Medical misogyny contributes to dismissal and normalization of pain in menstrual healthcare, often leaving AFAB (assigned female at birth) people with undiagnosed conditions for months or years. Meanwhile, menstrual tracking apps (MTAs) are increasingly integrating artificial intelligence (AI) to identify patterns that may evidence menstrual conditions in clinical settings. However, limited research explores whether AI-integrated MTAs challenge or reinforce medical biases. In this study, we worked with seven AFAB people aged from 24 to 39 years old in a speculative reflective writing process to explore AI-integrated MTAs through a feminist HCI lens. Thematic analysis was used to analyze reflections, and four themes were identified 1) compulsory AI-generated evidence; 2) quantifying menstrual experiences; 3) reinforcing reproductive labor; 4) a sociotechnical hierarchy of trust. Our findings show that AI-integrated MTAs could marginalize users with menstrual conditions, and frameworks are needed to evaluate how apps might perpetuate or challenge biases in menstrual healthcare.

Sports Human-Computer Interaction (SportsHCI) is a growing field that is dedicated to investigating the coming together of human-computer interaction and sports. Through this meet-up, we aim to bring together the SportsHCI community and engage adjacent communities including User-centered AI, MobileHCI, CHIPlay, ISWC-Ubicomp, and Augmented Humans. Sports inherently involves mobile, playful, and ubiquitous technologies as well as human augmentation—making SportsHCI directly relevant to these subcommunities. By framing discussions around AI in the athlete experience and the role of multifaceted sports data, we create natural entry points for researchers across these domains. We invite participants to discuss their thoughts on these topics to foster collaboration among research groups.

This paper presents a situated reflection on over a decade of Zwift use, combining more than 5,000km and 200 hours of personal activity with an ethnographic study of over 1,000km of community group rides during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than describing a path of athletic improvement, this work examines how engagement with virtual sports platforms is shaped by shifting routines, life transitions, health, and caring responsibilities. Group rides provided structure, support, and social connection, yet also revealed persistent barriers of access, flexibility, and technological complexity. By foregrounding the lived realities of both use and non-use, the findings contribute to SportsHCI by illustrating how participation in digital fitness is not simply related to motivation or performance, but an ongoing negotiation with everyday circumstances. This work highlights the need for flexible, inclusive, and enjoyable platform design, where community, adaptation, and fun are recognised as central to continued engagement.

HCI researchers recognize affect and emotion as fundamental parts of human experience however conceptualizing emotions as ineffable, embodied, situated, or culturally bound does not fit within some of the dominant paradigm of Affective computing and emotion AI research focused mostly on recognition and classification of basic emotions. An alternative term, Affective Interaction, has emerged to bring together a growing body of research which treats emotion and affect within HCI in similar ways. This workshop brings the research community together to examine various perspectives on affect, and specifically contrast Affective Interaction with Affective Computing. The aim is to discuss opportunities and limitations associated with each perspective, reconcile with advances in the science of emotion, and to speculate on future research directions. We believe that bringing together HCI researchers around Affective Interaction is vitally important because the broad reach of Affective Computing techniques may be obscuring advances in emotion research that show evidence that emotion defies easy categories and is culturally situated.

Sports and leisure cycling offer numerous health and social benefits, yet participation remains predominantly limited to a normative male stereotype. This paper explores how underrepresented communities use Instagram to promote broadened participation. Through interviews with 12 cyclists involved in these communities, we investigate how these digital spaces address barriers to participation and provide social support. Our findings reveal how Instagram facilitates the creation of flexible, diverse 'patchwork communities' that challenge traditional narratives and provide representation for cyclists with broad, underrepresented, intersectional identities. We highlight the critical role of representation as a form of social support and discuss key tensions between platform affordances, user practices, and community dynamics, including challenges in balancing visibility and safety, and user versus platform-curated content. This research contributes to sociotechnical understandings of online community building in sports, providing implications for fostering more inclusive and sustainable digital spaces for diverse users in an ever-changing online landscape.

