Conference schedule on BCS BritCHI 2026

alt.britchi: Between The Cracks lightning talks

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:18:35 +0100

Date: Monday 2 Nov 2026
Time: 17:20–17:30
Add this session to your calendar. Talks run back-to-back in the order below.

Order	Presentation	Abstract	Authors	Contribution type
1	Typecast: Who Do We Think Wrote This?	Positionality statements ask authors to explain how identity, experience and social position shape research. Yet readers already form views about authors from their papers. Typecast reverses the statement. A participant submits academic writing to a website, records what they expect a reader to infer from it, and receives a model-generated profile of the author. The profile also suggests where the work may or may not belong. Participants respond to each claim using five labels: correct, incorrect, uncomfortable, unknowable and none of your business. Some claims may be accurate; others may be implausible or harmful while retaining something recognisable. Typecast uses this mix of recognition and error to examine the assumptions readers and models bring to a paper. The exercise measures nothing. Its interest is in what happens once an inferred author enters the judgment of the work, which occurs whether or not anyone intends it. As artificial intelligence enters scholarly review, the project asks who a system thinks wrote a paper and how that imagined author may shape its reading.	Snow, Gouliev, Barry	alt.britchi
2	Yve Smith is human and can make mistakes, including about AI.	This paper is a provocation and, as such, is vulnerable to rigorous academic scrutiny. It presents a series of speculative LLM disclaimers as a potential avenue for experientially altering users’ understandings of LLM systems, but these are not intended for real-world use. Disclaimers are a narrowly bounded example of such experiential interventions and should not be considered a complete solution. Claims made in this paper about the irrelevance of anthropomorphism, the implications of language as a mode of interface, and the flattening of embodied experience into text remain open to dispute, and may be unfounded, incomplete or misleading. Reading this paper may cause confusion, irritation, amusement, uncertainty or fatigue. Please exercise caution and consult reliable corroborating sources before taking any action following the reading of this paper.	Smith	alt.britchi
3	Mollified by Mundane Machines: GenAI and the rise of Authorship Psychosis	“Whatever your name is, get ready for a big surprise: you are not you, you're me" (Hauser, Total Recall). Generative AI (genAI) has arrived to great fanfare and world-changing promises. Yet technological disruption is not new. From email in healthcare to eCommerce reshaping the high street, each has been normalised into mundanity. We argue genAI will follow this same march into the quotidian, while hiding an insidious challenge. One that HCI's augmentation paradigm cannot see. A challenge not to professions or marketplaces, but to selfhood and identity. In our work on responsible AI, we have seen practitioners grieving lost craft, observed skillsets become economically redundant and heard claims of "responsible use" from those circulating documents containing hallucinations. More worryingly, we see AI-slop being mistaken for authentic thought, which we call authorship psychosis. We end with a plea: as another profound technology disappears, let it not take our minds with it.	Dow, Colborn-Clark, Pointon	alt.britchi
4	Ted-AI Talks: Challenging Chats with AI-Enabled Teddies	People are increasingly turning to AI agents for advice and support, but can, as a result, be misled or develop an over-reliance upon a single AI voice. In this paper we offer a provocation that takes a playful approach to multi-agent conversations, where our embodied AI agents, each with their own unique characteristics and preferences, offer diverse opinions in a social discourse setting. Such a multi-agent approach stimulates critical thinking and moves us away from a simplistic assumption that the AI agent is always right.	Briggs, Wood, Jackson, Montague	alt.britchi
5	Playful and Forgiving Relationship with Smartphones: A First-Person Story of Academic Labour and Digital Dependency	Smartphones are portable, always present, and facilitate persistent connections with people, information, and work. They transformed how we live and work, blurring the boundaries between personal and professional life. HCI academics are uniquely positioned as both creators and consumers of these technologies, contributing to an 'always-with', 'always-on', and 'always-connected’ culture that can obscure their relationship to technology and academic labour. Although universities provide guidance on ‘digital health’ and work-life balance, contemporary academic smartphone use remains underexplored—this alt.britchi paper presents an autoethnographic account of a contemporary HCI researcher focusing on flexible working, FoMU (not FoMO), and forgiving intentions. It then invites the alt.britchi community to reflect on their smartphone battery—the question is not how long your phone lasts, but how long yours does— and how many recharge cycles you have left.	Lewis	alt.britchi
6	Guarded Hope: Opportunities and challenges in using interactive and AI-assisted filmmaking in educational research in South Africa	This paper is not from a study in Human-Computer Interactions (HCI) but emerged as having relevance to HCI discourses because of the integration of interactive computer technology with educational research activities and aims around social and environmental justice. Extending conventional discourses on HCI, this paper focuses on relationships of power, place, and participation to story-making and sharing technologies, and how this informs the social impact that technology can make. The paper conceives of a ‘Guarded Hope’ around tensions in a case study using interactive and AI-assisted filmmaking in participatory research with underrepresented Xhosa girls living in low-resource contexts in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa, to explore the risks they face collecting water, and the points of resiliency they draw on in their communities to navigate those risks. With the aim of moving towards hopefulness and overcoming guardedness, this paper offers recommendations to address some of the challenges identified.	Van Borek	alt.britchi
7	On the Power of Being Understood: Love, Strife, and the Boundaries of Relational Intelligence	On the Power of Being Understood examines interpersonal legibility as a form of relational power through two speculative artworks: an interactive fictional archive, The Invisible Mask - S59, and a speculative short film, The Vanishing Star - Venus. Both works examine technologies designed to infer emotions, memories, vulnerabilities, and unspoken needs. Drawing on Empedocles’ cosmological forces of Love (Philotes) and Strife (Neikos), I use love and strife as a conceptual lens for analysing the connective and divisive capacities of relational AI. At a systemic scale, S59 imagines a civilisation where technologies turn interpersonal transparency into social control. At an intimate scale, Venus traces a relationship between a socially isolated person and an artificial companion capable of recognising vulnerabilities overlooked by human society. Rather than advocating total legibility or absolute technological refusal, this paper offers two speculative design provocations: protected ambiguity, the active preservation of human opacity against structural surveillance, and relational intelligence as dual presence, a critical lens through which we navigate the co-existence of genuine emotional solace and systemic manipulation, exploring how AI can remain alongside human life without capturing it.	Xiao	alt.britchi

alt.britchi: Designing Otherwise: Power, Values and Consequences

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:18:35 +0100

Date: Tuesday 3 Nov 2026
Time: 12:00–12:30
Add this session to your calendar, or click a talk’s time to add just that talk.

Time	Presentation	Abstract	Authors	Contribution type
12:00-12:10	Safety by Design Will Not Save Us: Why Financial Technologies Always Side with Economic Abuse Perpetrators	“Safety by design” has become a familiar mantra within design, policy and information security circles. We take issue with this approach to design, an ahistorical and solutionist interpretation of technology-facilitated abuse that asks practitioners to anticipate how their systems might be misused, and to adjust their design to foreclose those possibilities. We argue that the features enabling technology-facilitated abuse are deeply embedded in the foundational principles under which digital technologies are conceived, and that addressing such harms instead requires systemic change. Taking fintech-facilitated economic abuse as our case study, we demonstrate that “safety by design” is powerless against the harmful potential of digital systems, and that promoting it is not merely ineffective but actively counterproductive.	Barros Pena, Wiper	alt.britchi
12:10-12:20	Values Before Variables: Why HCI Should Design “Boring” Digital Health Infrastructure	Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in digital health frequently focuses on designing decision aids and interfaces to solve complex frictions. Yet, in paediatric type 1 diabetes, deploying a beautifully designed Shared Decision Making (SDM) tool into rigid, linear clinical pathways leads to an illusion of choice. Our objective is to provoke the HCI community to look beyond the user interface and engage with the messy, “boring” hidden work of clinical service design by establishing a continuous, values-based SDM architecture. Co-design with 90 young people, their families and healthcare team took place within a hectic clinical environment, blending methodologies in response to resources and needs. A “Dual-Loop” architecture replaced a conventional pathway: an initial cycle ensuring values precede choice, followed by ongoing optimisation accommodating shifting clinical and personal realities. The dual-loop changed behaviours: 38% of families reconsidered their initial technology choice, shifting away from assumption-based decisions to those matching their values. HCI must stop treating clinical workflows as unchangeable or out of scope. Rigid clinical norms and activities can be separated and rebuilt as adaptable systems that survive the messy realities of young lives. The Dual-Loop generates space for effective communication and sustainable technology adoption, transferable to other self-managed chronic conditions.	Guy, Summerton, Williams, Boulos, Marshall, O'Kane	alt.britchi
12:20-12:30	On Hitting the Button	a one-page piece of prose expresses the defeated and disembodied experience of humans using GenAI casually while knowing or suspecting some of the resulting harms. It is written with a cadence to invoke a sense of direct causation from single user action to single outcome, but this is partly for effect to illustrate participating in a network of harms. In a closing line, the author suggests to the reader that even in such hopelessness, we still have choices. The abstract and keywords are placed afterward to protect the “show, don’t tell” rule of fiction writing. This piece was submitted to BritChi’s alt.britchi track, a creative call on the topic of what HCI (human-computer interaction) can’t do.	Gruben	alt.britchi

alt.britchi: Strange Relations with AI

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:18:35 +0100

Date: Monday 2 Nov 2026
Time: 12:00–12:30
Add this session to your calendar, or click a talk’s time to add just that talk.

