H.U. Genç
Please Note
20 records found
1
"are Compliments Bad Now?"
Comparing LLMs and Human Interpretations of Gender Microaggressions in the Workplace
Gender microaggressions are subtle yet persistent forms of discrimination in workplace interactions. While LLMs can detect them in written texts, it remains poorly understood how their interpretations align or diverge from human perspectives and experiences. We present a mixed-method study comparing how LLMs and humans differing in gender identity and lived experience, interpret gender microaggressions in the workplace. Using short dialogues adapted from real-world accounts, we asked 141 participants to rate the likelihood that a scenario contains a microaggression and provide a rationale for their answers. The same tasks were completed by 7 different LLM models. Our analysis reveals significant differences in how humans and LLMs interpret microaggressions, captured in both ratings and rationales, and more interestingly, the effect of gender and lived experience on human interpretations. These findings highlight the need for systems detecting microaggressions to embrace interpretive plurality, and support reflection and awareness while accounting for ambiguity.
The Bots of Persuasion
Examining How Conversational Agents' Linguistic Expressions of Personality Affect User Perceptions and Decisions
Large Language Model-powered conversational agents (CAs) are increasingly capable of projecting sophisticated personalities through language, but how these projections affect users is unclear. We thus examine how CA personalities expressed linguistically affect user decisions and perceptions in the context of charitable giving. In a crowdsourced study, 360 participants interacted with one of eight CAs, each projecting a personality composed of three linguistic aspects: attitude (optimistic/pessimistic), authority (authoritative/submissive), and reasoning (emotional/rational). While the CA's composite personality did not affect participants' decisions, it did affect their perceptions and emotional responses. Particularly, participants interacting with pessimistic CAs felt lower emotional state and lower affinity towards the cause, perceived the CA as less trustworthy and less competent, and yet tended to donate more toward the charity. Perceptions of trust, competence, and situational empathy significantly predicted donation decisions. Our findings emphasize the risks CAs pose as instruments of manipulation, subtly influencing user perceptions and decisions.
Selective Trust
Understanding Human-AI Partnerships in Personal Health Decision-Making Process
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more embedded in personal health technology, its potential to transform health decision-making through personalised recommendations is becoming significant. However, there is limited understanding of how individuals perceive AI-assisted decision-making in the context of personal health. This study investigates the impact of AI-assisted decision-making on trust in physical activity-related health decisions. By employing MoveAI, a GPT-4.0-based physical activity decision-making tool, we conducted a mixed-methods study and conducted an online survey (N=184) and semi-structured interviews (N=24) to explore this dynamic. Our findings emphasise the role of nuanced personal health recommendations and individual decision-making styles in shaping trust in AI-assisted personal health decision-making. This paper contributes to the HCI literature by elucidating the relationship between decision-making styles and trust in the AI-assisted personal health decision-making process and showing the challenges of aligning AI recommendations with individual decision-making preferences.
Photo BOO-th
Designing Visceral Encounters with Synthetic Intimate Imagery
Surrendering to Powerlesness
Governing Personal Data Flows in Generative AI
Persuasion in Pixels and Prose
The Effects of Emotional Language and Visuals in Agent Conversations on Decision-Making
The growing sophistication of Large Language Models allows conversational agents (CAs) to engage users in increasingly personalized and targeted conversations. While users may vary in their receptiveness to CA persuasion, stylistic elements and agent personalities can be adjusted on the fly. Combined with image generation models that create context-specific realistic visuals, CAs have the potential to influence user behavior and decision making. We investigate the effects of linguistic and visual elements used by CAs on user perception and decision making in a charitable donation context with an online experiment (n=344). We find that while CA attitude influenced trust, it did not affect donation behavior. Visual primes played no role in shaping trust, though their absence resulted in higher donations and situational empathy. Perceptions of competence and situational empathy were potential predictors of donation amounts. We discuss the complex interplay of user and CA characteristics and the fine line between benign behavior signaling and manipulation.
