More than 50 UMSI researchers to present at CHI 2026 in Barcelona, Spain

University of Michigan School of Information faculty and PhD students are creating and sharing knowledge that helps build a better world. 

Here are their awards, publications and workshops for the 2026 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Barcelona, Spain. They are organized by papers, workshops, journals, panels, awards, and posters. special interest groups, case studies and doctoral consortiums. 

Awards

SIGCHI Awards — Lifetime Service 

Thu, 16 Apr | 2:15 PM - 3:45 PM

Cliff Lampe 

University of Michigan School of Information professor Cliff Lampe has earned a 2026 Association for Computer Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Lifetime Service Award.

The award recognizes individuals who have contributed to the growth and success of SIGCHI in a variety of capacities and honors the extended service to the community at large over a number of years. 

“Families are messy”: From Parent-Child Tensions to Family-Centered Design of Smart Home Technologies

*Best Paper Award 

Fri, 17 Apr | 12:03 PM - 12:15 PM

Kaiwen Sun, Jade Xiaoyi Li, Irene Chung, Jenny Radesky, Jason Yip, Christopher Brooks, Florian Schaub

Smart home technologies have become common in family homes, making even young children inevitable users of these technologies. However, these systems are typically designed for individual adults, creating family tensions and conflicts over children's access, safety, and appropriate smart home use. To investigate children's and parents' individual and joint smart home needs and dynamics, we conducted an in-home study with nine families (children aged 6-11). We identify four key parent-child tensions with smart home technologies, including struggles over parental protection versus children's autonomy, differing views on technology's purpose, disagreements over technology-enforced routines, and children's vulnerability to embedded commercialism. Our work reconceptualizes parental mediation as a process of ``tension management'' rather than the application of static rules. This research challenges the dominant individual-centric choice architecture in smart home design, calling for a family-centered approach that acknowledges and adapts to the fluid, complex, and negotiated reality of modern family life.

Thing Ethnography in a Factory: Exploring Emergent and Dynamic Relations of Cobots and Workers

*Honorable Mention Award 

Tue, 14 Apr | 11:39 AM - 11:51 AM

Hyungjun Cho, Jiyeon Amy Seo, Yongjae Sohn, Hee Rin Lee 

Collaborative robots (cobots) are often portrayed as transformative technologies that promise efficiency and productivity in industrial workplaces, with their roles frequently pre-defined as autonomous collaborators to human workers. This paper presents a different picture based on an 18-day robot-centered thing ethnography conducted in a small-scale factory. In practice, the roles of cobots were dynamically constituted through intra-actions among CNC machines, human workers, and the factory owner. Our analysis identifies three roles: (1) frontline operators carrying out repetitive tasks, (2) care receivers dependent on continuous maintenance and cleaning, and (3) scapegoating managers whose stoppages summoned human intervention and mediation. These relational configurations foreground dynamics that remain backgrounded in human-centered accounts and offer a deeper understanding of how cobots are enacted within production environments. We argue that understanding cobot integration and advancing practical design discourse requires moving beyond assumptions of collaboration and autonomy, recognizing cobots as entities continuously redefined through their relations with environments and other agents.

Papers

Can Good Writing Be Generative? Expert-Level AI Writing Emerges through Fine-Tuning on High Quality Books

Mon, 13 Apr | 11:15 AM - 11:27 AM

Tuhin Chakrabarty, Paramveer Dhillon

Creative writing has long been considered a uniquely human endeavor, requiring voice and style that machines could not replicate. This assumption is challenged by Generative AI that can emulate thousands of author styles in seconds with negligible marginal labor. To understand this better, we conducted a behavioral experiment where 28 MFA writers (experts) competed against three LLMs in emulating 50 critically acclaimed authors. Based on blind pairwise comparisons by 28 expert judges and 131 lay judges, we find that experts preferred human writing in 82.7% of cases under the in-context prompting condition but this reversed to 62% preference for AI after fine-tuning on authors' complete works. Lay judges, however, consistently preferred AI writing. Debrief interviews with expert writers revealed that their preference for AI writing triggered an identity crisis, eroding aesthetic confidence and questioning what constitutes "good writing." These findings challenge discourse about AI's creative limitations and raise fundamental questions about the future of creative labor.

"I'm Constantly Getting Comments Like, 'Oh, You're Blind. You're Like the Only Woman That I Stand a Chance With.'": A Study of Blind TikTokers' Intersectional Experiences of Gender and Sexuality

Mon, 13 Apr | 11:15 AM - 11:27 AM

Yao Lyu, Jessica Shen, Alina Faisal, John M. Carrol

Social media platforms are important venues for identity expression, and the Human-Computer Interaction community has been paying growing attention to how marginalized groups express their identities on these platforms. Joining the emerging literature on intersectional experiences, we study blind TikTokers (“BlindTokers”) who are also women and/or LGBTQ+. Using interview data from 41 participants, we identify their intersectional experiences as mediated by TikTok’s socio-technical affordances. We argue that BlindTokers’ intersectional marginalization is infrastructural: TikTok’s classification and moderation features interact with social norms in ways that push them aside and distort how they are treated on the platform. We use this infrastructure perspective to understand what these experiences are, how they were formed, and how they become harmful. We further recognize participants’ infrastructuring work to address these problems. This study guides future social media design with accessible creator tools, inclusive identity options, and context-aware moderation developed in partnership with communities.

Expanding a Temporal Vocabulary Towards Designing for “Undiscoverable Learning” 

Mon, 13 Apr | 11:15 AM - 11:27 AM

Melissa Perez, Patricia Garcia

Narratives of learning often implicitly rely on linear temporalities, such as understanding time through a clock or positioning learning as a trajectory. When designing technology-rich learning environments, we need attention to the multiple times and temporalities that exist. In this paper, we expand on a temporal vocabulary to conceptualize how we may attend to and design for alternative temporalities for understanding learning in technology-rich learning environments. We conceptualize undiscoverable learning as a generative orientation for configuring non-linear time(s). To develop this combination, we first describe a 3-year partnership for the design of technology-rich learning environments with a public library in the southwestern US through encounters and other-time. We then offer three original terms that help expand our understanding of temporality in design for learning: traces, stamps, and renderings. The implications of this work can be seen across the intersections of learning, HCI, and design.

RAVEN: Realtime Accessibility in Virtual ENvironments for Blind and Low-Vision People

Mon, 13 Apr | 11:15 AM - 11:27 AM

Xinyun Cao, Kexin Phyllis Ju, Chenglin Li, Venkatesh Potluri, Dhruv Jain

As virtual 3D environments become more prevalent, equitable access is essential for blind and low-vision (BLV) users, who face challenges with spatial awareness, navigation, and interaction. Prior work has explored supplementing visual information with auditory or haptic modalities, but these methods are static and offer limited support for dynamic, in-context adaptation. Recent advances in generative AI allow users to query and modify 3D scenes via natural language, introducing a paradigm that offers greater flexibility and control for accessibility. We present RAVEN, a system that enables BLV users to issue queries and modification prompts to improve the runtime accessibility of 3D virtual scenes. We evaluated RAVEN with eight BLV people and six Unity developers, generating empirical insights into how conversational programming can support personalized accessibility in 3D environments. Our work highlights both the promise of natural language interaction—intuitive, flexible, and empowering—and the challenges of ensuring reliability, transparency, and trust in generative AI–driven accessibility systems.

