Beyond cute: exploring user types and design opportunities of virtual reality pet games

Virtual pet games, such as handheld games like Tamagotchi or video games like Petz, provide players with artificial pet companions or entertaining pet-raising simulations. Prior research has found that virtual pets have the potential to promote learning, collaboration, and empathy among users. While virtual reality (VR) has become an increasingly popular game medium, litle is known about users' expectations regarding game avatars, gameplay, and environments for VR-enabled pet games. We surveyed 780 respondents in an online survey and interviewed 30 participants to understand users' motivation, preferences, and game behavior in pet games played on various medium, and their expectations for VR pet games. Based on our findings, we generated three user types that reflect users' preferences and gameplay styles in VR pet games. We use these types to highlight key design opportunities and recommendations for VR pet games

Working Toward Empowering a Community: How Immigrant-Focused Nonprofit Organizations Use Twitter During Political Conflicts

In the digital age, social media has become a popular venue for nonprofit organizations to advocate for causes and promote social change. The 2016 United States Presidential Election occurred amidst divisive public opinions and political uncertainties for immigrants and immigration policies were a frequently-contested debate focus. Thus, this election provided an opportunity to examine nonprofit organizations' social media usage during political conflicts. We analyzed social media posts by immigrant-focused nonprofit organizations and conducted interviews probing into how they managed their online presence and social relations. This study finds that these nonprofit organizations adopted three key strategies to support their target community: 1) disseminating content about immigration-related issues and policies; 2) calling for participation in collective endeavors to influence the political climate; 3) engaging in conversations with outside stakeholders including political actors, media, and other organizations. We use empowerment theory, which has been used widely to study marginalized populations, as a theoretical lens to discuss how NPOs' social media usage on Twitter reflects their endeavors to bring information and calls to action to immigrant communities. We, then, present design opportunities to amplify the advantages of social media to help nonprofit organizations better serve their communities in times of political upheavals

Designing SocioTechnical Food Justice

For projects of moral and ethical import, designers and researchers are frequently motivated by notions of justice. However, it is unclear how justice influences design process. Within a participatory design process aimed at food access issues, I traced how concepts of justice manifested, were used when introduced, and under what conditions were concepts of justice ignored or laid aside for other concerns. This analysis produced several categories of design strategies participants employed to navigate complex ethical discussion around issues of food access. Within the design process, these design strategies included designing artifacts that were expanding food options, utilizing local resources, and localizing control. These results highlight the complex worlds in which these concepts of justice were situated within during the design process and inform how to support designers developing socially beneficial technologies while working alongside local communities.ye

Opportunities for Enhancing Access and Efficacy of Peer Sponsorship in Substance Use Disorder Recovery

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are characterized by an inability to decrease a substance use (e.g., alcohol or opioids) despite negative repercussions. SUDs are clinically diagnosable, hazardous, and considered a public health issue. Sponsorship, a specialized type of peer mentorship, is vital in the recovery process and originates from 12-step fellowship programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA). To investigate sponsorship relationship practices and to identify design opportunities for digitally-mediated peer support, we conducted 27 in-depth interviews with members of AA and NA. We identified five key sponsorship relationship practices relevant for designing social computing tools to support sponsorship and recovery: 1) assessing dyadic compatibility, 2) managing sponsorship with or without technology, 3) establishing boundaries, 4) building a peer support network, and 5) managing anonymity. We identify social computing and digitally-mediated design opportunities and implications

Media, Meaning, and Context Loss in Ephemeral Communication Platforms: A Qualitative Investigation of Snapchat

Most social media platforms are persistent in nature, enabling users to re-visit content at their discretion. Platforms with design features that support ephemeral communications, such as Snapchat, have become increasingly popular. During the course of our empirical study, we interviewed 15 Snapchat users about their experiences and practices. Our data reveal that Snapchat users experienced different types of loss, including media, meaning, and context loss, and developed workarounds to deal with those losses, including preemptive action and collaborative saving practices. Our findings revealed a conflict between the user's expectation of the affordance the ephemeral platforms would provide, and the actions user's followed

Designing Sustainable Food Systems

There is significant interest in designing technologies for the food system, from agricultural modeling tools to apps enabling humans to assess nutritional value of various food choices to drones for pest detection. However, a good food system must be a sustainable one. There is an urgent need for deliberation and thoughtfulness in designing for both technologies that support existing food systems and new modalities that work towards more sustainable food systems. This workshop will bring together HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners with an interest in exploring what constitutes a sustainable food system, as well as defining the role of HCI in this domain. Our key objectives for this workshop will be to identify what opportunities for design and collaboration exist and to lay the foundation for an active foodCHI community

Exploring Social Justice, Design,and HCI

The aim of this one-day workshop is to share existing research, discuss common practices, and to develop new strategies and tools for designing for social justice in HCI. This workshop will bring together a set of HCI scholars, designers, and community members to discuss social justice perspectives on interaction design and technology. We will explore theoretical and methodological approaches in and around HCI that can help us generatively consider issues of power, privilege, and access in their complexity. We will discuss the challenges associated with taking a justice approach in HCI, looking toward existing practices we find both productive and problematic. This workshop will bridge current gaps in research and practice by developing concrete strategies for both designing and evaluating social change oriented work in HCI, where agendas are made clear and researchers are held accountable for the outcomes of their work by members of their field site and the research community

"Will I always be not social?": Re-Conceptualizing Sociality in the Context of a Minecraft Community for Autism

Traditional face-to-face social interactions can be challenging for individuals with autism, leading some to perceive and categorize them as less social than their typically-developing peers. Individuals with autism may even see themselves as less social relative to their peers. Online communities can provide an alternative venue for social expression, enabling different types of communication beyond face-to-face, oral interaction. Using ethnographic methods, we studied the communication ecology that has emerged around a Minecraft server for children with autism and their allies. Our analysis shows how members of this community search for, practice, and define sociality through a variety of communication channels. These findings suggest an expansion in how sociality has traditionally been conceptualized for individuals with autism