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Large age differences and geographic distance between siblings can often hinder the development of close relationships, as they may have different social circles and schedules. Younger siblings may also have limited access to digital technology, which can further complicate communication and interaction between them. In this paper, we developed two technology probes, Haptic Bubble and Emoji Board. Both of these systems utilize embodied interaction, which has been shown to be an effective way to engage children in remote communication. Our work focused on three main goals through the development and preliminary study: the system design goal involved testing the feasibility of the embodied design approach, the empirical goal was to collect information on how siblings use embodied communication technology and the design goal was to inspire new kinds of technology to support large gap siblings’ needs. 

Siblings play a crucial and long-lasting role in family connections and relationships. However, with the older sibling transitioning out of their parental home, maintaining a close sibling relationship can be challenging, especially if siblings have a large age difference. We conducted a diary and interview study with nine families in China which have spaced siblings, to identify design opportunities for technology to better support their communication and connection needs. We contribute to the HCI community in three aspects. First, we contribute an empirical understanding of current communication patterns from distributed families with large age gap siblings in China. Second, we identify current facilitation roles, practices, and challenges regarding sibling relationships from different stakeholders’ perspectives. Last but not least, we present technological opportunities for supporting the large-gap sibling relationship, informing directions for future research and design for distributed families. 

Recovery from substance abuse disorders (SUDs) is a lifelong process of change. Self-tracking technologies have been proposed by the recovery community as a beneficial design space to support people adopting positive lifestyles and behaviors in their recovery. To explore the potential of this design space, we designed and deployed a technology probe consisting of a mobile app, wearable visualization, and ambient display to enable people to track and reflect on the activities they adopted in their recovery process. With this probe we conducted a four-week exploratory field study with 17 adults in early recovery to investigate 1) what activities people in recovery desire to track, 2) how people perceive self-tracking tools in relation to their recovery process, and 3) what digital resources self-tracking tools can provide to aid the recovery process. Our findings illustrate the array of activities that people track in their recovery, along with usage scenarios, preferences and design tensions that arose. We discuss implications for holistic self-tracking technologies and opportunities for future work in behavior change support for this context. 

Prior research has highlighted opportunities for technology to better support the tabletop game experience in offline and online settings, but little work has focused on the social aspect of tabletop gaming. We investigated the social and collaborative aspects of tabletop gaming in the unique context of “social distancing” during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic to shed light on the experience of remote tabletop gaming. With a multi-method qualitative approach (including digital ethnography and in-depth interviews), we empirically studied how people appropriate existing technologies and adapt their offline practices to play tabletop games remotely. We identify three themes that describe people’s game and social experience during remote play: creating a shared tabletop environment (shared space), enabling a collective understanding (shared information and awareness), and facilitating a communal temporal experience (shared time). We reflect on challenges and design opportunities for a better experience in the age of remote collaboration. 

Targeting the right group of workers for crowdsourcing often achieves better quality results. One unique example of targeted crowdsourcing is seeking community-situated workers whose familiarity with the background and the norms of a particular group can help produce better outcome or accuracy. These community-situated crowd workers can be recruited in different ways from generic online crowdsourcing platforms or from online recovery communities. We evaluate three different approaches to recruit generic and community-situated crowd in terms of the time and the cost of recruitment, and the accuracy of task completion. We consider the context of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the largest peer support group for recovering alcoholics, and the task of identifying and validating AA meeting information. We discuss the benefits and trade-offs of recruiting paid vs. unpaid community-situated workers and provide implications for future research in the recovery context and relevant domains of HCI, and for the design of crowdsourcing ICT systems. 

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. 

Community intergenerational mentorship offers an opportunity to address older adults' social isolation while providing valuable one-on-one or small group learning experiences for elementary school students. Current organizations that support this kind of engagement focus on in-person visits that place the burden of logistics and transportation on the older adult. However, as older adults become less independent while aging, coming to schools in person becomes more challenging. We present a qualitative analysis of current intergenerational mentorship practices to understand opportunities for technology to expand access to this experience. We highlight elements critical for building successful mentorship: the importance of relationship building between older adults and children during mentoring activities, the skills mentors acquired to carry out mentoring activities, and support needed from teachers and schools. We contribute a rich description of current intergenerational mentorship practices and provide insights for opportunities for novel HCI technologies in this context. 

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is the largest grassroots peer support group for any health condition. While AA meeting attendance is particularly important for people who are newly sober, newcomers often have trouble finding meetings because of a lack of global up-to-date meeting list due to preference for regional autonomy in AA's organizational structure. Detection of regional webpages containing meetings and extraction of day, time, and address of meetings from those pages are essential steps in making the information available and up-to-date in a global meeting list. However, varied structure of the webpages and the meetings pose challenges in achieving the goal with traditional information retrieval methods. In this paper we propose HAIR: a semi-automated human-aided information retrieval technique and explore its potential to solve this problem. We describe future directions in developing this critical tool and discuss major implications of our work in pointing to the importance of context-specific rather than context-agnostic semi-automated in-formation retrieval techniques by conceptualizing the proposed methods and results in a broader context. 

HCI has a history of developing rich media spaces to support collaboration between remote parties and testing such systems in investigations where each partner uses the same device setup (i.e., homogeneous device arrangements). In this work, we contribute an infrastructure that supports connection between a projector-camera media space and commodity mobile devices (i.e., tablets, smartphones). Deploying three device arrangements using this infrastructure, we conducted a mixed-methods investigation of device heterogeneity in media space collaboration. We found that the commodity devices provided a worse user experience, though this effect was moderated in some collaboration tasks. Collaborating with a partner who was using a commodity device also negatively affected the experience of the other user. We report specific collaboration concerns introduced by device heterogeneity. Based on these findings, we offer implications for the design of media spaces that use heterogeneous devices.