We design "D-Twins" (Digital Twins), an LLM-based affective AI agent that embodies each user's emotional reactions and personality traits, presenting a real-time, authentic reflection of the user. D-Twins addresses the current lack of personalized boredom interventions in automated environments by utilizing real-time physiological data to provide interventions aligned with users' emotional responses. Initially, we collected users' natural language expressions to capture their unique characteristics. These patterns were used to create LLM-based AI agents that highly resemble the users. Then, we developed a boredom classification model by collecting electroencephalogram (EEG) data in an automated environment and integrated it into D-Twins. This integration enables D-Twins to rapidly recognize boredom and initiate personalized interventions, which users perceive as highly empathetic, turning boring environments into engaging experiences. Our study highlights that AI agents with user-similar emotional resonance offer a novel, real-time personalized intervention solution in boredom situations.
This research examines the tactics employed by digital archive projects focused on Himalayan histories and cultures to navigate knowledge conflicts. While digital archives offer the means to provide visibility and increase the accessibility and recognition to marginalized communities, they inevitably give rise to knowledge conflicts, which may lead to epistemic injustices. Through interviews with contributors to Himalayan digital archives, we find that these projects attempt to navigate knowledge conflicts and address epistemic injustices by drawing on inclusive, participatory, and activist-oriented practices. We discuss the importance of surfacing conflicts when designing tools and practices for collaboration and cooperation within digital archives. Doing so, we argue, can help contextualize historical issues in the present and strengthen advocacy efforts against ongoing socio-environmental injustices. Finally, we highlight the opportunity for reconfiguring digital archives as digital commons to foster commoning practices and enable post-custodial, co-created, and self-governed archival infrastructures.
Despite the prevalence of digital gifting, designing meaningful and emotionally engaging digital gifts remains a challenge. One promising approach is Hybrid gifting, which combines digital and physical elements to improve the perceived value of gifts and provide opportunities for interpersonalisation. However, there is limited understanding of how hybridity shapes the dynamics of gifting in everyday contexts. To explore this, we developed a connected coffee machine prototype as a technology probe to study how givers personalise hybrid gifts and how recipients experience them. A study with seven pairs in intimate relationships revealed key insights: hybridity fosters slow, deliberate engagement; supports personalisation aligned with daily routines; grants recipients autonomy in receiving gifts; and reveals tensions between giver anxiety and recipient enjoyment. We discuss design implications for hybrid gifting systems that encourage recipients to savour digital gifts through slow, reflective interactions.
The widespread digitalisation of critical civic services in contexts of economic austerity, neoliberalism, and the COVID-19 pandemic, has renewed focus in HCI on interventions to enable digital access for populations considered ‘digitally excluded’. While digital inclusion (DI) practitioners play a critical role in this area, their perspectives remain under-explored in HCI. This paper reports on a series of asset-based engagements with digital inclusion practitioners in the North East of England. These engagements explored the values, assets, and needs comprising their practices and used these insights as design material to ideate strategies for future intervention. We contribute findings describing the complexities, contradictions, and diversity of digital inclusion practices and efforts. Based on these findings, we argue for a shift towards considering DI practice through the lens of care, and provide directions for future HCI research to support DI practitioners in doing care work.
Technology use is always gendered: ideas about a person's abilities shape their approach to technologies and thus their digital agency. Yet, approaches towards fostering digital agency often focus only on competencies, falling short of accounting for the relationality and situatedness of agency. Based on a survey with 411 persons, we assessed gendered stereotype threat and agency-related experiences. We designed a workshop concept for providing spaces for agency exploration. We developed roles that address various gender-related stereotypes and embedded the workshop in a playful sci-fi setting. Through participant observations and group interviews, we analysed its potential.
Our results show the relevance of understanding gendered notions and the need for a nuanced understanding of digital agency beyond dualistic thinking. Addressing stereotypes in digital agency must acknowledge the sociality and relationality of gender. Moreover, gendered aspects of identity can even serve as a basis for playful agency enactment and exploration, particularly through making.
While digital play installations for outdoor use are becoming more common, little work has been done on how such technology shapes play in nature-rich environments. We performed a study of children’s self-directed play with access to nature as well as digital installations. Our findings show that play with nature materials and digital installations emerged in different ways. Most notably, imaginative play was observed emerging in close interaction with nature, while the digital installations mostly inspired rule-based play. Furthermore, engagement with digital installations typically involved an active exploration phase which was not observed with nature materials. Nature materials instead engaged the children’s senses more immediately, and often offered opportunities for collection and consumption, paving way for fluent play activities roaming large areas. We argue that these differences motivate rethinking the design of digital installations for play in nature and suggest guidelines to this purpose.
The death of a young person is particularly tragic, leaving a profound emotional impact on the bereaved. Moreover, their legacies often diverge from traditional ones, incorporating a range of digital artifacts. This design study investigates age-specific approaches to death-related technologies by envisioning digital legacy curation systems tailored for young adults (age 19–34). Using cultural probes, design workbooks, and prototype testing, we examine the values and preferences of young adults in preparing for an untimely death. Our findings highlight relationship-oriented legacies that focus on minimizing the emotional burden of the bereaved and the potential benefits of physical artifacts. Through this study, we: (1) underscore recognizing specific user groups in death-related technologies, (2) explore death as an existential and disorienting grounds within HCI, (3) extend post-userist concepts to consider the notion of ``use'' after death, and (4) identify the liminal space between physical and digital legacies as a meaningful realm to explore.