51社区黑料

Researchers from the School of Interactive Arts & Technology (SIAT) once again had a major presence at this year's ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction.

Researchers from SIAT contributed seven full papers (including a Best Paper Award winner), four extended abstracts, and three workshop papers. In addition, several SIAT researchers also led conference workshops and meet-ups throughout the week.

Contributions to the conference come from SIAT professors William Odom, Bernhard Riecke, Wolfgang Stuerzlinger, Alireza Karduni, Carman Neustaedter, Philippe Pasquier and Ron Wakkary, along with many graduate students and alumni.

The 2026 conference took place in Barcelona, Spain between April 13^th-April 17^th.

Explore all of the papers, late-breaking works, and workshops by SIAT researchers below or explore the CHI conference program at the .

Conference Papers

(WINNER OF CHI BEST PAPER AWARD)
William Odom, Samuel Barnett, Jordan White, MinYoung Yoo, Nico Brand, and Henry Lin

This paper presents Capra, a long-term research product that captures and revisits personal hiking data, exploring how outdoor experiences are archived and reinterpreted across changing relationships, identities, and life transitions. Drawing on multi-year deployment insights, it reveals the emotional, temporal, and interpretive complexities of living with such data, and argues for design approaches that embrace ambiguity, gaps, and the evolving legibility of personal archives.

Sol Kang, William Odom, Amy Yo Sue Chen, and Carman Neustaedter

This paper introduces Quologue, a design research artifact that explores conversational interactions with personal data, focusing on how dialogue can support reflection, interpretation, and meaning-making over time. Through its design and deployment, it surfaces the tensions between coherence and plurality in self-understanding, arguing for conversational systems that preserve ambiguity and support evolving narratives of the self.

Reese Muntean, Hanieh Shakeri, and Carman Neustaedter

The work presents a co-design workshop conducted with 13 participants in a unique context鈥�a ship in a remote area of the Arctic with limited connectivity鈥�to understand how people's needs, behaviours, and social dynamics are influenced by digital disconnection.

Mohammadreza Amini, Wolfgang Stuerzlinger, Shota Yamanaka, Hai-Ning Liang Liang, and Anil Ufuk Batmaz

This paper defines a new measure to characterize steering in 3D (along a path). This is important for designing systems that include interaction with 3D menus, training and planning systems for virtual surgeries, where the surgeon has to follow a blood vessel, or similar systems.

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Shiyao Li, Roshini Deva, Arpit Narechania, Alireza Karduni, Cindy Xiong Bearfield, and Emily Wall

This paper presents a qualitative study of US-based participants, capturing how people mentally represent their attitudes and beliefs through free-form drawings and complementary textual descriptions.

Gizem N Oktay, Bahareh Barati, Minha Lee, and Ron Wakkary

This paper presents findings from a two-week living probe study where participants placed and cared for a living mycelium composite in a place of their choosing. The findings show that engaging with mycoremediation fostered stewardship, extended noticing of multispecies ecologies, and made distant places proximate.

Mengxu Pan, Panxin Liu, Jinda Zhang, Raina Cao, Viduni Ariyawansa, Yaning Li, Bingsheng Yao, Dakuo Wang, Philippe Pasquier, Alexandra Kitson, and Mirjana Prpa

This paper explores the use of LLM-based embodied conversational agents (ECA) in social virtual reality (VR), which provide personalized support and multimodal interaction in a contextualized environment. The paper鈥檚 findings suggest the potential of LLM-based ECAs in social VR for language learning and offer considerations for future agent design.

Extended Abstracts

Mohammad Raihanul Bashar, Mohammadreza Amini, Aunnoy K. Mutasim, Mayra D. Barrera Machuca, Wolfgang Stuerzlinger, and Anil Ufuk Batmaz

This work investigates how gaze, as an interaction modality in current Virtual Reality head-mounted displays, is affected by variations in (visual) depth, i.e., the distance of objects from the viewer. The results show that gaze is more affected by such depth variations than interaction with a 鈥渟tandard鈥� controller, which informs the design of future VR systems.

Koyo Motoe, Nobuhito Kasahara, Shota Yamanaka, Wolfgang Stuerzlinger, and Homei Miyashita

To predict user performance for steering through a path, e.g., when lassoing a group of objects or selecting subitems in GUI menus, current models are not accurate when the curvature of the path varies. This work presents a new model that takes visual constraints further along the path into account to make it easier to predict steering interaction.