Time	Presentation	Abstract	Authors	Contribution type
12:00-12:10	AI is a Gungfly: Why We Need New Mental Models for LLMs	Large Language Models (LLMs) are now used for a large area of applications. However, everyday users need better mental models to understand and navigate these Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. In HCI, mental models are historically shaped by deterministic computer systems delivering consistent outputs. LLMs overturn this principle, delivering what are essentially probabilistic outputs. This can be a strength, but the variability of outputs and notably the untruths can cause misalignment between deterministic user expectations and probabilistic system functionality. Because the inner workings of AI systems are hard to determine, we used synthetic ethnography to observe user inputs and system outputs. Using a synthetic probe, we observed variable iterative outputs from a simple calendar-based question. Based upon this, we suggest users accept the data landscape of LLMs is not reliable terra firma, but more like a gungfly – a Swedish term for a place where the ground is unstable and changeable.	Hunt, Nemeth, Holmquist	alt.britchi
12:10-12:20	Talking Shit with ChatGPT	Chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are well-known bullshitters. In some sense, this is an expected function of how generative artificial intelligence (AI) works and the garbage that feeds them, i.e., all sorts of junk from around the Internet. Dominant narratives have zeroed in on the problem of hallucinations. In this provocation, we aim to shift the conversation towards greater nuance (while retaining the fecal verbiage). With ChatGPT as our scapegoat, we explore the notion of shit-talking within conversational interactions. We raise theoretical questions, propose harmful and potentially worthwhile applications, and discuss design strategies. We include demonstrations with ChatGPT, for good measure. Gather ’round and join us in talking shit about—and with—ChatGPT. Content Warning: AI-generated insults, personal attacks, and derogatory speech.	Seaborn, Desai	alt.britchi
12:20-12:30	It’s Time to Think About Time: Artificial Intelligence, the Speed of Organisational Culture, and the Social Acceleration of Knowledge Work	Not only is Artificial Intelligence changing the pace of work and culture, but also the pace of change itself. To the people living through it, this can feel like whiplash. To describe that change, we typically reach for languages of technological progress, economic growth, labour process, or occupational pressures. This paper introduces a different language from the philosophies of time, speed, and social acceleration. For more than a century, philosophers of speed have asked what speed does to culture, to power, and to the self, but their thinking has barely been brought to bear on the changes we are experiencing due to generative AI. We start from the position that AI can be read as a chronotechnology: a time machine that closes the gap between wanting a piece of work and having it, and that produces many futures at once. We then ask how AI acceleration reshapes the knowledge worker’s relationship to the past, the present, the future, to power, and to risk. Our aim is to open the conversation between the discourse on AI and the philosophy of time, a conversation that we believe is currently missing, yet important and productive.	Sarkar	alt.britchi

Community Showcase 1

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:18:35 +0100

Date: Monday 2 Nov 2026
Time: 14:40–15:10
Add this session to your calendar, or click a talk’s time to add just that talk.

Time	Presentation	Abstract	Authors	Contribution type
14:40-14:55	Do Our Design Frameworks Age? Revisiting Conversational AI Design in the LLM Era	We ran two co-design workshops with 18 psychologists building LLM-powered chatbots using a framework published just before the LLM boom. The talk is about the resulting mismatches there. For example, the framework assumes rule-based systems with fixed capabilities and having a technical team supporting non-technical stakeholders. LLMs generate instead of routing, and now let domain experts design systems directly with no technical intermediaries in the room. We'll discuss what broke (e.g. technical questions arriving too late once roleplaying exposed decisions the group hadn't made yet), what held up (e.g. values-based prioritisation, made even more generative with a single-discipline group), and what we had to adapt to make things work (e.g. adding a "step zero" before prototyping). Our bigger argument is that framework maintenance should count as a genuine HCI contribution, not an afterthought, especially where the underlying technology keeps moving.	Sadek, Peters	Community
14:55-15:10	How AI became a design material	In 2017, I published an article in ACM Interactions entitled "Intelligence on Tap: Artificial Intelligence as a New Design Material". It predicted that soon, AI would become available for designers to create new products without requiring advanced technical knowledge. This is now happening, but we are still only in the beginning of this revolution. I observe three ways that AI is becoming a design material: First, access to open-weight and inexpensive Large Language Models that can understand context and carry out commands. Second, the Model Context Protocol, which makes it possible for AI models to communicate with external data sources and physical devices in a standardised way. Third, advanced software coding capabilities that lets designers create complete applications based on natural-language prompts. I will discuss the opportunities and risks of this new material, and how it is the responsibility of HCI researchers and educators to master it.	Holmquist	Community

Community Showcase 2

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:18:35 +0100

Date: Tuesday 3 Nov 2026
Time: 14:50–15:20
Add this session to your calendar, or click a talk’s time to add just that talk.

Time	Presentation	Abstract	Authors	Contribution type
14:50-15:05	The Wrong Question: Is Generative Artificial Intelligence Replacing Sketching?	Generative AI has reignited a long-standing question in design: Does manual sketching still matter when images can be created instantly from text? Our hot take is that this is the wrong question. Rather than replacing sketching, GenAI is exposing what sketching has always offered beyond image production: thinking, reflection, ambiguity, and dialogue. Drawing on preliminary findings from two recent case studies, we argue that the future of sketching is neither analogue nor GenAI-driven, but hybrid. At the same time, we challenge the HCI community to consider the ethical and educational implications of increasingly outsourcing creative processes to generative systems. Through an interactive presentation, participants will contribute their own perspectives, helping to shape an evolving conversation about what should—and should not—be delegated to GenAI in creative practice.	Lewis, Sturdee, Lengyel	Community
15:05-15:20	Writing so much - Changing so little: Towards Enhanced Participation of Children in HCI Research	The ChiCI group at the University of Lancashire have spent more than ten years seeking ways to improve the agency of children in HCI activity. Encouraging full participation without selection, facilitating non-participation, avoiding gathering personal data, explaining data to even the youngest children, and reporting back, are all methods we have explored. This talk reflects on our work to date and asks where this research is going and what has been its impact on the community. In pushing for children's participation to be valued and to be much more than tokenism, we firstly ask ourselves to what extent we have followed our own standards and then we question the way we have chosen to communicate our research – largely as academic outputs - which has been largely ineffective in changing practice. Our report card reads ‘must do better’ - in delivering this talk – we seek a roadmap for improvement.	Read, Horton, Fitton, Sim	Community

Paper Session 1: AI, Expertise and Changing Practice

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:18:35 +0100

Date: Monday 2 Nov 2026
Time: 11:00–12:00
Add this session to your calendar, or click a talk’s time to add just that talk.

Time	Presentation	Abstract	Authors	Contribution type
11:00-11:10	Between Thought and Expression: How Generative AI and Brain Data Shape the Future of Creative Practice	This paper investigates an exploratory approach to EEG-derived Generative AI (GenAI) co-creation, focusing on how EEG-derived signal variation can be used as low-level modulation input for generative visual output. We performed three studies: Study 1 used co-design workshops to elicit expectations and concerns among early-career creative practitioners. Study 2 used expert interviews to contextualise GenAI within established creative practice. Study 3 implemented and evaluated an EEG-modulated prototype generative system in a pilot study. The first two studies informed design requirements; only the third study evaluated the prototype interaction. Our findings from three studies reveal variations in participants’ experiences but show that shared creative perspectives can strengthen the robustness of AI-driven creative experiences through a Shared Neural Streams concept. We identify design opportunities and methodological constraints for using EEG-derived signals transparently within GenAI-supported co-creative interaction.	Pham, Holmquist	Paper
11:10-11:20	Craft Knowledge and Embodied Labelling in ML-Assisted Motion Capture	The StyleCap project developed a Machine Learning (ML) model for styling full body animation from sparse motion capture and text. The development contributes an approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in HCI research prioritising subjective expertise and embodied knowledge. Interviews with animators documented their values, expertise and use of language in animation. The interviews included a live motion capture session and were coded to produce a database of words describing style. Inverting the traditional process of using language to label data, data was created by expressing language through bodily movement. An ML model was trained on this dataset to produce stylised animations which were evaluated by professional animators. These evaluations were then used to measure the effectiveness of GPT 4.1 as a translator of the evaluators’ language to the specific labels utilised in training. The accuracy of these translations of the craft knowledge and vocabulary used by individual practitioners and enacted through embodied performance demonstrates the potential of human-centred approaches to HCI research with AI.	Koterwas, Morrow, Braghetto, Vaughan	Paper
11:20-11:30	Beyond the Dichotomy of Tool vs. Teammate: Functional, Normative, and Experiential Perspectives on AI in Organizations	The dichotomous debate coined “Team member vs. Tool” addresses the question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) is, can, or should be a team member or a tool in an organizational context. In this paper, we challenge the assumption that the ”Team member vs. Tool” positions are in tension at all and posit that apparent discrepancies between these two positions mainly arise from a failure to distinguish between different analytical levels: functional descriptions of what AI does, normative claims about what AI should be, and social-psychological accounts of how people experience and interpret AI at work. We disentangle these three perspectives and their respective contributions to the conceptualization of AI in the work and organizational context. Building on this distinction, we further demonstrate that the relations between these perspectives are interdependent but asymmetrical. Functional properties of AI systems more directly shape social–psychological experiences, which in turn inform organizational practices, while normative perspectives primarily influence both functional design and interpretive frames through processes of translation and implementation. We argue that many tensions in the literature stem from overlooking these uneven pathways of influence.	Ontrup, Alizadeh, Berretta, Georganta, Kerstan, Rieth, Tausch, Tschopp, Ulfert, Wischnewski	Paper
11:30-11:40	Beyond AI Adoption: Trust as a Task-Level Appraisal in Academic LLM Use	Large language models (LLMs) have been positioned as tools that could reduce workload and support productivity in academic work, yet adoption remains selective. Prior research attributes this to differences in trust but offers limited insight into how trust is enacted in practice. We report a qualitative study with 18 UK academics, examining how they decide when and how to trust LLMs in their work. Trust is not a stable attitude but a situated, task-level appraisal, governed primarily by whether outputs can be verified and at what cost. We identify verification burden to describe how, in academic knowledge work, the effort required to validate LLM outputs can exceed the benefit of using them, making restraint the reasonable choice. LLMs also serve as emotional infrastructure for managing the psychological demands of academic work, while creating tensions with academic identity. At the institutional level, we identify institutional paralysis: unclear policies, absent norms, and a lack of endorsed tools constrain adoption even among willing users. Together, these reframe cautious LLM use as a nuanced interplay of constrained trust calibration, emotional ambivalence, and institutional paralysis. We translate these findings into design concepts that make verification effort legible and treat emotional support as core function, as well as describing implications for institutional policy.	Chang, Mella, Dowthwaite, Ahmetoglu, Cox	Paper
11:40-11:50	Appropriate Automation in AI-Assisted Usability Heuristic Generation: Comparing Human-AI Collaborative Workflows	Domain-specific usability heuristics can better capture context-sensitive usability issues than general heuristics, but their development and refinement remain resource-intensive. This study examined UX practitioners’ experiences of three human-AI workflows for generating and refining heuristics for automotive smart cockpit interfaces. Thirty user experience (UX) practitioners used an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to generate an initial heuristic set and were assigned to one of three refinement workflows: continuous AI-assisted feedback and refinement (G1), human expert feedback with manual refinement (G2), or human expert feedback with AI-assisted refinement (G3). No significant between-group differences were found in overall workload, trust or technology acceptance. However, G3 participants reported higher mental demand than G2 participants and higher temporal demand than G1 participants. Interview findings indicated that AI supported early ideation and routine structuring, whereas AI-assisted refinement required prompt formulation, output checking and decision validation. Participants valued workflows that preserved expert control, enabled transparent review and retained human final judgement. These findings suggest that AI can support early-stage heuristic generation, while judgement-intensive refinement benefits from human control, task-relevant transparency and expert review.	Li, Hermawati, Maior	Paper
11:50-12:00	From Maker to Orchestrator: Navigating the UI/UX Designer Role Shift in AI-Augmented Design Practices	Generative AI is reshaping digital design, yet how practitioners integrate these tools into professional workflows remains understudied. Through 13 expert interviews, complemented by contextual inquiry with a subset of participants, we examine how UI/UX designers describe and demonstrate their use of AI prototyping tools during the realisation/implementation-facing stages of the design process. Our findings suggest a shift in reported practice: designers describe moving beyond divergent ideation to using AI for convergent, implementation-facing work. With the emergence of vibe coding, where designers leverage code-aware agents to participate more directly in codebases, participants described their role evolving from visual ”makers” towards technical ”orchestrators” of AI outputs. This shift has implications for the traditional design-engineering divide, pointing towards an emerging hybrid ”product engineer” role capable of contributing functional code. We discuss friction points in this reported workflow and derive implications and guidelines for future AI tools, workflows, and designers’ roles that prioritise inspectability and closer code-based collaboration.	Cheung, Lee	Paper