Situating Empathy in HCI/CSCW
A Scoping Review
From Silence to Dialogue
Boosting Collocated Social Interactions with Technology
Diversifying Knowledge Production in HCI
Exploring Materiality and Novel Formats for Scholarly Expression
This one-day studio aims to catalyze discussions and experimentation around non-textual academic documentation methods. With the understanding that human knowledge transcends written words, we aim to explore innovative ways to present and disseminate research outputs in diverse forms and of varying materiality. By bringing together researchers, practitioners, and academics from different disciplines and backgrounds, we seek to challenge the status quo of textual output and envision a future where knowledge production embraces the multisensory nature of human data.
How sustainable is your menu?
Designing and assessing an interactive artefact to support chefs' sustainable recipe-planning practices
Rising sustainability concerns in the food industry have driven the need for innovative approaches in culinary operations. Redesigning the menus and recipes from a sustainability perspective is a promising approach to reducing restaurants' environmental impact. Chefs, as crucial decision-makers in menu and recipe planning practices, play a vital role in promoting sustainable food services. However, the literature lacks insights into chefs' sustainable recipe planning practices and how information and communication technologies (ICTs) could support these practices. This paper addresses this gap by conducting individual interview sessions (n=10) and recipe generation workshops (n=10) with 20 chefs in total. It reveals four dimensions of sustainable recipes (locality, seasonality, frugality, and food quality) based on semi-structured interviews. It presents a novel interactive recipe planning concept called KNOBIE, which was designed to support chefs' sustainable recipe planning practices by using insights that gathered from the interviews. Lastly, based on an assessment of this concept through online recipe generation sessions with chefs, it provides five design implications for integrating ICTs into the sustainable menu and recipe planning practices to promote sustainable food services in restaurants.
Mind the Whisper
Enriching Collocated Social Interactions in Public Places through Audio Narratives
The quality of social interaction has great importance for psychological and physiological health. Previous research indicates that smartphones have adverse effects on collocated social interactions. Most HCI works addressed this issue by restricting smartphone use during social interactions. Diverging from previous work, we designed WHISPER, an audio narrative box that aims to enrich collocated social interactions without restricting mobile technology use. We conducted a user study in a café environment with 21 participants to understand how users react to WHISPER and how it would influence their social interactions. In this paper, we present the result of this study and discuss four implications for technologies designed to enhance collocated social interactions (Respectfulness, Balanced Ambiguity, Adaptability, and Being Targeted) and two implications for research touching upon the HCI work on Design for Behavior Change and Collocated Interactions (Designing responsible interventions for accommodating unintended outcomes and Quantifying the quality of social interactions).
Gestural interaction in the kitchen
Insights into designing an interactive display controlled by hand specific on-skin gestures
The kitchen is one of the busiest and messiest hubs of a home, where the hands are usually spoiled with food. In this setting, gestural interaction can offer several advantages: efficient, intuitive, and touch-free orchestration of interactive devices. Yet, research scarcely investigates the user's perspective on gesture-based systems in the kitchen and lacks designs developed through a user-centred process. With the contribution of 234 participants, we conducted formative studies that investigated users' expectations, perceived benefits, and concerns of gesture-based control in the kitchen. These studies guided our conceptual design ‘2HandTouch’, an information display controlled by Hand Specific On-Skin Gestures (HSoS). Then, we evaluated the user experience of this design through a summative user study. We introduced four perceived benefits of HSoS use in the kitchen that has not been visible in such detail. These are i) hygiene, (ii) time management, (iii) imminent control, and (iv) an uninterrupted cooking practice. We also provided broader implications of our work for designing gesture-controlled devices in the kitchen context.
