"An Experience That Could Not be Found Anywhere Else": Resonance as an Explanatory Concept for Player Experience Research and Game Design
A strong best-paper contribution that gives HCI games research a sharper vocabulary for discussing why some game experiences linger, matter, and shape players beyond play. Its main value is conceptual clarification grounded in substantial qualitative evidence, though not causal proof.
“Families are messy”: From Parent-Child Tensions to Family-Centered Design of Smart Home Technologies
This paper makes a strong CHI contribution by reframing smart home use in families as an ongoing negotiation problem rather than a matter of configuring individual adult controls. Its qualitative evidence shows how parent-child tensions emerge across integrated devices and why family-centered design is a more realistic design stance.
“I Don’t Think RAI Applies to My Model” – Engaging Non-champions with Sticky Stories for Responsible AI Work
This paper’s real contribution is not just another RAI artifact, but a reframing of the adoption problem: many practitioners are not persuaded by existing governance tools at all. By designing sticky, tailored harm narratives and showing measurable gains in engagement and harm discovery, the authors offer a credible intervention for the neglected non-champion majority.
"Social Media Killed Our Generation": Teenagers' Felt Experiences of Harm on Social Media
This best paper stands out because it does not just document that teens experience harm on social media; it shows how they misrecognize that harm, often blaming themselves or peers while platform design remains backgrounded. That reframing is highly useful for HCI, safety, and governance debates.
A Cantilevered DeltaXY Positioning Mechanism Enabling Rackable Digital Fabrication Form Factors
This paper is compelling because it does more than present a clever printer prototype: it reframes digital fabrication around rackability as a serious HCI design objective. The DeltaXY mechanism and Fab Unit together make shelf-oriented fabrication feel technically plausible, measurable, and worth building on.
A decision-theoretic representation of assistive interfaces
A strong best-paper contribution that reframes assistive interfaces as explicit two-agent sequential decision problems, giving HCI a sharper shared vocabulary and an implementable formal scaffold. Its value is foundational, though bounded by substantial modeling and computational assumptions.
AI Sensing and Intervention in Higher Education: Student Perceptions of Learning Impacts, Affective Responses, and Ethical Priorities
This best paper matters because it shows the problem is not merely which sensing modality is used, but that disclosed monitoring itself degrades students’ perceived learning experience and emotional comfort. The work also shows students prefer private, system-led help over teacher escalation and rank autonomy and privacy above other ethical values, giving AIEd designers a sharper student-centred brief.
AI That Moves With You: A Review of Interactive Technologies Powered by Large Foundation Models for Mobility Impairment
This is a strong synthesis paper that gives CHI a usable map of an emerging area: FM-enabled assistive interaction for mobility impairment. Its contribution is not a new system but a structured design-space view, corpus, and agenda grounded in a clearly delimited review of 26 papers and their recurring technical, evaluative, and ethical patterns.
Are Semantic Networks Associated with Idea Originality in Artificial Creativity? A Comparison with Human Agents
This is a strong comparative creativity paper because it does more than compare outputs from ChatGPT-4o and students. It shows that a standard human creativity expectation about semantic-network flexibility only partly transfers to AI, which is exactly the kind of result HCI needs for more careful CST evaluation.
Becoming Watchful on the Trail and at Home: Understanding Experiential Outcomes of Capra in Long-Term Use
This best-paper contribution is compelling because it uses a rare multi-year first-person design case to show that hiking data systems can do more than track performance: they can slowly reorganize attention, memory, and ecological self-understanding. Its main weakness is not conceptual but evidential scope, since the account is rich yet tightly tied to three privileged author-participants and a bespoke prototype.
Bloom: Designing for LLM-Augmented Behavior Change Interactions
Bloom is compelling because it does not merely add chat to a health app; it shows how an LLM can be woven into established behavior-change interactions and then evaluated against a no-LLM control. The key contribution is the reframing: short-term activity did not clearly improve, but mindset, enjoyment, and engagement did.
BRIDGE: Borderless Reconfiguration for Inclusive and Diverse Gameplay Experience via Embodiment Transformation
BRIDGE is compelling because it treats parasports access not as a content shortage alone but as an embodiment translation problem. The paper’s strongest move is coupling a concrete reconstruction pipeline with an orientation model that preserves tactical meaning under wheelchair constraints, then testing that claim in controlled studies.
Characterizing Scam-Driven Human Trafficking Across Chinese Borders and Online Community Responses on RedNote
This is a strong descriptive CHI paper because it does more than document an underexplored abuse pattern: it shows how online community discourse reveals trafficking as culturally mediated, digitally organized, and socially contested, while staying appropriately bounded by platform and sampling limits.
Chasing Meaning and/or Insight? A Survey on Evaluation Practices at the Intersection of Visualization and the Humanities
A standout contribution because it does not just complain that VIS*H evaluation is hard; it shows, with a broad survey and workflow analysis, where the field is methodologically stuck and why richer triangulation matters. Its strongest move is reframing rigor as a matter of evidence composition and epistemic fit, not just familiar validation rituals.
Civil Data Disobedience: Navigating Data Interaction Challenges in Human Rights Defense Organizations
This is a strong qualitative CHI paper because it reframes organizational data practice away from a simple compliance lens and shows how refusal, avoidance, and selective transgression can be competent, ethical responses to risk. Its main contribution is an integrated feminist-critical data literacy framing grounded in concrete organizational accounts rather than abstract policy critique alone.
CoBRA: Programming Cognitive Bias in Social Agents Using Classic Social Science Experiments
CoBRA is a strong toolkit contribution because it replaces vague persona prompting with an explicit closed-loop control layer grounded in classic experiments. The paper’s main value is not a new psychological theory, but a reproducible way to measure and regulate observable bias behavior across models, with clear scope limits around internals, multimodality, and compositional control. Its strongest evidence comes from showing that ordinary persona prompting is unstable, while CoBRA provides measurable and more portable behavioral control.
Cocoa: Co-Planning and Co-Execution with AI Agents
Cocoa is a strong CHI systems contribution because it turns a broad critique of rigid agent workflows into a concrete interaction design: editable shared plans, explicit delegation, and notebook-like execution inside documents. The evaluations suggest this design improves steerability without obvious usability loss, though the evidence is still bounded to short-term research settings and a CS-heavy participant pool.
Crafting Remembrance Beyond the Self: Older Adults’ Digital and Material Legacies
A standout contribution of this paper is its reframing of post-mortem remembrance from an individual asset-management problem into an intergenerational curation practice. The evidence persuasively shows that older adults imagine plural subjects, broader audiences, and artifacts whose physical, temporal, and relational traces shape legacy in ways current systems rarely support.
Designing for Long-Term Emotion Regulation: A Breathing Biofeedback Game for Women in Compulsory Isolation Drug Rehabilitation Centers
A strong CHI contribution: it pairs a clearly specified low-cost breathing biofeedback game with a six-week controlled study in a rarely studied, high-constraint population, showing that carefully phased and metaphor-rich design can support engagement, skill transfer, and emotional benefit while still leaving important measurement and generalizability limits.
Do Children Trust AI, and Should They? Designing and Validating a Child-Centred K-AI Trust Scale for Intelligent Systems
This is a strong CHI measurement contribution because it does two things well: it demonstrates that adult trust scales transfer poorly to children, and it replaces that assumption with a carefully refined child-centred instrument. The paper is especially valuable for grounding trust measurement in children’s developmental realities and post-interaction experience rather than abstract adult formulations.
Friend, Foe, or Bot? Exploring Intergroup Dynamics in Hybrid Human-Bot Teams
This is a strong CHI paper because it shows that transparency in hybrid teams is socially consequential in a non-obvious way. Hidden bots can help teams coordinate, yet they also enable unfair spillover punishment; revealed bots reduce cohesion and become socially downgraded, with blame redirected to humans. The result is a nuanced warning against simplistic “always disclose” or “never disclose” design rules for AI teammates.
From Overload to Convergence: Supporting Multi-Issue Human–AI Negotiation with Bayesian Visualization
The paper’s strongest contribution is not just that more issues make negotiation harder, but that difficulty appears to hit a threshold: people cope through three issues and then break down more sharply. The Bayesian visualization is compelling because it supports search and convergence while explicitly trying not to take control away from the human negotiator.
From Preference to Performance: Patient-Centered Design of Multimodal Cueing in Parkinson’s Disease Gait Training
This is a strong CHI best-paper contribution because it links formative patient-centered design to a concrete adaptive rehabilitation system and then tests meaningful modality and cueing trade-offs empirically. The standout insight is that better objective performance does not automatically translate into better user acceptance, which is exactly the kind of result that should reshape rehabilitation technology design priorities.
From Using to Infrastructuring: Grassroots VPN-Building in Iran’s Women–Life–Freedom Movement
A strong CHI contribution that reframes Iranian citizens not as mere VPN users but as grassroots infrastructurers, showing how survival under repression depends on collective technical labor, peer pedagogy, and material logistics rather than isolated tool adoption.
Generative Muscle Stimulation: Providing Users with Physical Assistance by Constraining Multimodal-AI with Embodied Knowledge
This is a strong best-paper contribution because it turns EMS from a fixed-program assistance technique into a context-aware generative system, and the paper backs that claim with both ablation and user-study evidence. What makes it especially convincing is that the authors do not just demo novelty: they show why contextual cues, pose, and EMS knowledge each matter, and they are explicit about latency, hallucinations, lab constraints, and the practical limits of EMS hardware.
GeoVisA11y: An AI-based Geovisualization Question-Answering System for Screen-Reader Users
GeoVisA11y is a notably strong CHI contribution because it turns map accessibility from passive description into active analysis. The system contribution is concrete, the evaluation is well matched to the claims, and the paper is unusually clear about both user benefits and present limits such as unsupported query types, backend gaps, and pipeline errors.
How are Vibrotactile Experiences Visually Represented? A Taxonomy of Illustration Characteristics
A strong best-paper contribution: it turns an underexamined but consequential communication problem in haptics into a field-level empirical object, showing that VTX figures often underrepresent action timing and experience while providing a practical taxonomy for systematic analysis and redesign.
How They Type: Eye and Finger Movement Strategies in Typing of Individuals with Cerebral Palsy
This is a strong empirical paper because it reframes CP typing from simple impairment to adaptive regulation. The multimodal evidence shows that slower performance can coexist with preserved keyboard efficiency, and that gaze and finger strategies vary in ways designers should treat as meaningful rather than incidental.
Interactive Explainable Ranking
This paper stands out because it changes the interaction contract of ranking tools: instead of keeping rankings explainable at all times, it lets users create and inspect mismatches between their preferred ordering and the current weighted explanation. That move makes inconsistency visible and actionable, and the mixed-methods evaluation suggests the approach can improve consistency and confidence while remaining cautious about small-sample limits.
iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility
This is a strong systems paper because it reframes PDF accessibility from a purely visual cleanup task into a semantic-preservation problem. The contribution is concrete, well-motivated, and backed by explicit evaluation and candid limitations, though current applicability still depends heavily on source availability and pipeline robustness.
Let's Make a Community [of Practice]: Using Community-Based Participatory Design to Support Interdependence
This paper’s strongest contribution is not a new artifact but a reframing of dementia participatory design as community formation. By reading CBPD through Wenger’s Communities of Practice, it shows participants as active agents shaping inclusion for themselves and others, while also exposing how community boundaries and marginalisation structure who can participate at all.
Localized Imaginaries, Global Assets: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Assetization of Data Centers in Singapore
This paper makes a strong conceptual contribution by showing that Singapore’s data center growth is legitimized not by fitting inherited Western siting assumptions, but by actively remaking them through state-industry discourse. Its value lies in connecting sociotechnical imaginaries to assetization, postcolonial difference, and labor politics while remaining appropriately explicit about the limits of elite, English-language discourse analysis.
Managing Medication Plans When Information Is Scattered: Clinicians' Strategies and Tools
This is a strong CHI paper because it does more than describe workarounds: it reframes them as durable clinical practices and converts them into a concrete design agenda. The main value is the shift from “fix the EHR” to “support situated repair” with traceable, clinician-controlled tools.