Paper Session 2: Immersive and Embodied Experiences

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:18:35 +0100

Date: Monday 2 Nov 2026
Time: 14:00–14:40
Add this session to your calendar, or click a talk’s time to add just that talk.

Time	Presentation	Abstract	Authors	Contribution type
14:00-14:10	RPD-Grounded Simulated Users for Pre-screening AR Training Interface Designs: A Unity ML-Agents Approach	Evaluating augmented reality (AR) training interfaces typically requires recruiting domain practitioners, coordinating controlled studies, and incurring the logistical and ethical costs of human-subject testing. This paper presents a pre-screening framework that uses simulated users to surface interface design trade-offs before human trials begin. Agents are built with Unity ML-Agents and grounded in the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model, with distinct reward structures derived from Cognitive Task Analysis of paramedic diagnostic reasoning encoding novice and expert decision strategies. We evaluate three interface configurations varying in button density, spatial layout, and labelling across both agent types, and characterize behaviour using behavioural interaction indicators computed from interaction logs and conceptually organized using a structure inspired by the NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX). Results show that dense dispersed layouts impose the highest temporal and search cost on novice agents, while deceptive clustering imposes the highest temporal and effort cost on expert agents. Search Complexity Indicator diverged between cohorts in a pattern consistent with RPD-predicted selective attention: expert agents narrowed search as complexity increased while novice agents maintained broad attention throughout. These patterns were consistent across behavioural indicator scores and raw interaction metrics including path entropy, inter-click intervals, and idle ratios. The framework requires no human participants, produces reproducible behavioural traces across conditions, and is intended as a complement to human-subject evaluation rather than a replacement. Validation against human self-reported ratings and objective performance data is identified as the essential next step.	Thilakarathna, Wong, Nguyen	Paper
14:10-14:20	HaptiCoach: Remote Haptic Feedback for Skill Training within Virtual Reality	Remote practice of physical skills is now common, but mainstream videoconferencing tools struggle to convey the embodied, touch-based corrections that are routine in face-to-face coaching. In this paper we present HaptiCoach, an exploratory prototype that combines body-tracked virtual reality with a full-body haptic suit, allowing a live human “coach” to deliver remote touch corrections to a student practising alongside a pre-recorded expert instructor. We use this prototype as a research probe to study, qualitatively, how learners perceive and respond to remote touch during physical practice. In a within-subjects study (N=13) using Tai Chi as the practice context, participants interpreted on-body haptic cues as corrective nudges and reported a sense of social presence around the human-triggered virtual coach. Participants also reported that being touched through the suit avoided the awkwardness they would feel if a real person physically adjusted their arm. Our qualitative data is complemented by quantitative measures which we use to provide context for the for participant interview data. We discuss what these patterns might suggest for the design of future remote physical-skill systems.	Afana, Marshall, Tennent	Paper
14:20-14:30	Theatrical Co-Design with Families: Exploring Sustainability through the Creation of a Mixed- Reality Installation	Co-designing with families for environmental sustainability relies on participatory imagination, yet habitual family roles and uneven voice, especially between adults and young children, often constrain it. A second challenge is translation across phases: workshop relationships and embodied ways of working do not easily survive into the final design, where artefacts travel more frequently than roles or interactional dynamics. We report on a nationally toured mixed-reality installation developed through applied-theatre-led co-design. Across three workshops, a professional theatre facilitator used applied theatre methods to support families to co-create narratives, artefacts, and interactional roles, and to re-stage workshop ecologies in the public encounter. We show how theatrical co-design fostered richer dialogue and collective creativity that persisted beyond workshops. We distil three design orientations for co-creating mixed-reality performances through applied theatre: rebalancing participation through status play, sustaining embodied practice across phases, and re-staging workshop ecologies within the installation.	Panagiotidis, Patel, Koleva, Benford, Spence, Tennent, Martinez Avila, Cliffe	Paper
14:30-14:40	Investigating the Relationship Between the Scale of Reflex-Based Challenge and Flow, Immersion, and Game Experience	This study examines how varying levels of reflex-based challenge influence player experience in Geometry Dash, a non-narrative rhythm game. Using a within-subjects design with N = 18 participants (predominantly aged 26 – 33, beginner to intermediate gaming ability), we measured Flow, sensory immersion, and affective states across easy, medium, and difficult game levels using the Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ). Results indicated that Flow peaked at medium difficulty consistent with Csikszentmihalyi’s optimal challenge hypothesis. However, a repeated-measures ANOVA test indicated no significant difference between the medium and difficult conditions. Sensory Immersion remained stable across conditions, while Tension/Annoyance increased linearly with difficulty. Multiple Regression analyses showed challenge consistently predicted Flow, whereas Competence only became significant in difficult conditions. These findings suggest that reflex-based tactical challenge follows distinct patterns that may influence player experience in mechanically focussed, non-narrative games, with implications for designing skill-based games that seek to balance challenge and enjoyment. Methodologically, sensory immersion was analysed separately from imaginative immersion to better reflect the reflex-based gameplay.	Ezzeddine, Vargheese, Sobolewska	Paper

Paper Session 3: Digital Social Life

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:18:35 +0100

Date: Monday 2 Nov 2026
Time: 16:00–16:40
Add this session to your calendar, or click a talk’s time to add just that talk.

Time	Presentation	Abstract	Authors	Contribution type
16:00-16:10	Children and Their Digital Monies: Expert Perspectives and HCI Opportunities	Children and young people grow up today in a digital economy. They will experience a vast array of digital forms and representations of money, from gift cards and pocket money apps to in-game purchases and cryptocurrencies. Recent child-centred research in HCI has begun to address this shift; in this study we extend this by gathering expert perspectives through an interview study with 12 diverse experts, to consider children’s financial experiences more holistically. In so doing, we identify: A) key qualities of digital monies that impact children’s lives; B) the primary benefits, challenges and harms they face with digital financial systems and C) the specific opportunities for the HCI community to address these challenges through research and design.	McKinley, Andries, Lechelt, Elsden	Paper
16:10-16:20	Conversational Interfaces Reshape What People Ask of Place	Conversational interfaces are displacing the search bar, but a chatbot is not a neutral conduit: what a system appears able to do shapes what users ask of it. We test this for queries with geospatial intent, which constitute a persistent share of information-seeking behaviour. We apply query log analysis to 423,142 first turns from three public chatbot corpora (WildChat, ShareChat, LMSYS-Chat-1M), using the same classifier and clustering pipeline as a prior 1M-query web-search taxonomy, and restricting analysis to short first turns so any difference is a conservative lower bound. We find that the factual-lookup core persists: people still ask chatbots for capitals, distances, and boundaries. But the largest conversational geospatial behaviour is one a search bar cannot support: users ask the system to compose place-grounded text rather than retrieve or evaluate place-facts, and treat the chatbot as a trip planner with complex constraints. Current geospatial benchmarks, weighted towards factual recall, are not equipped to evaluate this behaviour. We release our code and taxonomy for reproducibility.	Ilyankou, Cavazzi, Haworth	Paper
16:20-16:30	Deaf Play: Social Play and Signed Communication among Deaf Gamers in Co-Located Environments	Co-located multiplayer gaming experiences feature continuous, low-effort verbal communication, creating hidden barriers for Sign Language Users. Prior work on mixed hearing-deaf groups documents multimodal communication strategies; combining spoken communication, non-sign gesturing, and text-based chat systems. This leaves a gap in our understanding of how communication occurs in non-spoken contexts, where text-based modalities are impractical such as for groups composed of only sign language users in co-located environments. Without understanding these contexts, designers risk excluding d/DHH players from social experiences in games. We present an observational study of primary sign language users to show how two interacting constraints, manual encumbrance on the hands from having to hold the controllers, and competing visual attention between players and on-screen play, affect Deaf communication in a co-located gaming environment. We introduce a model describing how Deaf players negotiate attention, encumbrance, and communication timing during co-located play.	Curtis, Gould, Finnegan	Paper
16:30-16:40	Older Adults Navigating Trust, Safety, and Privacy in Online Dating	Older adults are increasingly using online dating, but this comes with safety and privacy risks. To understand how they manage these challenges, we interviewed 31 adults aged 60-85. Our thematic analysis identified four main themes representing stages of online dating: deciding to date online, creating a profile, evaluating profiles, and deepening a connection. Participants were aware of risks, adapted their approaches, and viewed trust as fragile and something to be earned over time. They also faced frustrations with platform issues such as the prevalence of fraudulent or inactive accounts and the difficulty of deleting profiles. We compare their experiences to the literature on younger adults and highlight ways to better support older online daters.	Marmorato, Stobert	Paper

Paper Session 4: Digital Health, Care and Wellbeing

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:18:35 +0100

Date: Tuesday 3 Nov 2026
Time: 11:00–12:00
Add this session to your calendar, or click a talk’s time to add just that talk.

