As automated vehicles (AVs) move toward mainstream adoption, understanding how users learn about and build trust in them is critical. Prior research shows that women hold safety concerns and report low trust and familiarity with AVs. While limited exposure is often cited as a cause, growing evidence indicates that women’s needs, preferences, and safety priorities remain insufficiently addressed in AV design and governance. We conducted ten dyadic and five individual semi-structured interviews with fifteen women drivers, guided by feminist HCI principles. We then analysed the findings for themes and through a socio-ecological framework to explore trust and learning across individual, interpersonal, institutional, community, and policy levels. Our findings show that women’s needs and expectations for AVs develop in conversation with gendered and caregiving responsibilities, and experiences of safety and vulnerability. Trust and learning co-evolve in this process as a dynamic association of forces influencing inclusive mobility. We contribute a feminist socio-ecological account of trust–learning dynamics, identifying design and policy interventions that support inclusive onboarding, institutional accountability, and community-based co-learning for equitable AV adoption.

Roleplay is a powerful tool for exploring social dynamics, particularly in education and training on sensitive topics like gender and power dynamics in STEM. However, traditional methods often cause discomfort when participants must embody roles that differ from their own identities. The Roleplay Mirror, an augmented reality (AR) system, addresses this by allowing participants to project their actions and voices onto digital avatars, reducing discomfort and enabling more authentic engagement. The system also facilitates the recording and review of role-plays in three-dimensional spaces, enhancing their educational value and fostering empathy through perspective taking. Initial feedback highlights both the potential of the system and the challenges of using digital avatars for representation. This paper details the design, implementation, and early insights from the Roleplay Mirror, contributing to the development of virtual roleplay systems that are both effective and ethically sensitive.

The learning phase for in-vehicle technologies is critical in the adoption of automated vehicles (AVs), particularly for older adults, who often rely on peer support and mentorship to navigate new technologies. We conducted a study involving nine older adults who experienced a Level 4 highly automated vehicle on a closed circuit track, followed by a workshop. Using a participatory design approach, the participants visualized their ideal human-machine interface (HMI) designs and expressed how external and mutual support among older adults can facilitate learning. Our preliminary findings revealed a strong preference for a combination of experiential learning, structured guidance, clear instructional materials, and social learning. Through the mentorable interaction framework, we explore how AV systems can integrate mentorship and peer-assisted guidance. Our study underscores the need for AV systems that align with users' pedagogical needs.

This study explores diversity initiatives in STEM, focusing on gender-based discrimination. Four archetypes of attitudes, Doubtful Advocate, Cautious Observer, Quiet Achiever, and Empowered Activist are identified through co-design workshops using comic-based augmented reality (AR) design fiction and interviews with 12 STEM Higher Education students. The exploratory study provides insights for designing AR platforms that support diversity in STEM and contribute to diversity initiatives through a Feminist HCI lens by enabling users to share experiences, brainstorm solutions, and practice responses to discrimination.

Advances in automated vehicle (AV) technology may significantly benefit older adults through enhanced mobility, independence, safety, and comfort. To understand older adults' role as future users, we systematically reviewed 79 peer-reviewed articles on older driver-AV interactions using a narrative synthesis approach and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Five main study topics emerged: attitude and intention to use AVs, trust and acceptance, take-over performance, situational awareness, and human-machine interfaces. Most articles adopted a deficit model, emphasizing older adults' cognitive and physical changes over personal preferences. Individual backgrounds, familiarity, and learning approaches were overlooked in the research. This article recognizes older adults' abilities and advocates for more inclusive AV design and research.

Automated vehicles (AVs) have the potential to enhance transportation for all, but current research suggests that women remain less engaged and more hesitant toward their adoption. This scoping review systematically analyses 34 peer-reviewed studies published between 2016 and 2025 to assess how women's experiences, needs, and concerns are represented in AV research. Using thematic analysis, we identify key facilitators and barriers to AV adoption and map them onto a Socio-Ecological Model spanning five levels: individual, interpersonal, institutional, community, and policy. Our findings reveal a critical gap: while gender is frequently recorded as a demographic variable, women are rarely centred as primary users or co-creators in AV design and evaluation. Most studies rely on quantitative, mixed-gender approaches, with limited use of qualitative or participatory methods that could surface the nuanced realities of women's mobility. As a result, vital concerns-such as safety, emotional comfort, caregiving roles, and design exclusion-are often overlooked in AV research. To address this, we introduce the WISE-AV Framework (Women-Informed Socio-Ecological Framework), which organises the multi-level influences shaping women's engagement with AVs. This framework extends the Socio-Ecological Model with a gender lens and integrates principles from feminist HCI to emphasise transparency, participation, and embodied experience. Our study offers both theoretical and practical contributions: it provides a roadmap for researchers, designers, and policymakers to create more inclusive AV systems, and it delivers actionable recommendations to ensure that AVs are not just technologically advanced-but socially equitable. We argue that AVs can only fulfil their promise of safer, smarter mobility when they are designed not for a generic "user," but with the diverse realities of women in mind.

