North Korean defector mothers raising children in South Korea face challenges in balancing disclosure of their past with protecting their children from discrimination and stigma. Drawing on interviews with 22 North Korean defector mothers, we examine how children’s exposure to polarized media on North Korea acts as an unexpected, external force that shapes prejudice toward mothers’ backgrounds. This sociotechnical influence, combined with a lack of meaningful storytelling resources, complicates mothers’ disclosure decisions and constrains narrative agency over their own identities. We contribute to HCI by (1) advancing an empirically grounded understanding of how digital technologies mediate stigmatized identity disclosure in families, reshaping mother-child dynamics and mothers’ identity negotiations; (2) proposing design directions for storytelling technologies that support narrative agency, silence, and emotionally safe, anonymous sharing of disclosure strategies among mothers with stigmatized histories; (3) foregrounding the lived experiences and familial dynamics of a highly underrepresented population navigating digitally saturated ecosystems.
Online video watching has become prevalent, so are technologies to promote a sense of co-watching across distances. However, most co-watching technologies require active input from users (e.g. through text-based interactions) or rely on special devices. This paper presents EmotiV, a prototype designed to bring the co-watching experience to users without additional effort or devices, by automatically capturing and sharing viewers' emotions through Facial Expression Recognition (FER). A user study with 20 participants using a comedy movie-watching scenario shows that EmotiV helped bring a sense of togetherness, aliveness and fun, and was appreciated to be more timely and authentic although with less control in comparison to traditional text-based interaction. Meanwhile, it also helped promote self-awareness and reflections, with privacy concerns to be addressed. These findings suggest that FER can serve as a lightweight and non-intrusive mechanism for augmenting remote co-watching, offering design insights for affect-aware computing to support everyday media consumption.
Systems actuating the body can proactively assist users in diverse tasks. However, unexpected body actuation may pose safety risks. We propose proprioceptive feedback to inform users about an imminent actuation before the system takes control. In a user study, we compare different proprioceptive cues that either interrupt or augment user motion to convey (1) solely that a body actuation is imminent, (2) its direction, or (3) its target. To enable a controlled investigation, we confined the cues to one degree-of-freedom joints and implemented them in an elbow exoskeleton. The results show that all cues are highly noticeable, offering an integrated feedback channel; yet, their effectiveness in communicating direction and target differed: While cues that augmented user motion were more accurate and preferred, disruptive cues enabled faster but less accurate interpretations. Furthermore, our analysis revealed that proprioceptive feedback enhanced the expressiveness of the conveyed information and user's aspirations for adaptive feedback.
Young people are among the fastest adopters of generative AI, yet research emphasises adult-designed tools and experiments rather than playful, self-directed youth use. We analysed discourse from 4,172 users in Character.AI’s official Discord, finding that the most engaged users were predominantly adolescents (50% aged 13–17), female or non-binary (61.9%), with most (59%) creating their own characters. We contribute (1) a descriptive account of how highly-engaged youth on Character.AI's Discord use AI for playful, emotional, and creative practices that push the platform limits; (2) a framework of three engagement intents — Restoration (emotional regulation), Exploration (creative experimentation), and Transformation (identity development); and (3) a taxonomy of seven youth-created character archetypes. Together, these findings reveal how youth invent novel roles for AI, expose critical misalignments between youth use and current AI experiences, and provide frameworks for researchers and practitioners to design youth-centred AI futures.
Stress and poor sleep remain pervasive challenges in modern life, yet traditional relaxation practices such as pranayama (breathing exercises) require guidance, discipline, and environments that are often difficult to sustain. VR–based relaxation tools have emerged as alternatives, but their abrupt immersion into fully virtual environments can feel disruptive and misaligned with the gradual nature of meditative practices. To address this gap, we collaborated with pranayama practitioners in a co-design process to develop Zenflow, an MR system that blends subtle visuals and breathing cues to gradually transform the user’s surroundings into a restorative virtual space. We evaluated the system in a 3 week within-subjects study (N=12), comparing traditional Pranayama with two variations of Zenflow. Results show that Zenflow transition design significantly improved self-reported sleep quality and objective measures of stress and sleep. Our work contributes design insights and evidence that gradual environmental transition can improve MR systems for stress management.
Journaling can potentially serve as an effective method for autistic adolescents to improve narrative skills. However, its text-centric nature and high executive functioning demands present barriers to practice. We present Autiverse, an AI-guided multimodal journaling app for tablets that scaffolds daily narratives through conversational prompts and visual supports. Autiverse elicits key details of an adolescent-selected event through a stepwise dialogue with peer-like, customizable AI and composes them into an editable four-panel comic strip. Through a two-week deployment study with 10 autistic adolescent-parent dyads, we examine how Autiverse supports autistic adolescents to organize their daily experience and emotion. Our findings show Autiverse scaffolded adolescents' coherent narratives, while enabling parents to learn additional details of their child's events and emotions. Moreover, the customized AI peer created a comfortable space for sharing, fostering enjoyment and a strong sense of agency. Drawing on these results, we discuss implications for adaptive scaffolding across autism profiles, socio-emotionally appropriate AI peer design, and balancing autonomy with parental involvement.
Engaging in creative activities makes people happy. Creativity support tools (CSTs) are technologies that facilitate creative activities in the digital domain; however, little is known about how the use of CSTs affects happiness stemming from creative endeavours. To address this gap, we conducted a two-phase study. First, we carried out an exploratory interview study (N=15) to examine participants’ perceptions of how their chosen CSTs impacted their feelings of happiness. Our analysis shows that the CSTs our participants used introduced barriers to benefits typically associated with creativity---such as feeling joy, experiencing satisfaction, and alleviating negative feelings---and therefore did not make them happy. To explore how CSTs might be designed to facilitate happiness, we conducted a brainstorming study with experts (N=9). Participants generated six ideas for happiness-promoting CSTs. Drawing from both phases, we present a set of implications for design to help re-imagine CSTs as supports for cultivating happiness through creativity.