Time	Presentation	Abstract	Authors	Contribution type
11:00-11:10	Constructing Metric Ecologies: How Fitness Tracker Users Distinguish Personal Health and Well-Being Metrics	Fitness trackers increasingly promise insight into both health and well-being. However, these constructs are hard to operationalise given they are not directly measurable via a single metric. Instead, people must interpret combinations of metrics—or metric ecologies—to make sense of their health and well-being. Yet, little is known about what metrics form these ecologies in practice, or how people distinguish health from well-being. To address this gap, we conducted an exploratory study with Garmin fitness tracker users (n = 21) using gaze-cued retrospective think-aloud sessions. Our findings show that participants treated health and well-being as related but distinct reflective constructs. Health was commonly understood as bodily and measurable, making it easier to interpret through objective metrics. Well-being, by contrast, was understood as emotional and contextual. We contribute empirical insights into how users define health and well-being and the relationship between these constructs, the metrics included and excluded within ecologies, and discuss opportunities for personal informatics systems to better support reflection of health and well-being.	Kersting, Rey, Vredenborg, Bentvelzen	Paper
11:10-11:20	Shift-Integrated mHealth for Safety-Critical Work: Formative Evaluation of a Police Wellbeing App	Designing mHealth tools for police personnel requires attention to irregular schedules, interrupted breaks and operational unpredictability. This paper reports a qualitative formative usability evaluation of a shift-integrated wellbeing app developed for police shift workers. Seven police personnel with 8–33 years of shift-work experience and three Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) experts participated in a 90-minute guided demonstration and focus group evaluation. Transcripts, facilitator notes and expert usability observations were analysed thematically. Findings show that the usability of a shift-integrated wellbeing tool was shaped by four occupational conditions: operational unpredictability, fragmented interaction windows, institutional trust concerns and shift-linked wellbeing needs. These conditions generated formative design requirements across four areas: operational adaptability, low-burden interaction, learnability and discoverability, and trustworthy schedule-aware wellbeing support. The paper proposes a formative analytic framing of the shift schedule as usability infrastructure in policing and related shift-work settings, describing how shift schedules may shape the timing, adjustability and perceived relevance of wellbeing support when operational work disrupts planned routines.	Ayorinde, Dogan, Adedoyin, Jiang, Bitters, Dempsey	Paper
11:20-11:30	Examining Personality-Aware Active Listening Strategies in Support Agents	Active Listening (AL) is a foundational social behaviour in support and coaching, yet its impact depends on how it is experienced by the person being supported. While prior work links personality—especially Openness and Agreeableness—to how people enact AL, less is known about how personality shapes preferences for receiving AL from conversational agents (CAs) in coaching contexts. To address this gap, we conducted a vignette-based human-subjects study (N=105) where participants evaluated text-based CA coaching dialogues that varied in AL intensity (low, moderate, strong), built using LISTEN-R, a theory-grounded framework that operationalises AL intensity for language-based coaching. We examine how Big Five traits moderate preferred AL intensity and perceived outcomes (personalisation, working alliance, satisfaction), and analyse demographic differences, revealing age- and gender-linked patterns. Our findings show that AL in conversational coaching is not one-size-fits-all, motivating adaptive agents that calibrate listening intensity to user characteristics and provide user-facing control over listening style.	Hussain, Keegan, Ross	Paper
11:30-11:40	Cognitive Empathy Toolkit: A Co-design Exploration with Adolescents with MID	Cognitive empathy is an essential skill in adolescents’ social and emotional development. Adolescents with a mild intellectual disability (MID) face additional challenges in this development. Interventions and school programs tailored to this target group are scarce. We present a co-design study with adolescents with MID (age 13-14) and their teachers, resulting in a design concept for a cognitive empathy toolkit. We contribute 1) a conceptual design of a digital toolkit for cognitive empathy development and 2) how to meaningfully involve adolescents with MID in a participatory design process.	Ooms, van Boxtel, Hauptmann	Paper
11:40-11:50	Personalising TaHaMi: Tangible Haptic Mindfulness Interface for Novice Meditators	While most HCI research on mindfulness meditation focused on audio and visual feedback to support attention regulation, haptic interfaces have been less explored. We present the design, and exploration with 19 novice meditators of a novel haptic interface integrating vibration and soft haptic. The study also engages users in the personalisation of their haptic patterns. Findings highlighted key experiential qualities of the two modalities and their potential to support or hinder mindfulness states. In particular, the result supports novice meditators’ phenomenological experience of mindfulness, facilitates grounding through deep breathing and promotes subtle, non-gamified interaction. We conclude with four design implications for haptics-based mindfulness technologies.	Asgari Tappeh, Sas	Paper
11:50-12:00	Intrusive by Default? Navigating Privacy by Design in LLM-Supported Care Documentation	In an LLM-based documentation support system for residential nursing homes, audio recordings of care worker–resident interactions are used to generate brief care reports. Drawing on ethnographic observations, we show that inconsistent privacy practices reflect a privacy calculus shaped by concerns about workplace surveillance. We examine the limits of operationalising Privacy by Design in a context where privacy concerns are intertwined with distrust toward both technology and the care organisation. As a technology probe to explore the technical potential for privacy protection, we developed an LLM-based privacy detection pipeline. While approximately three-quarters of pipeline-identified segments were confirmed as privacy-sensitive, unreliable speaker diarisation remains a major challenge. We argue that care workers should retain autonomy over their privacy preferences rather than relying on predefined technical safeguards. Our findings suggest that technical Privacy by Design measures alone are insufficient for establishing trustworthy AI documentation support systems in situated care work.	Kletter, Koeszegi	Paper

Paper Session 5: Critical and Responsible HCI

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:18:35 +0100

Date: Tuesday 3 Nov 2026
Time: 14:00–14:50
Add this session to your calendar, or click a talk’s time to add just that talk.

Time	Presentation	Abstract	Authors	Contribution type
14:00-14:10	From Accountability to Disclosure: A Citation Analysis of Positionality Statements in HCI	Positionality statements have grown rapidly in HCI, yet their theoretical grounding remains unclear. We conduct a citation analysis of ACM DL publications making claims about positionality statements, together with the literature they cite. From 36 papers we extract 48 excerpts citing 26 distinct works. Only 9 of those works engage with positionality statements as the concept is used in HCI, and only 3 offer affirmative and robust grounding. Citation practices transform reflexivity’s processual accountability into formalized disclosure, and redirect standpoint epistemology from elevating marginalized knowledge towards centring researcher identities. Positionality statements, as currently theorized, therefore risk undermining the goals of accountability and epistemic justice they seek to advance. We suggest resisting formalized disclosure, operationalizing reflexive transparency through process documentation, and re-centring empirical focus on marginalized knowledge. Concerns about the practice have so far been largely conceptual; we provide systematic citational evidence for them.	Ferreira, Sanches	Paper
14:10-14:20	Supporting Teachers in Teaching Critical AI Literacy from Co-design to Classroom Implementation	As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly ubiquitous in children’s everyday lives, it is crucial to develop children’s critical AI literacy. Yet, teaching critical AI literacy remains challenging in practice, with classrooms defaulting to technical skill acquisition while marginalising critical reflections on AI’s implications. Recent reviews call for supporting teachers in teaching critical AI literacy. In response, this paper explores how teachers develop strategies for teaching critical AI literacy through co-design and what happens when they implement them in the classroom. Following a design-based research approach, we trace one teacher’s journey in detail across co-design workshops, pre- and post-implementation interviews, and observation in a 7th-grade classroom. Using dialogic formative assessment as an analytical lens, we identify opportunities and challenges across four phases: co-design workshops, independent lesson planning, classroom implementation, and post-implementation reflection. We propose research directions for HCI research for designing support for facilitating critical AI literacy in formal education: (1) supporting teachers in developing dialogic facilitation repertoires; and (2) designing tools as dialogic partners that scaffold critical reflection on AI’s societal implications.	Liu, Surrow, Shokeen, Connelly, Jensen, Hjorth, Andersen, Dindler, Petersen, Iversen	Paper
14:20-14:30	Designing a Board Game to Explore and Communicate the Environmental Impact of AI	As technological developments and financial investments into AI continue, the physical footprint of these systems becomes more pronounced. The environmental impact of AI is complex and sits at the intersection of two major issues: climate change and technological innovation. Because of the scale of each issue, learned helplessness and disempowerment are profound. To address this, drawing on research through design methodologies and board games for sustainability, we developed SustAIn. SustAIn is a 2-4 player board game that enables players to move throughout a tabletop world, making decisions that affect the game state as an analogy for the environment. The game is designed around the use of narratives that communicate the environmental impact of AI. In this way, it seeks to establish a qualitative point of access to complex environmental considerations that do not always have a robust or comprehensive quantitative context. A print-and-play version of the game is available here: https://sustain-game.gitlab.io	Gillespie, Legon, O'Brien, Lopez, Barany, Lechelt	Paper
14:30-14:40	Conversational Care: Designing Responsible Human-AI Care Coordination	Healthcare systems worldwide face demand they cannot meet, and conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) is one of the pathways to scale provisions. But doing so responsibly requires addressing safety, fairness, effectiveness, accessibility, and several other criteria at once. Few projects have the resources to build a system that meets all of them from scratch. We followed a 2-year Research through Design process to iteratively build Conversational Care: a customisable platform that integrates AI agents into care-team workflows, automating routine tasks and escalating to humans when oversight is needed. The platform embeds nine responsible-AI criteria drawn from the literature. It has been designed with, and to support, community health workers, nurses, and families of people living with dementia in Peru and the UK; health coaches and link workers in London; with early exploration of care home monitoring in Singapore. Working across such varied scenarios surfaced the design trade-offs and recurring patterns that emerge when CAI is integrated into real care systems – contributions that other teams can adapt to their own contexts.	Da Re, Fonseca, Cho, Sanchez, Irina Serban, Diez-Canseco, Cuba-Fuentes, Vaidyanathan, Calvo	Paper
14:40-14:50	Class in the Prompt: Language-Based Proxy Bias in AI Systems in Bangladesh and Its Implications for the Global South	Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly used across the Global South for consequential decisions in hiring, credit, and health triage, often before regulatory oversight is in place. This study examines a bias that standard fairness audits are not designed to detect. Large language models (LLMs) produce different outputs for identical content depending on how it is written, without naming writing style in their reasoning; where the language a person writes in signals class position, this becomes a hidden channel of discrimination. We report a matched-guise prompt audit across four frontier LLMs and three decision tasks, varying the register of 30 matched scenarios across five language varieties while holding content constant. In Bangladesh, English from Bangla-medium schooling is scored consistently lower than identical English-medium English across all three tasks and three of four models (gradient: 0.37 hiring, 0.22 loan, 0.17 triage), an effect absent from stated reasoning in 96.4% of cases. We propose a register parity check as a low-cost intervention applicable across the Global South. The findings connect to United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals 10 (Reduced Inequalities) and 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions), and the governance responses proposed require no new legislation.	Ahmed, Arpita, Islam, Rahman, Zaber, Amin	Paper

Short Paper Showcase: Group A

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:18:35 +0100

Date: Monday 2 Nov 2026
Time: 10:15–10:30
Add this session to your calendar. Talks run back-to-back in the order below.

