Accepted Workshops

Faced with multiple, intersecting crises, numerous computing technologies have emerged and interacted with the crises. Amidst the growing prominence of AI, the discourses on AI-related harms predominantly focus on AI deployment and use, shifting attention away from their social and structural underpinnings. In response, this workshop seeks to reflect and map how AI intersects with the crises through framing the costs of AI. With costs of AI we refer to the human and natural toll of AI systems, such as labor exploitation, environmental degradation, and perpetuated social inequality, and emphasize the inherent and inevitable trade-offs in AI development and use. We invite contributions on various forms of AI-related costs, and critical engagement with methods to approach and address these costs. This workshop aims to (1) map the various costs of AI; (2) explore and reflect on concepts, frameworks, and methods to approach and engage with them; and (3) foster exchanges and collaborations in an interdisciplinary community.

How is the climate crisis mediated by data? In this one-day hybrid workshop, we will gather an interdisciplinary group of critical computing scholars and practitioners both examining and practising the different ways that climate change is becoming datafied. The datafication of climate change refers to the collection, analysis, and representation of data to inform decision-making around strategies for the prevention, mitigation, or adaptation to the impacts of climate change. While increased use of data promises to keep powerful actors accountable for their actions and enable targeted decision making necessary for policy analysis, there are challenges regarding how and what kinds of data are being used and for whom. Furthermore, the increased data usage also entails environmental impacts, such as the rising energy consumption, which may contradict the intended goals behind datafication in the first place. In this workshop, we aim to map the climate data pipeline, based on presentations by participants on their current research in relation to the data lifecycle (e.g. cleaning, storing, analysis, scraping, etc.) with a tentative output of a written publication in ACM interactions magazine.

This one-day workshop aims to map data and its inherent connections to work (of all kinds) across a landscape of ongoing crises. The workshop brings together researchers and practitioners with an interest in data work that underpins automation, algorithmic systems and organizational and societal strives toward datafication. The workshop provides a forum for interdisciplinary discussions around controversies related to data and work -- and data work in particular -- with the aim to expand the toolbox for working with data by proposing and developing critical approaches, drawing on the rich contributions of the growing body of literature on data work and datafication. Through spatial and temporal mapping exercises, the workshop intends to both trace paths through past crises into a contemporary moment, and towards more hopeful futures.

Risk literacy in technology contexts concerns the ability to understand, assess, and make informed decisions about risks and their implications. This requires understanding the landscape of sociotechnical harms, as well as cultivating skills for identifying social and technical sources of harms, interpreting probabilistic information, understanding uncertainty, evaluating risk-benefit tradeoffs, and making decisions with incomplete information. Despite efforts to educate diverse audiences on technological risks and harms, these efforts are often ad-hoc and issue-driven. To move beyond issue-based approaches, we need a systematic approach to understanding technology’s role in harm and assessing risk across sociotechnical contexts - what we term “systematic sociotechnical risk literacy”. In this workshop, we will experiment with existing harms frameworks to develop a toolkit for teaching systematic risks across different contexts. This will equip educators to teach digital safety and foster coherence through shared language and practices. Ultimately, systematic digital risk literacy will enable engineers, policymakers, and researchers to collaboratively shape computing’s future and navigate future uncertainties.

This workshop explores the challenges of participatory and engagement-driven approaches (PEDAs) in sensitive and marginalized contexts. Although PEDAs emerged from workplace democracy and structured labor environments, their application in crisis-affected and vulnerable communities raises ethical and methodological tensions. Researchers navigating these complexities must critically examine power imbalances, extractive participation, and agency in design. In this workshop participants will collaboratively create tangible outputs by making zines while reflecting on their experiences, sharing challenges, and developing strategies for ethical participation. The workshop fosters a supportive space for mutual learning, centering care, inclusion, and researcher well-being in participation-based research.

Computing is a field plagued with presentism, oriented towards the new in ways that limit our design and research practices - as well as our capacity to understand and collectively respond to emerging crises. To improve our sensemaking and strategizing about today's crises, this workshop explores what Tamara Kneese has deemed the last decade's shift from "techlash" to "tech fash". What have we learned from the era of misinformation and bias, of "surveillance capitalism" and tech worker organizing that can inform our struggle against the increasing power of a techno-fascist oligarchy? We will also look towards previous generations of computing professionals and activists, who likewise sought to address the harms of emerging automated systems and the complicity of computing within violent, imperialist projects. This workshop will create space for participants to explore these questions collectively, bridging past and present moments in an effort to devise strategies moving forward.

