to infer quite a bit of context about environments. Previous research primarily has shown that gas sensors can be used to discriminate accurately between odors when used in testing chambers. However, potential real-world applications require these sensors to perform an analysis in uncontrolled environments, which can be challenging. In this poster, we present our gas sensor system, called uSmell, to address these challenges. This system has the potential to improve context-aware applications, such as lifelogging and assisted living.

vSked is an interactive and collaborative assistive technology for students with autism, combining visual schedules, choice boards, and a token-based reward system into an integrated classroom system. In this paper, we present the results of a study of three deployments of vSked over the course of a year in two autism classrooms. The results of our study demonstrate that vSked can promote student independence, reduce the quantity of educator-initiated prompts, encourage consistency and predictability, reduce the time required to transition from one activity to another. The findings from this study reveal practices surrounding the use of assistive technologies in classrooms and highlight important considerations for both the design and the evaluation of assistive technologies in the future, especially those destined for classroom use.

In this paper, we present the results of an empirical study of perceptions towards pervasive video recording. We describe a commonly used model for understanding information privacy, the Concern for Information Privacy (CFIP) model, and present the ways that this model and its associated questionnaire can shed light on information privacy concerns about pervasive and ubiquitous computing technologies. Specifically, the CFIP model encourages analysis of data across four facets of experience: the collection of personal data, the risk of improper access, the potential for unauthorized secondary use, and the challenge of preventing or correcting errors in the data. We further identify areas not well handled by this model of information privacy and suggest avenues for future work, including research on how and when to notify people about recording technologies, awareness of data provenance and leakage, and understanding of and access to the data assemblage being created about individuals.

The proliferation of social network sites has resulted in an increasing number of profiles representing deceased users. In this paper, we present the results of a mixed-methods empirical study of 205,068 comments posted to 1,369 MySpace profiles of users who have died. Our results reveal interesting practices surrounding issues of authorship and audience, temporal patterns in posting, and continued social networking with the dead. These results suggest that post-mortem commenting behavior blends memorializing practices with existing practices and communication patterns for social network sites. We conclude by outlining future directions for research and implications for the understanding and use of social network sites in light of a deeper understanding of post-mortem comments.

As use of, and experiences with, social media continue to grow, the systems of representation that underlie their use become increasingly influential. In this paper, we present results from empirical studies of two online communities-Facebook and craigslist Missed Connections-that highlight the ways in which this underlying infrastructure and the user practices on these sites are inherently intertwined. We make particular use of a framework first introduced by Agre that focuses on the influence of eight underlying features of computing practice: ontology, standards, instrumentation, authentication, interpretation, selection, bias, and performance. The results of this analysis indicate how representational systems do more than simply represent the physical world; they are deeply intertwined with the social and material practices of everyday life.

Upon leaving the hospital, parents of high-risk infants experience a variety of challenges in providing care at home. In this work, we present results from a qualitative study to understand the role of social interaction and information-sharing surrounding high-risk infants among both home caregivers and health professionals. These results demonstrate challenges in communication and social support for caregivers of these infants. Based on these results, we present design guidelines for collaborative communication technologies for this population and a prototype system design that demonstrates how these design guidelines might be met in a mobile application. Finally, we discuss how collaborative technologies can serve to improve communication with professionals as well as provide much-needed social support.

Alongside the growing interest within HCI, and arguably computing more generally, in conducting research that has substantial societal benefits, there is a need for new ways to think about and to articulate the challenges of these engaged research projects as well as their results. Action Research (AR) is a class of methods and approaches for conducting democratic and collaborative research with community partners. AR has evolved over the last several decades and offers HCI researchers theoretical lenses, methodological approaches, and pragmatic guidance for conducting socially relevant, collaborative, and engaged research. In this article, I describe the historical context and origins of AR, the scientifically rigorous practice of conducting and evaluating AR projects, and the ways in which AR might meaningfully be applied to HCI research.

