chi 2025 recap 🌸 | Courtney N. Reed

A very busy 2026 of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Yokohama, JP. It was great to be back to Japan after so many years, catching up with friends from my days in Tokyo, and spending great time with HCI colleagues. We had a couple presentations - one TOCHI article and a new CHI publication - a workshop on sensorimotor interaction, and an excellent FemCHI meetup. 🌸🍡

Scenes from Yokohama, featuring meetups on the waterfront and at the Cup Noodles Museum, and finally catching up with friends from Australia - Yichen Wang (ANU) and Ajit Pillai (U Sydney)!

sensorimotor devices

I always recommend folks new to CHI to sign up for a pre-conference workshop and get acquainted with the community before diving into the massive scene of the day programme. This year was the first time I’ve gotten to organise a CHI workshop; with the fabulous senSInt group, we ran a programme on Sensorimotor Devices: Coupling Sensing and Actuation to Augment Bodily Experience.

We demoed some of the latest in sensory experience design and explored some of our goals and aspirations for designing sensorimotor devices and where we would like the field to progress in the next 5, 10, and 50 years.

Device demos, imagining sensory futures, collaborative action in understanding embodied experience.

research proceedings

I presented work with my collaborator (and great friend!) Adan Benito that was published earlier in the year in the TOCHI (Transactions of Computer-Human Interaction) journal. We took a theoretical approach to explore how mappings in data-driven designs fix representations of ambiguity and shift complex relationalities around interactions:

Shifting Ambiguity, Collapsing Indeterminacy: Designing with Data as Baradian Apparatus (Courtney N. Reed, Adan L. Benito, Franco Caspe, and Andrew P. McPherson)

“… We examine data-enabled artefacts acting as Baradian apparatuses: they do not exist independently of the phenomenon they seek to measure but rather collect and co-produce observations from within their entangled state: the phenomenon and the apparatus co-constitute one another. Connecting Barad’s quantum view of indeterminacy to the prevailing HCI discourse on the opportunities and challenges of ambiguity, we suggest that the very act of trying to stabilise a conceptual interpretation of data within an artefact has the paradoxical effect of amplifying and shifting ambiguity in interaction… we explore the nature of the apparatus, what phenomena it co-produces, and where the ambiguity lies to suggest approaches for design using these abstract theoretical frameworks.”

Co-presenting about ambiguity and Baradian Apparatuses with Adan Benito.

Another article featuring work by a new collaboration team at the University of California San Diego and ETH Zürich was presented by my coauthor Matin Yarmand. This work adapted our previous model of metaphor communication, presented at CHI’23, for interdisciplinary reading and iterative generated metaphors:

Towards Dialogic and On-Demand Metaphors for Interdisciplinary Reading (Matin Yarmand, Courtney N. Reed, Udayan Tandon, Eric B. Hekler, Nadir Weibel, and April Yi Wang)

“The interdisciplinary field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) thrives on productive engagement with different domains, yet this engagement often breaks due to idiosyncratic writing styles and unfamiliar concepts. Inspired by the dialogic model of abstract metaphors, as well as the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce on-demand support, we investigate the use of metaphors to facilitate engagement between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and System HCI… metaphors enhance likelihood to continue reading STS papers, and alternative perspectives can build critical thinking skills to mitigate potential risks of LLM-generated metaphors. We lastly offer a specified model of metaphor exchange (within this generative context) that incorporates alternative perspectives to construct shared understanding in interdisciplinary engagement.”

The senSInt crew back at it again for another excellent CHI conference.

