How can design support people in making more informed decisions, building healthy habits, or reflecting on their daily lives? Researchers in this cluster explore how technology and design shape human awareness, thinking, and behavior—with an emphasis on ethics, equity, and real-world impact.
We study the ways design can support individual and collective wellbeing—while also recognizing that interventions may have unintended consequences or reinforce inequities. Our work examines how people interact with information and systems, and how these interactions influence behavior and decision-making.
Drawing from research on behavior change, social influence, motivation, reflection, and mindfulness, we design and evaluate tools that aim to support awareness and learning in diverse contexts. These include health and wellness, education, leisure, civic engagement, politics, digital wellbeing, and sustainability.
HCDE Researchers
Recent Publications
- Gary Hsieh - Rethinking Teaching Evaluation Reports: Designing AI-transformed Student Feedback for Instructor Engagement in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (November 2025)
- Julie Kientz - “I Would Not Be This Version of Myself Today”: Elaborating on the Effects of Eudaimonic Gaming Experiences in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (October 2025)
- Sean Munson - Evaluation of an Email Blood Pressure Measurement Outreach Program in American Journal of Hypertension (October 2025)
- Sean Munson - Engagements with Generative AI and Personal Health Informatics: Opportunities for Planning, Tracking, Reflecting, and Acting around Personal Health Data in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT) (September 2025)
- Julie Kientz and Sayamindu Dasgupta - Reading AI and Reading the World: Using an Interactive AI System to Promote Children's Understanding of AI Bias in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (September 2025)
- Beth Kolko - Possibly true stories from semi-hidden worlds: Autoethnographic accounts of building a startup and a VC fund at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) (September 2025)
- Julie Kientz - Promoting Family Engagement With Early Childhood Developmental Screening via the Baby Steps Text Messaging and Web Portal System: Longitudinal Randomized Controlled Trial in JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting (September 2025)
- Jennifer Turns - Beyond Implementation: Exploring Research through Design to Elevate Everyday Educational Innovation in Engineering Education at the 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition (June 2025)
- Jennifer Turns and Cynthia Atman - Using design timelines for tracking and reflection on design processes: Emerging insights at the 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition (June 2025)
- Jennifer Turns - Generative AI as a Thinking Partner in Doctoral Education: An Autoethnographic Exploration at the 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition (June 2025)
- Sayamindu Dasgupta - "Even Though I Went Through Everything, I Didn't Feel Like I Learned a Lot": Insights From Experiences of Non-Computer Science Students Learning to Code in Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25) (April 2025)