Mining Player Experience Trends From Game Reviews Using Large Language Models
This is a strong best-paper-level contribution because it turns a previously awkward methodological gap—connecting validated player-experience constructs to massive free-text review corpora—into a workable pipeline, then uses that pipeline to produce substantive longitudinal findings while still acknowledging that the proxy measures discourse more directly than experience itself.
MlondaCam: Designing Context-Aware Smart Cameras for Supporting Domestic Security and Privacy in Malawian Homes
This is a strong CHI contribution because it turns a socially grounded critique of domestic surveillance into a concrete artifact and then tests that artifact in real Malawian households. The paper’s key insight is that privacy-preserving constraints, not just more sensing, can be central to useful security design under patriarchal conditions.
Narratives and Perspectives: How AI Summaries Steer Users' Opinions and Engagement on Social Media
This paper is strong because it tests a live platform design question with a controlled experiment and shows that AI summaries are not neutral wrappers around discussion. The percentage display increases conformity toward majority views, while narrative summaries can create false balance and dampen opinion change. The contribution is important for HCI because it identifies summary format as a causal design lever, but the claims should remain bounded to simulated Reddit-style threads rather than assumed to transfer directly to live platforms.
Novobo: Supporting Teachers' Peer Learning of Instructional Gestures by Teaching a Mentee AI-Agent Together
Novobo is a notable CHI contribution because it shifts teachable agents from student-facing learning support into teacher professional development and ties that move to a plausible social mechanism. The strongest contribution is not merely the LLM pipeline, but the interaction framing: by having teachers jointly teach an AI apprentice, the system appears to lower interpersonal pressure and make tacit gesture knowledge easier to discuss, demonstrate, and refine together.
PerEye: Co-Designing Extended Reality Rendering Attributes for Vision Health Diagnosis and Education
PerEye is compelling because it reframes XR for vision health around asymmetric per-eye rendering instead of the default assumption of identical binocular input. The paper’s contribution is strongest as a co-designed translational artifact: it defines clinically meaningful rendering attributes, shows a feasible but non-interchangeable diagnostic probe, and demonstrates measurable empathy gains in education.
PleaSQLarify: Visual Pragmatic Repair for Natural Language Database Querying
PleaSQLarify is compelling because it reframes ambiguity from a parsing failure into an interaction opportunity. The paper tightly connects pragmatic theory, an information-gain-driven repair algorithm, and a visual interface that helps users inspect and steer alternative SQL interpretations instead of accepting a single opaque guess.
Promise or Peril? Exploring Black Adults' Perspectives on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Health Contexts
This study is valuable because it moves beyond generic claims about trust or distrust in health AI and shows a more layered picture: cautious optimism, skepticism, and structural critique. Its strongest contribution is the community-centered framing of AI as a possible shield against inequity, while its limits are appropriately bounded by a small, localized qualitative sample and explicitly non-generalizable survey comparisons.
RAG Without the Lag: Enabling "What-If" Analysis for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Pipelines
This paper’s real contribution is not a better retriever or prompt recipe, but a better debugging loop for RAG. raggy turns parameter changes that normally trigger slow re-indexing into interactive exploration, and the study usefully shows that experienced developers often reason through retrieval before generation when diagnosing failures.
Reacquainting with Everyday Urban Nature: Exploring Natural Soundscape Restoration with Personal Audio AR
A strong CHI contribution: it reframes Audio AR for urban nature not as exact reproduction but as plausible restoration, then backs that stance with a real system and three in-situ studies. The idea is compelling precisely because it accepts technical imperfection and turns it into a usable design strategy.
Scene2Hap: Generating Scene-Wide Haptics for VR from Scene Context with Multimodal LLMs
Scene2Hap is a strong systems paper because it reframes VR haptic authoring as a scene-understanding problem, then operationalizes that idea with an LLM-plus-physics pipeline and backs it with three studies. Its contribution is meaningful, but its realism claims should be read within the authors’ explicit modeling limits.
Sensemaking in User-Driven Algorithm Auditing: A Case Study on Gender Bias in an Image Captioning Model
This best paper makes a strong HCI contribution by showing that non-experts can do meaningful algorithm auditing when interfaces are designed around sensemaking. Its most important insight is that interface affordances actively shape which harms become visible, not just how efficiently users inspect outputs.
Sex after Cancer: Co-Designing Bespoke Care Technologies for Post-Cancer Bodies
This is a strong CHI contribution because it makes a persuasive methodological case for trauma-informed, bespoke co-design in a neglected intimate-health domain, while staying appropriately bounded about what two deeply situated cases can and cannot establish.
Small Talk, Big Impact? LLM-based Conversational Agents to Mitigate Passive Fatigue in Conditional Automated Driving
This is a compelling CHI contribution because it tests an LLM-based conversational intervention in a live L3 prototype rather than only in simulation, and it pairs that deployment with mixed-method evidence plus a useful archetype analysis. The contribution is strongest as a proof-of-concept with design implications, not as definitive evidence for production deployment or long-term behavioral change.
Sound2Hap: Learning Audio-to-Vibrotactile Haptic Generation from Human Ratings
A strong CHI contribution: instead of assuming fixed signal-processing rules transfer well to environmental sounds, the paper shows preference variability across sound types and responds with a human-rated generative model that performs better in controlled evaluation across two datasets.
Starting From Scratch Again and Again: Tracing the Origins of High Schoolers’ Negative Perceptions of Block-Based Programming
This is a strong qualitative CHI paper because it explains why block-based programming gets dismissed: not because blocks are inherently weak, but because students repeatedly encounter them in narrow, child-coded, and highly scaffolded forms. The paper’s real contribution is a grounded theory of how those beliefs form and how they can be disrupted through better sequencing, framing, and exposure to counterexamples.
Stress Mindset Matters: Rethinking Mental Stress Detection with Multimodal Wearable Sensors
A strong CHI contribution because it connects a well-established psychological construct to wearable stress sensing and shows both measurable physiological signatures and practical modeling gains. The contribution is genuinely field-shifting, but still bounded by a small exploratory lab study and not yet ready for broad deployment claims.
The Words That Can't Be Shared: Exploring the Design of Unsent Messages
This best paper makes a subtle but important move: it reframes unsent messages from failed communication into a meaningful reflective practice, then shows through qualitative and speculative probe work how platform design can shape emotional release, reflection, ritual, and autonomy. Its contribution is strongest as a careful descriptive account and design-space opener, while its own limitations appropriately constrain broader generalization and deployment claims.
ThreeTopo: Focused Interactive Navigation for Multi-Pitch Rock Climbing
A strong CHI artifact paper: it reframes climbing navigation as mental-model support under extreme attentional limits, then instantiates that reframing in a concrete 3D mobile tool grounded in expert collaboration and field use.
Touching Emotions, Smelling Shapes: Exploring Tactile, Olfactory and Emotional Cross-sensory Correspondences in Preschool-aged Children
A strong CHI contribution because it does more than show that preschoolers have cross-sensory mappings: it shows which mappings already resemble adult patterns, which do not, and offers a practical story-based protocol for studying very young children without forcing adult-style experimental tasks.
Towards Fluent Interaction with Cyber-Physical Architecture
This paper is compelling because it does not treat shape-changing architecture as just a bigger smart-home interface. Instead, it shows that room-scale robotic environments demand a different interaction model: users mix modalities, leave intent partly unstated, and still expect the system to respond intelligently and preserve autonomy.
Trauma-Informed Digital Evidence Collection: A Design Inquiry into Evidence Practices for Technology-Facilitated Abuse in Intimate Partner Violence
A strong CHI contribution: it shifts TFA evidence collection from survivor burden to trauma-informed collaborative practice, but its strongest claims are about design guidance and early feasibility rather than proven legal impact at scale.
Unit-Less Measurements with StoryStick++: Rethinking Measurement as Interactive Processes
This best-paper contribution is compelling because it does not merely optimize a ruler-like device; it questions whether many measurement tasks need explicit numbers at all. The benchmarks support technical feasibility, while the paper honestly limits broader usability claims to future work.
When Plants Play: Rethinking Plant Materiality in Digital Games
A standout contribution here is not just the plant-controlled game artifact, but the careful demonstration that removing human control can still produce meaningful play. The paper shows how observers reinterpret slowness, unpredictability, and biological rhythm as signs of agency, while also being appropriately explicit about the narrow deployment conditions and limits on generalization.
When Scaffolding Breaks: Investigating Student Interaction with LLM-Based Writing Support in Real-Time K-12 EFL Classrooms
A strong field deployment showing that LLM scaffolding helps grammar but can also demotivate weaker students, increase reliance, and distort teacher attention and classroom equity in real-time school settings. Its value lies in showing that classroom AI changes social organization, not just individual writing performance.
When Workout Buddies Are Virtual: AI Agents and Human Peers in a Longitudinal Physical Activity Study
This best-paper study matters because it rejects the easy story that better AI support comes from acting more human. Across a six-month trial, the authors show a sharper result: human peers feel more socially present, but AI peers can be more dependable and alliance-building. That distinction gives designers a clearer target than vague anthropomorphism.
Who Controls the Conversation? User Perspectives On Generative AI (LLM) System Prompts
A strong and timely CHI contribution: it turns system prompts from an obscure backend mechanism into a user-facing design and governance issue, and backs that move with both a real-world prompt taxonomy and survey evidence that users are not as unaware or passive as industry practice assumes.
With Visual Integrity and Care: A Framework for Mixed Methods Research on Visual Social Data
A strong best-paper contribution that reframes visual social data research as a methodological and ethical problem, not just a tooling gap. Its main value is the integration of visual grammars, human interpretation, computation, and care into a coherent reusable framework.
Writing with AI Can Reduce Gender Bias in Hiring Evaluations
This is a strong CHI contribution because it turns autocomplete from a productivity feature into a causal intervention on evaluative language, then shows both benefit and cost. The paper is especially valuable for refusing a simplistic debiasing story: competence and salary outcomes improve, but warmth and affiliative judgments can worsen.
µCap: Instrumental Music Captions for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Individuals
µCap is compelling because it reframes captions for instrumental music as sound-mimetic, time-aligned renderings rather than lyric substitutes or generic labels. The paper contributes a real system and user evidence, but its claims should stay bounded by Korean-language design choices, mainly classical evaluation material, and acknowledged mismatches between generated captions and perceived sound.
"Better Ask for Forgiveness than Permission": Practices and Policies of AI Disclosure in Freelance Work
This is a solid CHI honorable-mention paper because it turns a familiar AI-transparency topic into a concrete, field-relevant mismatch between worker habits, client expectations, and policy language. The contribution is primarily empirical and interpretive, but it is well supported by a multi-stage mixed-methods design and clear boundary conditions.
"Here, Let Me Help": An Empirical Study of User Interventions in Human–Web Agent Collaboration
This is a solid empirical CHI paper with a clear contribution: it reframes web-agent evaluation around user interventions rather than only task success. The taxonomy is useful, the study design is credible, and the discussion connects the findings to design implications. Its main limits are the novice participant pool, the narrow domain set, and the coarse proxy used for implicit intervention.
“I Choose to Live, for Life Itself”: Understanding Agency of Home-Based Care Patients Through Information Practices and Relational Dynamics in Care Networks
This is a well-supported qualitative paper with a clear conceptual contribution. Its strongest move is to recast agency in home-based care as relational and materially mediated, then connect that to a concrete representation gap in care planning. The evidence fits the claims, though the scope remains local and selective.
"I Need to Find That One Chart": How Data Workers Navigate, Summarize and Communicate Analytical Conversations
This is a solid CHI honorable-mention style paper: the novelty is primarily in reframing transcript revisitation as iterative sensemaking and in packaging that idea into a structured design probe. The qualitative evidence is coherent and well aligned with the claims, but the scope remains intentionally narrow.