Three Modalities, Two Design Probes, One Prototype, and No Vision: Experience-Based Co-Design of a Multi-modal 3D Data Visualization Tool

Mon, 13 Apr | 11:15 AM - 11:27 AM

Sanchita S. Kamath, Aziz N. Zeidieh, Venkatesh Potluri, Sile O’Modhrain, Kenneth Perry, JooYoung Seo

Three-dimensional (3D) data visualizations, such as surface plots, are vital in STEM fields from biomedical imaging to spectroscopy, yet remain largely inaccessible to blind and low-vision (BLV) people. To address this gap, we conducted an Experience-Based Co-Design with BLV co-designers with expertise in non-visual data representations to create an accessible, multi-modal, web-native visualization tool. Using a multi-phase methodology, our team of five BLV and one non-BLV researcher(s) participated in two iterative sessions, comparing a low-fidelity tactile probe with a high-fidelity digital prototype. This process produced a prototype with empirically grounded features, including reference sonification, stereo and volumetric audio, and configurable buffer aggregation, which our co-designers validated as improving analytic accuracy and learnability. In this study, we target core analytic tasks essential for non-visual 3D data exploration: orientation, landmark and peak finding, comparing local maxima versus global trends, gradient tracing, and identifying occluded or partially hidden features. Our work offers accessibility researchers and developers a co-design protocol for translating tactile knowledge to digital interfaces, concrete design guidance for future systems, and opportunities to extend accessible 3D visualization into embodied data environments.

CodeStream: Augmenting Timelines with Code Annotation for Navigating Large Coding Histories

Mon, 13 Apr | 11:27 AM - 11:39 AM

Ashley Ge Zhang, Yan-Ru Jhou, Yinuo Yang, Shamita Rao, Maryam Arab, Yan Chen, Steve Oney

Code edit histories can offer instructors valuable insight into students’ problem-solving processes, revealing unproductive behaviors that final code alone cannot capture. For example, a correct solution may contain large copy-and-pasted segments (suggesting the code originated elsewhere) or unguided trial-and-error (suggesting a lack of clear strategy). Timelines are a common way to visualize code histories, but existing timeline visualizations of code or document histories show only when and where edits occurred, not what changed. Without this context, it is difficult to answer key questions about how students invested effort or to infer their intentions. We present CodeStream, a visualization system that augments timelines with situational code annotations, whose granularity and visibility dynamically adapt to scale and interaction state. A comparison study shows that CodeStream enables context-aware navigation of coding histories, supporting fast and accurate pattern identification, and helping instructors reason about students’ coding behaviors and identify who may need intervention.

"If we post, what will people think of us?”: Offline Norms, Online Engagement and Unpacking Gendered Experiences in a Pakistani Facebook Tech Community

Mon, 13 Apr | 11:27 AM - 11:39 AM

Hamza Naveed, Sheza Naveed, Raksha Hungund, Michaelanne Thomas 

This paper investigates how deeply entrenched offline gender norms and patriarchal power structures constrain and shape participation within Tech Aids, a large Facebook community in Pakistan focused on peer-to-peer technical help and e-commerce transactions. Through a qualitative study involving 14 months of participant observation and 20 semi-structured interviews (11 male, 9 female), we document significant gendered disparities: women exhibit lower public engagement, driven primarily by heightened privacy concerns, fear of harassment, and perceived male gatekeeping. Our analysis reveals that traditional socio-cultural restrictions on women's mobility and constrained interactions with unfamiliar men in physical tech marketplaces are directly mirrored in the online Tech Aids environment. To manage these risks, women actively engage in practices of digital purdah, utilizing workarounds like proxy-posting through male relatives to maintain both technical access and cultural modesty. By linking these offline barriers to online participation strategies, this study provides a vulnerability-centric framework and actionable design insights for creating more equitable online tech communities that explicitly address complex, deeply rooted socio-cultural constraints in non-WEIRD contexts. 

`I Know I Can Do the Job, It’s Just Putting It Down’: Using Personas as a Mirror to Identify Strengths

Mon, 13 Apr | 11:27 AM - 11:39 AM

Julie Hui, Mila Ekaterina Filipof, Soyoung Lee, Shanley Corvite, Mustafa Naseem, Tawanna Dillahunt

Work is increasingly shifting away from traditional full-time jobs toward more fragmented ways of working, like gig work and part-time jobs. Yet, employment platforms like LinkedIn often privilege those with traditional credentials and work histories, presenting barriers to those who possess little experience translating informal experiences into a format that such tools expect. To address this gap, we propose a narrative-based approach that enables individuals to recognize transferable skills and practice articulating them verbally and in writing via a group discussion setting. Through a participatory design workshop held in a public housing community, we demonstrate how a cultural-probe and persona-inspired activity can elicit self-reflection, enabling individuals to communicate their strengths. While prior HCI research has highlighted the critical need for reflection in the job search process, little work has been done to facilitate this reflection and translation into employment profiles. Our work addresses this call and informs new design directions for employment technologies.

TouchScribe: Augmenting Non-Visual Hand-Object Interactions with Automated Live Visual Descriptions

Mon, 13 Apr | 12:03 PM - 12:15 PM

Ruei-Che Chang, Rosiana Natalie, Wenqian Xu, Jovan Zheng Feng Yap, Tiange Luo, Venkatesh Potluri, Anhong Guo

People who are blind or have low vision regularly use their hands to interact with the physical world to gain access to objects' shape, size, weight, and texture. However, many rich visual features remain inaccessible through touch alone, making it difficult to distinguish similar objects, interpret visual affordances, and form a complete understanding of objects. In this work, we present TouchScribe, a system that augments hand-object interactions with automated live visual descriptions. We trained a custom egocentric hand interaction model to recognize both common gestures (e.g., grab to inspect, hold side-by-side to compare) and unique ones by blind people (e.g., point to explore color, or swipe to read available texts). Furthermore, TouchScribe provides real-time and adaptive feedback based on hand movement, from hand interaction states, to object labels, and to visual details. Our user study and technical evaluations demonstrate that TouchScribe can provide rich and useful descriptions to support object understanding. Finally, we discuss the implications of making live visual descriptions responsive to users' physical reach.

Privacy and Trust vs. Utility: Adoption of Commercial vs. Institutional AI assistants Among University Users

Tue, 14 Apr | 9:00 AM - 9:12 AM

Yuting Yang, Zixin Wang, Rongjun Ma, Florian Schaub 

Generative AI assistants are being rapidly adopted in universities, supporting students in coursework and faculty in academic tasks. To address privacy concerns, some institutions introduced institutional AI assistants, typically wrappers around commercial models (e.g., ChatGPT) with added governance and data protections. However, university-affiliated users appear to rely more on commercial tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini). We conducted a survey (n=260) at one U.S. university to examine preferences, usage scenarios, and perceptions of trust, privacy, and experience with institutional and commercial AI. Participants trusted institutional tools more and considered them more privacy protective, nevertheless commercial tools were often favored for writing, programming, and learning due to their features and utility. Findings reveal a trade-off between privacy and trust versus utility, highlighting complementary adoption patterns and design opportunities for both institutional and commercial AI in higher education.