Order	Presentation	Abstract	Authors	Contribution type
1	What is a Robot? Designerly Workshops for Speculating on Robot Futures in HCI	The concept of the “robot” no longer evokes a single, stable image. As robot forms and functions diversify, so too do the assumptions, values, and priorities that shape their design. We report on the CHI 2026 workshop Everything Is a Robot (and Nothing Is), which brought together HCI researchers to explore what robots are, what they could become, and how their futures might unfold. Discussions revealed themes spanning agency, communication, emotion, symbiosis, and technical challenges, while also exposing contrasting disciplinary assumptions, values, and future imaginaries. We identify three observations arising from the workshop: robots provide a shared conceptual space for interdisciplinary dialogue; designerly workshops make tacit assumptions and imaginaries visible; and timeline activities reveal an “inevitability trap", in which speculative futures become interpreted as likely trajectories. We argue that designerly workshops offer HCI a valuable means of imagining future robots while critically examining the assumptions that underpin them.	Ingold, Swierczynski, Aktaş, Haynes, Li, Thomas, Wagmann, Winters, Yang	Short paper
2	Age-Tailored Colour Palettes for Inclusive Visual Communication	Colour discrimination and vocabulary both decline with age, undermining visual communication that relies on colour. We ask which colour palettes most effectively support colour communication across age groups. Analysing 103,294 unconstrained colour-naming responses from an online experiment with 2,418 English-speaking participants aged 16 to 87, we identified focal colours for a younger (16–39) and a mature (40+) group. Each group’s focal colours were ranked by three criteria: perceptual discriminability (∆E00), categorical distinction (∆h) and codability (−H), to construct three palettes per group, evaluated against each age group’s own naming model. We also scored 10 widely used categorical palettes under both models to check for an existing age bias. The focal colours shifted with age (∆E00 = 5.7 on average), and colour-naming vocabulary richness declined. Age-tailoring robustly improved categorical distinction for the younger group out of sample; for the mature group, whose smaller vocabulary left less room to tailor, the benefit held only on the data it was built from. A majority (8/10) of widely used external categorical palettes were more codable for younger than for mature speakers, motivating age-tailored palettes for inclusive visual communication.	Sinkeviciute, Mylonas	Short paper
3	Benefits and Burdens of Technology-Supported Activity Pacing in ME/CFS: A Thematic Analysis of Reddit Discussions	Technology and self-tracking play an increasingly important role in the self-management of chronic conditions. Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) is a type of energy-limiting condition, with activity pacing as a key self-management strategy that helps individuals regulate their activity within their energy limits to prevent symptom worsening. However, people with ME/CFS frequently adopt technologies designed for healthy bodies, which they have to repurpose to suit their pacing needs. We report findings from a thematic analysis of Reddit data, using the Non-Adoption, Abandonment, Scale-Up, Spread and Sustainability (NASSS) framework as a sensitising concept. We identify three pacing strategies among people with ME/CFS: no-tech pacing, low-tech pacing (e.g., spreadsheets and diaries), and high-tech pacing (relying on continuous passive sensing from consumer wearables), and characterise the benefits and burdens of pacing technology use. Among these, affordability was a salient topic, highlighting the importance of making technology for pacing financially accessible to people with ME/CFS who follow the high-tech route.	Mátych, Doležel	Short paper
4	Avatar Gaze Guides Attention and Performance During Interface Interaction	Avatars are increasingly used within interactive systems to guide user attention and support interaction. Understanding how avatar behaviour influences users' performance is therefore an important challenge for HCI. We report a within-subjects study in which participants completed a repeated mouse-based target selection task while interacting with visually identical avatars presented as either human-controlled or computer-controlled. Avatar gaze significantly influenced behavioural performance, with faster responses when avatar gaze aligned with the target location. Although perceived agency did not produce an immediate performance advantage, participants' performance developed differently depending on whether they believed the avatar was controlled by a human or a computer, suggesting that the behavioural consequences of agency attribution may depend on familiarity with the task. These findings demonstrate the value of avatar gaze as a mechanism for guiding attention during interaction and suggest that the benefits of perceived agency may emerge as users gain experience with an interface.	Silver, Scott-Brown	Short paper
5	Designing a Collaborative Board Game for Children with ADHD and Neurotypical Peers	Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a form of neurodiversity characterised by inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity, which may hinder the inclusion of individuals with ADHD in learning activities. This paper presents Spell Myst, a boardgame designed to support inclusive play experiences for children with and without ADHD together. Spell Mystembraces neurodiversity through an ecosystem-aware design that promotes peer collaboration. This work contributes actionable guidance for designing inclusive, game-based systems for ADHD children and their care ecosystems. It also reports insights from an expert evaluation involving game design and ADHD specialists, highlighting considerations relevant to future design efforts.	Cicuto, Gennari, Georgiou, Melonio, Rizvi	Short paper
6	Playing to Learn: Designing Diegetic Onboarding for Creative Software	Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) often offer rich yet complex features, making onboarding overwhelming for novice learners. While prior research has explored interactive tutorials to ease the learning curve, less work has examined gameful approaches such as diegetic tutorials to support early engagement. To address this gap, we examine the use of diegetic onboarding, using a novel multimodal game-based prototype for Unreal Engine as our case study. Our prototype uses Unreal Engine to apply diegetic onboarding, introducing key software features such as manipulating visuals and sound, and navigating interactions. A mixed-methods preliminary evaluation evaluated the system by gathering feedback from seven experts, including three professional game developers and four educators, to collect useful insights on the onboarding experience ‘by proxy’ to assess the tools’ readiness for use with novice learners. Our findings suggest that diegetic onboarding can provide a more immersive and engaging entry point for learning, while illustrating key design tensions around clarity, pacing, and the transfer of knowledge from play to tool use. From these preliminary insights, we suggest design implications combining both usability and instructional design strategies for developing more approachable and inclusive creative software onboarding experiences.	Collins, Feng, Wruk, Ford	Short paper
7	Co-Designing Chatbots with University Educators: A Workshop Protocol and Four Pedagogical Themes	While LLMs and GenAI have been widely used, a structured way of articulating educators’ knowledge into chatbot specifications to address learners’ needs is lacking. Structured LLM prompting can help to facilitate chatbot design by educators for learners with diverse needs. This paper presents an educational chatbot co-design workshop protocol, which was conducted for 24 university educators from diverse disciplines, including engineering, social work, public health, language and communication, and business. The co-design workshop protocol introduced a four-step guide — map the bottleneck, position, mock up and optionally prototype — that translates a learning obstacle into a chatbot role and locates that role on a scaffolding-by-feedback Chatbot Role Map. A reflexive thematic analysis of the resulting concepts and worksheets yielded four design themes: personalisation and adaptive learning, engagement and motivation, critical thinking, and perspective-taking. By applying lenses such as self-determination theory (SDT) and the scaffolding-by-feedback Chatbot Role Map, these themes were translated into competence-, autonomy-, and relatedness-oriented designs that appear on the facilitative side rather than settling into a single evaluative, correctness-checking corner that dominates current chatbot deployments. This study introduces methods for designing educational chatbots by translating students’ learning obstacles into prompt positioning and detailed interfaces, incorporating pedagogical strategies.	Lee, Lee, Boon, Zhang, Sandhya, Lim	Short paper
8	Mission + Machine: Designing a Values-Led Toolkit for Organisational AI Deliberation	Generative AI (genAI) is increasingly entering the everyday work of charitable organisations, yet decisions about its use are often made without policy, guidance, or structured opportunities to consider how it aligns with organisational values. Building on prior work, we present Mission + Machine, a values-led deliberation toolkit that supports collective reflection on appropriate uses of genAI in value-driven organisations. Through prompts, value and scenario cards, and discussion mechanics, participants explore everyday organisational tasks and negotiate appropriate AI involvement levels in relation to their mission and values. We describe the toolkit’s design rationale and show how it was developed to support accessible, repeatable conversations about AI adoption. We argue that deliberative toolkits offer a practical alternative to static guidance documents, enabling organisations to continually reflect on and renegotiate their relationship with genAI as technologies, practices, and organisational priorities evolve.	Cecchinato, Colborn-Clark, Dow	Short paper
9	Impact of Directness in Language and Gaze on Motivational Interviewing Virtual Agent Effectiveness	Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are increasingly preferred over text- or voice-only agents in some domains like health behaviour change, where Motivational Interviewing (MI) is one of the most effective techniques for building confidence and motivation to change. While communication style is known to affect ECA satisfaction, preference, and effectiveness, the impact of directness specifically on MI ECA effectiveness is not well understood, despite its importance in balanced MI delivery. We designed an ECA to deliver MI sessions with two conditions: a more direct or more indirect communication style, using accessible, automated tools: a Large Language Model to alter the language style, and Unity game engine animations to control Gaze Aversion. We conducted a user study measuring whether these conditions affected MI effectiveness in increasing participant motivation or confidence for healthy eating or screen use reduction. Directness affected confidence for behaviour change differently by gender: women’s confidence increased further with a more direct agent and men’s with a more indirect one. Our findings offer guidelines for personalising MI ECA communication style by participant gender to improve effectiveness and adoption.	O'Mahony, Ross, Ennis	Short paper
10	Exploring delay and its impact on trust in teleoperated robots	Teleoperation enables humans to remotely control robots, often in environments that are hazardous, inaccessible, or impractical for direct human presence. Trust in robotics, particularly in human-robot interaction (HRI), is a critical area of research. This study investigates how different levels of input delay affect performance-based trust in a teleoperated robot during a collaborative task. A controlled latency mechanism was implemented within the robot control pipeline to introduce systematic input delay between user actions and robot response. Participants completed a short survey and a baseline question assessing general attitudes toward robots and teleoperation. Results indicate that latency may primarily influence operational aspects of trust, such as perceived reliability, responsiveness, and controllability.	Marshall Dawson, Georgiou, Romeo	Short paper
11	DignityAI: Prototyping and Evaluating Community-based Preventive Care Solutions for Ageing Populations in Singapore	In Singapore, a fast-ageing society, the community care apartment (CCA) is a public-housing model through which the Singapore government facilitates community-based care for older adults. CCA faces challenges including understaffing and the absence of intelligent monitoring, which limits its ambitions to prevent illness and support independent living. We conducted a four-day hybrid hackathon between Singapore and the United Kingdom in which around thirty interdisciplinary students and researchers built four prototypes that pair passive ambient sensing with AI-powered conversational agents, targeting the pre-crisis window across a client–monitor–AI triad. We then evaluated the prototypes through an expert review grounded in Value Sensitive Design (VSD) using five values — autonomy, dignity, well-being, transparency and trust, and care fit — and identified their central value tension. The four prototypes showed complementary, near-mirror value profiles: the monitor-facing digital twin scored highest on care fit but lowest on autonomy, while the resident-facing coaching agent showed the inverse pattern. Three cross-cutting tensions emerged: watching over people versus the feeling of being watched; design restraint that protects dignity at the cost of the residents’ own voice; and the inference of social intent from sensor data without explicit consent. We contribute the prototypes, the evaluation protocol, and design recommendations for dignified preventive care.	Lee, Calvo, Lim, Ying, Wang, Rodríguez-Carvajal, Da Re, Fonseca Arroyo	Short paper
12	“Am I now masking, even with a bot?”: Pseudo-Social Bonding between Autistic Adults and LLMs	Pseudo-social bonding – the formation of one-sided, socially meaningful bonds with entities that cannot meaningfully reciprocate them – is increasingly shaped by AI chatbots’ capacity to simulate social reciprocity in ways that convincingly mirror human interaction. Autistic adults exhibit anthropomorphic tendencies more frequently and into adulthood than non-autistic individuals. This raises questions about how such tendencies shape the pseudo-social bonds autistic adults form with AI chatbots, and the associated risks of harm. We present a seven-day diary study exploring pseudo-social bonding among 25 autistic and allistic adults interacting daily with a custom chatbot, using thematic analysis of open-ended diary and exit survey responses. Bonding patterns differed between groups, though relational, moral treatment of the chatbot itself was broadly shared. We identify several autism-specific interaction patterns, including masking, infodumping, and variation in trust and forgiveness towards the chatbot, and discuss implications for future chatbot design.	Cogley, Matthews, Finnegan	Short paper
13	Player Enjoyment and Trust in Board Games with Gameplay Challenge and Robotic Facilitation: A Preliminary Investigation	This preliminary study investigated how gameplay challenge and robot facilitation influence player enjoyment and trust in a robotic game facilitator. Twelve participants played three board games with varying challenge levels, including one facilitated by a telepresence robot. Player experience was measured using the Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ), while trust was assessed using the Multi-Dimensional Measure of Trust v2 (MDMT). Results showed significant differences in immersion, tension/annoyance, and negative affect across gameplay conditions. The robot-facilitated game produced the highest average experience ratings, while moral trust increased following interaction. These findings provide preliminary evidence that gameplay context and robotic facilitation can positively influence player experience.	Barrett, Petrichou, Edwards	Short paper