references

2025

Towards Dialogic and On-Demand Metaphors for Interdisciplinary Reading

Matin Yarmand, Courtney N. Reed, Udayan Tandon, and 3 more authors

In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Apr 2025

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The interdisciplinary field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) thrives on productive engagement with different domains, yet this engagement often breaks due to idiosyncratic writing styles and unfamiliar concepts. Inspired by the dialogic model of abstract metaphors, as well as the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce on-demand support, we investigate the use of metaphors to facilitate engagement between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and System HCI. Our reflective-style survey with early-career HCI researchers (N=48) reported that limited prior exposure to STS research can hinder perceived openness of the work, and ultimately interest in reading. The survey also revealed that metaphors enhance likelihood to continue reading STS papers, and alternative perspectives can build critical thinking skills to mitigate potential risks of LLM-generated metaphors. We lastly offer a specified model of metaphor exchange (within this generative context) that incorporates alternative perspectives to construct shared understanding in interdisciplinary engagement.
@inproceedings{Yarmand_CHI25_DialogicMetaphor, title = {{Towards Dialogic and On-Demand Metaphors for Interdisciplinary Reading}}, author = {Yarmand, Matin and Reed, Courtney N. and Tandon, Udayan and Hekler, Eric B. and Weibel, Nadir and Wang, April Yi}, year = {2025}, month = apr, booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems}}, location = {Yokohama, Japan}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, series = {CHI '25}, articleno = {1}, numpages = {19}, doi = {10.1145/3706598.3713698}, isbn = {97984007139412504}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713698}, }
Sensorimotor Devices: Coupling Sensing and Actuation to Augment Bodily Experience

Paul Strohmeier, Laia Turmo Vidal, Gabriela Vega, and 5 more authors

In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Apr 2025

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An emerging space in interface research is wearable devices that closely couple their sensing and actuation abilities. A well-known example is MetaLimbs [39], where sensed movements of the foot are directly mapped to the actuation of supernumerary robotic limbs. These systems are different from wearables focused on sensing, such as fitness trackers, or wearables focused on actuation, such as VR headsets. They are characterized by tight coupling between the user’s action and the resulting digital feedback from the device, in time, space, and mode. The properties of this coupling are critical for the user’s experience, including the user’s sense of agency, body ownership, and experience of the surrounding world. Understanding such systems is an open challenge, which requires knowledge not only of computer science and HCI, but also Psychology, Physiology, Design, Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Control Theory. This workshop aims to foster discussion between these diverse disciplines and to identify links and synergies in their work, ultimately developing a common understanding of future research directions for systems that intrinsically couple sensing and action.
@inproceedings{Strohmeier_CHI25_SensorimotorDevices, title = {{Sensorimotor Devices: Coupling Sensing and Actuation to Augment Bodily Experience}}, author = {Strohmeier, Paul and Turmo Vidal, Laia and Vega, Gabriela and Reed, Courtney N. and Mazursky, Alex and AliAbbasi, Easa and Tajadura-Jiménez, Ana and Steimle, Jürgen}, year = {2025}, month = apr, booktitle = {{Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems}}, location = {Yokohama, Japan}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, series = {CHI EA '25}, doi = {10.1145/3706599.3706735}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3706599.3706735}, }

2024

Shifting Ambiguity, Collapsing Indeterminacy: Designing with Data as Baradian Apparatus

Courtney N. Reed, Adan L. Benito, Franco Caspe, and 1 more author

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Dec 2024

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This article examines how digital systems designers distil the messiness and ambiguity of the world into concrete data that can be processed by computing systems. Using Karen Barad’s agential realism as a guide, we explore how data is fundamentally entangled with the tools and theories of its measurement. We examine data-enabled artefacts acting as Baradian apparatuses: they do not exist independently of the phenomenon they seek to measure but rather collect and co-produce observations from within their entangled state: the phenomenon and the apparatus co-constitute one another. Connecting Barad’s quantum view of indeterminacy to the prevailing HCI discourse on the opportunities and challenges of ambiguity, we suggest that the very act of trying to stabilise a conceptual interpretation of data within an artefact has the paradoxical effect of amplifying and shifting ambiguity in interaction. We illustrate these ideas through three case studies from our own practices of designing digital musical instruments (DMIs). DMIs necessarily encode symbolic and music-theoretical knowledge as part of their internal operation, even as conceptual knowledge is not their intended outcome. In each case, we explore the nature of the apparatus, what phenomena it co-produces, and where the ambiguity lies to suggest approaches for design using these abstract theoretical frameworks.
@article{Reed_TOCHI_ShiftingAmbiguity, author = {Reed, Courtney N. and Benito, Adan L. and Caspe, Franco and McPherson, Andrew P.}, title = {{Shifting Ambiguity, Collapsing Indeterminacy: Designing with Data as Baradian Apparatus}}, year = {2024}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, volume = {31}, number = {6}, issn = {1073-0516}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3689043}, doi = {10.1145/3689043}, journal = {ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction}, month = dec, articleno = {73}, numpages = {41}, }