Design and evaluation of user-generated media production and sharing in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) often focus on formal and informal media sharing, such as communication within social networks, automatic notifications of activities, and the exchange of digital artifacts. However, conceptual tools for understanding how people relate to the audiences they reach through these systems are limited. The increasing interest in user-generated content in HCI demands the infusion of new methods and theories that explicitly engage the construction and use of media within and among large groups of individuals and systems. In this paper, we suggest that the notion of “publics,” drawn from media theory, provides useful insights into user-driven, social, and cultural forms of technology use and digital content creation. We illustrate this by employing the notion of publics to the findings from a two-month deployment of a mobile photo sharing platform in a youth housing community. The results of this empirical work coupled with a theoretical examination of publics stimulate reflection on prevailing interpretations of user-designer-reader roles. The paper provides an outlook for potentially new and productive ways of understanding interdependencies within those activities. Implications that can be drawn from this work concern the role of digital media creation and sharing for the formation of collectives and how people position themselves collectively in relation to larger social groups and societal norms. The analysis suggests fruitful crossovers among HCI, Media Theory and New Media Research by approaching the user as both consumer and producer of digital content.

Children with autism often experience substantial challenges in understanding, structuring, and predicting the activities in their daily lives. The use of symbols to represent a series of activities, also known as visual schedules, have been shown to be an effective intervention technique for helping individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder. In this paper, we describe the design and technical architecture for vSked, an interactive visual scheduling tool that allows group interactivity with content generated through end-user programming. We also outline a scenario that demonstrates how vSked extends the benefits of traditional visual schedules through both interactivity and automatic logging of use. This scenario also indicates the type of experience a user might have during a demonstration session.

Disability studies and assistive technology are two related fields that have long shared common goals - understanding the experience of disability and identifying and addressing relevant issues. Despite these common goals, there are some important differences in what professionals in these fields consider problems, perhaps related to the lack of connection between the fields. To help bridge this gap, we review some of the key literature in disability studies. We present case studies of two research projects in assistive technology and discuss how the field of disability studies influenced that work, led us to identify new or different problems relevant to the field of assistive technology, and helped us to think in new ways about the research process and its impact on the experiences of individuals who live with disability. We also discuss how the field of disability studies has influenced our teaching and highlight some of the key publications and publication venues from which our community may want to draw more deeply in the future.

Visual schedules--the use of symbols to represent a series of activities or steps--have been successfully used by caregivers to help children with autism to understand, structure, and predict activities in their daily lives. Building from in-depth fieldwork and participatory design sessions, we developed vSked, an interactive and collaborative visual scheduling system designed for elementary school classrooms. We evaluated vSked in situ in one autism-specific classroom over three weeks. In this paper, we present the design principles, technical solution, and results from this successful deployment. Use of vSked resulted in reductions in staff effort required to use visual supports. vSked also resulted in improvements in the perceived quality and quantity of communication and social interactions in the classroom.

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder often require therapeutic interventions to support engagement in effective social interactions. In this paper, we present the results of a study conducted in three public schools that use an educational and behavioral intervention for the instruction of social skills in changing situational contexts. The results of this study led to the concept of interaction immediacy to help children maintain appropriate spatial boundaries, reply to conversation initiators, disengage appropriately at the end of an interaction, and identify potential communication partners. We describe design principles for Ubicomp technologies to support interaction immediacy and present an example design. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, we present an understanding of social skills in mobile and dynamic contexts. Second, we introduce the concept of interaction immediacy and show its effectiveness as a guiding principle for the design of Ubicomp applications.

A significant focus in the United States recently has been to increase engagement and interest in STEM curricula, particularly among girls and underrepresented minorities [3]. In this work, we take an approach to teaching and learning that supports flexibility, experimentation, and play with technology. With this approach, we aim to make STEM curricula more comfortable and engaging for all types of children and teens, with a particular emphasis on lower socio-economic status female students. We designed and tested a computing course for middle school girls, and this work resulted in three best practices: hands-on work incorporating creativity through crafts into engineering and computing, the frequent presence of an audience to motivate engagement, and engineering-focused individual roles structuring group work. Pre- and post-surveys and exit interviews revealed significant changes in attitudes and an enthusiasm for engineering projects and careers as a result of participation in the course.