We introduce a conceptual framework exploring the learning methods for older adults in navigating automated vehicle interfaces. Through semi-structured interviews, we observed distinct approaches to learning, and based on these, offer a novel conceptualization of a ‘mentorable’ interface to enhance technology education. The introduction of automated vehicles (AVs) to transportation has required novel lenses to technology adoption. Although AVs require less demand in cognitive, motor, and sensory acuity, there is an increasing dependence on digital literacy. While technology education has been broadly explored through the lens of learnability, this paradigm does not work well for older adults due to its inherent trial-and-error approach to independent learning. Because older adults rely heavily on additional external support in learning technologies, we present a conceptual framework for ‘mentorability’, where a network of support is emphasized, and mentorship is integrated into the design process for in-vehicle interfaces.

This article explains how a major Australian university is partnering with the local IT industry to better prepare IT students for the start of their careers in software engineering through real-world industry projects. We present experiences from three different viewpoints.

While the research on Augmented Reality (AR) predominantly emphasises technical advancements in devices, visualisation, and interactivity, it often overlooks the perspectives of everyday users regarding the integration of AR into their daily practices, social interactions, and creativity. To address this gap, we conducted workshops with a group of eight older creative writers to explore the potential of AR in their creative process. Our analysis, based on a postphenomenological perspective, reveals the complex nested worlds and narratives within participants' perspectives. We present the notion of multifocal realities in the design of AR technology to consider the layered and parallel realities users see, feel, and experience in creative collaborations. This view promotes an expansion of AR research from a technical perspective to understand the concurrent experiences in augmenting reality, what new forms of creativity and socialisation this may support, and what it means to live in an augmented and augmentable world.

We explore the design of systems that enable humans and machines to operate as teams, exercising their different and complementary abilities to work and learn together. Machine Learning (ML) is now widely used in diverse applications such as medical image reading and autonomous vehicles, but typically, ML systems are not designed with human learning in mind, sometimes eroding or supplanting human skills, creating a whole that is less than the sum of its parts. We propose a new approach to ML/AI system design to foster human-machine mutual learning: synergistic interactions in which machines help people think critically and gain wisdom, while people help improve machine models by reframing ML tasks and immersing them in human-machine-human systems which provide feedback to the AI model while helping humans to learn. By explicitly aiming to increase human skill and wisdom, teaming goes beyond “human-in-the-loop” approaches where humans serve primarily to enhance machine performance. We contribute a conceptual model for human-machine teaming design and use a case study in radiology training to identify five critical considerations for interaction design and for how to make AI interactive: (1) human-machine dialogue (2) labelling and attention (3) problem framing (4) biases, values and affect (5) ethics, agency and human choice.

This study investigated Australian older adults’ response to the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the adjustments they made to their activities, technology use, and social relations, to inform how technology design could be inspired by these adaptations. Online interviews revealed that some sorely missed social interactions, however, most enjoyed having a greater agency to curate their own activities and slowing down as a result of lockdown. These findings prompted us to rethink the design space of temporal design from the perspective of those craving an ongoing impact of slowness in their lives. We suggest that designing for a slower pace of life can be inspired by people’s response to life circumstances in lockdown, complementing the original concept of slow technology which seeks to intervene in a fast-paced life to encourage people to slow down and reflect. We conclude by proposing three new design pathways based on this new standpoint.

PDC Place will be hosted at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Australia, located on the lands of the Turrbal and Yugara people. QUT’s Kelvin Grove campus is located next to the Victoria Parklands/Barrambin – an urban park in the beginning stages of transformation by Brisbane City Council. PDC Place Brisbane provides an opportunity for the participatory design community within Australia to reconnect after some time separated by hard border closures and travel restrictions. Motivation for a Brisbane-based PDC Place event stems from an enthusiasm from the local PD community within South-East Queensland to come together with each other, with Country, and with the broader PD community within our region. We particularly encourage Higher Degree Research students and early to mid-career researchers and academics interested in reflection and discussion around the intersection of participatory design with a more-than-human focus.

