Despite its importance for well-being, spiritual care remains under-explored in HCI, while the adoption of technology in clinical spiritual care lags behind other healthcare fields. Prior work derived a definition of "spiritual support" through co-design workshops with stakeholders in online health communities. This paper contributes: (1) a revision of that definition through member checking with professional spiritual care providers (SCPs); (2) a novel design framework—SPIRIT—which can help to expand models of delivery for spiritual care using digital technologies. Through re-analysis of previous data and new interviews with SCPs, we identify three prerequisites for meaningful spiritual care: openness to care, safe space, and the ability to discern and articulate spiritual needs. We also propose six design dimensions: loving presence, meaning-making, appropriate degree of technology use, location, degree of relational closeness, and temporality. We discuss how SPIRIT offers guidance for designing impactful digital spiritual care intervention systems within and beyond clinical settings.
People who experience near-death events often turn to personal expression as a way of processing trauma and articulating their beliefs. While scholars have examined how individuals share near-death experiences (NDEs), limited research has explored how these narratives are communicated collaboratively on today’s social media platforms. We analyzed 200 randomly sampled TikTok videos tagged with \#nde and related hashtags. Content analysis revealed that individuals often use NDE narratives to articulate personal meaning, with spiritual and religious themes appearing in the majority of posts and serving as a means of exploring and making sense of personal spiritual perspectives. Consistent with this, analysis of comment sections reveals that videos containing spiritual themes tend to attract more engagement and foster deeper conversations around faith and meaning. Our findings offer insight into how online platforms facilitate community-level engagement with spirituality, and suggest directions for designing spaces that support shared expression and connection in specialized communities.
Religion and spirituality (R/S) shape billions of lives, yet they remain marginal in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Prior literature reviews mapped fragments of this space but missed key contributions and the lived realities of its researchers. We extend this picture through a review of 206 ACM and IEEE publications and a survey of R/S scholars in HCI (n=19). Our analysis shows a field in transition: Research on R/S is growing slightly in volume and diversity, with design-oriented work emerging as the dominant form of engagement. Yet the ACM and IEEE corpora remain largely separate, reflecting distinct epistemic traditions. Researchers report persistent challenges, including marginalization, exposing a deeper tension in HCI: While HCI claims to center the full range of human experience, R/S experience is still treated with suspicion. Our findings call for a reconsideration: If HCI is serious about human experience, it must take R/S experiences seriously as well.
Religion is a main aspect of life in many parts of the world; hence, it acts as a powerful tool for influencing people's views and actions. In the context of propaganda and misinformation, religion has been perceived as a factor that impacts people negatively leading them to be influenced by false or biased information. However, there are limited quantitative studies that explore the exact role of religion in this process. In this study, we investigate whether state-sponsored propaganda accounts share religious content in a different way than the typical norms reported in the literature and whether they mobilize this content to promote their agendas. We find by exploring 15 Middle Eastern propaganda Twitter datasets encompassing around 124 million tweets from 32.5K accounts that propagandists share religious texts according to patterns that reflect aspects of their state's agenda. We also demonstrate examples where such texts were used to modulate political messages.
Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) scholarship has begun to examine religion and spirituality; yet, devotion as a lived, material, and world-making practice remains largely overlooked. For millions across the Global South, devotional labor such as sculpting, tending to, or worshipping sacred figures forms a primary mode of engaging with the divine and shaping everyday social and technological imaginations. Drawing on a four-month ethnography with an idol-maker community in Kumartuli, Kolkata, India, this paper examines how artisans bring gods into being through materials, gestures, obligation, and collective care. Their practices reveal forms of knowledge, intentionality, and agency that complicate HCI’s predominantly secular and instrumental understandings of craft, creativity, and technology. Building on anthropological craft studies, postcolonial computing, and scholarship on religion and materiality, we show how sacred making foregrounds relational, embodied, and cosmological dimensions of practice. We argue that devotional craft constitutes an under-recognized site from which HCI can critically rethink its assumptions about materiality, mediation, knowledge, and the sacred.
Christian communities are increasingly using digital tools to engage their members. However, many young adults are moving away from traditional religious affiliations. This trend is notable among young adult Black Americans, who historically have maintained stronger religious identities than other racial groups. Given these converging trends of strong religious identity, increasing technology use, and the decline in traditional affiliation, we conducted an online survey and semi-structured interviews with Black Christians from 18 to 25 to understand their techno-spiritual practices. We found that while many participants used technology for Bible study and worship, most still valued non-digital aspects of spiritual practice; when watching live-streamed worship, most participants did not actively engage online. Finally, we observed a growing interest in the use of generative AI for spiritual guidance and study. Our findings provide insights in understanding techno-spirituality and spiritual practices for a marginalized young adult population in the United States.
Reflection is fundamental to how people make sense of everyday life, helping them navigate moments of growth, uncertainty, and change. Yet in HCI, existing frameworks of designing technologies to support reflection remain narrow, emphasizing cognitive, rational problem-solving, and individual self-improvement. We introduce Daoist philosophy as a non-Western lens to broaden this scope and reimagine reflective practices in interactive systems. Combining insights from Daoist literature with semi-structured interviews with 18 Daoist priests, scholars, and practitioners, we identified three key dimensions of everyday reflection: \emph{Stillness}, \emph{Resonance}, and \emph{Emergence}. These dimensions reveal emergent, embodied, relational, and ethically driven qualities often overlooked in HCI research. We articulate their potential to inform alternative frameworks for interactive systems for reflection, advocating a shift from reflection toward \emph{reflecting-with}, and highlight the potential of Daoism as an epistemological resource for the HCI community.