Updates from Human Centered Design & Engineering faculty, PhD students, and research scientists.
Summer 2025
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:
- was interviewed for the KUOW story, This puzzle game is helping kids think critically about AI.
- was featured in the UW News article, This puzzle game shows kids how they’re smarter than AI. Julie Kientz and Jason Yip were quoted; Trushaa Ramanan, Runhua Zhao and Robert Wolfe were mentioned.
- was featured in the MSN News article, AI couldn’t crack it, but kids did: THIS puzzle proves how kids are smarter than AI. Julie Kientz and Jason Yip were quoted.
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.”