From Text to Self: Users' Perceptions of Potential of AI on Interpersonal Communication and Self

In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-mediated communication (AIMC), tools powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming integral to interpersonal communication. Employing a mixed-methods approach, we conducted a one-week diary and interview study to explore users' perceptions of these tools' ability to: 1) support interpersonal communication in the short-term, and 2) lead to potential long-term effects. Our findings indicate that participants view AIMC support favorably, citing benefits such as increased communication confidence, and finding precise language to express their thoughts, navigating linguistic and cultural barriers. However, the study also uncovers current limitations of AIMC tools, including verbosity, unnatural responses, and excessive emotional intensity. These shortcomings are further exacerbated by user concerns about inauthenticity and potential overreliance on the technology. Furthermore, we identified four key communication spaces delineated by communication stakes (high or low) and relationship dynamics (formal or informal) that differentially predict users' attitudes toward AIMC tools. Specifically, participants found the tool is more suitable for communicating in formal relationships than informal ones and more beneficial in high-stakes than low-stakes communication

Parents’ ontological beliefs regarding the use of conversational agents at home: resisting the neoliberal discourse

This paper develops a critical perspective on the use of conversational agents (CAs) with children at home. Drawing on interviews with eleven parents of pre-school children living in Norway, we illustrate the ways in which parents resisted the values epitomised by CAs. We problematise CAs’ attributes in light of parents’ ontological perceptions of what it means to be human and outline how their attitudes correspond to Bourdieu’s [1998a. Acts of Resistance. New York: New Press] concept of acts of resistance. For example, parents saw artificial conversation designed for profit as a potential threat to users’ autonomy and the instant gratification of CAs as a threat to children’s development. Parents’ antecedent beliefs map onto the ontological tensions between human and non-human attributes and challenge the neoliberal discourse by demanding freedom and equality for users rather than productivity and economic gain. Parents’ comments reflect the belief that artificial conversation with a machine inappropriately and ineffectively mimics a nuanced and intimate human-to-human experience in service of profit motives

Supporting Intentional Media Use in Families

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2017-06Designers of interactive technologies have long prioritized user engagement, and today’s popular end-user products are irresistibly engaging. Modern technology offers enormous value and convenience, but it has also led to widespread feelings of dissatisfaction, and users report wishing they had a different relationship with the technologies they use. Though families are avid technology users, this eager adoption has come with concerns about the impact of technology on family life and child development, and limit-setting is a salient topic in family contexts. This conversation is complicated by social narratives that pressure families to limit exposure to technology. My dissertation examines how families choose to integrate technology into daily life, how they wish they integrated technology into daily life, and what designers can do to help close the gap between the two. By building tools that families find easy to dynamically use and not use, as it suits their shifting needs, designers can support them in both making technology a meaningful part of daily life and also keeping it within bounds they feel good about. Here, I report first on a series of formative studies to understand families’ practices and values related to using technology. Across three investigations, I report on observational, interview, diary, and survey data from both parents and children. These studies show, for example, that many parents feel guilty when using personal devices in front of their children (even when they use them for only brief periods of time), children have a harder time complying with rules that ban technology in certain contexts (e.g., no phones at the dinner table) than rules that ban certain types of technology altogether (e.g., no social networking), and young children find it easier to transition away from screen media when the technology itself encourages them to do so than when parents encourage them to do so without the support of technology. Based on this background work, I next examine how designers might create systems that promote intentional usage behaviors. I present the design, development, and evaluation of two such systems: “MyTime,” created for adults, and “Plan & Play,” created for children. MyTime is a system-level persuasive technology for intentional smartphone use, and my deployment results indicate that it is effective in changing users’ habits in the short-term. Plan & Play translates evidence-based techniques for teaching self-regulation to preschoolers into a digital setting, and a lab study with parent-child pairs suggests that it supports children in engaging with tablets with intention. Across these studies, I examine how motivation, autonomy, family dynamics, and situated activities shape the ways in which families engage with and push back against technology. I argue that today’s parental controls, the primary design mechanism for limit-setting in family contexts, undermine children’s likelihood of self-regulating their own technology use and do not attempt to support families in mentoring children in becoming thoughtful consumers of technology. In a world where technology is available at every moment, managing one’s own media consumption has become an essential life skill. I hope that this work will shed new light on how designers can support users in engaging with technology with intention and leave them feeling more satisfied with their own behaviors

UbiComp 2014

The 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing represented a wide variety of technologies, methodologies, user scenarios, and institutions. From wearable computing in outer space to smart mats for gyms, contributors pushed the boundaries on what's possible and continued to extend the reach of technology to be ever-more pervasive and ubiquitous

A Privacy-Focused Systematic Analysis of Online Status Indicators

Online status indicators (or OSIs, i.e., interface elements that communicate whether a user is online) can leak potentially sensitive information about users. In this work, we analyze 184 mobile applications to systematically characterize the existing design space of OSIs. We identified 40 apps with OSIs across a variety of genres and conducted a design review of the OSIs in each, examining both Android and iOS versions of these apps. We found that OSI design decisions clustered into four major categories, namely: appearance, audience, settings, and fidelity to actual user behavior. Less than half of these apps allow users change the default settings for OSIs. Informed by our findings, we discuss: 1) how these design choices support adversarial behavior, 2) design guidelines for creating consistent, privacy-conscious OSIs, and 3) a set of novel design concepts for building future tools to augment users’ ability to control and understand the presence information they broadcast. By connecting the common design patterns we document to prior work on privacy in social technologies, we contribute an empirical understanding of the systematic ways in which OSIs can make users more or less vulnerable to unwanted information disclosure

Designing Methods Towards Resilience: A Critical Reflection on Co-Designing Technology with Families During Early COVID-19

In the reactive environment of adjusting to remote learning and life during COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, families had few opportunities to collaborate, play, and imagine better futures. Using family resilience theory as a guiding framework, we describe a study of 30 US-based families who participated in a ten-week study using the Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) method between April and July 2020. In this paper, we analyze the affordances of co-design activities for envisioning solutions to family needs during the pandemic and share concerns as well as future directions for designing methods for resilience. Our findings suggest the asynchronous, creative collaboration through playful and open-ended prompts in our study lays the groundwork for cultivating family resilience, and we identify gaps in methods for sustained resiliency. We suggest modifications for applying the ARC method with educational communities and reflect on family engagement for relational commons

Probes to explore the individual perspectives on technology use that exist within sets of parents

© 2020 ACM. Research reveals that family experiences of technology use in everyday life can be complex and messy, often associated with tension and conflict. This complexity can be intensified when sets of parents have differing individual perspectives on their family's technology use. Exploring these different perspectives, requires an approach that not only considers parents not only as individuals, but also as part of a set. To challenge matters further, parents may not be fully aware of their own attitudes and assumptions relating to technology, let alone of each other's. Parents may also be embarrassed to share details about family conflicts. This methods paper presents a probe study that successfully helped us to explore the individual perspectives on family technology use that exist within sets of parents. It provides an example of an approach to using probes that can reveal the hidden experiences of multiple individuals within a social context. In this way, it contributes an understanding of how we might interrogate the complexities of co-experience