We present a duoethnography of our data-tracking practices as first-time parents during the first two years of our child’s life, beginning during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on Data Feminism and our own three-dimension framework for family informatics, we examine how digital tracking technologies mediated our experiences of care, shaped relational dynamics, and surfaced tensions around visibility, accountability, and normative parenting expectations. Our reflections trace how data practices evolved over time, highlighting the emotional, ethical, and material implications of co-tracking in early parenthood. We show how digital tools variously supported, constrained, and reconfigured our caregiving labor, often embedding value-laden assumptions about “good” parenting. Through our analysis, we offer methodological insights into the use of duoethnography in HCI as a means to surface plural perspectives and entangled subjectivities. We contribute a feminist discourse to family informatics and personal data studies by proposing design considerations for more reflexive, relational, and contextually aware tracking systems.

Participation and access to sports remains unequally distributed, despite the many benefits for health and wellbeing, with intersecting barriers including age, gender, ability, race, body size, responsibilities, and cultural norms, impacting access. Sports technologies, and the field of SportsHCI more broadly, have the potential to help broaden participation, yet reinforce inequalities by prioritising performance metrics and assuming normative user assumptions. This paper argues for a more inclusive and equitable SportsHCI, foregrounding the "everyday athlete" by examining the benefits and barriers to participation in sports, and how these related to the design of sports technologies. Drawing on lived experience, inclusive design literature, and recent academic work, we identify issues in sports technologies and propose a five-point manifesto outlining actionable commitments, that supports a more inclusive future for SportsHCI. This paper invites researchers, designers, and industry to take up the challenge and responsibility, of shaping sport technologies that empower all.

Industry demands that graduates excel in their academic disciplines while creatively solving problems and challenges across various contexts, while collaborating effectively as part of a multidisciplinary team. This paper reflects on key learnings and implications from delivery of an innovative and novel “year-out” multidisciplinary design education programme for third-year undergraduate students from multiple disciplinary backgrounds. The programme's core aim was to facilitate learning and application of a range of design tools and methods, while concurrently allowing students to apply knowledge and skills from their home disciplines. Bringing together students from a range of disciplines helped to create novel solutions to complex problems while fostering critical thinking, creativity, adaptability, communication and collaboration – key skills for graduate employability. This paper derives and interrogates key learnings associated with two years of programme delivery. With a focus on pedagogical approaches through the lens of Threshold Concepts, we provide recommendations that support students to develop their own agency, to make this transition possible.

The field of Sports Human-Computer Interaction (SportsHCI) investigates interaction design to support a physically active human being. Despite growing interest and dissemination of SportsHCI literature over the past years, many publications still focus on solving specific problems in a given sport. We believe in the benefit of generating fundamental knowledge for SportsHCI more broadly to advance the field as a whole. To achieve this, we aim to identify the grand challenges in SportsHCI, which can help researchers and practitioners in developing a future research agenda. Hence, this paper presents a set of grand challenges identified in a five-day workshop with 22 experts who have previously researched, designed, and deployed SportsHCI systems. Addressing these challenges will drive transformative advancements in SportsHCI, fostering better athlete performance, athlete-coach relationships, spectator engagement, but also immersive experiences for recreational sports or exercise motivation, and ultimately, improve human well-being.

Life transitions, whether due to ageing, health conditions, or significant life events, pose unique challenges for individuals’ health and well-being. These periods demand adjustments in physical health and self-care of mental states. Meanwhile, interactive technologies like personal informatics, self-tracking tools, artificial intelligence (AI) driven health monitoring systems and virtual reality can enhance well-being by helping individuals understand their bodily changes; their role in life transitions is under-explored. Therefore, this workshop aims to bridge the gap between the availability of interactive technologies for managing health and well-being and their meaningful use during life transitions. By examining current practices and gaps, we seek to identify opportunities for designing interactive technologies and develop a research agenda to facilitate the alignment of these technologies with the evolving needs of individuals.

