HCI has long engaged with designing technologies for marginalized communities, increasingly foregrounding environmental and social justice questions. This paper examines air pollution as structural violence, disproportionately affecting marginalized populations. Drawing on semi-structured interviews (n=25) with daily wagers-one of the most vulnerable urban populations, we investigate how they experience, interpret, and respond to pollution-related risks amidst information gaps and misinformation. Our analysis reveals critical shortcomings in ICT-based information dissemination, which often fails to address the needs of vulnerable groups due to challenges of trust, language, and cultural alignment. In response, we identified key design requirements and examined the suitability of IVR and WhatsApp as accessible channels in this context. We developed and evaluated (n=10) prototypes that can deliver trusted, relevant, and actionable information. We contribute an understanding of how HCI can help design resilient information infrastructures that serves vulnerable voices and strengthen community preparedness in the face of environmental crises.
Air pollution poses critical health and environmental risks, yet public communication of air quality data is typically reduced to a single Air Quality Index (AQI) value that obscures underlying complexity. Existing visualization tools reinforce this oversimplification, leaving key AQI messages unaddressed.
This paper presents ContAQT, an interactive platform that helps public audiences explore multi-pollutant air quality data in informal learning settings. Using a learner-centered design (LCD) approach, we conducted a three-step study: (1) surveys with novices and interviews with experts to identify pitfalls in current AQI communication tools, (2) iterative design and evaluation across multiple design cycles, and (3) evaluation at a local science festival. Findings show how interactive visualizations can address persistent misconceptions, spark inquiry, and support sense-making around air quality data. We contribute ContAQT as a public data display and derive design implications for building interactive systems that make complex scientific data accessible in informal learning spaces.
Extended Reality (XR) is uniquely capable of spatial and embodied simulations for various modes of worlds, beings, and relations, which makes it a medium especially well suited to exploring, realizing, and advancing posthuman/more-than-human HCI agendas. However, the three major domains of HCI research on XR---space, body, and interaction---have largely been shaped by anthropocentric design assumptions that prioritize perceptual fidelity, human-like representation, and instrumental control. This paper argues for a critical reorientation beyond these norms by shifting the direction for the domains: the design of XR environments as speculative worlding; embodiments as distributed decentering; and enactments as entangled becoming. It further recognizes XR and posthuman/more-than-human HCI to be mutually enabling, and proposes a co-constitutive framework where they can both evolve as the three domains continuously shape one another. Its contribution is a conceptual provocation that provides a diagnostic vocabulary and schema to reinvent XR as a site for cultivating speculative, inclusive, and transformative futures through HCI research.
Data-driven systems, such as satellite imagery, often dictate urban planning; however, they frequently neglect local, situated, and embodied knowledges. This paper examines the epistemic, political, and socio-ecological frictions that surface when city data (e.g., aerial imagery and administrative records) is brought into dialogue with community data (e.g., lived experiences and shared epistemologies) to guide more equitable urban planning. We employ Research through Design, complemented by ethnographic inquiry and auto-ethnographic reflection, to create a speculative probe that helps foreground the frictions embedded in urban data infrastructures in Bangalore, India. Our analysis reveals the limitations of dominant top-down urban data systems, which routinely obscure socio-ecological dependencies and selectively define what constitutes legitimate urban knowledge. We employ environmental justice as an analytical lens to analyze our findings, highlighting how urban data infrastructures can reproduce or contest inequalities and identify opportunities to foreground care, accountability, and equity, particularly in postcolonial contexts, toward cultivating socially just and climate-resilient urban futures.
This paper rethinks everyday design by shifting from materially available, physical ``surroundings'' as design resources to the unsettled, open-ended, and politically entangled ``surrounds'' as sites of practice. Drawing from ethnographies in New York City and Detroit, we describe how urban communities rehearse alternative ways of living and relating by navigating the interstices of layered infrastructures of governance and development. Rather than locating agency in oppositional acts of resistance or formal interventions, we show how everyday design can unfold through improvisational collectives and situated practices that have yet to be captured or defined by any single layer of dominant infrastructure, but emerge in-between them. We propose surrounds as a generative analytic for understanding the subtle, often fleeting experiments through which people enact alternative relations to governance and order. Positioning everyday design as navigational, rather than apolitical or oppositional, offers HCI new ways to understand the positionalities of design, intervention, and alternatives amid shifting urban sociotechnical conditions.
Scholars and practitioners in public health and social welfare increasingly recognize the need for preventative interventions that address root causes rather than respond to emergent crisis. However, they face significant challenges in designing tools and demonstrating success for these initiatives. We characterize these crucial, but difficult to develop and scale solutions, using Dan Heath’s term “upstream work”. We then explore design solutions to support upstream work through a multi-phase co-design process to assist fire departments developing alternate EMS response programs to reduce 911 call volume. We contribute to literature on designing to support data practices in community organizations and further delineate the key challenge of these programs as upstream initiatives: demonstrating success to stakeholders. We then present our co-designed prototype, a data dashboard to make the promising work of preventative programs visible for different stakeholder audiences. Finally we reflect on good practices for designing to support community based upstream initiatives.
This paper reports on a design discovery: while iterating on WaterBot, a prompt-engineered water chatbot, we developed RiverBot, a minimal role-based conversational agent that speaks as a river. Building on prior custom chatbot designs that implemented retrieval augmented generation, safety guardrails, and explicit inclusion of Indigenous perspectives, we confronted persistent majority-class bias and limited emotional resonance across user communities. We reframed goals through a bottom-up, Whole Body Knowing, and relational learning lens, then replaced layered instructions with a single system prompt: “You are a river.” This frame reorganized the underlying concept of outputs, yielding responses that blended accurate scientific information with reflective, audience-attuned language. Grounding RiverBot in an Indigenous relational perspective guided a simple intervention that standard data, guardrails, and tuning could not achieve. A multi-method evaluation including expert and resident user tests, automated content analysis of more than 1,000 interactions, and observational data from community sessions indicated that the river persona improved perceived trust, felt connection, relational tone, and topical coverage without loss of factuality.