Taking on the challenge of motivating users to drink water regularly, we designed a smart water bottle that can track water intake behavior and inform users about this behavior through ambient feedback. We then conducted two studies to explore the bottle's feedback design from the perspective of users and designers. First, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 prospective users and found that they would like to receive personalized, precise, gamified and reminding feedback. Second, we conducted a design workshop with 13 professional designers to explore the range of visualizations that can be used to give feedback. Analyzing these visualizations, we identified three reminder types (augmenting, restoring and balancing) and six visualization styles grouped according to three dimensions of ambient displays (representation fidelity, notification level, aesthetic emphasis). In this paper, we first explain our water bottle concept along with existing solutions. Then, we report the results of these studies. Finally, we discuss the potential implications of the results for our own work as well as for designing ambient displays aimed at supporting users' water intake tracking practices.
KNOBIE
A Design Intervention for Supporting Chefs' Sustainable Recipe Planning Practices
Reducing the environmental impact of current food production and consumption practices is a significant challenge for a more sustainable future. Even though previous HCI studies illustrated that design interventions could support more sustainable food practices in domestic contexts, little attention has been given to hospitality contexts (e.g., restaurants). Addressing this gap, we first investigated food preparation practices in restaurants (i.e., how recipes, menus and meals are prepared) through interviews with 10 chefs and instructors of culinary arts. Then, we designed KNOBIE, a design intervention aimed at supporting chefs' sustainable food preparation practices through better recipe and menu planning. In this paper, we present the results of these interviews, KNOBIE as a concept to support sustainable recipe planning and how interviews guided its design.
Children in 2077
Designing children's technologies in the age of transhumanism
What for and how will we design children's technologies in the transhumanism age, and what stance will we take as designers? This paper aims to answer this question with 13 fictional abstracts from sixteen authors of different countries, institutions and disciplines. Transhumanist thinking envisions enhancing human body and mind by blending human biology with technological augmentations. Fundamentally, it seeks to improve the human species, yet the impacts of such movement are unknown and the implications on children's lives and technologies were not explored deeply. In an age, where technologies such as under-skin chips or brain-machine interfaces can clearly be defined as transhumanist, our aim is to reveal probable pitfalls and benefits of those technologies on children's lives by using the power of design fiction. Thus, main contribution of this paper is to create diverse presentation of provocative research ideas that will foster the discussion on the transhumanist technologies impacting the lives of children in the future.
Excessive smartphone use has negative effects on our social relations as well as on our mental and psychological health. Most of the previous work to avoid these negative effects is based on a top-down approach such as restricting or limiting users' use of smartphones. Diverging from previous work, we followed a bottom-up approach to understand the practice of smartphone use in public settings from the users' perspective. We conducted observations in four coffeehouses, six focus group sessions with 46 participants and three design workshops with 15 designers. We identified five themes that help better understand smartphone use behavior in public settings and four alternative design approaches to mediate this behavior, namely enlighteners, preventers, supporters, and compliers. We discuss the implications of these themes and approaches for designing future interactive technologies aimed at mediating excessive smartphone use behavior.
Food is an essential nutritional source for all humans, yet tons of food is wasted at an increasing rate each year. Although previous HCI studies examined this issue, most of this work focuses on the domestic context. To the best of our knowledge, no study explored the food waste in hospitality sector from a design perspective. Addressing this gap, we made observations and interviews in a high-end hotel restaurant kitchen to better understand the sources of food waste in restaurants. From our findings, we envisioned three design speculations which can inspire HCI researchers and practitioners explore this issue further.
GROW
A smart bottle that uses its surface as an ambient display to motivate daily water intake
Water is an essential nutrient for human health. However, individuals may ignore drinking enough water due to the rush of everyday life. We present Grow, a conceptual smart bottle prototype designed to encourage users to drink water regularly. Our concept utilizes bottle surface as an ambient display instead of a traditional screen-based display to give feedback. Grow tracks daily water intake through an embedded liquid level sensor. It gives positive, abstract, non-intrusive and aesthetic feedback through heating up different parts of a thermo-chromic print on its surface (a tree image). We also present the results of a user study exploring 10 prospective users’ reactions to Grow as well as their expectations of smart water bottles in general.