Student mental health and wellbeing have come under increased scrutiny in recent years. Postgraduate research (PGR) students are at risk of experiencing mental health concerns and this, with the often isolated and competitive nature of their work, can impact their sense of community and social connectedness. In response to these concerns, we designed Pears, a system to connect PGR students for regular "pearings" (inperson meetings) and provide activities to promote reflection and conversation. A four-week evaluation of Pears with 15 students highlighted its potential to sometimes, but not always, facilitate peer support. Some participants would instead meet formally and according to their needs, others instead used the system to make new social connections. Additionally, some participants who faced work-related difficulties during the study found using the system contributed to their stress levels. We conclude by noting how technologies that encourage peer support can help build social relationships, providing an avenue to share similar PhD experiences and guidance for those new to the experience, while importantly raising awareness and an understanding for the need to take time for self-care. However, these technologies must be utilised carefully, and are not a replacement for other sources of student support in universities.

Individual emotion can significantly impact one's well-being and a team's emotional environment can affect team performance. In addition, one's emotions in a team can affect others’ emotions. Thus, in order to have a positive team emotional state (environment) and avoid one's negative emotions propagating to others, a team emotion forecast tool is needed for teamwork management. How to design an easy-to-use team emotion forecast tool is our research question. In this study, we first propose to use keystroke and mouse dynamics as potentially effective signals to recognize emotions because of their ubiquity in the work environment, especially in remote work. And the emotion recognition process is non-intrusive and unobtrusive, which helps to identify emotions more objectively. Second, the user-centered design method is used to design such a tool/system. Third, a qualitative study has been conducted to analyze users’ demands and concerns. At last, a digital prototype has been designed and developed.

Very little research has concurrently explored the influence of both physical space and social context (or place) on the way people engage with a public interactive display. We addressed this issue with a novel approach: studying how people engaged with the same interactive installation in ten situations with varying spatial and social properties. The main finding across these studies is that place trumps space: a conducive social context could overcome a poor physical space and encourage interaction; conversely, an inappropriate social context could inhibit interaction in spaces that might normally facilitate engagement. We discuss this finding in terms of the salience of the display within the space, the visibility of incidental interactions with the installation, the different understandings of place that people can have in the same location, and the role of emergent champions and comperes in encouraging interaction.

HCI has a long history of designing to support family life, despite this little is known about the unique needs of adoptive families. Though work has explored the role of photos, and photo sharing in the family home, this does not take account of the essential role of photos in supporting the well-being of adopted children. We report on a Research through Design (RtD) project investigating how adoptive parents communicate life story, which is essential to a child's sense of identity. In this pictorial we show the role of photos and visual communication in enabling core aspects of communicative openness between parent and child, as derived from interviews with adopters about their child's life story book. We conclude by discussing the need for visual guidelines and tools to support a more nuanced use of photos and illustrations.

Personal informatics technologies support the collection of and reflection on personal data, but enabling people to learn from and act on this data is still an on-going challenge. Sharing and discussing data is one way people can learn from it, but as yet, little research explores how peer discourses around data can shape understandings and promote action. We ran 3 workshops with 5-week follow-ups, giving 18 people the opportunity to swap their data and discuss it with another person. We found that these workshops helped them to recontextualise and to better understand their data, identify new strategies for changing their behaviour and motivated people to commit to changes in the future. These findings have implications for how personal informatics tools could help people identify opportunities for change and feel motivated to try out new strategies.

Traditionally, many consumer-focused technologies have been designed to maximize user engagement with their products and services. More recently, many technology companies have begun to introduce digital wellbeing features, such as for managing time spent and for encouraging breaks in use. These are in the context of, and likely in response to, renewed concerns in the media about technology dependency and even addiction. The promotion of technology abstinence is also increasingly widespread, e.g., via digital detoxes. Given that digital technologies are an important and valuable feature of many people's lives, digital wellbeing features are arguably preferable to abstinence. However, how these are defined and designed is something that needs to be explored further. In this one-day workshop we welcome both industry and academic participants to discuss what digital wellbeing means, who is responsible for it, and whether and how we should design for it going forward.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are slowly populating our homes. In this age of sharing economy and increased mobility, however, the home environment is no longer a fixed location always shared by the same people. To better understand the issues and challenges around agency and IoT use in the home, we take a pragmatic and situated approach. In this paper, we draw on our own experiences as users and identify the tensions between ownership and usage, and the economic implications there might be when sharing IoT systems with trusted people vs. strangers. We suggest the distinction between owners and users should be