Community Advisory Boards for Technology Design in HCI: Lessons from Trans and Queer Research

Tue, 14 Apr | 9:36 AM - 9:48 AM

Calvin A Liang, Kat Brewster, Kathryn Macapagal, Oliver Haimson

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) scholars have invested deeply in community-based research; however, partnering with community advisory boards (CABs) in HCI remains rare and underexplored. In this paper, we translate traditions common in public health and community-based participatory research by presenting case studies of research partnerships with three CABs, each assembled to co-design technologies for and with transgender and queer people. Drawing upon comparative case study analysis and ethnographic-inspired reflections, our findings outline each CAB's operations across establishment, implementation, and sustainability stages. We then present four key facilitators of fostering meaningful partnerships with CABs: establishing expectations, transparency in decision-making, attending to positionality, and benefits to participation beyond research. Finally, we recommend that future community-based sociotechnical research adopt CABs to create meaningful relationships with community partners. However, we demonstrate that doing so requires careful deliberation around mutually beneficial research, contextually dynamic partnerships, and strategies for realignment between academic and community needs.

Thing Ethnography in a Factory: Exploring Emergent and Dynamic Relations of Cobots and Workers

*Honorable Mention Award 

Tue, 14 Apr | 11:39 AM - 11:51 AM

Hyungjun Cho, Jiyeon Amy Seo, Yongjae Sohn, Hee Rin Lee 

Collaborative robots (cobots) are often portrayed as transformative technologies that promise efficiency and productivity in industrial workplaces, with their roles frequently pre-defined as autonomous collaborators to human workers. This paper presents a different picture based on an 18-day robot-centered thing ethnography conducted in a small-scale factory. In practice, the roles of cobots were dynamically constituted through intra-actions among CNC machines, human workers, and the factory owner. Our analysis identifies three roles: (1) frontline operators carrying out repetitive tasks, (2) care receivers dependent on continuous maintenance and cleaning, and (3) scapegoating managers whose stoppages summoned human intervention and mediation. These relational configurations foreground dynamics that remain backgrounded in human-centered accounts and offer a deeper understanding of how cobots are enacted within production environments. We argue that understanding cobot integration and advancing practical design discourse requires moving beyond assumptions of collaboration and autonomy, recognizing cobots as entities continuously redefined through their relations with environments and other agents.

Designing for Proactive Accountability: Lessons on Governing Technology from Detroit’s Food Sovereignty Movement

Tue, 14 Apr | 11:39 AM - 11:51 AM

Jared Lee Katzman, Ben Green, Tawanna Dillahunt 

Governance structures for new technologies are frequently top-down, reactive, and informally enforced, leaving marginalized communities with little power to address harms until after they occur. To address these limitations, we introduce Proactive Accountability, a conceptual framework theorizing that effective governance must be community-led, formally enforced, and continually maintained. We explore these principles through a speculative design study with Detroit's food sovereignty community, in which participants identified community-owned cooperatives---described as ``ancestral technologies''---as a model for redistributing power within a capitalist economy. Synthesizing these theoretical and empirical insights, we introduce the Designing for Proactive Accountability (D4PA) framework, providing implications for how designers can operationalize the goals of proactive accountability into HCI research and design projects. Finally, we contribute a future research agenda that positions cooperatives not merely as beneficiaries of design, but as sites of inquiry for understanding how to institutionalize justice-oriented democratic governance of sociotechnical systems.

Instructional Mechanisms for Professional Writing: A Comparison of Scaffolded Annotation and ChatGPT

Tue, 14 Apr | 12:27 PM - 12:39 PM

Shanley Corvite, Rebecca L Matz, Mark Mills, Julie Hui

Professional writing skills are essential for crafting job application materials where applicants showcase their qualifications to recruiters and employers. Lettersmith is a digital tool that supports writing through scaffolded annotation, an instructional approach combining an expert-informed checklist, annotated examples, and self-tagging. We evaluated the efficacy of the instructional mechanisms that make up scaffolded annotation, as well as the use of ChatGPT, in facilitating writing cognitive processes and writing quality. Through a lab experiment with 146 first-year college students writing and revising a cover letter, we found that the combined mechanisms of scaffolded annotation within Lettersmith promoted a stronger understanding of the writing genre. Specifically, the use of a checklist combined with another writing support, like an example or self-tagging, was particularly effective for improving writing quality. Unstructured use of ChatGPT did not improve writing cognitive processes or writing quality more than Lettersmith.

“I Felt Bad After We Ignored Her”: Understanding How Interface-Driven Social Prominence Shapes Group Discussions with GenAI

Wed, 15 Apr | 9:00 AM - 9:12 AM

Janet G Johnson, Rujie Sophia Huang, Khoa Nguyen, Ji Young Nam, Michael Nebeling 

Recent advancements in the conversational and social capabilities of generative AI (GenAI) have sparked interest in its role as an agent capable of actively participating in human-AI group discussions. Despite this momentum, we don’t fully understand how GenAI shapes conversational dynamics or how the interface design impacts its influence on the group. In this paper, we introduce interface-driven social prominence as a design lens for collaborative GenAI systems. We then present a GenAI-based conversational agent that can actively engage in spoken dialogue during video calls and design three distinct collaboration modes that vary the social prominence of the agent by manipulating its presence in the shared space and the degree of control users have over its participation. A mixed-methods within-subjects study, in which 18 dyads engaged in realistic discussions with a GenAI agent, offers empirical insights into how communication patterns and the collective negotiation of GenAI's influence shift based on how it is embedded into the collaborative experience. Based on these findings, we outline design implications for supporting the coordination and critical engagement required in human-AI groups.

UnWEIRDing Peer Review in Human-Computer Interaction

Wed, 15 Apr | 9:48 AM - 10:00 AM

Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Farhana Shahid, Vishal Sharma, Abigail Oppong, Michaelanne Thomas, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed

Peer review determines which scholarship is legitimized; however, review biases often disadvantage scholarship that diverges from the norm. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lacks a systemic inquiry into how such biases affect underrepresented Global South (GS) scholarship. To address this critical gap, we conducted four focus groups with 16 HCI researchers studying the GS. Participants reported experiencing reviews that confined them to development research, dismissed their theoretical contributions, and questioned situated knowledge from GS communities. Both as authors and reviewers, participants reported experiencing the epistemic burden of over-explaining why knowledge from GS communities matters. Further, they noted being tokenized as "cultural experts'' when assigned to review papers and pointed out that the hidden curriculum of writing HCI papers often gatekeeps GS scholarship. Using epistemic oppression as a lens, we discuss how review practices marginalize GS scholarship and outline actionable strategies for nurturing equitable epistemological evaluation of HCI scholarship.

