Short Paper Showcase: Group A
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 |