We present a long-term study of use of the Messaging Kettle, an Internet of Things (IOT) research prototype that augments an everyday kettle with both sensing and messaging capability and a beautiful light display in order to investigate connecting geographically distant loved ones to their family through the routine of boiling the kettle. Connection at a distance has been of sustained interest to the CHI community, and the social connection of older people is of increasing importance in recognition of ageing populations globally. However, very few novel designs in this domain have been investigated in situ or over the long term to examine whether their use sustains, and if so, how they impact communication in a relationship. The Messaging Kettle was trialled with four pairs of dispersed older mothers and adult daughters over timeframes that lasted between two months to more than two years. We observed the phenomenon of collaborative habituation wherein each party creatively made the technology work for them both through a combination of the gradual transformation of their everyday practices, arrangements, and living. Through developing these joint practices over time, participants expressed feelings of everyday togetherness that nurture their relationship at a distance. Three of the four couples continued to use the prototype for years, beyond the initial trial. We reflect on the artful integration of features of the Messaging Kettle and the way in which these features supported collaborative habituation . We also reflect on lessons and implications for the design of such relational technologies.

Sensing the mental, physical and emotional demand of a driving task is of primary importance in road safety research and for effectively designing in-vehicle information systems (IVIS). Particularly, the need of cars capable of sensing and reacting to the emotional state of the driver has been repeatedly advocated in the literature. Algorithms and sensors to identify patterns of human behavior, such as gestures, speech, eye gaze and facial expression, are becoming available by using low cost hardware: This paper presents a new system which uses surrogate measures such as facial expression (emotion) and head pose and movements (intention) to infer task difficulty in a driving situation. 11 drivers were recruited and observed in a simulated driving task that involved several pre-programmed events aimed at eliciting emotive reactions, such as being stuck behind slower vehicles, intersections and roundabouts, and potentially dangerous situations. The resulting system, combining face expressions and head pose classification, is capable of recognizing dangerous events (such as crashes and near misses) and stressful situations (e.g. intersections and way giving) that occur during the simulated drive.

We present tangible design non-proposals as a technique for establishing and growing relationships in community-based co-design projects, particularly with Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Prior tangible design products from our research group were used to introduce our capabilities and interests and as tangible provocations to understand potential community interests for co-design. We describe how the non-proposals supported initial conversations and imagination, forming relationships, formalising an official relationship, understanding the scope and scale of community aspirations, artful appropriation, and how they morphed into a research prototype aligned to the community's needs and vision. We describe the ways that tangibles supported a mutual sensitisation process and realising project limits, bounds and misalignments. We contribute a framework for design non-proposals with both general characteristics and dimensions salient to our collaborative work with Aboriginal communities. We evaluate our own design non-proposals using the framework to present implications for seeding co-design processes.

Namibia, a southern African country with an Ubuntu culture that emphasizes interrelations, generally displays a low reading culture. In this study, we explored a social approach to reading to engage Namibian primary learners. Inspired by promising reading approaches, such as shared group reading enhanced by embodied actions, we created Spin Da Bottle—a multiplayer reading-action game to draw Namibian learners into reading while keeping them captivated in action. The game was co-designed with 36 learners and then evaluated by 32 learners with an adapted immersion questionnaire, post-experience survey and individual interviews. 50 learners were then observed while playing at a public event. Our findings confirm that learners are engaged and enjoy the collective embodied reading experience. We observed different group behaviours scaffolding individual readers. We contribute to the field of reading technologies a digital tool that creates a collective and embodied reading experience, and an adapted immersion instrument. What is already known about this topic What this paper adds Implications for practice and/or policy

Namibia, a southern African country with an Ubuntu culture that emphasizes interrelations, generally displays a low reading culture. In this study, we explored a social approach to reading to engage Namibian primary learners. Inspired by promising reading approaches, such as shared group reading enhanced by embodied actions, we created Spin Da Bottle-a multiplayer reading-action game to draw Namibian learners into reading while keeping them captivated in action. The game was co-designed with 36 learners and then evaluated by 32 learners with an adapted immersion questionnaire, post-experience survey and individual interviews. 50 learners were then observed while playing at a public event. Our findings confirm that learners are engaged and enjoy the collective embodied reading experience. We observed different group behaviours scaffolding individual readers. We contribute to the field of reading technologies a digital tool that creates a collective and embodied reading experience, and an adapted immersion instrument. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic It has been recognized that shared reading increases learners engagement and participation. Dialogic reading experience is enhanced through embodied actions. What this paper adds Through a design-based research approach, a digital multiplayer reading-action game was developed to explore whether a social, embodied, group game could increase interest and engagement of children in reading. The game was co-designed and the immersion validated with primary school learners in Namibia. An adapted immersion instrument was derived for reading games. Implications for practice and/or policy Collective reading games offer weak readers support from their peers. A Namibian inclusive education for all, considering an Ubuntu pedagogy, can be supported with appropriate technologies. Teachers can integrate this game in the classroom by authoring their content in order to engage learners.