Balancing Goals, Health, and Cost: A Food Information System for Managing Complex Choices and Fostering Sustained Food Agency

Wed, 15 Apr | 11:15 AM - 11:27 AM

Annalisa Syzmanski, Jeongwon Jo, Michelle Sawwan, Heather Eicher-Miller, Ann-Marie Conrado, Danielle Wood, Tawanna Dillahunt, Ronald Metoyer 

Technology offers new opportunities to support healthier food choices, particularly for individuals in low-income communities who face systemic barriers to obtaining nutritious, affordable groceries. We introduce a novel conceptual model of grocery planning that frames food purchasing as a multi-objective optimization problem that considers cost, nutrition components, and a consumer's personal dietary goals. Guided by Zimmerman’s model of Self-Regulated Learning and prior research on food agency, we designed the Food Information System, a planning tool that provides optimized product recommendations aligned with users’ goals by integrating store inventory, prices, and nutritional data. We evaluated our system in an eight-week within-subjects intervention with 55 participants from a food-insecure community, followed by focus group sessions. While overall Healthy Eating Index scores remained largely stable, participants reported improved nutritional awareness and greater perceived agency in planning and purchasing groceries. We discuss design implications to support food agency by promoting long-term food literacy and by enhancing autonomy in making food choices.

Silencing \& Surging: A Layered Ecology of Algorithmic Repression and Resistance in the Gaza Escalations

Wed, 15 Apr | 11:15 AM - 11:27 AM

Houda Elmimouni, Sarah Ruller, Yarden Skop, Norah Abokhodair, Konstantin Kosta Aal, Tashfia Fetema, Mahmoud Fawzi, Ghadeer Awwad, Walid Magdy, Vokler Wulf, Peter Tolmie

During the 2023–ongoing Gaza war, Palestinian advocacy on social media has faced rapid removals, downranking, and account sanctions. In this contribution, we offer a layered analysis of how people endure and counter this repression across affective, mechanistic, and material dimensions. Using patchwork ethnography over 295 first-person testimonies and 85 NGO/press documents, we identify a recursive Contest Loop: hostile mass-report brigades and automated enforcement that spur supporter ``appeal brigades,'' mirroring, and migration. Findings are organized as a three-layer ecology---Invisible Scars (whiplash, shadowbanning as probabilistic throttling, self-censorship), Dueling Brigades (frictions, coordinated reports, supporter procedures), and Feed-to-Street Ripples (fundraising, evidentiary preservation, livelihoods). Conceptually, we extend platform-assemblage thinking with a Resistance Assemblage: ad-hoc technical, emotional, and legal mutual-aid infrastructures that keep visibility alive under sanction. We contribute: (1) an event-centered, experience-near account of co-produced moderation in conflict; (2) two integrative lenses (Contest Loop, Resistance Assemblage); and (3) design/policy directions, including collective-appeal dashboards, and evidentiary safeguards that separate archiving from distribution.

What do we mean by social support? A systematic review of HCI research investigating and designing for social support

Wed, 15 Apr | 11:15 AM - 11:27 AM

Xuanyu Liu, Joseph Heger, Irene Yu, Gabriela Marcu 

Social support contributes to numerous health outcomes and overall well-being, and technology now facilitates many forms of support among both strangers and existing ties. Consequently, Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research has devoted significant attention to understanding and designing for social support. We conducted a systematic review of 183 papers to take stock of this work. We identified several dominant trends: studies frequently focus on social media and online communities, address health-related topics, and explore interactions among strangers who share an identity or experience; use survey and interview methodologies; and encompass user research without the design or deployment of a new system. Notably, most papers do not explicitly conceptualize social support and tend to frame it as uniformly positive. Our review indicates that, although technology increasingly mediates supportive interactions, HCI lacks consistent definitions of technologically mediated social support. We contribute a synthesis of conceptualizations, point out methodological patterns, and offer directions for strengthening future HCI research in this domain.

Understanding Gendered Experiences of Harassment Among Pakistani Young Adults Using Human-Centered Threat Modeling

Wed, 15 Apr | 12:03 PM - 12:15 PM

Warda Usman, Taha Taha, Saba Iqbal, Amna Batool, Daniel Zappala 

Harassment impacts the safety and well-being of young adults in Pakistan. Prior research has largely focused on women, often imposing external definitions of harm and overlooking how individuals themselves understand and respond to harassment. This study examines how Pakistani young adults define, experience, and cope with harassment. Drawing on 33 semi-structured interviews guided by a human-centered threat modeling framework, we surface context-specific threat models. Participants’ definitions of harassment were shaped by gender norms, religious values, and moral judgments. Women described harassment as a routine part of life, tied to public visibility, modesty norms. Men also reported harassment, though framed by different dynamics such as pressure to maintain control, avoid vulnerability, and conform to masculinity. Across participants, formal reporting pathways were viewed as untrustworthy or unsafe. Our findings highlight the need for interventions that reflect local definitions of harm, address relational adversaries, and support safety within sociocultural contexts.

Auditorily Embodied Conversational Agents: Effects of Spatialization and Situated Audio Cues on Presence and Social Perception

Wed, 15 Apr | 12:15 PM - 12:27 PM

Yi Fei Cheng, Jarod Bloch, Alexander Wang, Andrea Bianchi, Anusha Wishana, Anhong Guo, Laurie M. Heller, David Lindlbauer

Embodiment can enhance conversational agents, such as increasing their perceived presence. This is typically achieved through visual representations of a virtual body; however, visual modalities are not always available, such as when users interact with agents using headphones or display-less glasses. In this work, we explore auditory embodiment. By introducing auditory cues of bodily presence — through spatially localized voice and situated Foley audio from environmental interactions — we investigate how audio alone can convey embodiment and influence perceptions of a conversational agent. We conducted a 2 (spatialization: monaural vs. spatialized) × 2 (Foley: none vs. Foley) within-subjects study, where participants (n=24) engaged in conversations with agents. Our results show that spatialization and Foley increase co-presence, but reduce users’ perceptions of the agent’s attention and other social attributes.

Digital Infrastructural Resistance: Working Around Severe Telecommunication Disruptions in Gaza

Wed, 15 Apr | 12:03 PM - 12:15 PM

Ghadeer Awwad, Kentaro Toyama 

Despite experiencing extensive losses in telecommunication infrastructure since October 2023, Gazans have managed to communicate with the outside world. How have they accomplished this? Through semi-structured interviews with 18 Gazan residents, this study examines how Gazans have perceived various interruptions and losses of electronic communication, how they responded and worked around communication limits, and why they persisted in communicating outside of Gaza. Our findings confirm previous results about communication under state-imposed telecom shutdowns, and also contribute new knowledge, given Gaza’s distinctive political and technological dynamic. We find that restrictions drove participants– who felt compelled to maintain contact – to perpetual technical improvisation, often toward pre-digital tools, varying by geography, available technology, and electrical power. Creative, subaltern networks such as Bluetooth meshes and street internet disrupted severe repression. Our participants discussed such activities as a response to the larger context of violence, and we conceptualize their efforts as "digital infrastructural resistance."

"My Brother Is a School Principal, Earns About $80,000 Per Year... But When the Kids See Me, 'Wow, Uncle, You Have 1,500 Followers on TikTok!'": A Study of Blind TikTokers' Alternative Professional Development Experiences

Thu, 16 Apr | 9:24 AM - 9:36 AM

Yao Lyu, Tawanna Dillahunt, Jiaying “Lizzy” Liu, John M. Carrol 

One’s profession is an essential part of modern life. Traditionally, professional development has been criticized for excluding people with disabilities. People with visual impairments, for example, face disproportionately low employment rates, highlighting persistent gaps in professional opportunities. Recently, there has been growing research on social media platforms as spaces for more equitable career development approaches. In this paper, we present an interview study on the professional development experiences of 60 people with visual impairments on TikTok (also known as “BlindTokers”). We report BlindTokers’ goals, strategies, and challenges, supported by detailed examples and in-depth analysis. Based on the findings, we identified that BlindTokers’ practices reveal an alternative professional development approach that is more flexible, inclusive, personalized, and diversified than traditional models. Our study also extends professional development research by foregrounding emerging digital skills and proposing design implications to foster more equitable and inclusive professional opportunities.