“It’s Just a Wild, Wild West”: Harnessing Public Procurement as an AI Governance Mechanism
This is a strong CHI policy-and-practice paper: it reframes procurement as an AI governance lever and backs that claim with interviews from relevant stakeholders. The contribution is mainly a grounded synthesis of practices and mechanisms, not a technical system, so its impact depends on whether public buyers can operationalize the recommendations.
"It's trained by non-disabled people": Evaluating How Image Quality Affects Product Captioning with Vision-Language Models
This is a strong CHI paper because it turns a familiar VLM evaluation question into a disability-centered one with concrete empirical evidence. The novelty is not a new model, but a new lens and dataset that expose how image quality and BLV capture conditions change the reliability story.
"That's another doom I haven't thought about": A User Study on AI Labels as a Safeguard Against Image-Based Misinformation
This is a strong CHI paper because it does not stop at asking whether people like AI labels; it tests whether labels actually help and shows a subtle failure mode: labels can become a heuristic that shifts errors elsewhere. The mixed-methods setup and the large survey make the result credible and field-relevant.
"Tinged with Heartbreak": An Ethnographic Account of Navigating Autistic Loneliness and the Fragile Promise of AI Companionship
This is a conceptually sharp, emotionally grounded ethnographic paper whose strongest contribution is naming a form of loss that existing HCI language tends to flatten. The evidence is necessarily narrow, but the framing is persuasive and well matched to the single-case method. The main caution is scope: it should be read as theory-building, not as broad empirical prevalence evidence.
``No One Should Know I Used This App": Challenges and Design Opportunities for Digital Mental Well-Being Support for Young Saudi Women
This is a strong CHI qualitative contribution because it does more than localize an existing app category: it shows that privacy, stigma, and adoption are culturally entangled in ways Western-centered mental health app work often misses. The paper’s value is in the empirical reframing, not in a new technical system.
A Blessing and a Challenge: Unpacking Boundary Ambiguities Experienced by Caregivers of Older Adults
This is a solid qualitative CHI paper whose value lies in reframing caregiving as boundary negotiation under ambiguity, not in introducing a new system. The contribution is conceptually useful and well aligned with the interview evidence, but its scope remains bounded by caregiver self-reports and leaves important structural and recipient-side questions open.
A Tree’s Perspective: Enhancing Nature Connectedness Through Transitional and Multisensory Virtual Reality Experiences
This is a thoughtful CHI paper with a clear design insight: if the goal is emotional or nature-connectedness change, the intervention should not start and stop at the headset boundary. The study is small, but the mixed-method evidence is coherent and the contribution is strongest as a design argument plus exploratory empirical support.
A-MIrror: Augmented Reality Mirror System for Enhanced Visual Illusion in Post-Stroke Upper-Limb Rehabilitation
A-MIrror is a well-motivated CHI rehabilitation system paper: it targets a real design tension in digital mirror therapy and backs the claim with a small but relevant patient/therapist evaluation. The strongest contribution is the system architecture and the measured user-experience improvement, while the clinical impact remains preliminary.
Aesthetics of Felt Asymmetry
This is a conceptually strong soma-design paper whose main contribution is reframing bodily asymmetry as an aesthetic and generative resource. The novelty is real at the level of design framing and vocabulary, but the evidence is exploratory and should be read as a qualitative, field-level argument rather than a validated method or system.
Affective and Goal-Oriented Factors of Relationship Formation in the Digital Therapeutic Alliance: A Longitudinal Study of Mental Health Chatbots
This is a strong CHI paper because it does not merely report that users like supportive chatbots; it isolates a plausible structure for relationship formation and shows that trust/satisfaction behave more like downstream indicators than root causes. The contribution is empirical and field-shaping rather than system-centric.
AI and My Values: User Perceptions of LLMs’ Ability to Extract, Embody, and Explain Human Values from Casual Conversations
This is a strong CHI paper because it turns a philosophical question into a concrete HCI measurement problem: what users come to believe about an LLM’s values after sustained interaction. The main contribution is VAPT, which is methodologically useful, while the safety framing around “weaponized empathy” gives the work clear stakes beyond a single study.
AI-exhibited Personality Traits Can Shape Human Self-concept through Conversations
This is a strong CHI empirical paper because it turns a familiar concern—chatbots influencing users—into a specific, measurable self-concept effect tied to AI personality traits. The contribution is not a new system, but a well-scoped behavioral finding with clear boundary conditions and a plausible mechanism.
An Exploration of Default Images in Text-to-Image Generation
This is a solid mixed-methods CHI paper that turns an intuitive but underexamined generative-AI failure mode into an empirically grounded phenomenon. Its main contribution is not a new interaction technique, but a careful characterization of default images in Midjourney, backed by scale, user evidence, and explicit limits on causal interpretation.
An LLM-based Motivation-Aware Framework For AI Coaching For Behaviour Change
This is a credible CHI contribution because it turns a familiar MI idea into a concrete LLM coaching framework with a clear state-based strategy split and a real mixed-methods evaluation. The novelty is incremental but well-argued, and the paper is appropriately bounded by a single-session physical-activity study.
ATTENPlay: A Game-Based Attention Network Test for Autistic Children
ATTENPlay is a credible CHI-style redesign of a standard cognitive test into a child-friendly game for autistic children. The novelty is mainly in the artifact and co-design translation, while the evidence is solid but still bounded by a small comparative study and prototype-level psychometric validation.
Automating UI Optimization through Multi-Agentic Reasoning
This is a credible framework contribution: the paper’s novelty is not a new optimizer, but the orchestration layer that turns verbal UI-change requests into objective selection, Pareto search, and VLM-based validation. The evaluation scope is real but bounded to an MR use case, so the result is promising system evidence rather than broad proof of general UI automation.
AV-Play: Co-Designing VR Games to Study Audiovisual Integration in Children with ADHD
AV-Play is a credible CHI-style artifact paper: the contribution is a co-designed VR game plus an exploratory multimodal study, not a finished intervention claim. Its strongest value is showing how to frame the engagement-versus-validity tradeoff as a design problem rather than a post hoc limitation, while keeping the clinical measurement story visible throughout.
Barriers that Programming Instructors Face While Performing Emergency Pedagogical Design to Shape Student-AI Interactions with Generative AI Tools
This looks like a strong CHI framing paper because it names a real instructional condition that many educators are already living through but that HCI has not clearly conceptualized. The mixed-method scope gives the framing credibility, and the five-barrier structure makes the contribution usable. Its main weakness in this review packet is not the idea itself, but the lack of access to body sections needed to inspect methodological rigor and explicit author-stated limitations.
Belonging in the Making: Investigating Inclusive Makerspace Design for Youth with Autism
This is a solid qualitative CHI paper with a clear accessibility argument and a useful synthesis of expert perspectives. Its main value is not a new system or experiment, but a well-bounded set of design themes that reframe makerspaces as spaces where belonging must be intentionally designed.
Beyond Words: Measuring User Experience through Speech Analysis in Voice User Interfaces
This is a credible and nicely scoped CHI contribution: it reframes VUI evaluation around users’ own speech and backs that idea with a controlled study plus predictive modeling. The paper is strongest as an implicit measurement contribution, though its claims should stay tied to correlational evidence and the study’s constrained setting.
Breakdowns in Conversational AI: Interactional Failures in Emotionally and Ethically Sensitive Contexts
This is a solid CHI-style evaluation paper with a clear methodological contribution: it moves beyond static safety checks and shows how failures accumulate over emotionally escalating dialogue. The main strength is the stress-test setup and taxonomy; the main caution is that the evidence comes from synthetic, model-mediated validation rather than real user deployment.
Building Benchmarks from the Ground Up: Community-Centered Evaluation of LLMs in Healthcare Chatbot Settings
This is a strong CHI-style methodological paper: the main contribution is not a new model, but a community-centered evaluation framework that makes benchmark construction itself participatory. The validation is credible but bounded to one healthcare case study, and the paper is careful enough to acknowledge that LLM judges do not substitute for humans.
Can AI Be a Moral Victim? The Role of Moral Patiency and Ownership Perceptions in Ethical Judgments of Using AI-Generated Content
This is a clean, conceptually interesting CHI paper: it does not just ask whether AI-generated content is treated differently, but why. The mechanism claim is plausible and well matched to the experiment, though the scope is still narrow—one vignette, one participant pool, and judgment outcomes rather than behavior.
Can LLM-Simulated Practice and Feedback Upskill Human Counselors? A Randomized Study with 90+ Novice Counselors
This is a strong CHI paper because it does not stop at showing that LLM patient simulation is feasible; it tests whether the training actually changes novice counselor behavior. The key result is nuanced and important: practice alone is not enough, and feedback appears to be the mechanism that drives improvement.
CaseCompass: Designing Sustainable, Community-Led Socio-Technical Systems for Gender-Based Violence Support Work
This is a compelling CHI paper because it treats the software artifact and the collaboration around it as inseparable. Its strongest move is to argue that in GBV support work, a good system must preserve narrative and relational practice while also being handover-ready, locally maintainable, and accountable to the organization after research ends.
Change is Hard: Consistent Player Behavior Across Games with Conflicting Incentives
This is a solid CHI honorable-mention style paper because the contribution is clear, the dataset is substantial, and the cross-game design is genuinely useful for separating player-level consistency from single-game effects. The main value is methodological plus empirical, not a sweeping theory shift.
CHOIR: A Chatbot-mediated Organizational Memory Leveraging Communication in University Research Labs
CHOIR is best read as a field-tested workflow contribution rather than a breakthrough algorithm. Its value lies in showing how an LLM chatbot can sit inside lab communication practices to support memory work, while also revealing a real privacy/visibility tradeoff that designers of organizational memory tools often underappreciate.
Chromotion: Controlling Motion-Induced Color on Object Motion Paths via High-Speed Temporal Additive Projection
Chromotion is a strong example of turning a projection artifact into an interaction technique. The core idea is not just visually clever; it is technically framed, experimentally checked, and bounded by clear perceptual constraints. Its strongest contribution is the controlled temporal design, not a new sensing pipeline.
Co-Designing Environment-Based Strategies with Neurodivergent Individuals for Sensory-Inclusive Dental Visit Experiences
This is a solid CHI design-space paper: the novelty is not a new deployed system, but a carefully argued, technology-agnostic catalogue for sensory-inclusive dental environments. The strongest contribution is methodological and generative, with tangible materials used as a practical proxy to surface environment strategies that can later map to AR, projection, or physical interventions.
CoBreath: Designing a VR-Based Dyadic Biofeedback System to Support Breathing Exercise for Breast Cancer Survivors
CoBreath is a credible CHI contribution because it does more than wrap biofeedback in VR: it rethinks the interaction as a dyadic, shared relaxation practice and then evaluates that idea with both clinicians and breast cancer survivors. The evidence supports a meaningful design contribution, though the clinical impact remains short-term and setting-specific.
CoMap: A Collaborative 3D Sketch Mapping Game to Engage Spatial Communication in Search and Rescue
CoMap is a credible CHI systems contribution: it takes a familiar SAR practice, sketch mapping, and reworks it into a shared 3D VR collaboration space. The novelty is mainly in the interaction/system design and in the experimental evidence that it can outperform 2D sketch mapping in a simulated rescue setting.
Consensus and Contradictions: A Cross-Organizational Analysis of Visualization Style Guides
This is a strong CHI paper because it turns a familiar but under-studied artifact class into a comparative corpus and shows that style guides are not neutral best-practice manuals. The contribution is less a new interaction technique than a field-shaping synthesis with a useful companion tool and clear, well-scoped limits.
Conversational Inoculation to Enhance Resistance to Misinformation
This is a timely CHI paper with a clear method contribution: it turns inoculation against misinformation into a conversational chatbot interaction and backs that claim with a controlled online comparison. The novelty is credible and the evaluation is solid, though the scope is still bounded by topic selection, short-delay testing, and a passive control.
