Universities in North America often frame accessibility as an individual responsibility, emphasizing individualized accommodations for disabled students. However, these systems do not always align with students’ access needs, leaving them to take on additional labour. At a Canadian university, we interviewed 13 student activists and leaders of disability-related groups. We investigate how disabled students collectively address access frictions that emerge from institutional infrastructure; adopting community practices that work with, within, and around the university to address gaps. Using the concept of 'routine infrastructuring', we demonstrate how student groups leverage technologies to mobilize and negotiate access needs through informal and formal practices as collective care infrastructure. We introduce the concept of 'counteractive frictions', which are produced collectively to disrupt and provoke negotiation with institutions. We call for scholars and designers to rethink 'infrastructuring' as adapting and maintaining, which masks the politics and generative potentialities of friction to re-imagine disability futures.
Current news commenting systems are designed based on implicitly individualistic assumptions, where discussion is the result of a series of disconnected opinions. This often results in fragmented and polarized conversations that fail to represent the spectrum of public discourse.
In this work, we develop a news commenting system where users take on distributed roles to collaboratively structure the comments to encourage a connected, balanced discussion space. Through a within-subject, mixed-methods evaluation (N=38), we find that the system supported three stages of participation: understanding issues, collaboratively structuring comments, and building a discussion.
With our system, users' comments displayed more balanced perspectives and a more emotionally neutral argumentation. Simultaneously, we observed reduced argument strength compared to a traditional commenting system, indicating a trade-off between inclusivity and depth.
We conclude with design considerations and trade-offs for introducing distributed roles in news commenting system design.
Effective file management is central to coordination in collaborative work, as shared files serve as the primary medium through which collaborators exchange contributions. Building on existing PIM and CSCW literature on file management breakdowns, we recontextualize such breakdowns within specific dynamics of collaboration. In Study 1, we conducted a need-finding interview(N=33) and identified four recurring breakdowns in collaborative file management: ambiguous file placement and ownership, inefficient version management, uninterpretable metadata, and missing status cues. Building on these findings, Study 2 used a design probe evaluation(N=12) to examine potential benefits and concerns associated with supporting collaborative file management. Participants reported benefits such as clearer ownership, stronger reference convergence, improved metadata interpretability, and heightened progress visibility, while expressing concerns related to surveillance, exploration containment, overdisclosure, and social pressure. Taken together, the studies reframe well-known file management issues as a dichotomy between perceived benefits and concerns, thereby outlining design directions for file-level alignment.
Digital health has strong potential for promoting physical activity (PA), yet interventions often fail to sustain engagement among culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) women. Prior reviews focus on short-term efficacy or surface-level localisation, while a design-oriented synthesis of deep cultural adaptation and long-term strategies remain limited. This scoping review systematically screened 1968 records, analysed 18 studies and identified a critical design paradox: techno-solutionist systems overlook social and cultural barriers, while social-support features often fail in low-activity social networks. To address this gap, we propose the Culturally Embedded Interaction Framework, integrating five dimensions: culturally-grounded measurement, multi-modal interaction, contextual and temporal adaptability, embedded social weaving, and theory-guided cultural adaptation. The framework advances beyond accessibility-focused approaches by mapping behavioural theory to design mechanisms that support sustained and culturally plural participation. We provide actionable design principles to help HCI researchers and practitioners move from one-size-fits-all models toward adaptive, theory-informed, and culturally sustaining design.
HCI has studied food practices and speculative food futures, and drawn on tools to support, for example, decision-making and participatory futuring in relation to food. However, there is little understanding of how quantitatively-grounded tools like interactive simulation models can mediate collaborative reasoning about large-scale food futures. This paper addresses this gap by exploring how interactive models that simulate food production can mediate how stakeholders think about and collaboratively negotiate sustainable and healthy food systems. We designed and developed an interactive crop and livestock model as a technology probe to allow UK food system stakeholders to explore the impacts of changing the configuration of the food production landscape in their region. We deployed it as part of the mediation of two workshops where stakeholders deliberated about future food systems to understand participant interactions with and experiences of it. As well as the design of the technology probe, we contribute an analysis of these workshops and present a preliminary set of guidelines for designing systems to support future thinking about food systems.
The quality of online wellness communities is difficult to explain using simple growth metrics. However, an empirical understanding of the structural and relational factors that define quality has proven elusive. To fill this gap, we analyzed over 17 million posts from 56 Reddit wellness communities between 2023 and 2024 by applying the sociability-usability framework, measuring user-based factors (e.g., User Retention, Gini Coefficient) and content-based factors (e.g., Interactivity, Quasi-Quality Index), while also examining the impact of identity (Linguistic Distinctiveness and Topic Drift). Our analysis confirmed that quality depends on a stable core user base and meaningful reciprocal exchanges rather than conversation volume. A strong identity creates a trade-off, enhancing internal cohesion while acting as a barrier to new user inflows. Overall, we challenge the conventional 'growth=success' paradigm, establishing structural sustainability as the core mechanism for defining quality in online wellness communities and offering a new framework for their design and evaluation.
Social media platforms have become integral to everyday life and serve as the foundation for online communities. These platforms not only enable communication but also shape the ways in which online communities are formed and maintained. In this paper, we examine an online community, the BTS fandom ARMY, using Durkheim's concept of solidarity, we show how ARMY’s symbolic commitments, collective labor, and boundary negotiations are simultaneously community practices and infrastructural labor that generate cultural and economic value. Using an online survey and ethnographic observations of BTS ARMY, we present the BTS Industrial Complex, an ecosystem of communities all related to BTS that rely on digital platforms to influence and interact with each other. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a conceptualization of the BTS Industrial Complex as a sociotechnical ecosystem, (2) empirical insights into how platforms shape collective action, and (3) implications for HCI in designing for and critically examining large-scale cultural economies.