In designing for dementia, the concept of person-centered care (PCC) effectively shifts attention away from deficit orientations. However, it predominantly focuses on the roles of humans in sustaining personhood, leaving the roles of nonhuman actors in care assemblages under-explored. To address this, we propose a theory–method package that extends PCC with posthumanist perspectives. We applied it in a six-month participatory design process to develop a conversational agent (CA) with four people living with dementia (PlwD), their relatives, and care workers. We report both the design process and analysis of conversations between the CA and one PlwD. Tracing the socio-material and ethical assemblages that emerged in these intra-actions, we identify moments of recognition, validation, holding, and facilitation. Situating these within broader discussions of care, process-oriented ethics, and posthuman design, we illustrate opportunities and limits to design for meaningful experiences of personhood between people with dementia, CAs, and other nonhuman actors.
People's identities change during life transitions (e.g., studying abroad). They bring everyday objects that embody memories and reflect their identities during such moves. To assist in these transitions, we ask how people's human identities could be supported by their objects through an artificial agent. This paper presents an exploratory research-through-design study around how people undergoing life transitions experience conversing with their everyday objects through a chatbot. Drawing on a two-week field deployment of a technology probe and interviews with 12 participants, we contribute (1) a conceptualization of "trans-embodiment" describing the asynchronous imagination of object and human identities on the chatbot, (2) empirical evidence of the resulting trans-embodied emotional and reflective experiences that supported identity processes, and (3) three types of trans-embodied object identities for designing conversational agents for human-object conversations. Our contributions sum up to triangulating human-agent-object identity as trans-embodiment in supporting life transitions.
Time is increasingly researched in HCI, yet design often remains tied to normative temporal constructs, e.g., clocks and calendars. This is especially limiting in dementia contexts, where temporal experience is altered. Existing approaches largely enforce normative time and overlook futures, prioritizing the past for people with dementia. To explore how people with dementia and their partners experience time, we designed the Temporal Snapshots probe for 12 participants to reflect on temporal subjectivity across past and future moments. The probe surfaced layered narratives. Participants articulated fluid temporal associations, anchored narratives to personally meaningful moments, and situated themselves within future and past trajectories. We contribute empirical insights into how couples experience subjective time, a dual temporal lens for HCI, design directions for reframing time in dementia contexts, and methodological reflections on researching temporality. We foreground time as relational and co-constructed, challenging assumptions of linearity and fixed orientation in interaction design.
Tracking for people living with dementia(PLWD) and their care partners is primarily focused on quantified dementia symptoms presented to care partners. However, what PLWD want to track, what other aspects of dementia care partners wish to know, and how tracking fits within the care relationship remain to be identified. We performed an exploratory study in which eight PLWD and nine care partners provided iterative design feedback on a system concept: one that captures conversational data from a robot and visualizes it through a speech-tracking mobile application. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we found that PLWD wanted to use the system to maintain autonomy, especially by talking about their symptoms with the robot and using tracked information as a memory aid. Care partners valued numerical insights into the cognitive progress of PLWD only when accompanied by clear calls to action that supported them in their caregiver roles. In their relational roles as spouses, care partners valued tracking memories and discussion points to understand their loved ones better. Results suggest that providing related but distinct information tailored to each user's needs can support both.
For university students transitioning to an independent and flexible lifestyle, having ADHD poses multiple challenges to their academic task management, which are closely tied to their metacognitive struggles—difficulties in awareness and regulation of one’s own thinking processes. The recently surged Generative AI shows promise to mitigate these gaps with its advanced information understanding and generation capabilities. As an exploratory step, we conducted co-design sessions with 20 university students diagnosed with ADHD, followed by interviews with five experts specialized in ADHD intervention. Adopting a metacognitive lens, we examined participants’ ideas on GenAI-based task management support and experts’ assessments, which led to three design directions: providing cognitive scaffolding to enhance task and self-awareness, promoting reflective task execution for building metacognitive abilities, and facilitating emotional regulation to sustain task engagement. Drawing on these findings, we discuss opportunities for GenAI to support the metacognitive needs of neurodivergent populations, offering future directions for both research and practice.
Digital tools promoting individual focus are increasingly popular in knowledge work. Yet their narrow framing of attention as a binary of focus versus non-focus can be unsustainable and discourage engagement in other vital activities, such as team coordination and collaboration. We introduce TimeMarbles, a web app that encourages more holistic self-reflection by tracking three modes of focus: high-focus, normal-focus, and break, as well as a team vs. individual dimension. In a two-week comparative structured observation in the field with 24 knowledge workers across six countries, we explored how users experience TimeMarbles vs. a more traditional focus-centric web app. Our thematic analysis shows that participants felt more positive about their day when tracking their time in TimeMarbles and that, despite the added logging effort, they preferred the more granular approach because it better represented the range of different attention and activities that characterize their workday. Our work points toward re-imagining digital workplace time-tracking tools to better support worker wellbeing.