The Burden of Bearing Witness: Digital Practices of Marginalized Social Media Users in High-Stakes Contexts

Thu, 16 Apr | 9:48 AM - 10:00 AM

Sena Kojah, Hibby Thach, Oliver Haimson, Michaelanne Thomas 

Social media platforms and their governance policies often fail marginalized users in high-stakes contexts, including war, violent attacks, human rights violations, humanitarian crises, and situations of systemic oppression. Through interviews, autoethnography, and digital ethnography, this paper presents three case studies from Venezuela, Nigeria, and the United States to examine how marginalized populations engage with social media in non-normative ways. We analyze how platform design and policies intersect with participants’ identities, marginalization, and labor. Our central finding is that users’ urgent infrastructural and contextual needs are often overlooked, revealing structural flaws in social media design that mimic physical-world power asymmetries. In response, users develop innovative workarounds, engage in self-censorship, and adopt coping strategies, undertaking additional, often invisible, sociotechnical repair work that reinforces their precarity. To address these complex needs, we urge social media companies to collaborate with marginalized users to integrate alternative infrastructural features, such as emergency response tools and exit mechanisms for well-being.

Embracing Chaos Again: Tracing Boundary Negotiating Artifacts in Knowledge Workers’ Data Practices for Collaborative Public Health Crisis Response

Thu, 16 Apr | 9:48 AM - 10:00 AM

Jian-Sin Lee, Tiffany Veinot, Elizabeth Yakel 

As knowledge workers, university personnel’s data partnerships with government entities represent an emerging mode of collaboration for public health crisis response. However, little is known about how such collaborations unfold in non-routine, complex settings. This paper investigates a data partnership between a university research team and a state health department during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on 15 interviews with university personnel, we analyzed their data practices using boundary negotiating artifacts (BNA) theory, identifying five key challenges and related artifacts. We found that the absence or breakdown of artifacts pushed university personnel toward ad hoc workarounds, while power dynamics complicated artifact creation and use. Consequently, collaboration relied more on broader sociotechnical arrangements than on artifacts themselves. These insights both enrich BNA theory’s defining features of non-routine, complex collaborations and point to design opportunities for supporting knowledge workers engaged in crisis-driven data partnerships, which are often politically charged.

AmongOthers: A Design Speculation for Rethinking AI in Online Social Communities

Thu, 16 Apr | 10:00 AM - 10:12 AM

Hyungjun Cho, Jiyeon Amy Seo, Woosuk Seo, Naomi Yamashita

Artificial intelligence (AI) is deepening human social experiences within online spaces in increasingly layered ways. Amid these shifts, we designed AmongOthers, an online community populated with 800 AI agents, and rethought human–AI social interactions. Eight participants engaged with AmongOthers for four weeks. For the first two weeks, they were told the community was exclusively for immigrants and international students, after which we disclosed that most users were AI agents. Participants shared periodic reflections and later joined interviews. Initially, AmongOthers was described as warm and respectful. However, after disclosure, participants diverged in their attitudes toward AI in online social communities, ranging from embracing and denying to imagining it only as a conditional possibility. We discuss these tensions in human perceptions of AI and highlight the risks of framing AI as failed replicas or preferable proxies. We finally suggest rethinking AI as distinct social entities in their own right.

Patchworking Networks of Support: On the Digital Successes and Challenges of Women- and Minority-Owned Restaurant Businesses

Thu, 16 Apr | 10:12 AM - 10:24 AM

Matthew Bui, Cameron Moy, Hibby Thach, Julie Hui

The restaurant industry has become increasingly reliant on digital technologies for business operations, digital marketing, and promotion, especially amid and after the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper presents the findings of a two-year study exploring how women- and minority-owned restaurants in Chicago and Detroit encountered and overcame digital challenges in their day-to-day operations, across a range of levels of digital skills and literacy. Drawing from semi-structured and impromptu interviews with restaurant owners (n=47) and participant observation, we apply HCI literature on infrastructuring and patchworking to highlight how restaurateurs' experiences often run counter to the assumptions of a "typical" user. Indeed, they often must build and leverage their—offline and online—networks of support to overcome failing infrastructures, both within the restaurant industry and on digital platforms. Concurrently, we emphasize the importance of community building and social infrastructuring to overcome these challenges while also building up alternative networks of resources for their communities, especially considering identity-related inequalities and amid a global moment of crisis.

Counter-Visual Artifacts: Negotiating Surveillance and Carceral Visuality in Public Housing through Videovoice

Thu, 16 Apr | 11:15 AM - 11:27 AM

Alex Jiahong Lu, Mark S. Ackerman, Zachary Rowe, Tawanna Dillahunt

U.S. public housing is historically a site of racialized and carceral surveillance. Digital surveillance technologies reinforce this containment by mediating carceral visuality, the institutionalized visual and analytic lenses that shape perceptions and governance of public housing spaces and residents. This paper presents a videovoice project with a public housing community, for which residents used smartphones to capture their routines, spatial practices, and imaginaries in relation to surveillance. We analyze how these video artifacts enact alternative ways of seeing and knowing, surfacing overlooked routines, relations, and critiques of surveillance. These videos document what is often invisibilized: the lived consequences of carceral visuality and the situated knowledge of those surveilled. We propose ``counter-visual artifacts'' to describe the political and disruptive role these videos play in challenging dominant visual regimes and reclaiming the right to see and be seen otherwise. By advocating for counter-visual sensibilities, we invite HCI scholars to rethink how artifacts make room for alternative ways of seeing.

SIGCHI Awards — Lifetime Service 

Thu, 16 Apr | 2:15 PM - 3:45 PM

Cliff Lampe 

University of Michigan School of Information professor Cliff Lampe has earned a 2026 Association for Computer Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Lifetime Service Award.

The award recognizes individuals who have contributed to the growth and success of SIGCHI in a variety of capacities and honors the extended service to the community at large over a number of years. 

Do Teachers Dream of GenAI Widening Educational (In)equality? Envisioning the Future of K-12 GenAI Education from Global Teachers’ Perspectives

Fri, 17 Apr | 9:00 AM - 9:12 AM

Ruiwei Xiao, Qing Xiao, Xinying Hou, Phenyo Phemelo Moletsane, Hanqi Jane Li, Hong Shen, John Stamper 

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly entering K-12 classrooms worldwide, initiating urgent debates about its potential to either reduce or exacerbate educational inequalities. Drawing on interviews with 30 K-12 teachers across the United States, South Africa, and Taiwan, this study examines how teachers navigate this GenAI tension around educational equalities. We found teachers actively framed GenAI education as an equality-oriented practice: they used it to alleviate pre-existing inequalities while simultaneously working to prevent new inequalities from emerging. Despite these efforts, teachers confronted persistent systemic barriers, i.e., unequal infrastructure, insufficient professional training, and restrictive social norms, that individual initiative alone could not overcome. Teachers thus articulated normative visions for more inclusive GenAI education. By centering teachers’ practices, constraints, and future envisions, this study contributes a global account of how GenAI education is being integrated into K-12 contexts and highlights what is required to make its adoption genuinely equal.

