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Research Updates

Updates from Human Centered Design & Engineering faculty, PhD students, and research scientists.

Summer 2025

September 12, 2025

HCDE was well-represented at 4S 2025, the 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S):

Awards

  • David Ribes and Daniela Rosner, with Janet Vertesi, Carl DiSalvo, Laura Forlano, Steven J. Jackson, Yanni Loukissas, and Hanna Rose Shell, received the STS Infrastructure Award 2025 for their work on the digitalSTS initiative.

Conference Leadership

  • Daniela Rosner served as Conference Co-Chair
  • David Ribes served as Program Committee Co-Chair
  • Gabrielle Benabdallah served as a Zine Festival Co-Chair

Panel Organizers

  • Gabrielle Benabdallah was:
    • a Panel Co-organizer for {Techno} magic and crafting digital artifacts 1
    • a Panel Organizer for {Techno} magic and crafting digital artifacts 2
    • a Panel Organizer for {Techno} magic and crafting digital artifacts 3
  • Anaid Gakhokidze was a Panel Organizer for Back to Black Marxism: Convening racial capitalism theories and STS
  • Sucheta Ghoshal was a Panel Co-organizer and Discussant for Back to Black Marxism: Convening racial capitalism theories and STS
  • David Ribes was a Panel Co-organizer for:
    • The Rise of Research Security
    • Knowledge of HIV/AIDS in STS: Archives, Expertise, and Participation
  • Daniela Rosner was:
    • a Panel Organizer for Threaded Keynote: Art Scenes
    • a Panel Organizer for Threaded Keynote: Bordering
    • a Panel Organizer for Threaded Keynote: Political Water
    • a Panel Organizer for New Critical Computing Conference: Co-Design Gathering
    • a Panel Co-Organizer for Craft and STS Meet Up
  • Joseph Schafer was a Panel Organizer for Memes and Humor as Digital Activism: Subversive Narratives in the Social Media Age
  • Will Sutherland was a Panel Organizer for:
    • Software as Instrument 1
    • Software as Instrument 2

Papers

  • McKane Andrus delivered a paper: From Data Activism to Activism in a Time of Data-Centrism: Engaging with Data and Epistemological Refusal
  • Kyra Arnett and David Ribes delivered a paper: Security through Openness: Tracing the Development of “Fundamental Research”
  • Adiza Awwal delivered a paper: "Trad Wife" Audiences on YouTube: A Mixed-Methods Content Analysis of Feminine Political and Lifestyle Influencers
  • Gabrielle Benabdallah with co-authors Afroditi Psarra and Sadaf Sadri delivered a paper: {Techno} magic and crafting digital artifacts
  • Sayan Bhattacharjee delivered a paper: Skin in the game: Tracing critique in the emergence of a novel skin tone scale for AI/ML
  • Zarine Kharazian delivered a paper: Governance Clashes Over Generative AI in Online Knowledge Commons
  • Beth Kolko delivered a paper: Possibly true stories from semi-hidden worlds: Autoethnographic accounts of building a startup and a VC fund
  • Caitlin Lustig delivered a paper: From Industrial & Organizational Psychology to AI technology
  • Caitlin Lustig with co-author Hunter Akridge delivered a paper: Future(s) of Care Work: How Digital Care Platforms Reproduce and Contest the Cultural Politics of Care
  • Nina Lutz delivered a paper: "Called It!": Prediction and Precarity in the 2024 US Election Lead Up
  • Nina Lutz, Joseph Schafer, Julie Vera, and Sourojit Ghosh delivered a paper: Spider Jesus: Folk Theories and Meaning Making Around AI Slop
  • David Ribes with co-authors Pooja Mohanty and Eric Monteiro delivered a paper: Sensing the winds: ML as concatenated instrumentation
  • Daniela Rosner delivered a paper: Fibers of Alignment
  • Daniela Rosner with co-authors Nava Haghighi, Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat, Jingyi Li, and Alex Taylor delivered a paper: Hope, Ontological Breakdowns, and a World of Many Worlds
  • Joseph Schafer delivered a paper: Ignore All Previous Instructions: Memetic Refusal of Engagement with LLM-Enabled Accounts Via Humor
  • Will Sutherland delivered a paper: From substrate to instrument: software practice and rigor in an astrophysics collaboration
  • Neilly Tan and Claire Weiznegger delivered a paper: Subjectivities of/within Security and Surveillance
  • Joice Tang delivered a paper: Navigating the Response to Corporatization & AI in Higher Education as Unionized Workers
     

September 5, 2025

Beth Kolko, with Responsible Innovation Labs, provided "office hours" to startups at Seldon Lab, a startup accelerator in San Francisco focused on AGI security.

