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A. Bozzon

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Revisiting Inclusive Design and Access

Conference paper (2026) - Himanshu Verma, Giulia Barbareschi, Sophia Ppali, Kathrin Gerling, Maartje De Meulder, Judith Good, Jatinder Singh, Pablo Cesar, Alessandro Bozzon, More Authors
Over 1.3 billion people worldwide live with long-term disabilities, yet many still face systemic exclusion despite advances in accessibility policy and technology. New regulations such as the EU Accessibility Act demand comprehensive transitions, but compliance risks becoming a superficial “checklist” exercise rather than fostering meaningful inclusion. For the HCI community, this moment calls for rethinking our approaches to participation, technology, ethics, and policy. In this meetup, we bring together researchers, practitioners, and advocates to revisit inclusive design through four themes: rethinking inclusive methodologies, disentangling technological challenges, unpacking ethical implications, and navigating policy opportunities. Through interactive mapping activities, participants will share practices, identify collaboration opportunities, and co-develop future directions. Our goal is to build cross-disciplinary connections and create actionable approaches that move beyond compliance toward holistic inclusion, ensuring that accessibility remains central to HCI research and practice. ...

A narrative review of barriers and opportunities

Review (2026) - Netsanet Mengistie, Himanshu Verma, Alessandro Bozzon, Wichor M. Bramer, Vera Dubbink, Marlieke de Fouw, Jan Carel Diehl
Background: This narrative review examines the barriers and opportunities that shape access and delivery of cervical cancer care services in sub-Saharan Africa. Unlike prior studies that only focused on single phases of care, this review adopts a comprehensive perspective by assessing access across the full cervical cancer care continuum. Methods: A narrative review was conducted using six databases (Embase, Medline, Web of Science, Scopus, African Index Medicus, and CINAHL Plus). The included studies were thematically analyzed, and emerging themes were interpreted through the lens of the five dimensions of healthcare access: accessibility, availability, affordability, acceptability, and accommodation. Results: Across 38 included studies, findings identified three overarching categories of barriers. (1) Individual-level barriers, including knowledge and awareness, socio-demographic and economic factors, and attitudes and beliefs; (2) Community-level barriers, including cultural acceptance and social norms, and community and social support networks, which further constrained engagement with services; and (3) Health-system-level barriers, including resource limitations, service delivery and quality, and weak policy implementation, which compounded delays and limited care effectiveness. Moreover, opportunities, such as methodological opportunities (community-driven health education, culturally informed healthcare interventions, and multi-stakeholder engagement) and technological opportunities (technology-enhanced health education, digital systems for patient navigation, and task decentralization using mobile health platforms, telehealth, electronic health records, and digital reminder systems), could be effectively integrated into the healthcare system to improve access and service delivery. Conclusion: Access to cervical cancer care in sub-Saharan Africa is shaped by interconnected structural, sociocultural, and individual barriers that extend beyond supply and service availability alone. Literature often focuses on screening, diagnosis, and treatment of cervical cancer, while research gaps identified in this review persist in primary prevention, follow-up, and palliative care services. Findings from the review suggest that integrated, context-specific, and human-centered healthcare interventions are needed to strengthen care coordination, improve access, and enhance care outcomes. ...
Foreword postscript (2026) - Alessandro Bozzon, Thomas Kosch, Vera Liao, Xiaojuan Ma, Anna Ricarda Luther, Celine Offerman, Xinyu Shi, Qiurong Song