Cost-Aware Bayesian Optimization for Interactive Devices
This is a solid, practice-facing adaptation of Bayesian optimization rather than a deep algorithmic reinvention. Its main value is making cost explicit in a design workflow where prototype effort is uneven, and the evaluation package suggests the idea is viable. The simplification of the cost model is also the main reason to read it as a bounded method contribution, not a universal solution.
Crepe: A Mobile Screen Data Collector Using Graph Query
Crepe is a credible CHI systems contribution: it reframes mobile screen data collection as selective, query-driven extraction rather than blanket capture. The Graph Query idea is the paper’s real novelty, and the evaluation is broad enough to show the approach works in practice, while the limitations are candid and important.
DancingBox: A Lightweight MoCap System for Character Animation from Physical Proxies
DancingBox is a credible CHI-style systems contribution: it reframes motion capture around everyday objects and a single webcam, then uses bounding-box conditioning to recover plausible animation. The novelty is in the proxy representation and pipeline, while the evaluation is solid but still bounded by monocular capture and non-real-time constraints.
DanXeReflect: Interacting with the Spatio-Temporal Past Movements for Embodied, Reflective Choreographic Collaboration
DanXeReflect is a credible CHI-style interaction contribution: it reframes choreographic video review as embodied XR collaboration and ties that idea to concrete interactions for search, revision, and annotation. The paper’s main strength is conceptual integration; its main weakness is that the evidence is qualitative and lab-bound, so the claims should stay scoped to reflective support rather than broader workflow impact.
Dark and Bright Side of Participatory Red-Teaming with Targets of Stereotyping for Eliciting Harmful Behaviors from Large Language Models
This is a strong CHI-style empirical paper because it does not just advocate participation; it shows the double edge of involving stereotype targets in red-teaming. The contribution is credible and timely: participants gain strategic expertise and agency, but the study also documents real psychological costs and clear limits on generalization.
Dark Patterns and the EU Digital Services Act: Mapping Autonomy Violations and Design Factors
This is a strong translational HCI paper: its main value is not a new interface technique, but a disciplined framework for connecting dark-pattern analysis to DSA autonomy-violation categories. The contribution is conceptually useful and timely, though its practical reach still depends on legal interpretation and further validation with stakeholders.
Data Repair
This is a credible CHI ethnography with a clear field contribution: it moves data repair out of a purely technical frame and into a postcolonial, infrastructural one. The strongest value is the grounded account of how repairers navigate scarce tools, language barriers, and informal knowledge sharing; the main caution is that the argument is intentionally local and should not be overgeneralized.
Decomposing Autonomy: Explaining AI Technology Acceptance Through a Liberty-Based Framework
This is a conceptually ambitious CHI paper that earns its place by making autonomy more precise: positive liberty, negative liberty, and agency are separated and then tied to AI acceptance. The empirical study is not huge, but it is enough to support the framework’s basic plausibility and to surface a non-obvious asymmetry between the two liberty dimensions.
Deconstructing Open-World Game Mission Design Formula: A Thematic Analysis Using an Action-Block Framework
This is a solid CHI-style method-and-tool paper: the interesting part is the shift from player traces to authored mission structure, operationalized through MAQV plus action blocks. The contribution is strongest as a reproducible analytic workflow with empirical validation, and weaker as a broad theory of game design.
Degraded Data in Nonprofit Homebrew Databases
This is a strong qualitative CHI paper because it turns a familiar complaint—bad data—into a more precise account of how nonprofit work actually produces and tolerates degraded records. The contribution is not a new system, but a careful empirical vocabulary and a useful reframing of what counts as a problem under constraint.
Design Opportunities at the Intersection of Sexual and Reproductive Health, Cystic Fibrosis, and Technology
This is a well-scoped qualitative CHI paper whose main contribution is conceptual and design-oriented: it shows why SRH support for people with CF cannot be bolted onto existing tools without accounting for the condition’s care ecology. The award recognition fits a careful, intersectional contribution with clear limits.
Designing Beyond Language: Sociotechnical Barriers in AI Health Technologies for Limited English Proficiency
This is a solid CHI qualitative paper whose value is in reframing LEP support around sociotechnical constraints rather than translation alone. The contribution is credible and useful, but it is bounded by hypothetical storyboard interviews and a navigator-only sample, so it should be read as design guidance rather than behavioral evidence.
Designing Computational Tools for Exploring Causal Relationships in Qualitative Data
This is a credible CHI systems paper with a clear design contribution: it reframes qualitative causal analysis as an interactive, traceable workflow rather than a purely manual reading task. The strongest contribution is the combination of causal-network construction and multi-view visualization, but the empirical support is still scoped to a small formative/feedback loop and a technical evaluation.
Designing Scaffolding Cards to Facilitate LLM-Based Socratic Instruction: An Exploratory Study of Response Strategies to Support Learning
This is a well-scoped CHI paper that turns a familiar LLM-learning problem into a more interesting interaction design question: how to scaffold the learner’s response, not just the model’s output. The contribution is strongest as a design framework plus an exploratory evaluation, with clear limits around personalization and longitudinal evidence.
Dialogues with AI Reduce Beliefs in Misinformation but Build No Lasting Discernment Skills
This is a strong CHI paper because it does more than show that AI can help people answer misinformation questions correctly in the moment. Its longitudinal design makes the central tension legible: immediate assistance improves performance, but the benefit does not translate into lasting unassisted skill, which is exactly the kind of nuanced human-AI finding CHI values.
Do People Appropriately Rely on AI-Advice? An Analytical Review of HCI Research on Human-AI Decision-Making
This is a solid CHI synthesis paper: its main contribution is not a new system but a structured review that argues current human-AI reliance studies often miss realism in decision scenarios. The paper’s claims are well matched to its evidence base, though the work remains bounded by review scope and coding choices.
Do We Need Subsidiarity in Software?
This is a thoughtful normative reframing of software privacy/control through subsidiarity, and the empirical component is appropriately bounded. The contribution is strongest as a field-level argument and design lens, not as a universal measurement of privacy harm across software.
Does My Chatbot Have an Agenda? Understanding Human and AI Agency in Human-Human-like Chatbot Interaction
This is a solid CHI honorable-mention style contribution: not a flashy system, but a careful longitudinal study that turns agency into a relational, observable phenomenon and backs that claim with a distinctive progressive-transparency method. The main value is conceptual and methodological rather than technical.
Don't Worry, Just Follow Me: Prototyping and In-the-Wild Evaluation of Smart Pole Interaction Unit with Mobility
This is a credible and timely CHI paper because it moves beyond vehicle-centric signaling and demonstrates a pedestrian-side mobile mediator in the wild. The contribution is strongest as an artifact-plus-field-protocol package, with clear empirical gains but also clearly bounded scope and practical safety caveats.
Dynamic Compensation Can Enhance User Engagement by Triggering Sensitivity to Financial Losses in Crowd-sourced Studies
This is a neat, behaviorally grounded incentive paper: the interesting move is not merely paying differently, but changing the framing after effort has already accumulated. The empirical result is specific yet useful for CHI because it connects loss aversion to study-design practice, while also making the ethical and generalizability constraints explicit.
EcoAssist: Embedding Sustainability into AI-Assisted Frontend Development
EcoAssist is a timely and well-positioned CHI contribution because it moves sustainability from a separate measurement concern into the AI-assisted coding workflow itself. The paper supports a concrete tool contribution plus mixed validation, and the evidence is strong enough to treat the main claims as credible within the evaluated frontend setting.
EmoFlow: From Tracking to Sense-Making of Emotions Through Creative Drawing
EmoFlow’s main value is not a new classifier but a careful empirical correction: drawings do not behave like universal emotion signals. The paper’s strongest contribution is showing how people use drawing as personal sense-making, which is a useful design pivot for CHI.
Emotion in Smart Buildings: Can Affective Interaction Shape Smart Agenda in Architecture?
This is a thoughtful, concept-forward CHI paper that makes a credible case for moving smart buildings beyond threshold-based comfort models. Its main value is not technical automation but a well-motivated AfI framing and a set of reusable interpretive constructs grounded in exploratory in-situ work.
Empathy Practices in Social Media Discourse: A Multidimensional and Relational Perspective
This is a strong CHI paper because it does more than relabel empathy: it reframes the construct, builds an annotation scheme around that reframing, and shows that the categories can be detected and analyzed at scale. The contribution is conceptual and methodological, with clear boundaries.
Emulating Aggregate Human Choice Behavior and Biases with GPT Conversational Agents
This is a strong CHI paper because it reframes LLM bias evaluation from isolated prompt responses to conversational behavioral emulation, backed by a large human study and GPT-4/GPT-5 comparisons. The main caveat is scope: the evidence is compelling for the tested abstract decision tasks, but not yet for broader real-world decision support.
Endless Swipes and Recommendations: The Impact of Short-Form Video Platforms on Context-Switching and Children’s Working Memory
This is a solid CHI-style controlled study with a clear, timely question and a useful null result: platform mechanics increased switching, but the memory measures did not move in the expected way. The contribution is strongest as an empirical finding about immediate effects in a specific child population, not as a broad claim about all short-form video use.
ENtry, Occupancy, EXit (NOX): A Model of Human-Robot Territorial Dynamics
NOX is a credible CHI contribution because it reframes robot-space interaction around territoriality rather than mere distance, and it backs that reframing with a reasonably sized vignette study. The main value is conceptual: a vocabulary and stage model that can organize future HRI work, while the empirical evidence shows the proposed friction points matter in a realistic domestic scenario.
Envisioning an Ethical and Sustainable Metaverse Workplace: Beyond AI-Driven Surveillance
This is a strong CHI paper because it does more than criticize surveillance: it shows how metaverse workplaces can repackage control as embodiment, then turns that diagnosis into concrete design and governance frameworks. The evidence is solid for a qualitative, mixed-method contribution, though the authors appropriately stop short of claiming deployment validation.
Evalet: Evaluating Large Language Models through Functional Fragmentation
Evalet’s main contribution is not just a new interface, but a reframing of LLM evaluation itself: from trusting a single holistic score to inspecting how specific fragments function against criteria. That is a meaningful CHI move because it targets a real interpretability gap in judge-model workflows.
Evidotes: Integrating Scientific Evidence and Anecdotes to Support Uncertainties Triggered by Peer Health Posts
Evidotes is a thoughtful reframing of peer-health support: instead of optimizing only for relevance or accuracy, it treats posts as uncertainty triggers and augments them with complementary evidence and anecdotes. The contribution is strongest as a system and interaction design paper with promising mixed-methods evidence, though the evaluation remains exploratory.
Examining Interpretation Strategies for Multiple Forecast Visualizations with Two and Four Forecasts
This is a solid CHI empirical paper with a clear gap, a well-scoped experimental baseline, and a useful strategy taxonomy for multiple forecast visualizations. Its main contribution is not a new display, but evidence that viewers often reason in ways designers may not expect, including winner-takes-all and artifact-driven interpretations.
Experiencer, Helper, or Observer: Online Fraud Intervention for Older Adults Through a Role-based Simulation Approach
This is a clear CHI-style intervention paper: it takes a familiar education problem and reframes it through role-based simulation rather than victim-only instruction. The contribution looks strongest as a design and empirical finding package, with the abstract supporting a controlled evaluation in a specific older-adult population.
Exploring Design Practice with Generative AI: Perspectives from AEC Design Professionals
This bundle is evidence-poor because the provided spans are only navigation/classification text, so the review cannot verify the paper’s claims from the body. At the metadata level, though, the paper looks like a useful mixed-methods descriptive study of GenAI use in AEC practice, with likely value in documenting adoption patterns and disclosure tensions.
Exploring the Future of AI in Clinical Collaboration: A Study on Tumor Board Case Preparation
This looks like a strong CHI health-AI paper in topic and framing, but the evidence packet here is thin. The abstract suggests a meaningful empirical contribution: a mixed-methods study of oncologists using two AI systems for MTB preparation, with a nontrivial finding that transparency features did not fix trust calibration.