We propose hosting a design workshop style sprint to create a list of guidance for researchers who study the links between social media and social movements, based on the collective knowledge-making of researchers and activists interested in varied social movements across global contexts. The guidance will be split into current empirical/tactical knowledge of social media use in social movements, theoretical innovations, and ethical and safety guidance for researchers working in this field.

Synthetic data is increasingly used throughout the AI development pipeline to address three primary challenges surrounding data use - data scarcity, privacy concerns, and data representativeness or diversity. With the introduction of the AI Act, these three challenges take on new urgency. Creating synthetic data clearly addresses the data scarcity problem and over a decade of research has interrogated the possibilities of differential privacy, yet little attention has been paid to whether and how data diversity is addressed in these systems. When applied to data, the term representation has multiple definitions, including both "representativeness,'' which describes quantitative metrics of how many instances of a particular kind or grouping are in a dataset, and "representation,'' which concerns the qualities that tend to be assigned to groups and individuals. In this workshop we will explore synthetic data with a view to this plurality of representation as essential to responsible AI development practices.

In this workshop we investigate “alternative futures” of programming with generative-AI tools. The workshop aims to establish a strand of HCI research on the future of AI-supported programming that goes beyond the current focus on usability and performance of GenAI-assisted programming tools, to instead explore radical re-conceptualizations of co-coding and co-creation with AI. The workshop is open to researchers and practitioners engaged in critically exploring novel ways of coding and interacting with AI-based programming tools. We encourage speculative design inquiries exploring prototypes, and provocations that facilitate engagement with a wider spectrum of human skills, experiences and ways of knowing when programming with AI. The workshop welcomes contributions that i) present examples of novel interaction, empirical studies or prototypes of AI-based programming, ii) re-conceptualize how programming with AI-based tools may be conducted and designed for, iii) reflect on values and ethical challenges of AI-based programming.

Given the current ecological crisis, the HCI and design community is showing a growing interest in the adoption of more-than-human perspectives, challenging human-centric approaches. While this has sparked numerous research initiatives, many of them are still a far cry from providing practical solutions or transforming the industry. This also presents a hurdle for teaching more-than-human perspectives to design students, as they may feel powerless to practice those teachings in real-life industrial settings. To bring forth concrete examples of how more-than-human design practice can matter, we believe that it is now time to move beyond theorising about and advocating for the adoption of such perspectives and start a more-than-human design practice that transforms the industry. This workshop therefore aims to bring together educators, researchers, and designers to discuss and co-develop strategies for transitioning more-than-human perspectives from niche/speculation to mainstream/practice in HCI and design. The workshop also aims to develop ways to empower students to work with these perspectives to bring about this transformation of the industry.

This one-day workshop sets out to discuss academic impact, its multi-faceted meanings and, therefore, the various ways it can be achieved. Over the last year, for both HCI research and other academic fields, impact has become a key notion to assess research, including the evaluation of funding proposals, project outcomes, and departments. Expressions, such as, community outreach, environmental harms and benefits, societal relevance, or industry interests are all expressions that can be associated with this growing focus. Yet, questions remain about the audience of academic research, the societal role of academia, the tensions between corporate-driven technological trends and critical intellectual interests, and how mutually beneficial partnerships between academia and other actors can be developed. The theme of this year's conference "Computing [in] Crisis" reminds us of the importance of such questions and the urge for future research to take them seriously. The workshop will provide a platform for HCI researchers, practitioners, representatives of public institutions, and diverse interested actors to discuss impact, and how a future research agendas that take it seriously might look like. We plan to accept up to twenty contributions and run the workshop on-site.

Design research is inherently both social and political. We are living and working in times of great unrest and upheaval, and we feel that our work must increasingly reflect this. We propose this workshop to engage with the material practices of protest. These range from long-held traditions of banners and badges to more emergent forms of zines, stickers, tattoos, and visible repairs. We propose a day of making and exchange to engage these practices. We will explore the materiality of the protest banner as a surface of collective expression, while also emphasizing care, repair, and feminist practices of collective knowledge-making in design research. Practically, we will be making banners, stickers, and temporary tattoos, using a speculative trade union as a unifying structure for discussions around care and justice in design.

As AI systems increasingly shape human experiences in work, communication, and decision-making, the way we design interactions with these systems plays a critical role in ensuring ethical, transparent, and human-centered AI. However, HCI and design researchers are often underrepresented in AI teams and discussions. Hence, this workshop explores the future of design in Human-AI Interaction (HAI) by addressing key challenges such as explainability, trust, job augmentation, social AI, and sustainability. Through interactive discussions and hands-on design sprints, participants will prototype AI interfaces that foster trust, inclusivity, and responsible AI usage. We will reflect on how design practice will change over the next decade as well as how design and HCI methods can address these challenges for shaping an AI-powered future that enhances rather than replaces humans.