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. ...
Journal article (2026) - S. Kernan Freire, T. He, C. Wang, E. Niforatos, A. Bozzon
In the shift towards human-centred manufacturing, our two-year longitudinal study investigates the real-world impact of deploying Cognitive Assistants (CAs) in factories. The CAs were designed to facilitate knowledge sharing among factory operators. Our investigation focussed on smartphone-based voice assistants and LLM-powered chatbots, examining their usability and utility in a real-world factory setting. Based on the qualitative feedback we collected during the deployments of CAs at the factories, we conducted a thematic analysis to investigate the perceptions, challenges, and overall impact on workflow and knowledge sharing. Our results indicate that while CAs have the potential to significantly improve efficiency through knowledge sharing and quicker resolution of production issues, they also introduce concerns around workplace surveillance, the types of knowledge that can be shared, and shortcomings compared to human-to-human knowledge sharing. Additionally, our findings stress the importance of addressing privacy, knowledge contribution burdens, and tensions between factory operators and their managers. ...
Access to cervical cancer care remains limited in sub-Saharan Africa, where women face compounded socio-cultural, gendered, and structural barriers. This qualitative study explores the lived experiences of nine women diagnosed with cervical cancer in Ethiopia and develops an empirically grounded patient journey map as a design and process artifact based on semi-structured interviews. The journey map reveals fragmented, non-linear care pathways, showing how barriers accumulate from symptom recognition through diagnosis, treatment, and post-treatment support. By visualizing breakdowns and transitions across the care path, the artifact supports problem framing, reflection, and identification of design opportunities. These disruptions intensify emotional and practical burdens, highlighting critical gaps in health literacy, information access, and continuity of care in the healthcare structure. The journey map defines a design-relevant problem space for context-sensitive digital health interventions. This work provides evidence for HCI researchers and practitioners to address accessibility barriers in cervical cancer care in low-resource settings. ...

A Scoping Review on Designing Virtual Assistants for Patient-Centered Care

Conference paper (2026) - Ariane Lucchini, Alessandro Bozzon, Sara Colombo
Chronic illnesses (CI) are increasing worldwide, positioning virtual assistants (VAs) as valuable tools for supporting patients in self-management. As effective self-management relies on holistic, patient-centered practices, AI is increasingly integrated into VAs to provide more personalized support. Yet, it is essential that VA design processes remain grounded in participatory approaches prioritizing patients' values, needs, and lived experiences. To assess the current state of VA design processes, we conducted a scoping review of 55 papers examining how care is framed and patients are involved. Our findings reveal AI-driven VAs prioritize reductionist approaches over holistic care with minimal patient involvement. This highlights a gap between the potential of patient-centered care technology and current implementation practices. Our contributions include (1) a mapping of care dimensions currently implemented in VAs, (2) a categorization of patient roles in the design process, and (3) design implications to expand care dimensions and patient involvement in AI-driven VAs. ...
Living with a chronic condition involves ongoing work: tracking symptoms, managing medication, coordinating care, and maintaining routines to prevent recurrence of acute episodes. In psychiatric care, this workload is equally complex yet rarely examined in HCI and design research. Digital phenotyping, a nascent AI/ML-based approach to monitoring behaviour, passively collects sensor and device data and is promoted as an unobtrusive and scalable tool. Yet, this promise of passivity obscures the skilled labour that takes place-from data sense-making to fitting new tools into existing care practices. In this position paper, situated in the context of outpatient bipolar disorder treatment in the Netherlands, we seek to problematise the current approach and apply Burden of Treatment Theory to unpack this hidden workload. We argue that digital phenotyping design lacks sensitivity to the care ecologies of self-management it intervenes into and call for HCI researchers to further engage with this problem space. ...
Conference paper (2026) - Z. Breed, E. Karana, A. Bozzon, Katherine W. Song
Bio-digital systems that merge microbial life with technology promise new modes of computation, combining biological adaptability with digital precision. Yet realizing this potential symbiotically – where biological and digital agents co-adapt and co-process – remains elusive, largely due to the absence of a shared vocabulary bridging biology and computing. Consequently, microbes are often constrained to uni-directional roles, functioning as sensors or actuators rather than as active, computational partners in bio-digital systems. In response, we propose a taxonomy and pathways that articulate and expand the roles of biological and digital entities for synergetic bio-digital computation. Using this taxonomy, we analysed 70 systems across HCI, design, and engineering, identifying how biological mechanisms can be mapped onto computational abstractions. We argue that such mappings enable computationally actionable directions that foster richer and reciprocal relationships in bio-digital systems, supporting regenerative ecologies across time and scale while inspiring new paradigms for computation in HCI. ...

Reflexive Annotating for Situated AI Alignment

AI alignment relies on annotator judgments, yet annotation pipelines often treat annotators as interchangeable, obscuring how their social position shapes annotation. We introduce reflexive annotating as a probe that invites crowd workers to reflect on how their positionality informs subjective annotation judgments in a language model alignment context. Through a qualitative study with crowd workers (N = 30), including follow-up interviews (N = 5), we examine how our probe shapes annotators' behaviour, experience, and the situated metadata it elicits. We find that reflexive annotating captures epistemic metadata beyond static demographics by eliciting intersectional reasoning, surfacing positional humility, and nudging viewpoint change. Crucially, we also denote tensions between reflexive engagement and affective demands such as emotional exposure. We discuss the implications of our work for richer value elicitation and alignment practices that treat annotator judgments as situated and selectively integrate positional metadata. ...