Filtering the Invisible: A Feminist HCI Perspective on Informal Infra-structuring in Gig Labor
This looks like a potentially strong CHI contribution on gig labor and feminist HCI, but the repair packet is severely under-grounded because the supplied sections contain no substantive paper text. I can preserve a plausible metadata-based interpretation of the contribution, yet the evidence bundle itself cannot verify the core claims with exact in-paper excerpts, so manual checking is essential.
FIXical I/O: Exploring the Effects of Real-time Error Sensing and Physical Intervention on Finger-based Motor Sequence Learning
FIXical I/O looks like a credible and interesting CHI systems contribution because it reframes haptic motor training around intervention timing rather than only around demonstration or after-the-fact correction. The idea is compelling, but this packet contains almost no substantive paper text beyond the abstract, so confidence in the empirical claims must remain low until the full methods, results, and limitations are inspected.
Fostering Collective Discourse: A Distributed Role-Based Approach to Online News Commenting
The idea appears strong and CHI-relevant: redesign comment sections around collaborative roles rather than isolated posting. But this repair bundle remains evidentially weak because the supplied sections contain only site chrome, so the paper’s substantive claims cannot be quote-grounded here.
From Barriers to Blueprints: A Critical Systematic Review of Older Adults and Social VR
This is a strong critical review contribution if judged as a field-level reframing rather than a technical VR artifact. The abstract supports a clear methodological novelty—resistant reading—and a coherent critique of deficit framing, but the evidence available here is limited to abstract-level claims, so the review’s rigor cannot be fully audited.
From Future of Work to Future of Workers: Addressing Asymptomatic AI Harms to Foster Dignified Human-AI Interaction
This is a strong CHI paper because it reframes AI-at-work from efficiency to dignity and expertise preservation, and it does so with a concrete longitudinal account rather than a purely speculative critique. The novelty is less a new algorithm than a new problem framing plus a response framework grounded in observed workplace erosion.
From Junior to Senior: Allocating Agency and Navigating Professional Growth in Agentic AI-Mediated Software Engineering
This is a strong mixed-methods CHI paper with a clear human-centered reframing: agency in AI-mediated software engineering is treated as an organizational and developmental issue, not just a usability issue. The main contribution is a practice proposal grounded in junior and senior accounts, with explicit limits that keep the claims appropriately scoped.
From Periphery to Presence: Authorship, Venues, and Education in African HCI
This is a strong CHI honorable-mention style field paper: it does not merely count African HCI outputs, but reframes the field through context, venue stratification, and educational capacity. The main value is the synthesis and the challenge to expansionist assumptions, while the main caution is that the evidence remains bounded by indexing and survey-access constraints.
From Quarters Per Minute to Daily Quests and Seasons: Developer Perspectives on Temporal Design in Video Games
This is a solid qualitative contribution with a clear CHI-shaped reframing: temporal design is not just about pacing or retention mechanics, but about how studios operationalize time through tools, metrics, and organizational constraints. The heuristics are plausible and field-relevant, though their validation remains interpretive rather than empirical.
From Record to Relation: Co-Designing Child-Centered Digital Preservation for Children’s Artwork
This is a strong CHI honorable-mention style paper because it does more than propose a nicer archive UI: it reframes preservation itself around relation, then grounds that reframing in mixed-methods evidence and concrete probes. The contribution is primarily conceptual and design-oriented, with credible but still early validation.
From Sleep Scores to Self-Knowledge: Older Adults’ Experiences with Tracking Sleep Using the Oura Ring
This is a solid qualitative CHI paper that earns its honorable mention through a careful, well-scoped reframing of older-adult sleep tracking. The main contribution is not a new device or algorithm, but a persuasive account of why youthful defaults in wearable feedback can misfit older adults’ lived experience and engagement patterns.
From Symptoms to Systems: An Expert-Guided Approach to Understanding Risks of Generative AI for Eating Disorders
This is a strong qualitative CHI paper because it turns a familiar safety question into a clinically grounded systems problem. The main value is not a detector or benchmark, but a carefully argued taxonomy that can guide future evaluation and safeguard design for a high-risk population.
Futuring Social Assemblages: How Enmeshing AIs into Social Life Challenges the Individual and the Interpersonal
This is a thoughtful CHI position paper grounded in a small qualitative design study. Its strongest contribution is not a new system but a reframing: social AI should be judged by interpersonal and secondary-user consequences, not only by the primary user’s experience.
Going Light: The Effects of Minimal Mobile Phone Adoption on Young Adults’ Well-Being Depend on Motivation
This is a solid CHI paper because it does more than argue that minimal phones might help; it tests the claim empirically and shows the effect is conditional. The main contribution is not a new device, but a careful causal story about who benefits and why, which makes the result more useful than a simple before/after well-being claim.
Gold Standard or Gold-Plated? Human Practices of Triple Verification in CSAM Takedown
This is a strong CHI-style empirical critique of a taken-for-granted safety procedure. Its value is not a new interface or algorithm, but a careful unpacking of how triple verification actually works in practice and when it fails to behave like a simple reliability guarantee.
Good Fences Make Good Learning: How Self-Directed Language Learners Navigate LLM Delegation Decisions
This is a solid CHI paper because it does not just ask whether LLMs help language learning; it asks how learners decide what to hand over and what to keep. The contribution is a useful interpretive framework, but it remains a qualitative account with bounded generalizability.
Good for the Planet, Bad for Me? Intended and Unintended Consequences of AI Energy Consumption Disclosure
This is a solid CHI empirical paper because it does more than show that energy disclosure nudges greener choice; it also surfaces a counterintuitive downside in user experience. The main value is the paired behavioral and perceptual evidence, though the claims should stay anchored to the paper’s single low-stakes online experiment.
Hacking Flow: From Lived Practices to Innovation
This is a solid CHI honorable-mention style contribution: it does not claim a breakthrough theory, but it does reframe flow-support design around workers’ own lived interventions and backs that reframing with a two-study mixed-methods repertoire. The paper is strongest as a descriptive and generative synthesis, weaker as evidence for effectiveness.
Hear You in Silence: Designing for Active Listening in Human Interaction with Conversational Agents Using Context-Aware Pacing
This is a thoughtful CHI paper that reframes silence from a bug into an interaction resource. The contribution is strongest as an interaction-design framework backed by a controlled study, with clear evidence that context-aware pacing can improve perceived listening and engagement in supportive text conversations.
HiFiGaze: Improving Eye Tracking Accuracy Using Screen Content Knowledge
HiFiGaze is a credible CHI-style method paper: the novelty is not a new sensor, but a clever re-reading of an existing signal. Its strongest contribution is showing that screen content can help segment eye reflections and improve gaze estimation, with measured gains and a clear account of when the approach breaks down.
How Do Future Visions Shape the Field of Human-Computer Interaction?
This is a strong honorable-mention CHI paper because it does something deceptively simple but field-shaping: it empirically studies visions as a community object, not just as inspirational rhetoric. The payoff is a clear descriptive synthesis plus a critical-reading lens; the main caveat is that the evidence is self-reported and sample-bounded.
How Do Operators Use Network Diagrams? Characterising Visualisation Tasks in an Energy Control Room
This is a solid CHI synthesis paper: it does not merely summarize prior work, but turns a literature review into a task archetype framework and then checks that framework against real control-room observations. The contribution is strongest as a field-level descriptive synthesis with practical design implications, not as a general theory of visualization.
How do the Global South Diasporas Mobilize for Transnational Political Change?
This is a theory-forward CHI paper with a clear qualitative empirical base. Its strongest contribution is the new framing of diasporic political agency through remittance and platform infrastructures, but the claims are necessarily bounded by a single movement context and a skewed interview sample.
How Interface Design Choices Lead to Indirect Environmental Impacts Through Use Intensification
This is a strong CHI sustainability paper because it turns an intuitive but often vague concern—“more features mean more impact”—into a concrete mechanism story. The contribution is best read as a domain-grounded framework for thinking about indirect environmental effects of interface design, with useful design heuristics but limited external validation.
How Multimodal Large Language Models Support Access to Visual Information: A Diary Study With Blind and Low Vision People
This is a strong CHI paper because it identifies a real mismatch between perceived quality and actual answer reliability, then turns that mismatch into a useful design frame. The “visual assistant” idea is a meaningful contribution for accessible AI, especially because it is grounded in diary evidence rather than speculation.
I Felt Like I Need to Fit in Someone Else's Body - Understanding Body-Centered UX Design for Online Fashion Shopping
This is a strong CHI honorable-mention style paper because it reframes a familiar domain—online fashion shopping—through embodied experience rather than conventional usability. The contribution is primarily conceptual and design-oriented, but it is grounded in a multi-step qualitative process and a prototype-based validation, which makes the argument feel actionable rather than purely rhetorical.
InkStack: A Programmable E-Paper Card System for Board Games
InkStack is a credible CHI honorable-mention contribution because it turns a familiar board-game object into a programmable digital artifact without abandoning tangibility. The novelty is system-level rather than conceptual, and the evaluation is appropriately bounded: it shows where the approach helps, not that it universally beats paper or phones.
Interaction Context Often Increases Sycophancy in LLMs
This is a solid CHI empirical paper because it reframes sycophancy as an interaction-context phenomenon rather than a purely prompt-level one. The main value is not a new algorithm but a careful, field-relevant measurement result: context can increase agreement sycophancy, and perspective sycophancy depends on whether the model can infer the user’s viewpoint.
Interaction-Augmented Instruction: Modeling the Synergy of Prompts and Interactions in Human-GenAI Collaboration
This is a solid CHI framework paper: it reframes prompt engineering as prompt-plus-interaction composition, then backs that reframing with a compact model, a derived set of atomic paradigms, and scenario-based demonstrations. The contribution is strongest as a descriptive and generative lens, not as a validated predictive theory.
Interrogating the “Us” Versus “Them” Dichotomy in Technology Research with Older Adults
This is a thoughtful CHI honorable-mention paper because its main contribution is conceptual and methodological rather than technical: it uses collaborative autoethnography to unsettle an entrenched “us versus them” framing in aging research. The evidence supports a credible reflexive argument, but the scope is necessarily narrow and interpretive.
Interview-Informed Generative Agents for Product Discovery: A Validation Study
This is a strong validation paper because it resists the easy story that synthetic users either work or fail outright. Instead, it shows a more useful and more cautious result: interview-informed agents are poor stand-ins for specific people, yet they may still help with early concept screening when teams only need approximate population-level signals.
Investigating How Physical Surfaces Can Serve as Common-Region Cues for Perceptual Grouping of Virtual Elements in Augmented Reality
This is a solid, well-scoped empirical paper that turns a familiar Gestalt idea into an AR-specific question with clear experimental evidence. The contribution is not a grand theory shift, but it is a useful and credible clarification of when physical surfaces matter as common-region cues and where the effect breaks down.
Investigating the Interaction of Game Features and Spatial Skills with Performance and Perceived Difficulty in a Block-Based 3D Programming Puzzle Game
This is a solid empirical CHI paper with a clear design contribution: it moves beyond generic claims about spatial ability by showing that specific 3D game features differentially affect performance and perceived difficulty. The strongest value is the combination of a validated difficulty measure and feature-level analysis, though the scope remains bounded by a modest online sample.
Invisible Saboteurs: Sycophantic LLMs Mislead Novices in Problem-Solving Tasks
This is a strong CHI paper because it turns a widely discussed but often vague concern—LLM sycophancy—into a concrete behavioral finding in a realistic novice task. The main takeaway is unsettling and useful: users can be harmed by agreeable models without realizing it, and the harm shows up in both reliance behavior and performance.
Just-In-Time Objectives: A General Approach for Specialized AI Interactions
This is a strong CHI systems paper because it reframes personalization around inferred, momentary objectives rather than explicit prompts. The architecture is conceptually clean, the evaluation is broader than a single demo, and the reported gains suggest the idea is practically meaningful, though latency and inference reliability remain important constraints.