Short Paper Showcase: Group B

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:18:35 +0100

Date: Monday 2 Nov 2026
Time: 15:10–15:25
Add this session to your calendar. Talks run back-to-back in the order below.

Order	Presentation	Abstract	Authors	Contribution type
1	Disruptors and Co-Designed Interventions for Autistic and ADHD Users in the Audio-Visual Media Context	IP-based media distribution and machine learning enable increasingly personalised media, yet the accessibility needs of autistic and ADHD communities remain largely underserved. We conducted a multi-stage participatory design study (N = 8) with autistic and ADHD participants, combining interviews and co-design activities to identify media disruptors and develop targeted interventions. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we identified key disruptors across sensory, cognitive, and narrative modalities: impeded narrative comprehension, auditory discomfort, dialogue masking in multi-speaker scenes, aversive scene triggers, misaligned pacing, and transient text presentation. From 28 co-designed concepts, we synthesised six functional intervention clusters (spanning intersemiotic translation, audio alteration, content segmentation, and dynamic recaps) and evaluated interactive mockups with a subset of participants (N = 5). Evaluation revealed initial evidence of high perceived utility (Mdn = 3–5), while highlighting that participants required flexible control to adapt interventions to their personal preferences and viewing contexts. This work provides preliminary design insights for integrating user-tailored accessibility for autistic and ADHD audiences into streaming platforms, laying the groundwork for future generalisable evaluation.	Cieciura, Glancy, Jackson	Short paper
2	Towards AI Design Companion: A Three-Stage Framework for Reflective Design Learning with Generative AI	Generative artificial intelligence (AI) offers new opportunities for design education, but generic generative interfaces give novice learners powerful outputs without explicit support for how to explore, question, and revise them. This paper presents AI Design Companion, an early-stage web prototype for conceptual design activities in which learners expand an initial idea, interrogate assumptions and constraints, and refine a concept proposal. Drawing on reflective practice, creativity support, and recent HCI research on AI-assisted ideation, the prototype organises AI assistance into three iterative roles: a cognitive catalyst, a reflective mirror and sparring partner, and an assistant/evaluator. The paper contributes (1) a theoretically grounded human–AI interaction framework instantiated in a working prototype and (2) preliminary design-refinement insights from a structured four-model proxy critique conducted before human evaluation. The proxy exercise identified needs for stronger reflection prompts, clearer progress cues, and explicit controls for adopting, adapting, rejecting, or further investigating AI suggestions. The work argues for AI interfaces that scaffold novice design judgement while keeping learners responsible for design decisions.	Dong, Castagna, Suleimenova	Short paper
3	Designing ValoTheko: A Formative Needs Assessment and Low-Fidelity Design Concept Study of a Conversational User Interface for Bangla Multimodal Mental Health Survey	Accurate data is critical for research, and surveys are the link connecting researchers with public perception. However, conducting surveys is challenging in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) such as Bangladesh due to limited digital experience, literacy issues, and discomfort in disclosing sensitive personal information. These factors exclude underrepresented populations and create biases, especially in mental health surveys, where stigma and privacy concerns affect participation in digital interventions. To mitigate these issues, we propose ValoTheko, a low-fidelity design concept for a Bangla multimodal Conversational User Interface (CUI) for mental health surveys. ValoTheko is examined through a two-fold approach comprising a formative needs assessment followed by a low-fidelity prototype concept evaluation. In the first phase, snowball sampling was used to recruit 137 participants (male = 72, female = 65, age = 18-65) for a needs-assessment survey. Based on the findings, we derived design requirements and developed a low-fidelity prototype. The second phase involved a formative prototype concept evaluation conducted with 17 newly recruited (random sampling) participants (male = 8, female = 9, age = 18-65), where participants reviewed a non-interactive screen-by-screen walkthrough and provided their anticipated reactions rather than interacting with a working system. The findings indicate that mixed-mode interaction represents a promising approach for sensitive mental health data collection, as it accommodates both expressive voice input and click-based response mechanisms.	Remal, Chowdhury, Islam, Rahman, Zaber, Amin	Short paper
4	Beyond Screens: Exploring Alternative Forms of Personal Data Visualisation Through Co-Creation	While sensor technologies have grown and become democratised, so have the collection of data relating to the individual. But the presentation of such data, if it exists, is typically made interpretable to all. In this paper, we present results from the first of a series of co-design workshops, during which we prompted participants to reflect and co-create novel alternative forms of data representations that felt more personal. We found that personal data covers many categories, with no simple rules for what should be private, semi-private or public: in some cases, sharing personal data was described as desirable. This co-creation workshop allowed individuals to explore physical design spaces and produce their own abstractions. This is the first step to understanding such personal metaphors, leading to further exploration of reflexivity and actionability for individuals that goes beyond traditional visualisation practices and media.	Le Bras, Georgiou, Winton, Padilla	Short paper
5	Useful, Not Human: A Feasibility Study of User Trust and Credibility in AI Interview Training	AI-powered interview simulators are increasingly deployed as scalable training tools, yet little is known about whether users perceive them as credible sources of developmental feedback. This paper presents a mixed-methods feasibility study (n = 14) evaluating user trust, credibility, and feedback acceptance in a voice-based AI interview simulator, combining validated psychometric instruments with qualitative open-text responses in a pre–post design. Feedback delivery showed preliminary signs of being a failure-sensitive component, with participants who experienced feedback failures tending to rate helpfulness lower even when the interaction itself was perceived positively, though this rests on a small, non-randomised subgroup. Distrust decreased following a single session (r = .68) whilst active trust did not rise to the same degree, supporting a two-factor treatment of trust. Users also adopted functional mental models (Examiner, Tool, Coach) rather than relational ones. These preliminary findings suggest the success of AI interview training may depend less on human-like realism and more on reliable, contextually grounded feedback.	Johnston, Hudelist, Hannay	Short paper
6	Sense-O-Plex: How Compositions of Cross-sensory Artefacts Shape Children’s Collective Emotional Sense-Making	Children increasingly encounter sensory-rich technologies in classrooms, museums, and play, yet little is known about how they collectively negotiate meanings across vision, touch, and smell while shared references and vocabularies are emerging. We introduce Sense-O-Plex, in which 52 children aged 8–11 worked in small groups to compose shared cross-sensory artefacts from visual, tactile, and olfactory items on an affect circumplex. Qualitative analysis of talk, gesture, action, and decisions shows that colours supported rapid consensus through familiar cultural associations; shapes prompted embodied exploration and negotiation; and scents exposed limits of shared reference, producing personal stories, disagreement, or conversational stalling. We contribute an account of how artefact composition, shareability, and manipulability shape participation, explanation, disagreement, and closure, with implications for collaborative sense-making technologies for children.	Li, Roberts-Morgan, Lo, Tierney, Horton, Read, Metatla	Short paper
7	Beyond Generation: How Creative Practitioners Use GenAI to Articulate, Evaluate, and Preserve Creative Judgement	Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly integrated into creative workflows, raising questions about its impact on human cognition and authorship. This exploratory qualitative study examines how experienced creative practitioners engage with GenAI across creative and educational contexts. Our findings suggest that participants did not experience GenAI as simply reducing or preserving critical thinking. Instead, they described critical judgement as occurring across the creative workflow: before generation, as practitioners articulate intent and translate tacit criteria into prompts; after generation, as they compare and interrogate outputs; and across iteration, as they verify uncertain material and decide whether outputs should be accepted, refined, rejected, or reframed. We identify five design opportunities for practitioner-led GenAI: intent articulation, prompt formulation, output comparison, verification, and boundary decisions. By shifting attention from automated production to reflective creative judgement, this work offers a design-oriented account of how participants used GenAI to support, rather than replace critical thinking.	Pham, Holmquist	Short paper
8	From Justice to Care: Envisioning Technology’s Role in Offline Misinformation Correction	The offline spread of misinformation remains largely overlooked in HCI research, despite a documented role in real-world harms. This paper situates the problem in urban environments, where existing technological infrastructures offer potential for large-scale intervention. Using a speculative co-design approach, we ran workshops asking participants to envision futures in which urban technologies detect and respond to the offline spread of false information. Using Activity Theory as an analytical lens, we identify two roles that participants envisioned technology taking in this context: mediating justice; and mediating care-giving. We discuss the additional challenges an offline, urban setting brings to false information tracking.	Scott, Mahoney, Colborn-Clark, Talhouk	Short paper
9	AI functional fixedness and the challenge of designing beyond efficiency	This paper examines what drives design students, even when explicitly invited to move beyond utility in AI artefact design, to drift back toward efficiency-driven outcomes. Drawing on two workshop series, it traces this recurring pattern across five annotated cases and identifies the cultural, cognitive, and material forces sustaining it. Building on the theory of functional fixedness, the authors extend the concept from the individual object to a structural, cultural level, naming the resulting condition AI functional fixedness. The paper closes by sketching directions for future pedagogical inquiry aimed at disrupting this condition.	Caruso, Cioni, Squatrito	Short paper
10	Ramadan Fasting Selectively Reshapes Cognition: A Webcam Eye-Tracking Study in the Wild	Ramadan fasting is observed by 1.8 billion people annually, yet HCI has not characterised how fasting reshapes cognition or what this means for interface design. We deployed a browser-based webcam cognitive assessment platform across 60 sessions from 18 participants during Ramadan 2026, capturing six oculomotor features and computing a four-dimensional Cognitive Readiness Index (CRI). Fasting is not associated with uniform suppression of cognition but with selective reshaping: Pattern Recognition significantly exceeded Visual Processing in 82.4% of high-reliability sessions (M = 47.3 vs M = 31.9; Wilcoxon W = 55, p < 0.001, n = 34). This divergence narrows beyond ten fasting hours (ρ = −0.452, p = 0.007), suggesting a practical design boundary for fasting-aware systems. A literature-anchored heuristic comparison against established oculomotor norms provides partial support for interpreting observed score levels relative to a non-fasting reference. Webcam capture quality must be explicitly stratified before inference (p < 0.001, r = −0.524). These preliminary findings have direct implications for the design of adaptive digital interfaces serving the 1.8 billion people who fast annually.	Tahri Sqalli, Meftah El Menani, Kanzi Belghiti	Short paper
11	Patterns of Soft Financial Delegation	Financial delegation involves entrusting someone to manage your finances and can be key for independent living for people with limited financial capability. Traditionally, the only legitimate way to delegate finances was through lasting powers of attorney (LPA). However, LPA fails to consider everyday needs of managing money. Recently, new delegation services are allowing people to flexibly delegate specific financial matters - a concept we call soft delegation. This paper reports on an analysis of nine soft delegation services, with the aim to understand the ways they enable soft delegation. Findings of our analysis demonstrate an understanding in the way the social challenges of financial oversight, configurability and power imbalances affect how we might use these services to delegate.	Khalilian, Elsden, Vines, Wilkinson	Short paper
12	To Stay or to Step Back? Relational Transitions in AI Companionship: Preliminary Insights from a Pilot Scoping Review	AI companions are conversational or embodied systems that users engage with in sustained relational roles, yet they are often evaluated through retention-orientated metrics that treat continued interaction as a marker of success. Human-AI relational involvement can change or end, and how such transitions should be understood and designed remains unclear. We report a pilot scoping synthesis of relational transitions in AI companionship, drawing on a preliminary corpus of 51 charted papers from an ongoing PRISMA-ScR review and iterative qualitative synthesis. Across the evidence, companion relationships evolve through distinct transition pathways, reflecting changes in user needs, relational value, safety considerations, and platform conditions. We develop a preliminary working framework for mapping relational presence pathways (not mutually exclusive): (1) appropriate continuation, (2) protective withdrawal, (3) supported graduation, (4) imposed discontinuation, (5) user-initiated exit, and (6) gradual fade. We further examine continuity work after transition, including user attempts to restore disrupted AI relationships and platform efforts to shape relational continuity. Current evidence clusters around user retention, risk management, and externally imposed changes, while adaptive and user-centred relational transitions remain insufficiently studied. Informed by psychotherapy termination literature and self-determination theory, we argue for a shift from retention-orientated design towards supporting safer relational transitions.	Xiao, Zhang, Hu, Calvo	Short paper
13	Raise, Don’t Replace: Two Kinds of Connection in AI Character Products	Some new consumer apps promise to do your socialising for you: an avatar that likes, comments, breaks the ice, and screens people on your behalf. We think this confuses two different things. Connecting with another person depends on that person actually showing up; hand the act to a stand-in and most of its value goes, which is part of why a message believed to be written by AI is trusted and felt less. Connecting with a virtual character is not like that. The character is openly made, and what carries the bond is what you put into it, not whether some hidden human meant it. Automating the first kind tends to hollow it out, and an avatar acting as you is unlikely to build the second kind either. The opening many products are missing, we argue, is that second kind: the bond with a character you make and raise. Drawing on a deployed AI-character game and 20 interviews with its creator-users, we describe what seems to carry that bond, authoring, a character that stays coherent, care over time, and seeing it in your own life, and report something we did not expect: most (though not all) of our most committed users were lukewarm on AI conversation, yet were deeply attached to their characters.	Zhu, Guo	Short paper