Nonvisual Support for Understanding and Reasoning about Data Structures

Fri, 17 Apr | 10:12 AM - 10:24 AM

Brianna L Wimer, Ritesh Kanchi, Kaija Frierson, Venkatesh Potluri, Ronald Metoyer, Jennifer Mankoff, Miya Natsuhara, Matt Wang

Blind and visually impaired (BVI) computer science students face systematic barriers when learning data structures: current accessibility approaches typically translate diagrams into alternative text, focusing on visual appearance rather than preserving the underlying structure essential for conceptual understanding. More accessible alternatives often do not scale in complexity, cost to produce, or both. Motivated by a recent shift to tools for creating visual diagrams from code, we propose a solution that automatically creates accessible representations from structural information about diagrams. Based on a Wizard-of-Oz study, we derive design requirements for an automated system, Arboretum, that compiles text-based diagram specifications into three synchronized nonvisual formats—tabular, navigable, and tactile. Our evaluation with BVI users highlights the strength of tactile graphics for complex tasks such as binary search; the benefits of offering multiple, complementary nonvisual representations; and limitations of existing digital navigation patterns for structural reasoning. This work reframes access to data structures by preserving their structural properties. The solution is a practical system to advance accessible CS education.

PeriphAR: Fast and Accurate Real-World Object Selection with Peripheral Augmented Reality Displays

Fri, 17 Apr | 11:27 AM - 11:39 AM

Yutong Ren, Arnav Reddy, Michael Nebeling

Gaze-based selection in XR requires visual confirmation due to eye-tracking limitations and target ambiguity in 3D contexts. Current designs for wide-FOV displays use world-locked, central overlays, which is not conducive to always-on AR glasses. This paper introduces PeriphAR (/peh-ree-faar/), a visualization technique that leverages peripheral vision for feedback during gaze-based selection on a monocular AR display. In a first user study, we isolated text, color, and shape properties of target objects to compare peripheral selection cues. Peripheral vision was more sensitive to color than shape, but this sensitivity rapidly declined at lower contrast. To preserve preattentive processing of color, we developed two strategies to enhance color in users' peripheral vision. In a second user study, our strategy that maximized contrast of the target to the neighboring object with the most similar color was subjectively preferred. As proof of concept, we implemented PeriphAR in an end-to-end system to test performance with real-world object detection.

"I can take what I want and adapt as needed": BIPOC Identity Making and Resistance Through Internet Aesthetics on TikTok

Fri, 17 Apr | 11:27 AM - 11:39 AM

Natalie Chen, Gianna Williams, Alexandra To, Michael Ann DeVito 

Internet Aesthetics are personal styles that are curated, instantiated, and remade on social media through collections of art, fashion, sensory experiences, literature, and media to communicate and share lifestyle narratives. BIPOC users often use Internet Aesthetics on TikTok as identity-making tools. However, they may experience algorithmic symbolic annihilation in which the platform neglects the existence of BIPOC in particular Internet Aesthetics, reducing their agency over their online identity-making. Using semi-structured interviews, we identify how BIPOC users understand Internet Aesthetics and what strategies BIPOC use to engage with them on TikTok. We discuss how BIPOC users apply algorithmic folk theories and offline strategies to resist symbolic annihilation while engaging in identity-making by extracting joy and meaning from Internet Aesthetics. We also model the uncertainty BIPOC users face around experiencing symbolic annihilation using the concept of microaggressions and give guidance on designing tools to addressing this phenomenon.

Safety With Community: Technologies of Care, Connection, Collective Safety, and Mutual Aid for Transgender Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (TBIPOC)

Fri, 17 Apr | 11:39 AM - 11:51 AM

Denny Starks, Hibby Thach, Aloe DeGuia, Tawanna Dillahunt, Oliver Haimson

Technology has the potential to enhance safety by supporting community-driven strategies. However, current safety technologies often narrowly frame safety as preventing violence, without incorporating the community-centered strategies essential to well-being for transgender, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (TBIPOC). We conducted 22 interviews with TBIPOC individuals to understand their safety challenges, experiences navigating violence, and safety strategies. Our findings reveal that safety is not only the absence of harm but also the presence of trust, connection, collective care, and mutual aid. Participants emphasized survival resources like self-defense training and trans-specific spaces, alongside joy rooted in community and support. We argue that community is not separate from safety; it is its foundation. This work contributes fundamental knowledge about TBIPOCs’ experiences and design implications for technologies that affirm TBIPOC lives. Designing for TBIPOC safety requires shifting toward community-centered technologies and non-technological approaches that prioritize lived experiences, mutual aid, and collective joy.

“Families are messy”: From Parent-Child Tensions to Family-Centered Design of Smart Home Technologies

*Best Paper Award 

Fri, 17 Apr | 12:03 PM - 12:15 PM

Kaiwen Sun, Jade Xiaoyi Li, Irene Chung, Jenny Radesky, Jason Yip, Christopher Brooks, Florian Schaub

Smart home technologies have become common in family homes, making even young children inevitable users of these technologies. However, these systems are typically designed for individual adults, creating family tensions and conflicts over children's access, safety, and appropriate smart home use. To investigate children's and parents' individual and joint smart home needs and dynamics, we conducted an in-home study with nine families (children aged 6-11). We identify four key parent-child tensions with smart home technologies, including struggles over parental protection versus children's autonomy, differing views on technology's purpose, disagreements over technology-enforced routines, and children's vulnerability to embedded commercialism. Our work reconceptualizes parental mediation as a process of ``tension management'' rather than the application of static rules. This research challenges the dominant individual-centric choice architecture in smart home design, calling for a family-centered approach that acknowledges and adapts to the fluid, complex, and negotiated reality of modern family life.

Platforms as Crime Scene, Judge, and Jury: How Victim-Survivors of Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery Report Abuse Online

Fri, 17 Apr | 12:03 PM - 12:15 PM

Li Qiwei, Katelyn Kennon, Nicole Bedera, Asia A. Eaton, Eric Gilbert, Sarita Schoenebeck

Non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), also known as image-based sexual abuse (IBSA), is mediated through online platforms. Victim-survivors must turn to platforms to collect evidence and request content removal. Platforms act as the crime scene, judge, and jury, determining whether perpetrators face consequences and if harmful material is removed. We present a study of NCII victim-survivors' online reporting experiences, drawing on trauma-informed interviews with 13 participants. We find that platform reporting processes are hostile, opaque, and ineffective, often forcing complex harms into narrow interfaces, responding inconsistently, and failing to result in meaningful action. Leveraging institutional betrayal theory, we show how platforms' structures and practices compound harm, and, in doing so, surface concrete intervention points for redesigning reporting systems and shaping policy to better support victim-survivors.