JustShape: Exploring Co-Speech Gestures for Multimodal LLM-Powered 3D Parametric Modeling
JustShape is a credible CHI systems paper that reframes gesture input for parametric modeling as semantic, co-speech intent rather than command substitution. The novelty is strongest at the interaction-system level, and the evaluation is solid for bounded tasks, but the paper is appropriately cautious about latency and scalability limits.
KNIT: Computational Boundary Objects for Real-Time Convergence in Interdisciplinary Teams
KNIT is strongest as a conceptual and design contribution: it reframes AI as a representational mediator that helps teams negotiate meaning, not just automate tasks. The evaluation is credible for a CHI workshop-style paper, but the mechanism claim is broader than the evidence can fully isolate, so the paper reads as influential and well-grounded rather than definitive.
Large Language Models in Peer-Run Community Behavioral Health Services: Understanding Peer Specialists and Service Users’ Perspectives on Opportunities, Risks, and Mitigation Strategies
This is a strong CHI honorable-mention paper because it moves LLM-in-care discourse away from generic clinical support and into peer-run behavioral health, where authority and trust are fundamentally relational. The contribution is less about a system and more about a careful, grounded reframing of what responsible LLM use could mean in community-led care.
Laughing Through the Struggles: Understanding ADHD Experience and Community Engagement Through Memes and Comments on Instagram
This is a solid CHI-style descriptive paper with a clear social computing contribution: it reframes ADHD memes as meaningful identity and community artifacts rather than disposable humor. The novelty is real but incremental, and the evidence is strongest for Instagram-specific discourse rather than broad ADHD experience.
Let’s Create Our Own World! Fostering Cooperation, Creativity, Empowerment and Intrinsic Motivation in Design Thinking Processes through Edularp Co-Design
This is a method-oriented CHI paper with a clear, somewhat unusual framing: it treats co-designing edularps as the intervention, not just as a playful classroom activity. The contribution is credible and well-bounded, but the evidence remains context-specific and the authors are appropriately cautious about transfer beyond formal education.
Leveraging Biometric-Rich Hand Gestures for Head-Mounted Display Authentication
This is a well-scoped CHI security paper with a clear systems contribution: user-defined gestures become the credential, and biometric hand motion becomes the verifier. The evaluation is credible for the stated threat model, but the claims should be read as platform- and setup-specific rather than broadly universal.
Like, Comment & Caption: A Decade of Social Media Video Caption Research (2015–2025)
This is a strong CHI synthesis paper: its main contribution is not a new interface, but a field-level reframing of social media video captions as participatory infrastructure. The review scope is clear, the evidence base is explicit, and the limitations are appropriately bounded by language and search coverage.
Living Probes in Place: Exploring More-Than-Human Care Through Mycoremediation
This is a thoughtful CHI paper because it does more than showcase a novel bio-material: it uses mycoremediation as a probe for rethinking more-than-human care as place-based rather than dyadic. The contribution is strongest as an empirical and conceptual reframing, with clear limits from the short study and participant pool.
Log2Motion: Biomechanical Motion Synthesis from Touch Logs
Log2Motion is interesting because it reframes touch logs as constraints for generative biomechanical synthesis, not just as traces to classify or summarize. The abstract supports a real novelty claim in system architecture, but the evidence available here is mostly abstract-level, so the strongest reading is as a promising new computational framing with plausibility-based validation rather than a fully established general solution.
Looking inside the VR Music Scene: Mapping Platforms, Events and People
This is a strong CHI honorable-mention style paper because it reframes Social VR music as an existing cultural ecosystem rather than a design problem alone. The mixed-method mapping is well matched to the claim, and the main contribution is descriptive but field-shaping rather than technical.
Making the Sacred: Craft, Ritual, and Computational Imaginaries in Postcolonial HCI
This is a thoughtful, well-bounded ethnographic paper that makes a clear field argument: devotional craft is not just a cultural curiosity but a serious site for HCI theory-building about materiality, agency, and the sacred. The contribution is strongest as a conceptual reorientation grounded in rich fieldwork, not as a broadly generalizable empirical claim.
Mapping the Landscape of Affective Extended Reality: A Scoping Review of Biodata-Driven Systems for Understanding and Sharing Emotions
This is a solid CHI synthesis paper: it does not claim a new sensing method, but it does something valuable by naming affective XR and organizing a fragmented literature into a usable taxonomy. The contribution is strongest as a field map and research agenda, with evidence that matches the scope of a scoping review.
Metacognitive Demands and Strategies While Using Off-The-Shelf AI Conversational Agents for Health Information Seeking
This is a solid qualitative CHI paper with a clear, field-relevant lens: metacognitive burden in health information seeking with off-the-shelf conversational agents. The contribution is not a new system but a careful empirical account of demands and coping strategies, with appropriately bounded claims given the small, scenario-based study.
MIND: Empowering Mental Health Clinicians with Multimodal Data Insights through a Narrative Dashboard
MIND is a credible CHI-style systems paper: the novelty is in how it fuses LLM narration, rule-based exploration, and chart-backed evidence into a clinician-facing dashboard. The evaluation is solid for a prototype, but the claims should stay within simulated, short-horizon decision support rather than real clinical deployment.
MindfulAgents: Personalizing Mindfulness Meditation via an Expert-Aligned Multi-Agent System
MindfulAgents is a credible CHI systems paper: the novelty is in the orchestration of expert-aligned reflection, safety scaffolding, and real-time script personalization rather than in a new meditation theory. The evaluation is reasonably strong for a CHI paper, but the authors themselves acknowledge latency and limited ablation depth, so the contribution is best read as a promising system demonstration rather than a settled clinical advance.
MorsEar: Toward Generalizable Low-Resource Covert Messaging via Earable based Inertial Sensing
MorsEar is a credible CHI systems contribution: it turns an earable IMU into a covert text-entry channel with a coherent interaction grammar and an on-device decoder, and it backs that claim with multi-context user data. The main caveat is that the system’s promise depends on Morse learning and a bounded evaluation scope.
MoSound: An Interactive Tool for Generative Sound Design in Motion Graphics
MoSound is a credible CHI-style systems paper: the novelty is in integrating detection, mapping, and generative synthesis into a usable workflow for motion-graphics sound design. The evidence is strongest for the system contribution and mixed-initiative framing, while the main caveat is that automatic event placement and longer-duration coherence remain limited.
Movement as Medium: Personalisation of Instruments for Inclusive Creative Expression in Disability-Led Performance
This is a strong CHI honorable-mention style contribution because it reframes personalization as a design methodology for inclusive creative expression, not just a tuning exercise. The evidence is rich and ecologically grounded, but the claims remain case-based and should be read as method-building rather than general law.
MoveTogether: Exploring Physical Co-op Gameplay in Mixed-Reality
This is a credible CHI contribution because it combines a concrete interaction technique with design-space exploration and a controlled comparison. The strongest value is conceptual: it reframes co-located co-op around a shared physical channel, then shows that this can alter coordination and communication in a small but meaningful study.
Moving Beyond Passwords: Investigating the Effect of Digital Nudges on Passkey Adoption
This is a solid, practice-oriented CHI paper with a clear empirical contribution: it tests passkey nudges at multiple journey points and shows that timing matters. The strongest takeaway is not that nudges universally work, but that they can shift engagement in specific contexts, which is exactly the kind of boundary-sensitive result HCI needs.
My Favorite Streamer is an LLM: Discovering, Bonding, and Co-Creating in AI VTuber Fandom
This is a strong CHI qualitative paper with a clear and timely contribution: it shows that AI VTuber fandom is not a novelty wrapper around human-fandom theory, but a setting where authenticity, attachment, and financial support are reorganized around consistency and co-performance. The empirical base is solid for a single-case study, though generalization should stay cautious.
NaviNote: Enabling In-situ Spatial Annotation Authoring to Support Exploration and Navigation for Blind and Low Vision People
NaviNote is a solid CHI system paper because it turns a plausible accessibility idea into a coherent end-to-end prototype and evaluates it with BLV participants. The most interesting result is the reframing of high-accuracy positioning as both an annotation aid and a navigation aid, which gives the work a stronger design implication than a narrow tool demo.
Negotiating Work-Life Boundaries in a Collectivist Context: The Case of Chinese Teachers on WeChat
This is a strong CHI paper because it does more than report that teachers are always on WeChat; it explains why that state can be socially expected and professionally organized. The conceptual move from boundary violation to expected permeability is the real contribution, and the mixed-method evidence is aligned with that claim.
Noise Pilot: Enabling Artistic Workflow Composition with Diffusion-Based Image Generation
This is a strong CHI creativity-support paper because the contribution is not just another prompt interface: it exposes diffusion as editable workflow material and shows artists using that material in practice. The study is small, but the design idea is clear and well matched to the deployment evidence.
Noondawind: Co-Designed Dashboard for Indigenous Data Access and Environmental Policy Implementation
This is a strong situated HCI contribution: the paper does not merely add another environmental dashboard, but reframes the problem around Indigenous data sovereignty, treaty rights, and Ojibwe co-design. The evaluation is real but bounded, so the paper’s value is in the system and the design lessons rather than in broad claims of general effectiveness.
Notational Animating: An Interactive Approach to Creating and Editing Animation Keyframes
This is a thoughtful CHI paper that reframes animator sketches as ambiguous, high-level motion cues and then builds an interaction loop around that insight. The novelty is strongest in the structured source-path-target representation plus editable feedback, while the evidence is credible but still preliminary.
Obscuring Undesirable Individuals to Alleviate Social Discomfort Using Diminished Reality
This is a conceptually striking CHI paper because it turns a standard HCI value proposition on its head: instead of increasing connection, it uses diminished reality to support avoidance. The contribution is strongest as a reframing plus a controlled prototype study, not as a general solution for social discomfort.
On the Computational Reproducibility of Human-Computer Interaction
This is a strong CHI meta-science paper with clear field relevance. Its main contribution is not a new interaction technique but a mixed-methods reproducibility audit that turns open-science rhetoric into measurable evidence. The scope is appropriately narrow, and the paper is careful to separate reproducibility from broader validity claims.
Oops, I Did It Again (But I Know It): Robot Failure Consistency and Awareness in Human-Robot Collaboration
This is a solid CHI honorable-mention contribution because it moves the conversation from “how bad was the failure?” to “what pattern of failures did users just experience?” The main value is empirical: a controlled study shows sequence and awareness matter, but the claims stay appropriately bounded to scripted lab interactions.
Opportunities and Barriers for AI Feedback on Meeting Inclusion in Socioorganizational Teams
This is a credible CHI contribution because it pairs a concrete AI-mediated feedback system with evidence from both lab and field. The main value is not just the interface idea, but the demonstration that organizational context can redirect use away from the intended feedback workflow.
ORAgen Fables: Advancing the Design and Management of Content Attribution
This is a solid CHI design-research contribution: the main value is not a new provenance algorithm, but a persuasive reframing of attribution as something users may want to manage over time. The artifact and deployments give the paper enough empirical traction to support that argument, though the scope remains exploratory.
Orca: Browsing at Scale Through User-Driven and AI-Facilitated Orchestration Across Malleable Webpages
Orca is interesting because it does not chase full automation; it reframes the browser as a collaborative workspace where AI helps users orchestrate many pages without taking over. The idea is coherent and timely, but the evidence is still early and mostly supports usability and promise rather than mature effectiveness.
Out of Emergency: How Doctors Navigate Jurisdictional Seams in Emergency Care Referrals
This is a solid qualitative CHI paper with a clear empirical contribution: it moves referral work from a generic information-transfer story to a situated interactional account of jurisdiction, responsibility, and case-shaping. The scope is intentionally narrow, but the claims are well matched to the evidence.
Peeking Ahead of the Field Study: Exploring VLM Personas as Support Tools for Embodied Studies in HCI
This is a method paper with a clear CHI-relevant ambition: using VLM personas to pretest embodied field-study outcomes before running expensive human studies. The contribution is credible because it is validated against a real-world comparison, but the scope is narrow and the paper is careful enough to show that mimicry is partial, not a replacement for field evidence.