Short Paper Showcase: Group C

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:18:35 +0100

Date: Monday 2 Nov 2026
Time: 16:40–17:00
Add this session to your calendar. Talks run back-to-back in the order below.

Order	Presentation	Abstract	Authors	Contribution type
1	Mapping the Landscape of Non-Verbal Communication Tracking in Videoconferencing: A Systematic Literature Review	Non-verbal cues help people communicate emotion, attention, and intent, but are harder to perceive in videoconferencing because of restricted framing, camera use, and audio-visual limitations. We present a systematic review of 35 papers on systems that track, interpret, or represent non-verbal communication cues in videoconferencing. We map how these systems capture cues, present outputs, and are evaluated. Most rely on camera and microphone inputs, provide real-time feedback, and use bespoke labels or representations. Evaluations commonly use controlled studies and convenience samples, with limited participatory design and little attention to users with disabilities. We derive a minimum reporting structure for cue-to-feedback design and identify priorities for accountable labelling, ecological and participatory evaluation, and accessible, user-controlled systems.	Vazquez Gonzalez, Neate, Borgo	Short paper
2	Generative AI as Communication Prosthesis: Design Tensions and Principles for Adaptive Support in Apraxia of Speech	Apraxia of Speech (AoS) is a motor speech disorder characterised by inconsistent articulation, disrupted prosody and effortful initiation. Existing augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) tools and emerging AI-driven speech systems treat the speaker as a stable signal source, yet AoS produces unstable, variable input that breaks this assumption. This short paper reframes generative AI not as a productivity tool nor as an AAC accelerator, but as a communication prosthesis: an adaptive partner that infers intent from unreliable speech while preserving the user's agency, voice and trust. We articulate four HCI design tensions specific to AoS (input variability vs. response consistency; agency preservation vs. assistance density; fluent assistance vs. calibrated uncertainty; adaptive autonomy vs. explainable control) and propose five design principles for adaptive AI support. The paper aims to provoke conversation in the HCI community about how large language models should behave when the user's voice is itself the contested object.	Omoyemi	Short paper
3	Adaptive Conversational Agents for Motivation and Engagement in Task-Related Goal Planning Dialogues	The psychological quality of a conversational agent’s dialogue style shapes user engagement and experience, yet controlled experimental evidence for motivational effects remains limited, particularly for brief task-related single-session interactions. This study presents a within-subjects experiment examining whether two Self-Determination Theory-grounded dialogue styles, a warm, autonomy-supportive Friend condition and a structured, competence-oriented Coach condition, can enhance task-related state motivation (users’ in-session drive to pursue their stated goal) and user engagement compared to a non-adaptive Generic baseline condition. All three conditions employed identical session-scoped conversational memory, isolating dialogue style as the sole manipulated variable. The evaluation employed a mixed-method approach combining validated self-report scales, exploratory behavioural indicators and qualitative thematic analysis. Both adaptive conditions statistically significantly outperformed the SDT-neutral Generic baseline in this controlled comparison in terms of improved engagement and motivation (both with large measured effect sizes). The two SDT styles did not differ significantly, though preference, behavioural and qualitative indicators converge tentatively on competence support mattering more than relatedness in task-focused planning. These findings provide empirical evidence that psychologically informed dialogue design enhances engagement and motivation in brief goal-oriented interactions, with practical implications for conversational AI design.	Yu, Robb	Short paper
4	Training Alone Together: Developing a Virtual Opponent for Home-Based Kickboxing Training	Solo training leaves martial artists without a resource it cannot replace: a responsive sparring partner - an absence the COVID-19 pandemic made acute when it closed gyms and dojos worldwide. Replicating that partner digitally requires real-time recognition of a practitioner’s movement, which is still an open challenge for SportsHCI. Virtual Reality (VR) is one route: consumer headsets can place a digital opponent in front of the practitioner, though few actually adapt to how the user is moving. To address this gap, drawing from our experiences as martial arts practitioners, we present a proof-of-concept VR sparring system for kickboxing that attempts to close a feedback loop of recognition, prediction and response for a solo practitioner. Webcam pose estimation feeds a machine learning (ML) classifier, whose output drives an ML sequence predictor that selects the response of an avatar opponent in Unity, a 3D game engine. The classifier reached 87.22% test accuracy across 18 movement classes but reliably recognised only three in deployment. Assessed through autobiographical design, the system is presented as an early exploration from which we draw two provisional design principles for responsive digital sparring partners: calibrated unpredictability and a readable opponent.	McCrossan, Stawarz	Short paper
5	Trust Me, I’m Human! Comparing Attitudes Towards AI versus Human Junior Colleagues in Medical Device Design	Regulatory demands for transparency and accountability conflict with opaque artificial intelligence (AI) in the medical device design industry. A mixed-methods design was used to study how trust shapes human-AI roles, where interviews with design professionals (N=7) highlighted the importance of safety-criticality in this context. This informed a 2x2 within-subjects experiment (N=24) that manipulated information source (AI, junior colleague) and task safety-criticality (high, low). Crucially, participants were presented with similar reports but were told they were created by either a junior colleague or an AI. Significantly higher trust ratings were given for reports purportedly written by colleagues than for AI. An interaction was found for perceived success, with AI rated significantly higher in non-safety-critical tasks, but not in safety-critical tasks. The results suggest that in regulated industries, where trust depends on accountability rather than just ability, efficiency is prioritised until safety is jeopardised.	Chuah, Lawson	Short paper
6	Designing for Informal Mindfulness: Exploring How Interactive Technology Can Support Mindful Awareness in Everyday Life	Informal mindfulness, the practice of bringing mindful awareness to everyday activities, has been associated with a range of well-being benefits, yet most technologies focus on formal practices (e.g., meditation). We explore how interactive technology can support informal mindfulness. We conducted interviews with informal mindfulness practitioners (n=12) and used the findings to design a tangible prototype, the Mindfulness Ball. We then evaluated it in a day-long in-the-wild study with 12 participants, followed by exit interviews. Our findings show that the Mindfulness Ball can support informal mindfulness through low-threshold, embodied interactions that prompt brief moments of awareness during daily activities. Participants reported increased awareness that sometimes lingered beyond the interaction. Engagement was shaped by embodied and curiosity-driven interaction, while prompt effectiveness depended on contextual fit. We conclude with implications for designing technologies that better support informal mindfulness in everyday life.	Koekkoek, Bentvelzen	Short paper
7	Co-Living Between Courtrooms: Extended Reality as Digital Bridge for Moot Court Training	Moot court training is central to legal education because it helps students develop oral advocacy, confidence, courtroom etiquette, and familiarity with formal legal procedure. Yet physical moot courts are resource intensive and infrequent, and unevenly accessible, particularly for students from under-resourced institutions and remote regions. This paper explores how Extended Reality XR might act as a digital bridge between scarce physical moot court opportunities and more routine, accessible rehearsal. We report an exploratory multi-method study combining expert interviews, semi-structured interviews with students, faculty, lawyers, and judges, passive onsite observations of moot court proceedings, and analysis of moot court documents. The study suggests that the scarcity of moot court opportunities is driven primarily by systemic resource constraints rather than pedagogical preference. Participants also described performance anxiety, limited rehearsal opportunities, and unequal access to training. In response, we designed and prototyped a virtual moot court environment aligned with institutional guidelines used in India. Early qualitative feedback suggests that XR-based moot court environments may support repeated low-stakes practice, broaden access to courtroom rehearsal, and help students become more familiar with courtroom formality and interaction. Positioned within HCI research on immersive learning, embodied interaction, and mixed reality, this work contributes an emerging design space for digitally bridging physical institutions and everyday professional training.	Yadav, Kulkarni, Akhtar	Short paper