Ying Lei, Reese Muntean, and Carman Neustaedter

This work presents a design-oriented study of FamilyCanvas, a digital calendar for blended families, based on a nine-month autobiographical design and a five-week field study with two additional blended families. We find that scheduling in blended families is often heavy, uneven, and fragmented, with unstable connection across households. FamilyCanvas was selectively adopted through lightweight whiteboard interactions and used alongside existing calendaring tools. While shared visibility supported awareness and coordination, its use remained limited in practice due to uneven participation, practical constraints, and relational dynamics.

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Sara Khalilipicha, Armin Froozanfar, Diane Gromala, Chris Shaw, Philippe Pasquier, Patricia Derbyshire

InterLeaf is a letter-based mobile platform designed to support people living with chronic pain through reflective writing, comfort-item sharing, and intentional peer connection. The system combines a calm, non-performative interaction model with an AI tagging pipeline that helps identify shared themes in user narratives while supporting safer and more meaningful forms of connection.

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Workshops

Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Heidi Biggs, O臒uz 'Oz' Buruk, Angella Mackey, William Odom, and Oscar Tomico

This workshop explores how interaction design can engage more deeply with forests as complex, living systems, moving beyond human-centered perspectives toward relational, more-than-human approaches. Through hands-on activities and critical discussion, participants will develop new design methods and concepts that foreground ecological entanglement, care, and long-term responsibility in shaping future technologies.

Fiona Bell, Jingwen Zhu, Nadia Campo Woytuk, Fernanda Soares da Costa, Lauren Thu, Qiuyu Lu, Katherine W Song, Phillip Gough, Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao, Marion Koelle, Valentina Nisi, and Ron Wakkary

This workshop aims to grow the ecosystem of Bio-HCI works by facilitating a space for experienced researchers and practitioners to exchange biomaterial recipes, biofabrication tools, biomaking practices, and biodesigned artifacts. Participants will share these contributions in a show-and-tell format鈥攑roviding physical samples to demonstrate and explain their work

Workshop Papers

Samuel Barnett and Will Odom

This workshop paper explores speculative design approaches to engaging with human鈥搕echnology relations across the lifespan, focusing on how futures of aging, memory, and identity can be critically reimagined. It highlights how speculative methods can surface assumptions, values, and long-term implications, opening new directions for designing technologies that accompany and shape lives over time.

Samuel Barnett and Will Odom

This workshop paper explores the design of unobtrusive technologies for forest environments, focusing on how digital systems can support engagement with nature without dominating or disrupting it. It invites new approaches that emphasize subtlety, ecological sensitivity, and attunement, opening pathways for technologies that integrate more respectfully into forest ecologies.

Co-Speculating the Living Archive with People with Blindness: Design Fictions of Longitudinal Engagement and Narrative Agency
MinYoung Yoo and Will Odom

This workshop paper explores the use of design fiction as a method for crafting speculative stories that critically examine the implications of emerging technologies. It highlights how narrative-driven approaches can surface assumptions, values, and alternative futures, enabling designers to engage more deeply with societal and ethical dimensions of innovation.

Meet-Ups

Amy McCerery, Jayne Wallace, William Gaver, Kyle Montague, William Odom, Samuel Barnett, Austin L. Toombs, Anja Thieme, Claire Craig, and Tiago Guerreiro

This meetup brings together researchers and practitioners to explore how AI systems are increasingly shaping people鈥檚 sense of self, memory, and identity over time. Through open discussion and exchange, it aims to surface emerging challenges and opportunities for designing AI that supports reflective, plural, and ethically grounded understandings of the self.

MinYoung Yoo, Sophia Ppali, Catherine Wieczorek, Hayoun Noh, Seung Hyeon Han, Anna R. L. Carter, Alexandra Teixeira Riggs, Nava Haghighi, Yvon Ruitenburg, and William Odom

This meetup explores alternate research outcomes in HCI, focusing on forms of contribution that extend beyond traditional papers, such as artifacts, systems, and experiential formats. Through discussion and examples, it aims to broaden how we value, document, and evaluate research, opening space for more diverse and practice-based forms of knowledge production.