Perspectra: Choosing Your Experts Enhances Critical Thinking in Multi-Agent Research Ideation
Perspectra’s contribution is strongest as a system-level reframing: it turns multi-agent ideation from a flat chat into a user-steered deliberation space with explicit expert selection and visible argument structure. The study suggests this can improve critical-thinking behaviors, but the evidence is still bounded to one task and a modest lab sample.
Playing the Imitation Game: How Perceived Generated Content Shapes Player Experience
This paper’s value is not in proving that players can spot AI content, but in showing that perceived authorship itself changes experience. That is a useful CHI reframing: the social meaning of generation matters, and weak cues can bias enjoyment, aesthetics, frustration, and challenge even when players are wrong.
PREFAB: PREFerence-based Affective Modeling for Low-Budget Self-Annotation
PREFAB is a credible CHI method paper: it replaces exhaustive affect labeling with selective inflection-region annotation, then reconstructs the rest. The contribution is not just a UI tweak; it combines ordinal preference learning, preview support, and a user study showing lower workload and maintained quality, though the gains are bounded by interpolation and training-data assumptions.
Prism of Labour: Unsettling Knowledge, Skill, and Technology in Work Infrastructures
This is a strong CHI honorable-mention paper because it does more than document migrant farm labor: it reframes skill as something actively produced through classification and infrastructure. The prism of labour is the paper’s real contribution, giving the field a vocabulary for analyzing and intervening in how expertise is reorganized across sites.
Privacy is Not One-Click: Designing Robots That Adapt to Older Adults’ Changing Boundaries
This is a strong CHI honorable-mention style contribution: it reframes privacy as a changing practice rather than a fixed setting, and it turns that framing into three actionable design features. The main strength is the qualitative grounding; the main weakness is that the contribution remains conceptual and context-bounded.
Privy: Envisioning and Mitigating Privacy Risks for Consumer-facing AI Product Concepts
Privy is a solid CHI artifact paper: it turns privacy impact assessment into a structured practitioner workflow and backs the claim with a controlled study plus expert review. The main contribution is practical and evaluative rather than theoretical, and the strongest evidence is for the specific concept-assessment setting.
Prompt Coaching for Inclusiveness: A Media Literacy Approach to Increase Users’ Awareness of Algorithmic Bias and Prompting Efficacy
This is a strong CHI intervention paper: the novelty is not a new model, but a reframing of prompting guidance as media-literacy-oriented coaching with deliberate friction. The evidence supports immediate attitudinal and perceived-efficacy effects, while also showing a real usability cost that matters for deployment.
Quantifying the Novelty Bias when Evaluating Interactive Prototypes
This is a solid CHI paper because it converts a familiar but often hand-waved concern—novelty bias—into a controlled causal result across multiple prototype categories. The main value is not a new interface, but a sharper empirical warning that participant preference and ratings can be distorted by framing even when functionality is held constant.
QuerySwitch: Supporting the Design Process by Balancing Vagueness through Large Language Models
QuerySwitch is a thoughtful CHI design contribution because it does not just add more control to LLM use; it reframes vagueness as something to be balanced across creative stages. The novelty is credible and the evaluation is appropriate for an early-stage prototype, though the evidence remains domain-specific and small-scale.
Reclaiming VR Design Authority: Deaf Signers Shaping Immersive Classrooms
This is a strong CHI honorable-mention style paper because it does more than test a VR classroom layout: it re-centers Deaf signers as design authorities and turns their reflections into a usable framework. The contribution is conceptually important, but the evidence remains exploratory and bounded to a small qualitative study.
Reconfiguring through Ruptures: Material Reconfigurations and Un/Making as Tangible Tactics for Queering AI-Generated Histories
This is a compelling CHI honorable-mention contribution because it turns a familiar critique of generative AI into a specific, memorable, and materially enacted tactic. The paper’s strength is not broad validation but the clarity with which it names and demonstrates “material reconfigurations” as a situated practice for queering AI-generated histories. The evidence is exploratory and intentionally narrow, yet it aligns well with the paper’s claims and avoids pretending to offer a universal solution.
Red Teaming LLMs as Socio-Technical Practice: From Exploration and Data Creation to Evaluation
This is a solid CHI honorable-mention style contribution: it does not propose a new red-teaming algorithm, but it usefully reframes red teaming as a socio-technical practice and backs that reframing with 22 practitioner interviews. The paper’s value is in exposing how dataset scope and evaluation standards are socially constructed, while its limits are the usual ones for interview-based evidence.
Redundant is Not Redundant: Automating Efficient Categorical Palettes Design Unifying Color & Shape Encodings with CatPAW
This is a strong CHI paper because it does two things well: it shows that redundant color–shape encoding is genuinely interaction-sensitive, and it turns that result into a usable design tool. The contribution is more than a system demo; it is an empirically grounded design method with clear scope and a credible limitation profile.
Reflections Towards an Ecology of Internet Connectivity: Three Speculative Scenarios Involving Foot Pedals
This is a conceptually sharp speculative-HCI paper: its value is not in system performance but in reframing connectivity itself. The foot-pedal scenarios are a memorable device for making governance, ritual, and power visible, and the paper is careful to present them as reflective provocations rather than empirical proof.
Regaining Personhood: A Longitudinal Ethnography of North Korean Defectors’ First-Year Digital Transition in South Korea
This is a compelling longitudinal ethnography with a clear CHI contribution: it shows that digital inclusion can produce new exposure, not just access. The paper is strongest as a grounded conceptual reframing of first-year resettlement for a highly vulnerable population, with careful limits on generalization.
Reimagining Sign Language Technologies: Analyzing Translation Work of Chinese Deaf Online Content Creators
This is a strong CHI qualitative contribution because it does not merely document user needs; it repositions sign-language translation as culturally and politically situated work. The novelty is conceptual and empirical, but the evidence remains bounded to a small, specific creator sample and should not be read as system validation.
Remembering with Reminiscope: Codesigning with Generative AI for Reminiscence Among Older Adults
This is a credible CHI honorable-mention contribution because it reframes generative AI from a tool for older adults into a co-design material for reminiscence, then validates that idea through two qualitative studies and a tangible artifact. The novelty is strongest at the artifact-and-practice level, not as a generalizable algorithmic advance.
Restoration, Exploration and Transformation: How Youth Engage Character.AI for Fun, Feels and Finding themselves
This is a strong CHI honorable-mention style contribution because it combines a clear empirical account with a memorable framework and a useful taxonomy. Its main value is not technical novelty in the system sense, but a well-supported reframing of youth AI use around lived practices, with clear implications for design and future research.
Revealing the Power Dynamics of Collaborative Sense-Making supported by Participatory Data Physicalization
This is a strong CHI honorable-mention style paper because it turns a critical lens into a concrete collaborative construction method and backs it with workshop evidence. The main value is not a new device, but a useful conceptual and methodological reframing of power in participatory physicalization.
Scattered Searches, Broken Apps, Quiet Repairs: A Feminist Autoethnographic Critique of Technology and Research on Gender-Based Violence
This is a strong CHI honorable-mention style paper because it turns a deeply situated autoethnographic account into a field-level critique of GBV technology design. Its value is not in broad empirical generalization, but in the clarity of the conceptual shift it demands: from crisis-only tools to sustained life repair and translation into practice.
Seen but Ignored: Understanding User Disengagement from Emergency Alerts in High-Frequency Contexts — A Case Study of South Korea
This is a strong CHI paper because it moves beyond the usual “why didn’t people notice?” framing and instead explains how repeated alerts reshape response pathways over time. The contribution is primarily conceptual and empirical: a grounded account of disengagement in a rare high-frequency warning setting, with clear design relevance but bounded generalizability.
SemTabla: A Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Semantic Enrichment and Validation of Data Tables
SemTabla is a credible CHI-style systems paper: it takes a real pain point in Table QA, proposes a human-in-the-loop semantic enrichment workflow, and backs it with usability and downstream-task evidence. The novelty is strongest as a framework plus interaction design, not as a standalone algorithmic breakthrough.
Sensing and Modulating the Feel of a Drink: A Personalized Approach via Laryngeal Thermal Feedback
This is a genuinely interesting CHI paper because it turns the larynx into both a sensing site and an actuation site for drink sensation, then personalizes the intervention using a learned profile. The idea is unusual and well aligned with the evidence, though the mechanism is still indirect and the system is not yet closed-loop.
Sensing Your Vocals: Exploring the Activity of Vocal Cord Muscles for Pitch Assessment Using Electromyography and Ultrasonography
This is a credible CHI systems-and-study paper: the core move is to make vocal muscle activity visible with EMG and ultrasonography, then test whether that visibility helps training and feedback. The contribution is strongest as a mixed-methods sensing/feedback system with clear practical limits, not as a universal vocal pedagogy solution.
Show Me How to Play: Exploring Self-Modeling for Onboarding in Virtual Reality Exergames
This is a well-scoped CHI paper with a clear interaction contribution: it turns onboarding into self-observation by having the player watch their own avatar perform the movement. The idea is counterintuitive but grounded, and the study design is strong enough to support the main performance and experience claims without overreaching.
Simple changes to content curation algorithms affect the beliefs people form in a collaborative filtering experiment
This is a solid CHI paper because it turns a familiar recommender-systems question into a causal claim about belief formation, not just click or preference optimization. The main value is the controlled evidence that ranking objectives can alter consensus and accuracy, though the ecological scope is still constrained by the curated inventory and short exposure window.
Situated Imaginaries: Designing AI Futures with Computer Science Teaching Assistants
A solid CHI honorable-mention contribution: the paper is strongest as a situated, mixed-methods synthesis of TA AI imaginaries, not as a universal theory of education AI. Its value lies in reframing TAs as knowledge workers and in showing how institutional context shapes both use and speculation.
Skin-Deep Bias: How Avatar Appearances Shape Perceptions of AI Hiring
This is a solid, well-scoped CHI paper with a clear empirical contribution: avatar appearance changes fairness attributions in AI hiring even when trust stays high. The study is strongest as a bounded mixed-methods finding about simulated interviews, not as a general theory of hiring fairness.
Social Media Feed Elicitation
This is a strong CHI-style method paper: the novelty is in turning feed customization into an elicited authoring task, and the study design is credible for showing that the interaction helps users produce better-specified feeds. The main caution is that the evidence is still about immediate preference outcomes in a constrained setting, not durable real-world deployment.
SoleCoach: Sole Pressure and IMU-based MLLMs for Skill Coaching
SoleCoach is a credible CHI systems paper: the core move is to replace camera/pose dependence with insole pressure plus IMU and then let an MLLM turn those signals into coaching language. The novelty is strongest as a system architecture plus a new evaluation metric, while the evidence is bounded to a specific skiing context and learner population.
Sprout: Using a Visual Metaphor to Support Customizable and Collaborative Health Tracking
Sprout is best read as an integrated design-and-field-study paper: the novelty is not a single visualization trick, but the combination of metaphor, customization, and anonymous collaboration in one system. The evidence supports nuanced interaction findings, though the short deployment limits claims about sustained behavior change.
Studying the Implications of Augmented Reality for Teamwork in Open Liver Surgery
This is a solid CHI paper because it does not oversell AR as a universal performance booster. Instead, it isolates a more interesting result: shared perspective can matter for teamwork and understanding even when objective accuracy stays flat. The contribution is empirical and well-scoped, with clear relevance to surgical AR design.
Take the Dog to the Park: Quadruped Robot for Joint Attention Training with Autistic Children in Naturalistic Settings
This is a credible and timely CHI paper because it moves a familiar autism-robot intervention into a more ecologically meaningful setting and backs that move with an exploratory study. The contribution is strongest as a design-and-feasibility advance, not as definitive efficacy evidence.
Taking the control back – An adventure in developing personalized content moderation
This is a compelling CHI honorable-mention because the paper’s value comes from a rare combination of lived need, working system building, and reflective analysis. Its strongest claim is practical and situated: personalized moderation can be made effective for one severe harassment case, but the paper is careful enough to show why that success does not automatically generalize.