8	“It Might Break but It Has to Work”: Challenging and Comparing Values in Personal Physical Activity Systems	Values play a key role in how we experience technology. Understanding the rationale behind choices between values may help future designers to build systems better aligned with user wants and needs. We present the outcomes of a workshop centred around an adversarial tournament-style ‘values deathmatch’ containing 32 values derived from the literature. These values were discussed in the context of personal exercise systems, with choices based around users’ preferences. Participants debated and chose from randomly paired values, and we analysed their arguments to understand their rationales. We found participants typically prioritised values relating to more effective system outcomes (e.g. Usefulness, Alignment), and gave less weight to values they felt could be as effectively satisfied by themselves, such as Safety or Direction. We highlight how users prioritise values, and we provide rationale-centric framing for discussing values in the context of behaviour change and technologies for supporting physical activity.	Scott, Han, Stawarz	Short paper
9	Designing and implementing an LLM-Supported Embodied VR Tutor for Smoking Cessation: An Early Prototype	This paper presents an early prototype of an LLM-supported embodied conversational tutor for smoking cessation in immersive virtual reality (VR). The tutor supports spoken interaction with a visible agent and is designed to connect conversational guidance with a planned smoking-trigger context. The dialogue is informed by Motivational Interviewing and Self-Regulated Learning and includes safety constraints to support non-judgemental interaction. The prototype explores how voice-based dialogue and embodiment can be coordinated as a situated human–agent interaction within immersive VR. Early development has highlighted conversational timing and gesture naturalness as areas requiring further refnement. The design provides a basis for studying how embodied conversational support can be delivered within smoking-related situations in immersive VR. The prototype will next be refned through expert and stakeholder feedback before formal user evaluation.	Alshahrani, Cristea	Short paper
10	Audio-Tactile Paintings for Accessible Interaction in Museums	This paper presents a tactile sonified painting prototype for accessible human-computer interaction in museums. The design responds to a common problem: paintings often depend on sight, while visitors who are blind and visually impaired are mainly offered spoken description or guided support. The prototype turns a selected painting into a touchable and listenable interface. A tactile surface divides the artwork into raised tactile zones, while an ESP32 touch system detects contact and triggers mapped sounds. Spatial audio is used to place these sounds near, far, left, or right, so visitors can build a mental map of colour, shape, texture, mood, and layout. The paper argues that this method is original because it joins tactile modelling, sonification, and spatial listening within museum objects. It also shifts access from passive reception toward active exploration. The paper contributes a practical framework for inclusive museum interaction and future audio-tactile studies. It offers a clear path for museums seeking access tools that are practical and user-led.	Opara, Lewis, Choudhury	Short paper
11	Making Architectural Decisions Traceable in the Participatory Design of LLM Agents	Participatory design enables HCI researchers to involve stakeholders in shaping interactive systems that reflect their values and contextual needs. In LLM-based conversational agents, however, user experience is shaped not only by visible dialogue or interface features, but also by behind-the-scenes elements such as underlying models and architectures. While participatory design is well-suited to eliciting descriptive user needs, the translation from qualitative design themes to internal agent architectures often remains implicit, distributed across teams, and difficult to trace. This lack of traceability makes it challenging to verify whether the resulting system remains aligned with stakeholder expectations, especially in high-stakes domains like mental health. To address this challenge, this paper explores how to make architectural decisions traceable in the participatory design of LLM-based agents. We present a reflective case situated in the design of an agent for mental health. Through this case, we articulate a translation process shaped by four forms of design judgment: making operations visible, identifying database needs, consolidating overlapping logics, and assigning architectural roles. We show that the same qualitative theme can yield different technical structures, each carrying distinct interactional and ethical consequences. By examining this interpretive translation layer, we illustrate through a reflective case how the movement from participatory insights to agent architecture can be made more traceable.	Cho, Fonseca, Di Simplicio, Calvo	Short paper
12	How Generative AI Image Generation Aligns with and Shapes Human Mental Images	Although Generative AI (GenAI) image generators are widely used by people to turn an idea into a picture within seconds, the process of generating and iterating over these images based on people’s mental images remains underexplored. We report an exploratory mixed-methods study combining a pre-survey of everyday GenAI image-generation practices (N = 156) with an image-generation task (N = 46) in which participants generated images of an assigned abstract or concrete target word and repeatedly compared the output with their mental image. Participants rather quickly converged on an AI-generated image that matched their mental image, with further iterations refining rather than reshaping it, but this convergence played out differently depending on what was being visualised: abstract concepts left more room for the AI to shape the outcome, while concrete concepts anchored participants to a more stable image that resisted further AI influence. We discuss implications for designing GenAI image-generation interfaces around this distinction to better support the different processes of expressing and updating one’s internal images.	Ghittini, Reicherts	Short paper
13	RoboCorp: A Structured Corpus and Analysis of News Reports on Robotaxi Incidents	Shared automated vehicles, commonly referred to as robotaxis, are becoming increasingly present in major urban environments. Their deployment introduces new forms of interaction between automated systems, urban infrastructures, and everyday social practices, while a growing number of operational challenges and traffic incidents has raised concerns about how these systems are designed, governed, and made accountable in public space. As an emerging technology, there is currently a lack of systematic collection of these incidents in publicly available datasets. Using a structured, multi-query search and relevance-screening process on the LexisNexis Nexis Uni database, we assembled and coded a corpus of 63 English-language newspaper articles on such incidents, spanning their formative years of deployment from 2016 to 2023, which serves as a starting point for investigating them. We categorise risks, including collisions, operational breakdowns, and situations in which human intervention remains consequential, and examine their influence on perceptions of safety, responsibility, and trust in urban contexts.	Serratore, Schade, Savino, Reicherts, Schöning	Short paper
14	Hollowing the Collegial: Six Displacements of Collegial Attention in Software Engineering Work	Software teams coordinate through mundane but consequential exchanges: a question asked across a desk, a design rationale worked through aloud, or a judgement made visible in review. Interviews with 33 UK software professionals suggest that LLM use can move some of these exchanges into private worker– model conversations. We examined passages describing changes in consultation, witnessing, explanation, contribution and team learning using qualitative content analysis informed by constant comparison. The analysis yielded six related displacements: witness withdrawal, consultation rerouting, articulation atrophy, reciprocity collapse, attribution obscuration and collective deskilling. Participant accounts show how these shifts appear in practice and connect them to CSCW work on common ground, situated action, boundary objects, practical wisdom and attention. We offer the taxonomy as a sensitising lens rather than a measurement instrument, and close with design directions for keeping model-assisted reasoning inspectable and available to colleagues.	Vishwarupe, Blackwell, Shadbolt, Jirotka, Flechais	Short paper