A11y-CUA Dataset: Characterizing the Accessibility Gap in Computer Use Agents

Fri, 17 Apr | 12:03 PM - 12:15 PM

Ananya Gubbi Mohanbabu, Rosiana Natalie, Brandon Kim, Anhong Guo, Amy Pavel 

Computer Use Agents (CUAs) operate interfaces by pointing, clicking, and typing - mirroring interactions of sighted users (SUs) who can thus monitor CUAs and share control. CUAs do not reflect interactions by blind and low-vision users (BLVUs) who use assistive technology (AT). BLVUs thus cannot easily collaborate with CUAs. To characterize the accessibility gap of CUAs, we present A11y-CUA, a dataset of BLVUs and SUs performing 60 everyday tasks with 40.4 hours and 158,325 events. Our dataset analysis reveals that our collected interaction traces quantitatively confirm distinct interaction styles between SU and BLVU groups (mouse- vs.keyboard-dominant) and demonstrate interaction diversity within each group (sequential vs. shortcut navigation for BLVUs). We then compare collected traces to state-of-the-art CUAs under default and AT conditions (keyboard-only, magnifier). The default CUA executed 78.3% of tasks successfully. But with the AT conditions, CUA’s performance dropped to 41.67% and 28.3% with keyboard-only and magnifier conditions respectively, and did not reflect nuances of real AT use. With our open A11y-CUA dataset, we aim to promote collaborative and accessible CUAs for everyone.

Navigating Safety and Technology: The Everyday Safety Labor of Transgender Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the United States

Fri, 17 Apr | 12:27 PM - 12:39 PM

Denny L. Starks, Hibby Thach, Aloe DeGuia, Tawanna Dillahunt, Oliver Haimson

Technologies like online support networks and safety apps hold promise for improving personal safety. However, these tools often fail to address the widespread violence against gender-diverse individuals, particularly transgender Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (TBIPOC) in the United States. To better understand technology's role in managing safety among TBIPOC individuals, we conducted 22 semi-structured interviews. We found that participants engaged in what we call safety labor, the emotional and cognitive work of managing misrecognition, assessing risk, and downplaying discomfort to maintain self-preservation. Visibly-trans participants faced greater vulnerability and tended to feel safer when their trans identity was not visible. Technology enabled sharing locations and rides, and sending coded messages. Findings highlight the need for tailored technologies that protect privacy and help TBIPOC individuals when they experience violence. Our research contributes a deeper understanding of TBIPOC experiences and informs technology development to promote TBIPOCs’ safety.

Workshops

Towards Proactive Approaches to Combating Toxicity, Harassment, and Abuse in Online Social Spaces: A Collaborative Theory-Building Workshop

Tue, 14 Apr | 2:15 PM - 3:45 PM

Regan L. Mandryk, Guo Freeman, Julian Frommel, Jan Gugenheimer, Cliff Lampe, Lingyuan Li, Michel Wijkstra, Douglas Zytko

Toxic and harmful online interactions represent a pervasive issue across diverse contemporary online social spaces, ranging from social media, online gaming, and online dating to social VR. Toxicity has caused severe harms on the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of online users and community members. One reason for the persistence of such online toxicity is that most existing interventions rely on detection and sanctioning, while there is often not one group of "toxic'' users that can be sanctioned and excluded. Therefore, exploring proactive interventions that reduce the likelihood of problematic behaviour before it happens is critical. However, to effectively design and develop such interventions, we need to first better understand and theorize the complex contextual interactions that lead to toxic behaviours online (when, why, and for whom it develops). In this workshop, we convene experts spanning various domains of online toxicity to synthesize existing knowledge and initiate the development of a comprehensive theoretical framework that will support the development of proactive interventions to combating toxicity, harassment, and abuse in online social spaces.

Restoring Human Authenticity in AI-Mediated Communication

Wed, 15 Apr | 2:15 PM - 3:45 PM, Wed, 15 Apr | 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

Jiyeon Amy Seo, Hyungjun Cho, Naomi Yamashita, Woosuk Seo, Ge Gao, Elizabeth Gerber, Wolker Wulf, Pernille Bjorn, Donghee Yvette Wohn

People now connect, collaborate, and maintain relationships through technologies far more complex than early computer-mediated communication (CMC). Beyond text, audio, and video, today’s tools include social robots, tangible interfaces, and virtual reality, all actively shaping routines and relationships. The rapid rise of AI further changes the picture: it now edits, augments, and even generates messages, transforming how people express intentions and emotions. These capabilities promise assistive gains but also raise concerns about authenticity, over-automation, and interaction quality. This workshop invites interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners to examine opportunities and challenges in integrating AI into communication technologies. We view communication as a layered social practice involving the negotiation of presence and connectedness, attention to partners and contexts, and self-presentation while attuning to others’ emotions. Our goals are to: (1) co-develop design agendas grounded in these practices, (2) identify recurring opportunities and risks of AI integration, and (3) propose sustainable directions that respect autonomy, authenticity, and social well-being. Participants will share experiences and uncover design opportunities through short talks and interactive sessions. Together, we aim to deepen understanding of CMC in the age of AI and reimagine technologies that foster meaningful interaction. 

Panels 

The Global Impact of Generative AI on the HCI Landscape: International Perspectives on HCI Education, Industry Dynamics, and Funding Considerations

Wed, 15 Apr | 2:15 PM - 3:45 PM

Guo Freeman, Cliff Lampe, Elizabeth D Mynatt, Heloisa Candello, Kori Inkpen, Nitesh Goyal, Karrie Karahalios, Xiaojuan Ma, Pawel W. Wozniak

In recent years, we have witnessed a boom of AI-related research from both academia and industry at CHI. Built upon these ongoing conversations and a recent panel at CSCW 2025, this panel aims to promote community-wide discussions that reflect on generative AI’s multidimensional impact on the global HCI landscape beyond specific research agendas or directions. In particular, rather than discussing such impact at the regional or even national level, we will highlight international perspectives on AI’s impact on HCI education, industry dynamics, and funding considerations across various cultures and regions. Featuring a diverse group of panelists, including academic leaders in HCI education and industry experts from various regions, this panel aims to foster collective reflection at CHI on key questions crucial to sustaining the future of HCI as an international community.

Posters

"Without AI, I Would Never Share This Online": Unpacking How LLMs Catalyze Women's Sharing of Gendered Experiences on Social Media

Mon, 13 Apr | 2:15 PM - 3:45 PM, Mon, 13 Apr | 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

Runhua Zhang, Ziqi Pan, Huiran Yi, Huamin Qu, Xiaojuan Ma

Sharing gendered experiences on social media has been widely recognized as supporting women's personal sense-making and contributing to digital feminism. However, there are known concerns, such as fear of judgment and backlash, that may discourage women from posting online. In this study, we examine a recurring practice on Xiaohongshu, a popular Chinese social media platform, in which women share their gendered experiences alongside screenshots of conversations with LLMs. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 women to investigate whether and how interactions with LLMs might support women in articulating and sharing gendered experiences. Our findings reveal that, beyond those external concerns, women also hold self-imposed standards regarding what feels appropriate and worthwhile to share publicly. We further show how interactions with LLMs help women meet these standards and navigate such concerns. We conclude by discussing how LLMs might be carefully and critically leveraged to support women's everyday expression online.