Co-Designing Bespoke Care Technologies for Post-Cancer Bodies

Cancer treatment leaves survivors with sexual difficulties that extend beyond physical symptoms and permeate many aspects of life, yet these concerns remain neglected in current cancer care. This paper responds to this gap by exploring how bespoke co-designed care technologies can support survivors when grounded in their lived sexual experiences. We conducted trauma-informed, generative workshops with two cancer survivors. The workshops surfaced four themes: gaps in anticipatory care, shifts from lovers to carers, unsettled bodies and selfhood, and navigating fragmented support. Through co-designing, we created Lived Experiences Archive (a ĝzine series of anonymous survivor stories) and BodyTalk (a sensory couple game for rebuilding emotional and physical intimacy). Beyond the artefacts, we contribute a methodological account of co-designing as care and empirical insights into post-cancer sexuality. We demonstrate the epistemic potential of bespoke intimate health technologies to generate situated forms of care and knowledge often overlooked in conventional health technology design. ...
Foreword postscript (2026) - Himanshu Verma, Alessandro Bozzon, Andrea Mauri, Jie Yang
Conference paper (2026) - Maria Luce Lupetti, Christina Harrington, Massimo Menichinelli, Cristina Zaga, Laura Forlano, Alessandro Bozzon, Q. Vera Liao
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies are increasingly integrated into a variety of products and services. However, AI promises often fall short and unintended consequences multiply, causing a negative impact, especially on marginalised communities. In response, Participatory AI has emerged as a promising method to account for the consequences on people subject to AI and to help develop systems that are better aligned with societal values. Yet meaningful participation remains difficult to achieve. Participation tends to be short-term and consultative, or even a mask for hidden labour. Moreover, the aim of building knowledge that is situated and subjective often conflicts with the global scale and generalizability of AI, especially when it comes to foundational models. This panel unites experts to explore how to account for these issues, and more specifically, to collectively draw a picture of the limits of Participatory AI in terms of social justice. ...

Unpacking Experiences of Using LLMs for Self-management of Endometriosis and PCOS

Women with endometriosis and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) require individualized, long-term, holistic care, yet systemic healthcare barriers leave many managing independently. Increasingly, women are turning to Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, for support in self-management. However, little is understood about how people use and experience LLMs in this context. We employed a feminist participatory approach to collective knowledge production and situated expertise to explore participants' motivations and expectations in using LLMs for self-management. We engaged in co-annotation of personal ChatGPT conversations and collage-making sessions with 8 women living with endometriosis and/or PCOS, centering their lived experiences. We surfaced the layered experiences of self-managing endometriosis and/or PCOS with LLMs and how these compare and contrast with their ideal visions of care. We contribute empirical insights and design considerations for LLM systems providing support in this context. ...
Conference paper (2026) - Xun Zhang, Weihao Xia, Yulong Liu, Bo Yang, Alessandro Bozzon, Pan Wang
Understanding the neural basis of three-dimensional (3D) perception is a fundamental objective in cognitive neuroscience. Despite advances in decoding 2D visual stimuli from neural data, reconstructing high-fidelity 3D objects with detailed texture and geometry remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce NeuroSculptor3D, the first single-stage, end-to-end framework for reconstructing textured 3D shapes directly from brain activity. NeuroSculptor3D integrates a viewpoint-aware brain embedding module that captures fine-grained spatial variations across visual perspectives, and a hierarchical guidance mechanism that aligns brain-derived features with perceptual, semantic, and structural priors. Together, these components facilitate the generation of consistent multi-view embeddings, which are then decoded via TRELLIS to produce high-quality textured 3D reconstructions. Experiments on the fMRI-Shape dataset demonstrate that NeuroSculptor3D outperforms existing baselines across multiple settings, achieving significant improvements in both structural accuracy and semantic consistency. Code will be released to facilitate further research. ...
Anticipating the ethical and societal risks of emerging technologies has become an urgent challenge as their rapid integration into everyday life can produce far-reaching social consequences. In response, Design Futures practices are gaining traction within HCI and design as approaches to critically examine and anticipate the implications of technology. Yet, systematic knowledge on how these practices are structured to foster ethical reflection remains limited. To address this gap, we conducted a scoping review of 32 case studies employing Design Futures to engage with ethical concerns. Drawing from this review, we present a Taxonomy of Design Futures Processes for Ethical Reflection, which illustrates how different activities, actors' involvement, and types of futures generated shape the scope of ethical discussion. This taxonomy provides researchers and practitioners with practical guidance for creating Design Futures activities that foster ethical reflection on technology. ...
Conference paper (2026) - Florian Müller, Andrii Matviienko, Alessandro Bozzon, Carmen Santoro, Larbi Abdenebaoui, Andrea Lavazza, Andreas Komninos, Nicolas Sklavos
AI-driven services continuously infer "models-of-users"to personalize content, automate decisions, and optimize interaction. Yet, most user models remain opaque, fragmented across platforms, and hard to correct, transfer, or revoke. As a result, personalisation in AI-driven services is commonly experienced as a trade-off between privacy and platform lock-in. Users must stay loyal to platforms if a model of adequate utility is to be built around them. This tension is sharpened by emerging regulatory obligations around transparency and user oversight (e.g., GDPR and the EU AI Act). We propose a full-day EICS 2026 workshop that focuses on engineering cross-compatible personalization: a vision for future interactive systems in which users can make their digital self-representations inspectable, editable, and selectively shareable. The workshop brings together researchers and practitioners from interactive systems engineering, HCI, AI/ML, and security/privacy to (1) map the design and engineering space of user-sovereign personalization; (2) derive reusable artifacts for the EICS community, such as a reference architecture, protocol sketches, and a pattern language of interaction techniques; and (3) seed a community around building interoperable toolchains for AI personalization that is not only accurate, but also controllable, auditable, and context-adaptive. ...