Interventions to support children with autism often include the use of visual supports, which are cognitive tools to enable learning and the production of language. Although visual supports are effective in helping to diminish many of the challenges of autism, they are difficult and time-consuming to create, distribute, and use. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study focused on uncovering design guidelines for interactive visual supports that would address the many challenges inherent to current tools and practices. We present three prototype systems that address these design challenges with the use of large group displays, mobile personal devices, and personal recording technologies. We also describe the interventions associated with these prototypes along with the results from two focus group discussions around the interventions. We present further design guidance for visual supports and discuss tensions inherent to their design.

This paper presents an analysis of attitudes towards everyday tracking and recording technologies (e.g., credit cards, store loyalty cards, store video cameras). This work focuses on both institutional and end-user tracking and recording technologies. In particular, this paper describes (1) an empirical interview and survey study of everyday institutional tracking and recording technologies and (2) an analysis of these empirical data against a framework originally used to describe tension points for end-user tracking and recording technologies. Results from the study demonstrate that people can be highly concerned with information privacy while simultaneously reporting significantly less concern regarding the use of everyday technologies that have the capabilities to collect, process, and disseminate personal information. The empirical results and theoretical analysis identify and begin to explain this dissonance. Furthermore, we provide extensions to the analytic framework for capture and access technologies to address differences, similarities, and interplay between institutional and end-user tracking and recording technologies. The results of this paper contribute to the fields of personal and ubiquitous computing by providing significant insight relevant to the evaluation, design, deployment, and adoption of new tracking and recording technologies.

Collaborative brainstorming can be a challenging but important part of creative group problem solving. Mind-mapping has the potential to enhance the brainstorming process but has its own challenges when used in a group. We introduce GroupMind, a collaborative mind-mapping tool that addresses these challenges and opens new opportunities for creative teamwork, including brainstorming. We present a semi-controlled evaluation of GroupMind and its impact on teamwork, problem solving and collaboration for brainstorming activities. GroupMind performs better than using a traditional whiteboard in both interaction group and nominal group settings for the task involving memory recall. The hierarchical mind-map structure also imposes important framing effects on group dynamics and idea organization during the brainstorming process. We also present design ideas to assist in the development of future tools to support creative problem solving in groups.

In this paper, we present a study of responses to the idea of being recorded by a ubicomp recording technology called SenseCam. This study focused on real-life situations in two North American and two European locations. We present the findings of this study and their implications, specifically how those who might be recorded perceive and react to SenseCam. We describe what system parameters, social processes, and policies are required to meet the needs of both the primary users and these secondary stakeholders and how being situated within a particular locale can influence responses. Our results indicate that people would tolerate potential incursions from SenseCam for particular purposes. Furthermore, they would typically prefer to be informed about and to consent to recording as well as to grant permission before any data is shared. These preferences, however, are unlikely to instigate a request for deletion or other action on their part. These results inform future design of recording technologies like SenseCam and provide a broader understanding of how ubicomp technologies might be taken up across different cultural and political regions.

Interventions to support children with cognitive and social developmental disabilities often include visual elements. Use of visual artifacts has been shown to increase the communication and understanding levels of children with disabilities. We describe a research agenda for expanding these capabilities using interactive, collaborative and intelligent systems.

Children with special needs often struggle to communicate about even the most basic of concepts. For children who cannot verbally communicate, augmentative visual communications tools can enable them to get their needs met, to socialize, and more. Despite these benefits, the tools currently available have many shortcomings. In this paper, we present results from a preliminary formative study focused on understanding current tools, and determine needs for the design of new tools. We also present the design of Mocotos, a new class of mobile communications tools for children with special needs.

In this paper, we introduce LoRy, a system for an interactive story telling game that engages children in reflective ways on issues around healthy nutrition. LoRy provides distributed information from different perspectives in a ubiquitous computing environment where children can explore, gather, combine, and reconfigure information.

Identifying the function of problem behavior can lead to the development of more effective interventions. One way to identify the function is through functional behavior assessment (FBA). Teachers conduct FBA in schools. However, the task load of recording the data manually is high, and the challenge of accurately identifying antecedents and consequences is significant while interacting with students. These issues often result in imperfect information capture. CareLog allows teachers more easily to conduct FBAs and enhances the capture of relevant information. In this paper, we describe the design process that led to five design principles that governed the development of CareLog. We present results from a five-month, quasi-controlled study aimed at validating those design principles. We reflect on how various constraints imposed by special education settings impact the design and evaluation process for HCI practitioners and researchers.

