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Faith institutions provide social support and community care for many in the United States (U.S.). Notably, churches with predominantly Black populations have served as a site for social change and care provision, historically and in contemporary society. However, the pandemic has emphasised how localising these care networks in physical spaces can limit access to social support. Information and communication technologies offer opportunities for expanding access to care in these communities. However, integrating care networks into online contexts remains a challenge for many churches, and the potential for technology to expand these networks is not well understood. Through interviews and focus groups with nine church members, we explore how hybrid faith communities that bridge offline and online contexts can enable social support and care provision. Our findings highlight care network structures in Black churches, barriers to embedding these networks online and strategies for building more seamless hybrid support systems. 

HCI researchers have increasingly examined how social context shapes health behaviors. Much of this work operates at the interpersonal level. Communities such as churches play important roles in supporting wellbeing and addressing health inequities. While some work has investigated creating digital health tools for religious populations, few have explicitly focused on the incorporation of community support in the form of prayer support. Embedding health interventions in any community has the potential to support or challenge the community’s dynamics. We report on findings from interviews with 17 church members who used a church-based mHealth application over a 4-week period and provide guidelines for developers based on these results. Through their use of the system, participants characterized several community dynamics including a desire for social intimacy, communicating care, creating opportunities for fellowship, maintaining privacy and discretion, and building community connections, and how these dynamics influence their aspirations for a church-based health app. 

In response to COVID-19, a vast number of visualizations have been created to communicate information to the public. Information exposure in a public health crisis can impact people’s attitudes towards and responses to the crisis and risks, and ultimately the trajectory of a pandemic. As such, there is a need for work that documents, organizes, and investigates what COVID-19 visualizations have been presented to the public. We address this gap through an analysis of 668 COVID-19 visualizations. We present our findings through a conceptual framework derived from our analysis, that examines who, (uses) what data, (to communicate) what messages, in what form, under what circumstances in the context of COVID-19 crisis visualizations. We provide a set of factors to be considered within each component of the framework. We conclude with directions for future crisis visualization research. 

Churches have historically played an important role in Black American communities, catalyzing the pursuit of aims such as social justice, community organization, and health promotion. However, researchers have rarely examined how technology can support an assets-based approach to these efforts, nor the implications of race, traditions, and history when creating such systems. Addressing this gap, we conducted research with two predominantly Black churches to explore health promotion design opportunities. We used photovoice, a research method where participants led their own data collection and analysis. Participants provided nuanced descriptions of the racial and ethnic identities of their communities, and how church history and aspirations for the future impacted these identities. Our findings characterize tensions between tradition and ‘modernization,’ implications for technology design, and the need for a temporal approach to understanding communities. We conclude with broader implications for studying the intersection of race and religion in community technology design. 

Culturally informed design for virtual agents has been shown to positively impact health outcomes when tailored to target audiences. We present a participatory design methodology for culturally tailoring virtual agents. Investigators worked with key informants from our target population, members of predominantly Black church communities, to design culturally-relevant and sensitive virtual agent health promotion interventions. In the first participatory session, key informants designed agents to assist them with different aspects of their lives, providing input on agent appearance and agent functionality. In a second design session, participants re-wrote the content of a health conversation with an agent, to include personally-relevant content related to their community (e.g., religious and scriptural references). We report design principles for religious tailoring derived from these studies. We conducted a validation study to assess the effects of applying these principles to agents that promoted two health behaviors, finding that participants responded very positively to the tailored agents. 

Social Networking Sites (SNS) offer youth activists and youth empowerment organizations (where adults help youth address community issues) opportunities for civic action. Impression management is critical to youth empowerment organizations’ work online, as they attempt to influence the opinions of their audience. However, there is a dearth of research characterizing online impression management in the context of youth empowerment organizations. To address this research gap, we conducted a qualitative study investigating the use of SNS in a youth empowerment organization. Using Goffman’s dramaturgical model, we characterized how youth tried to hack SNS algorithms, and their desire to better identify their audience. Our findings reveal how youth use SNS to create authentic images and connections with their audience. On the other hand, we discuss adults’ desire to convey a curated organizational image and challenges that arose. We conclude with design implications for tools that support impression management online for youth activists. 

In the task abstraction phase of the visualization design process, including in "design studies", a practitioner maps the observed domain goals to generalizable abstract tasks using visualization theory in order to better understand and address the users needs. We argue that this manual task abstraction process is prone to errors due to designer biases and a lack of domain background and knowledge. Under these circumstances, a collaborator can help validate and provide sanity checks to visualization practitioners during this important task abstraction stage. However, having a human collaborator is not always feasible and may be subject to the same biases and pitfalls. In this paper, we first describe the challenges associated with task abstraction. We then propose a conceptual Digital Collaborator: an artificial intelligence system that aims to help visualization practitioners by augmenting their ability to validate and reason about the output of task abstraction. We also discuss several practical design challenges of designing and implementing such systems. 

Social Networking Sites (SNS) provide a platform for engaging youth in activism (e.g., by helping mobilize civic action). While youth typically employ casual approaches to online activism (i.e., quick actions, such as broadcast posts to advertise social justice events), more strategic practices (i.e., those that are more creative and informed) can increase the likelihood of successful online campaigns. However, little work has examined how youth activists can be supported to use SNS more strategically. To address this research gap, we conducted interviews with youth activists, exploring how youth made sense of social network visualizations and their perspectives on how such tools could support their activism efforts. Our findings characterize how participants made inferences about followers’ identities based on their hashtag use, and how they used those inferences in outreach decisions. We conclude with design implications for future research in this area.