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1. Parenting in a Pandemic: Juggling Multiple Roles and Managing Technology Use in Family Life During COVID-19 in the United States

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3479546  

   Michelson, Rebecca; DeWitt, Akeiylah; Nagar, Ria; Hiniker, Alexis; Yip, Jason; Munson, Sean A.; Kientz, Julie A. (October 2021, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   The COVID-19 pandemic upended the lives of families with young children as school closures and social distancing requirements left caregivers struggling to facilitate educational experiences, maintain social connections, and ensure financial stability. Considering families' increased reliance on technology to survive, this research documents parents' lived experiences adapting to technology's outsized role alongside other shifts in family life associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we describe a 10-week study with 30 enrolled families with children aged 3 to 13 in the United States using the asynchronous remote communities (ARC) methodology to 1) understand the benefits and challenges faced by families as they adapted technology at home to navigate the pandemic, and 2) to ideate improvements to those experiences through co-design. We found that amidst gaps in infrastructural support from schools, workplaces, and communities, parents experienced deep anxiety and took on new roles, including tech support, school administrator, and curator of meaningful activities for their children. As parents shared bold and creative technology-based solutions for improving family well-being, schooling experiences, social life, and beyond, they demonstrated their capacity to contribute to new models of learning and family life. Our findings are a call to action for CSCW researchers, designers, and family-focused practitioners to work with learning communities that incorporate parent, teacher, and technology experiences in their academic and community planning. 

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2. On the Way to a Framework for Evaluating Creativity in Requirements Engineering

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IRI58017.2023.00039  

   Bhowmik, Tanmay; Do, Anh Q.; Lam, Hayden; Amin, Md Rayhan; Bradshaw, Gary L.; Niu, Nan (August 2023, IEEE)

   Creativity in requirements engineering (RE) has recently emerged to help innovate “novel and useful” requirements and improve a software system’s sustainability. Existing research has mostly focused on workshops, techniques, and tools to aid creative requirements elicitation. Limited attention, however, has been dedicated to creativity evaluation, despite the current mechanisms being largely restricted to rating requirements for a broad notion of “novelty and appropriateness”. In addition, such mechanisms focus on evaluating creativity from an elicitation perspective, leaving other RE activities widely disregarded. To further advance the literature, we present a preliminary study on developing a framework that aims to evaluate creativity in a precise manner and accounts for the full spectrum of RE activities. In particular, we propose a “creative requirement diagnosis scale (CRDS)” that includes 27 indicators to assess creativity, present a novel framework to evaluate the creative merits of requirements in terms of the complete RE process, and further evaluate requirements using our framework in a study with 53 participants. The results suggest our framework’s potential to capture creativity aspects that would otherwise be undetected by traditional techniques. Our study also indicates the need for further refinement of the framework, thereby opening new avenues for creativity in RE. 

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3. Identifying Cognitive and Creative Support Needs for Remote Scientific Collaboration using VR: Practices, Affordances, and Design Implications

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3527927.3532797  

   Olaosebikan, Monsurat; Aranda Barrios, Claudia; Kolawole, Blessing; Cowen, Lenore; Shaer, Orit (June 2022, C&C '22: Creativity and Cognition)

   Remote scientific collaborations have been pivotal in generating scientific discoveries and breakthroughs that accelerate research in many fields. Emerging VR applications for remote work, which utilize commercially available head-mounted displays (HMDs), offer the promise to enhance collaboration, through spatial and embodied experiences. However, there is little evidence on how professionals in general, and scientists in particular, could use existing commercial VR applications to support their cognitive and creative collaborative processes while exploring real-world data as part of day-to-day collaborative work. In this paper, we present findings from an empirical study with 14 coral reef scientists, examining how they chose to utilize available resources in existing virtual environments for their ongoing data-driven collaborative research. We shed light on scientists’ data organization practices, identify affordances unique to VR for supporting cognition in a collaborative setting, and highlight design requirements for supporting cognitive and creative collaboration processes in future tools. 

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4. Reading Experiences and Interest in Reading-Assistance Tools Among Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Computing Professionals

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3373625.3416992  

   Alonzo, Oliver; Elliot, Lisa; Dingman, Becca; Huenerfauth, Matt (October 2020, The 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '20))

   null (Ed.)

   Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) software replaces text with simpler alternatives. While some prior research has explored its use as a reading assistance technology, including some empirical findings suggesting benefits for deploying this technology among particular groups of users, relatively little work has investigated the interest and requirements of specific groups of users of this technology. In this study, we investigated the interests of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) individuals in the computing industry in ATS-based reading assistance tools, motivated by prior work establishing that computing professionals often need to read about new technologies in order to stay current in their profession. Through a survey and follow-up interviews, we investigate these DHH individuals’ reading practices, current techniques for overcoming complicated text, and their interest in reading assistance tools for their work. Our results suggest that these users read relatively often, especially in support of their work, and they were interested in tools to assist them with complicated texts. This empirical contribution provides motivation for further research into ATS-based reading assistance tools for these users, prioritizing which reading activities users are most interested in seeing application of this technology, as well as some insights into design considerations for such tools. 

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5. Reimagining Systems for Learning Hands-on Creative and Maker Skills

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3503732  

   Turakhia, Dishita G; Blikstein, Paulo; Holbert, Nathan R; Worsley, Marcelo; Jacobs, Jennifer; Anderson, Fraser; Gong, Jun; DesPortes, Kayla; Mueller, Stefanie (April 2022, CHI EA '22: Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   In the last decade, HCI researchers have designed and engineered several systems to lower the entry barrier for beginners and support novices in learning hands-on creative maker skills. These skills range from building electronics to fabricating physical artifacts. While much of the design and engineering of current learning systems is driven by the advances in technology, we can reimagine these systems by reorienting the design goals around constructivist and sociocultural theories of learning to support learning progression, engagement across artistic disciplines, and designing for inclusivity and accessibility. This one-day workshop aims to bring together the HCI researchers in systems engineering and learning sciences, challenge them to reimagine the future design of systems of learning creative maker skills, form connections across disciplines, and promote collaborative research in the systems of learning creative skills. 

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