Beth Kolko delivered a paper, Possibly true stories from semi-hidden worlds: Autoethnographic accounts of building a startup and a VC fund, at 4S 2025, the 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).

Sean Munson, with co-authors Shaan Chopra, Katherine Juarez, and James Fogarty, had a paper, Engagements with Generative AI and Personal Health Informatics: Opportunities for Planning, Tracking, Reflecting, and Acting around Personal Health Data, published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT).

Zhuoyi Zhang, with co-authors Di Liu, Jingwen Bai, Yilin Zhang, Zhenhao Zhang, Jian Zhao, and Pengcheng An, had a paper, TherAIssist: Assisting Art Therapy Homework and Client-Practitioner Collaboration through Human-AI Interaction, published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT).
 

August 29, 2025

Brock Craft with co-authors, Alexander Pagano, Saadeddine Shehab, Cristian Eduardo Vargas-Ordonez, Hadi Ali, Micah Lande, Georges Y. Ayoub, Sebastian Dziallas, and Taylor Parks, had a paper, Advancing Human-Centered Engineering (HCE): A Framework for Defining and Building the Emerging Discipline, presented at the 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition in Montreal, Quebec.

Brock Craft with co-authors, Taylor Parks, Alexander Pagano, and Saadeddine Shehab, had a paper, WIP: Using a human-centered engineering design mapping tool to inform ABET accreditation for an existing engineering design program, presented at the 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition in Montreal, Quebec.

Sourojit Ghosh and Sarah Marie Coppola had a paper, Empowering Engineering Graduates to Contribute towards Designing Safer Generative AI Tools through an Ethics Course, presented at the 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition in Montreal, Quebec.

Sourojit Ghosh, Sarah Marie Coppola, and Arpita B. had a paper, Integrating Theory and Practice into a Design Foundations Course, presented at the 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition in Montreal, Quebec.

Jennifer Turns had a paper, Beyond Implementation: Exploring Research through Design to Elevate Everyday Educational Innovation in Engineering Education, presented at the 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition in Montreal, Quebec.

Jennifer Turns and Cynthia Atman, with co-authors Reid Bailey, Krina Patel, Susannah Howe, Micah Lande, and Eli Patten, had a paper, Using design timelines for tracking and reflection on design processes: Emerging insights, presented at the 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition in Montreal, Quebec.

Jennifer Turns and Yuliana Flores had a paper, Generative AI as a Thinking Partner in Doctoral Education: An Autoethnographic Exploration, presented at the 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition in Montreal, Quebec.
 

August 22, 2025

Nadya Peek received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) Phase II grant of $1,491,300 for RepLab: Open Source Hardware for Laboratory Automation.

Nadya Peek, with co-authors Jennifer Jacobs, Emilie Yu, Mackenzie Leake, Hannah Twigg-Smith, and Emily Whiting, had a paper, Computational Craft: Computational Fabrication Methods for Enabling Craft Production in Textiles and Ceramics, published in the Proceedings of the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Courses (SIGGRAPH Courses '25).

Pitch Sinlapanuntakul and Mark Zachry had a paper, Impacts of AI on Human Designers: A Systematic Literature Review, published in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication.

August 15, 2025

Leslie Coney has been awarded a fellowship by the Georgetown-Howard Center for Medical Humanities and Health Justice (MHHJ). The theme for this inaugural year of the fellowship is “Networks.”

Brett Halperin had a book review, Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation by Marina Hassapopoulou (review), published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Kate Starbird was:

August 1, 2025

Charlotte Lee and Adam Hyland had an article, Floating Points, published in Proceedings of the sixth decennial Aarhus conference: Computing X Crisis (AAR '25).