A case study of autonomous bus operations at an international airport

Organizations are increasingly immersed in automation programs aimed at enhancing operational efficiency, yet these initiatives fundamentally impact and reshape traditional workplaces. Prior research has examined automation's effects on workers who directly interact with it, but less attention has been given to how broader worker ecosystems are impacted. To address this gap, we investigate an autonomous shuttle bus project at an international airport. We conduct an interview study with nine external experts holding prior experience in similar automation contexts. To engage participants in discussing the impacts of a future autonomous bus operation, we utilize systemic design as a lens and conduct co-design activities with them. Our findings surface key tasks, responsibilities, scenarios, and implementation considerations that affect workers within the broader ecosystem. Through this empirical case, we intend to move beyond techno-centric approaches to automation and illustrate the value of incorporating systemic perspectives in worker-centered automation efforts. ...

Designing AI-Based Mental Health Diagnostic Tools Through Aesthetics

Conference paper (2025) - K. Bogdanova, N. Cila, O. Kudina, A. Bozzon
With psychiatry lagging behind other medical fields in terms of innovation in instruments and methods, AI provides it an opportunity to catch up. Advocates of digital phenotyping promise to provide an objective tool that detects symptoms by analysing data from personal devices. We argue that digital phenotyping requires a more reflexive and critical approach to its design and an alignment of the clinicians’ interests in generating relevant evidence with the needs of service users who seek tools to manage their condition. We propose a felt informatics approach, situating digital phenotyping design within the problem space of pragmatist aesthetics. Within this perspective, felt life becomes a central object and a site for digital phenotyping design. This paper reveals the ways diagnostic data mediates mental ill health experience, emphasises the cultivation of aesthetic sensibility as a fundamental element of digital phenotyping and includes design considerations for practitioners and researchers. ...

Scrutinizing Practitioners' Imaginaries in an International Airport

In organizations, the interest in automation is long-standing. However, adopting automated processes remains challenging, even in environments that appear highly standardized and technically suitable for it. Through a case study in Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, this paper investigates automation as a broader sociotechnical system influenced by a complex network of actors and contextual factors. We study practitioners' collective understandings of automation and subsequent efforts taken to implement it. Using imaginaries as a lens, we report findings from a qualitative interview study with 16 practitioners involved in airside automation projects. Our findings illustrate the organizational dynamics and complexities surrounding automation adoption, as reflected in the captured problem formulations, conceptions of the technology, envisioned human roles in autonomous operations, and perspectives on automation fit in the airside ecosystem. Ultimately, we advocate for contextual automation design, which carefully considers human roles, accounts for existing organizational politics, and avoids techno-solutionist approaches. ...