Graphical virtual worlds are increasingly significant sites of collaborative interaction. Many argue that the simulation of the everyday environment makes them particularly effective for collaboration. Based on a study of visual practice in Second Life, we argue: first, that the practice of looking is more varied than it might at first seem; second, that we need to look beyond the virtual in understanding virtual worlds; and third, that implementations blend interactional practice. We suggest that the value of virtual worlds as sites of collaboration might lie more in their richness and openness to appropriation than in their simulation of everyday interaction.

This paper presents an exploration and analysis of attitudes towards everyday tracking and recording technologies (e. g., credit cards, store loyalty cards, store video cameras). Interview participants reported being highly concerned with information privacy. At the same time, however, they also reported being significantly less concerned regarding the use of everyday technologies that have the capabilities to collect, process, and disseminate personal information. We present results from this study that both identify and begin to explain this discrepancy.

From birth through age five, children undergo rapid development and learn skills that will influence them their entire lives. Regular visits to the pediatrician and detailed record-keeping can ensure that children are progressing and can identify early warning signs of developmental delay or disability. However, new parents are often overwhelmed with new responsibilities, and we believe there is an opportunity for computing technology to assist in this process. In this paper, we present a qualitative study aimed at uncovering some specific needs for record-keeping and analysis for new parents and their network of caregivers. Through interviews and focus groups, we have confirmed assumptions about the rationales parents have and the functions required for using technology for record-keeping. We also identify new themes, potential prototypes, and design guidelines for this domain.

Storyboarding is a common technique in HCI and design for demonstrating system interfaces and contexts of use. Despite its recognized benefits, novice designers still encounter challenges in the creation of storyboards. Furthermore, as computing becomes increasingly integrated into the environment, blurring the distinction between the system and its surrounding context, it is imperative to depict context explicitly in storyboards. In this paper, we present two formative studies designed to uncover the important elements of storyboards. These elements include the use of text, inclusion of people, level of detail, number of panels, and representation of the passage of time. We further present an empirical study to assess the effects of these elements on the understanding and enjoyment of storyboard consumers. Finally, we demonstrate how these guidelines were successfully used in an undergraduate HCI class.

Evidence-based care is an increasingly popular process for long term diagnosis and monitoring of education and healthcare disabilities. Because this evidence must also be collected in everyday life, it is a technique that can greatly benefit from automated capture technologies. These solutions, however, can raise significant concerns about privacy, control, and surveillance. In this paper, we present an analysis of these concerns with regard to evidence-based care. This analysis underscores the need to consider community-based risk and reward analyses in addition to the traditionally used analyses for individual users when designing socially appropriate technologies.

We developed an inquiry technique, which we called "paratype," based on experience prototyping and event-contingent experience sampling, to survey people in real-life situations about ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) technology. We used this tool to probe the opinions of the conversation partners of users of the Personal Audio Loop, a memory aid that can have a strong impact on their privacy. We present the findings of this study and their implications, specifically the need to broaden public awareness of ubicomp applications and the unfitness of traditional data protection guidelines for tackling the privacy issues of many ubicomp applications. We also point out benefits and methodological issues of paratypes and discuss why they are particularly fit for studying certain classes of mobile and ubicomp applications.

Teams of therapists often provide targeted interventions for children with developmental disabilities. A common practice in these cases is one-on-one interaction between a therapist and the child together with occasional group meetings of the therapists to discuss progress and make informed decisions to modify the intervention plan. We designed a system called Abaris to support this form of collaborative decision-making for a particular intervention popular in the treatment of children with autism. Our system allows for the simultaneous use of trending data across therapy sessions and detailed session data that is automatically integrated with highly indexed video. We discuss the impact this system had on the team dynamics, the amount of collaboration, and the effect it had on the team using evidence and videos to make decisions about the care of the child.

In this paper, we report findings from a study of American Christian ministers' uses of technologies in religious practices. We focus on the use of technologies for spiritual purposes as opposed to pragmatic and logistical, but report on all. We present results about the uses of technologies in three aspects of religious work: religious study and reflection, church services, and pastoral care. We end by examining how the collaborative religious uses of technologies cross and blend work and personal life.