Charlotte Lee, Will Sutherland, Negin Alimohammadi, Ridley Jones LeDoux, and Andrew Neang had an article, The Agony and Ecstasy of Extended Research on Computational Systems, published in Proceedings of the sixth decennial Aarhus conference: Computing X Crisis (AAR '25).

Kevin Feng and David McDonald with co-author Amy Zhang, had a paper, Levels of Autonomy for AI Agents, published by the Knight First Amendment Institute.

Cecilia Aragon was quoted in The Washington Post article, Fan fiction is everywhere, if you know how to look.

July 25, 2025

Julie Kientz has been elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences for “award-winning leadership in HCI computing, whose research has advanced health and education technology, influenced policy, and shaped the HCI field of through impactful scholarship, interdisciplinary collaboration and inclusive, real-world technology design.” Dr. Kientz is one of twelve faculty members at the University of Washington elected to the WSAS in 2025.

Joseph Schafer and Kate Starbird, with co-authors Morgan Wack, Ian Kennedy, Anna Beers, and Emma Spiro, had an article, Legislating Uncertainty: Election Policies and the Amplification of Misinformation, published in Policy Studies Journal.

Aayushi Dangol is quoted in the Seattle Times article: UW game shows kids they are smarter than AI. Julie Kientz is mentioned, and Jason Yip is quoted.

July 18, 2025

Jeffrey Basoah, with co-authors Daniel Chechelnitsky, Tao Long, Katharina Reinecke, Chrysoula Zerva, Kaitlyn Zhou, Mark Díaz, and Maarten Sap, had an article, Not Like Us, Hunty: Measuring Perceptions and Behavioral Effects of Minoritized Anthropomorphic Cues in LLMs, published in the Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparent (FAccT '25) .

Gabrielle Benabdallah, with co-authors Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Laura Devendorf, and Mirela Alistar, had an article, "Chaotic, Exciting, Impactful": Stories of Material-led Designers in Interdisciplinary Collaboration, published in the Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '25).

Nisha Devasia, with co-authors Chris Coward and Jin Ha Lee, had an article, Escape Rooms for Misinformation Education: A Case Study of Co-Design with Two Communities, published in the Conference Proceedings of DiGRA 2025: Games at the Crossroads.

Nisha Devasia and Julie Kientz, with co-author Jamie Espinosa-Briones, had an article, Preliminary Results from a Systematic Review of Narrative Game-based Interventions for Mental Health, published in the Abstract Proceedings of DiGRA 2025: Games at the Crossroads.

Nisha Devasia, Adrian Rodriguez, Logan Tuttle, and Julie Kientz had an article, Partnership through Play: Investigating How Long-Distance Couples Use Digital Games to Facilitate Intimacy, published in the Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '25).

Brett Halperin, with co-authors Willem van der Maden, Vera van der Burg, Petra Jääskeläinen, Peter Kun, Derek Lomas, Timothy Merritt, Joseph Lindley, Pavel Okopnyi, Frode Guribye, Maria Luce Lupetti, and Jichen Zhu, had an article, From Dead-ends to Dialogue: Third Workshop on Design Research & GenAI, published in the Companion Publication of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '25 Companion).

Brett Halperin, with co-authors Alexandra Kitson, C. Estelle Smith, Franzisca Maas, Michael J Hoefer, Sara Wolf, Elizabeth Buie, had an article, Diving Into the Ocean of Religious and Spiritual Design Research, published in the Companion Publication of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '25 Companion).

David Ribes, with co-author Francis Lee, had an article, Computational universalism, or, Attending to relationalities at scale, published in Social Studies of Science.

Donghoon Shin and Gary Hsieh, with co-author Young-Ho Kim, had an article, PlanFitting: Personalized Exercise Planning with Large Language Model-driven Conversational Agent, published in the Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI '25).

Donghoon Shin and Gary Hsieh, with co-authors Tze-Yu Chen and Lucy Lu Wang, had an article, What About My Design Context?: Exploring the Use of Generative AI to Support Customization of Translational Research Artifacts, published in the Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’25).