Exploring Needs and Design Opportunities for Proactive Information Support in In-Person Small-Group Conversations

Mon, 13 Apr | 2:15 PM - 3:45 PM, Mon, 13 Apr | 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

Shaoze Zhou, Diana Rodriguez, Pedro Remior, Joaquin Frangi, Lingyao Li, Renkai Ma, Janet Johnson, Christine Lisetti, Chen Chen 

In-person small-group conversations play a crucial role in everyday life; however, facilitating effective group interaction can be challenging, as the real-time nature demands full attention, offers no opportunity for revision, and requires interpreting non-verbal cues. Using Mixed Reality to provide proactive information support shows promise in helping individuals engage in and contribute to group conversations. We present a preliminary participatory design and qualitative study (N = 10) using focus groups and two technology probes to explore the opportunities of designing proactive information support in in-person small-group conversations. We reveal key design opportunities concerning how to maximize the benefits of proactive information support and how to effectively design such supporting information. Our study is crucial for paving the way toward designing future proactive AI agents to enable the paradigm of augmented in-person small-group conversation experience.

Algorithmic and Gender-Specific Challenges of Gig Work in the Indonesian Ride-Hailing Industry: Preliminary Findings

Tue, 14 Apr | 2:15 PM - 3:45 PM, Tue, 14 Apr | 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

Annisa Permata Yudiani, Mustafa Naseem, Tawanna Dillahunt 

Gig platforms promise freedom and flexibility for their workers, yet their algorithm significantly restricts workers’ autonomy. Women ride-hailing drivers in particular face additional safety risks and discrimination in this male-dominated industry, but little is known about their coping strategies to navigate algorithmic and gender-specific challenges in collectivist contexts such as Indonesia. Through semi-structured interviews with 16 Indonesian women drivers, we show that algorithmic and gender-specific challenges are deeply intertwined and that major ride-hailing platforms vary in their support for women drivers. Women drivers adopt strategies such as negotiating with customers to reduce gender-motivated trip cancellations and relying on driver communities to mitigate safety concerns. We conclude with policy and design recommendations to advance gender equity in the ride-hailing industry.

From Searchable to Non-Searchable: Generative AI and Information Diversity in Online Information Seeking

Wed, 15 Apr | 2:15 PM - 3:45 PM, Wed, 15 Apr | 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

Yulin Yu, Yizhou Li, Siddharth Suri, Scott Counts 

Conversational generative AI systems such as ChatGPT are transforming how people seek and engage with information online. Unlike traditional search engines, these systems support open-ended, conversational inquiry, yet it remains unclear whether they expand or constrain the diversity of knowledge users encounter—an essential foundation for knowledge work, learning, and innovation. Using over 200,000 real-world human–ChatGPT interactions, we examine how generative-AI–mediated inquiry reshapes diversity in both user inputs and system outputs through the lens of searchability, or whether a query could plausibly be answered by a traditional search engine. We find that nearly 80% of ChatGPT queries are non-searchable and span broader topics and knowledge space, indicating expanded modes of inquiry. However, for comparable searchable queries, AI responses are less diverse than Google search results across most topics. Moreover, response diversity predicts subsequent changes in users’ inquiry diversity, revealing a feedback loop between AI outputs and human exploration.

Surveillance, Spacing, Screaming and Scabbing: How Digital Technology Facilitates Union Busting

Thu, 16 Apr | 11:39 AM - 11:51 AM

Frederick Reiber, Nathan Chan-Yeong Kim, Allison McDonald, Dana Calacci 

Despite high approval ratings for unions and growing worker interest in organizing, employees in the United States still face significant barriers to securing collective bargaining agreements. A key factor is employer counter-organizing: efforts to suppress unionization through rule changes, retaliation, and disruption. Designing sociotechnical tools and strategies to resist these tactics requires a deeper understanding of the role computing technologies play in counter-organizing against unionization. In this paper, we examine three high-profile organizing efforts–at Amazon, Starbucks, and Boston University–using publicly available sources to identify four recurring technological tactics: surveillance, spacing, screaming and scabbing. We analyze how these tactics operate across contexts, highlighting their digital dimensions and strategic deployment. We conclude with implications for organizing in digitally-mediated workplaces, directions for future research, and emergent forms of worker resistance.

Role Reversals and Role-Based Inequality on Stack Overflow After the Release of ChatGPT

Thu, 16 Apr | 2:15 PM - 3:45 PM, Thu, 16 Apr | 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

Ji Eun Kim, Lea Vitale, Yulin Yu 

This study examines how patterns of knowledge consumption and production changed among users with different roles—consumers, producers, hybrid users, and low-activity users—on Stack Overflow, one of the largest programming-focused Q&A communities, following the launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. We find that consumers (users who primarily ask questions) and producers (users who primarily provide answers) exhibit behavioral patterns that run counter to their traditional roles: after the release of ChatGPT, consumers ask fewer questions but contribute more answers, while producers ask more questions and provide fewer answers. Beyond these role reversals, we find evidence of widening inequality in recognized knowledge production. Following the intervention, answers provided by producers are accepted more frequently, while consumers experience a decline in their answer acceptance rates. This divergence emerges despite an increase in the volume of answers posted by consumers, suggesting that greater participation does not necessarily translate into greater recognition. Together, these findings highlight the heterogeneous effects of generative AI on different user groups and underscore the need for future research to examine who benefits from and who is disadvantaged by AI-mediated participation.

Simulating Human Cursor Trajectories for Path-Sensitive GUI Evaluation

Thu, 16 Apr | 2:15 PM - 3:45 PM, Thu, 16 Apr | 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

Xiangyu Zhou, Steve Oney

User simulation models support predictive evaluation of interface designs by generating synthetic interaction behavior. While existing models can accurately simulate unconstrained pointing and clicking, many common graphical user interface interactions impose geometric constraints on cursor motion, where the path taken directly affects interaction outcomes. We present a parametrizable generative user simulation model that generates realistic cursor trajectories for such tasks by formulating constrained movement as a receding-horizon optimization problem using Model Predictive Contouring Control. The model balances speed, smoothness, and continuous path and boundary compliance. Evaluation against human data in both abstract tunnel steering tasks and realistic interface scenarios, including cascading menus and lasso selection, shows that the simulated trajectories closely match human behavior and support scalable, trajectory-level analysis of path-sensitive interface designs.

Meet-Ups

Generative Design and Vibe Coding: Rethinking The Design-Development Divide for UI Prototyping

Mon, 13 Apr | 2:15 PM - 3:45 PM

Xinqi Zhang, Hariharan Subramonyam, Advait Sarkar, Ian Drosos, Zichao Wang, Kyungho Lee, Veronica Pimenova, Xiang ‘Anthony’ Chen, Kai Lukoff

Prototyping has long been central to HCI as a way of knowing for exploring and communicating design ideas. Recent advances in Generative AI Practices—from Generative Design to Vibe Coding—are reshaping who prototypes and how. These approaches blur boundaries between designers and developers, enabling faster, more inclusive workflows while raising new challenges around trust, authorship, and control. This CHI 2026 meet-up will gather researchers and practitioners to discuss how AI-assisted prototyping transforms Houde and Hill’s dimensions of "look and feel" and "implementation". Through a hands-on Designathon, participants will reflect on opportunities, breakdowns, and best practices for human–AI collaboration in prototyping.

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