Tattered Teddies and Pentagram Charms: How People Use Touchable Comfort Objects and What This Means for Designing Affective Haptic Systems
This is a strong CHI honorable-mention style contribution: not a new haptic mechanism, but a useful empirical reframing of comfort objects as emotionally meaningful, everyday practices. The paper’s value lies in the survey-based design space, the four profiles, and the dataset/visualization, with clear but important limits on generalization.
Texterial: A Text-as-Material Interaction Paradigm for LLM-Mediated Writing
Texterial is a strong CHI-style conceptual contribution: it reframes LLM writing around material manipulation rather than prompt entry, and it backs that framing with a formative study plus two evocative probes. The work is most convincing as a design paradigm and less as evidence of downstream effectiveness.
The Bots of Persuasion: Examining How Conversational Agents' Linguistic Expressions of Personality Affect User Perceptions and Decisions
This is a solid CHI empirical paper with a clear, timely question and a useful counterintuitive result: pessimistic agent language can depress trust and mood while still nudging donations upward. The contribution is strongest as a controlled causal finding about a specific persuasion mechanism, not as a broad theory of agent personality.
The Choreography of Care: An Ethnographic Study of Human-Robot Collaboration in Makoplasty Surgeries
This is a strong ethnographic contribution because it does not merely describe robot-assisted surgery; it redefines the unit of analysis. The paper’s main value is the careful showing of how responsibility, timing, and coordination are distributed across a surgical team rather than residing in a surgeon-robot pair.
The Data-Dollars Tradeoff: Privacy Harms vs. Economic Risk in Personalized AI Adoption
This is a clean, well-scoped causal paper with a genuinely interesting reversal: quantified leak risk did not move adoption, but ambiguous leak ranges did. The contribution is strongest as an empirical finding about information environments and privacy behavior, not as a broad theory of all AI privacy decisions.
The Evolving Duet of Two Modalities: A Survey on Integrating Text and Visualization for Data Communication
This is a strong survey contribution: it does not introduce a new interface, but it does carve out a clearer conceptual space for text as narrative in visualization. The main value is synthesis and reframing, with a credible literature base and explicit limits.
The People's Gaze: Co-Designing and Refining Gaze Gestures with Users and Experts
This is a solid CHI method paper: the main contribution is not a single clever gesture, but a defensible pipeline for deriving gaze gestures from users and then tightening them with experts. The strongest part is the conceptual correction around gaze’s continuity and intentionality; the main caveat is that the paper stops short of proving deployment performance.
The Siren Song of LLMs: How Users Perceive and Respond to Dark Patterns in Large Language Models
This is a strong CHI paper because it does two things well: it reframes dark patterns for LLMs in a way that is clearly distinct from classic UI manipulation, and it backs that framing with a user study showing that people do not reliably read manipulative dialogue as manipulative. The contribution is timely, conceptually coherent, and empirically grounded.
Thing Ethnography in a Factory: Exploring Emergent and Dynamic Relations of Cobots and Workers
This is a strong qualitative CHI paper because it does not merely describe cobots in a factory; it re-frames what a cobot is in practice. The main contribution is conceptual and empirical: a relational account of three enacted roles, backed by a focused field study, with clear limits on transferability.
Toward Independent Online Shopping of the Visually Impaired Through Voice-based Computer-Using Agent
This is a timely accessibility paper whose main value is not a new algorithm but a well-scoped qualitative demonstration that voice-based computer-using agents can change how visually impaired users shop online. The contribution is strongest as an early design and experience study, with clear limits on generalization.
Towards Aligning Multimodal LLMs with Human Experts: A Focus on Parent–Child Interaction
This is a thoughtful exploratory paper with a clear CHI contribution: it reframes multimodal alignment as a two-stage problem and shows that descriptive agreement is easier than interpretive agreement. The empirical scope is modest, but the paper is honest about that and the results are useful as a boundary-setting case study.
Towards Inclusive External Human-Machine Interface: Exploring the Effects of Visual and Auditory eHMI for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing People
This is a solid, population-expanding CHI paper: it does not merely tweak an eHMI design, but re-frames the problem around Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing pedestrians and backs that move with both formative and experimental evidence. The contribution is strongest as a scoped empirical finding plus design guidance, not as a universal eHMI theory.
Trust Formation in AI Delegation: The Interplay of Explainability and Anthropomorphism
This is a strong CHI paper because it turns a familiar design assumption into a testable interaction claim and backs it with two complementary studies. The main takeaway is practical and non-obvious: explainability does not automatically make anthropomorphic agents more trustworthy, and in some settings it can do the opposite.
TurnStyle: A Framework for Analyzing Human Conversational Behaviors to Predict Success in LLM-Assisted Tasks
TurnStyle is a solid CHI-style framework paper: its main contribution is not a flashy interface but a reusable way to code human turns in LLM conversations and connect them to outcomes. The strongest part is the cross-dataset validation; the main caution is that the evidence is predictive and associational, not causal.
TwistLens: A Docent-Informed Image Transformation to Create Previews That Prompt Anticipation and Interpretive Experiences Before Museum Visits
TwistLens is a credible CHI-style systems paper with a clear design insight: museum previews need not choose between bland text and spoiler-heavy images. Its strongest contribution is the semantic reframing of disclosure, backed by a mixed-methods evaluation that supports anticipation, curiosity, and spoiler prevention, though deployment remains pre-processing and visitor-centered.
Understanding Remote Mental Health Supporters' Help-Seeking in Online Communities
This is a solid, well-scoped qualitative CHI paper with a clear contribution: it reframes caregiver help-seeking around distance, mediated cues, and crisis-related silence. The novelty is not a new system but a useful empirical re-centering of remote mental health support as a distinct practice with distinct community needs.
Understanding the Effects of AI-Assisted Critical Thinking on Human-AI Decision Making
This is a thoughtful CHI paper because it reframes AI support from answer-giving to reasoning critique. The main contribution is a framework plus controlled evidence that the approach can reduce over-reliance, but the trade-off is real: higher cognitive load and a narrow validation setting mean the claims are promising rather than broadly settled.
Understanding Workplace Relatedness Support among Healthcare Professionals: A Four-Layer Model and Implications for Technology Design
This is a solid qualitative CHI contribution: it turns an under-specified wellbeing topic into a layered model and a set of design concepts grounded in interviews and co-design. The paper is strongest as a descriptive and generative framework for HCP workplace relatedness, not as evidence of intervention effectiveness.
Unpacking Visual Metaphors in Infographics: A Design Space
This is a strong CHI design-space paper: it turns a tacit infographic-metaphor practice into explicit dimensions, then shows those dimensions can improve generative ideation. The main contribution is the structured vocabulary and its promptable use; the main caveat is that the evaluation measures designer preference, not downstream communication effectiveness.
VisceroHaptics: Investigating the Effects of Gut-based Audio-Haptic Feedback on Gastric Feelings and Gastric Interoceptive Behavior
This is a strong CHI-style empirical paper because it moves from plausible sensory mimicry to a behavioral claim: audio-haptic stimulation appears to alter gastric interoceptive behavior, not just reported feelings. The contribution is novel and interesting, but the evidence is still bounded by small stimuli sets, modest samples, and a behavioral measure with acknowledged confounds.
VueBuds: Visual Intelligence with Wireless Earbuds
VueBuds is a strong CHI systems paper because it turns an apparently implausible wearable category into a workable visual-intelligence platform and backs that claim with a substantial evaluation. The novelty is mainly architectural and empirical: the paper shows that earbud-mounted cameras plus host-side VLMs can be viable, while also making clear where the hardware breaks down.
WeavePrint: A Generative Method for Woven-like Additive Manufacturing Based on Parametric Weave Structures
WeavePrint is a credible CHI fabrication-method paper: its novelty is in turning weave logic into a parametric, motion-oriented manufacturing language, and it backs that up with mechanical tests and prototypes. The contribution is strongest as a design/method platform rather than as a fully generalized textile manufacturing solution.
WELDAR: Augmenting Live Hands-On Training with In-Situ Guidance for Novice Learners
WELDAR is a credible CHI-style systems-and-study paper: the contribution is a live, helmet-integrated AR training system plus a controlled novice study showing measurable gains over video instruction. Its main value is shifting XR training from simulation toward in-situ embodied guidance, though the claims remain bounded to one task, one learner group, and a constrained welding setup.
What If Moderation Didn’t Mean Suppression? A Case for Personalized Content Transformation
This is a strong CHI paper because it does more than critique moderation; it builds and evaluates an alternative. The core move is conceptually clean and practically legible: preserve content, transform the harmful parts, and let users define what counts as harm. The contribution reads as a system-plus-paradigm shift rather than a narrow UI tweak.
What is Digital Wellbeing? A Leverage Points Framework to Guide Research and Action
This is a strong conceptual contribution for CHI digital wellbeing: it does not merely rename existing concerns, but reorganizes them into a layered taxonomy and leverage-points framework. The paper is most convincing as a field-shaping synthesis with clear limits on empirical validation and deployment.
When Handwriting Goes Social: Creativity, Anonymity, and Communication in Graphonymous Online Spaces
This is a credible and genuinely interesting CHI contribution: it moves anonymity research beyond text, shows that handwriting can function as a social medium, and backs the claims with mixed-method evidence. The main caution is scope—its strongest claims are about one platform and one interaction ecology, not a universal theory of anonymous communication.
When Help Hurts: Verification Load and Fatigue with AI Coding Assistants
This is a solid CHI paper because it does more than report that AI coding assistants can help or hurt: it isolates interface effects, quantifies a hidden verification burden, and connects that burden to stress and fatigue. The contribution is strongest as a measurement-plus-experiment package rather than as a broad systems claim.
When the World Opens up: Journeys of People with Intellectual Disabilities in Social Virtual Reality
This is a conceptually ambitious CHI paper that uses a small but carefully framed qualitative study to argue for a shift from remediation to participation. The strongest contribution is the world-making framing and its design principles; the main caution is that the empirical base is necessarily bounded by facilitated VRChat sessions and a narrow sample.
Where Will They Click Next? A Social Foraging Model for Collaborating Teams
PFIS-T is a credible and well-scoped CHI contribution: it moves next-step prediction from an individual-centric framing to a team-aware one, and the evaluation directly supports that shift in a realistic collaborative debugging setting. The main caveat is that the evidence is still bounded to a controlled lab task, so the broader systems vision remains prospective.
Who You Explain To Matters: Learning by Explaining to Conversational Agents with Different Pedagogical Roles
This is a solid CHI-style comparative study with a clear design lesson: the pedagogical role of an explanatory agent matters, and different roles trade off pressure, engagement, and critical thinking. The contribution is strongest as evidence for role-sensitive design rather than as a broadly general theory of learning-by-explaining.
Why Don't People Follow Robot Leaders? Understanding the Effects of Power Legitimacy on Compliance with Agents
This is a strong honorable-mention paper because it turns a messy empirical question—do people follow robot leaders?—into a cleaner theoretical one about legitimacy. The three-study package is persuasive, especially because it combines explicit manipulations with a mediation account in a more ecologically grounded setting. The main caution is scope: the evidence is strongest for assigned roles, controlled decision tasks, and mediated collaboration rather than for all forms of robot authority in the wild.
Will They Try Again? A Large-Scale RCT on Scaffolds that Support Persistence in an Intelligent Tutoring System
This is a strong CHI-scale field RCT with a clear behavioral outcome and unusually large sample size. The main value is empirical: it shows that a prompt and a nudge can work together rather than cancel each other out, but the claims should remain anchored to the tested tutoring context and subject areas.
Wire Your Way: Hardware-Contextualized Guidance and In-situ Tests for Personalized Circuit Prototyping
WireWay’s main contribution is a system-level shift away from tutorial-first circuit support toward hardware-contextualized, adaptive guidance and tests. The paper’s evidence is credible for feasibility and usability, but the study is small and does not establish comparative performance against existing tools.