Pitch Sinlapanuntakul and Mark Zachry had an article, Perception in Pixels: Effects of Avatar Representation in Video-Mediated Collaborative Interactions, published in the Proceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work (CHIWORK '25).

Claire Florence Weizenegger, with co-authors James Pierce, Robyn Anderson, Hope Terpilowski, Wyatt Olson, Lian Bensadon, Faith Ong, and Cobi Stancik, had an article, Arca: Documenting Novel Design Patterns for Improving Interpersonal Privacy with Smart Cameras, published in the Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '25).

Aayushi Dangol:

Samuel So was interviewed for the KUOW story, Layoffs, lost faith, and 'cruel optimism' in tech.

June 27, 2025

Murtaza Ali and co-author Benjamin Xie had a column, Automated Benchmarking Infrastructure: Moving Toward Robust Investigations of Gen AI in Computing Education, published in ACM Inroads.

Aayushi Dangol had an extended abstract, Beyond Users: Supporting Children in Interpreting, Resisting, and Collaborating with AI, published in the Proceedings of the 24th Interaction Design and Children (IDC '25).

Aayushi Dangol and Julie Kientz, with co-authors Robert Wolfe, Daeun Yoo, Arya Thiruvillakkat, and Ben Chickadel, had an extended abstract, “If anybody finds out you are in BIG TROUBLE”: Understanding Children’s Hopes, Fears, and Evaluations of Generative AI, published in the Proceedings of the 24th Interaction Design and Children (IDC '25).

Aayushi Dangol, Trushaa Ramanan, and Julie Kientz, with co-authors Runhua Zhao, Robert Wolfe, and Jason Yip, had an article, “AI just keeps guessing”: Using ARC Puzzles to Help Children Identify Reasoning Errors in Generative AI, published in the Proceedings of the 24th Interaction Design and Children (IDC '25).

Aayushi Dangol, Trushaa Ramanan, and Julie Kientz, with co-authors Robert Wolfe, Runhua Zhao, JaeWon Kim, and Katie Davis, had an article, Children's Mental Models of AI Reasoning: Implications for AI Literacy Education, published in the Proceedings of the 24th Interaction Design and Children (IDC '25).

Meghna Gupta, Arpita B, and Julie Kientz had an article, "Being a nanny isn't just caregiving": An Analysis of How Nannies Seek Support in Online Communities like /r/Nanny, published in the Proceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work (CHIWORK '25).

Brett Halperin had an article, Crafting computational counter-media: Spatial story design of housing (in)justice and archival challenges, published in the Radical Housing Journal.

Kyler Menge and Gary Hsieh, with co-authors Barclay T. Stewart, T. Varugis Kurien, Caitlin Orton, Rebecca Estrada, Gretchen Carrougher, Callie Thompson, and Tam N. Pham, had an article, Optimizing the user-experience (UX) and −interface (UI) of a mHealth application to aid recovery from burn injury (BurnCORE) through a user-centered design approach, published in Burns Open.

Caroline Pitt, with co-authors Jessica Andrews, Melissa Carlson, Anessa Roth, and Jason Yip, had an extended abstract, Let's test it!: Designing peer-to-peer engineering games with and for children, published in the Proceedings of the 24th Interaction Design and Children (IDC '25).

Kate Starbird was quoted in the NBC News article, How Minnesota shooting conspiracy theories hijacked social media.

June 13, 2025

Sourojit Ghosh with co-authors Yanfu Liu, Cheng Guo had a paper, “Post-Editing Vs Neural Machine Translation: A Comparative Study of English ↔ Mandarin Translations in Daily Conversations,” published in The International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction.

Sean Munson with co-authors Alex Zhu, Jessica Sher, Richard Li, Otari Ioseliani, Leah Cantor, Elena Brewer, Karla Landis, David Bridges, Hanna Hunter, Cindy Lin, Sarah Psutka had a paper, “What motivates bladder cancer patients to be active? A qualitative study assessing attitudes towards physical activity and digital health technologies,” published in Urologic Oncology: Seminars and Original Investigations.

Kate Starbird was a featured guest on KUOW’s Soundside program, “Clock is ticking for scientists to make the case against funding cuts.”

Samuel So was featured in the UW Daily article, "What UW students should know before entering the tech industry.”

 

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