Karthik Bhat

Screen use pervades daily life, shaping work, leisure, and social connections while raising concerns for digital wellbeing. Yet, reducing screen time alone risks oversimplifying technology’s role and neglecting its potential for meaningful engagement. We posit self-awareness—reflecting on one’s digital behavior—as a critical pathway to digital wellbeing. We developed WellScreen, a lightweight probe that scaffolds daily reflection by asking people to estimate and report smartphone use. In a two-week deployment with college students (\(\mathtt {N}\)=25) focused on generating formative insights, we examined how discrepancies between estimated and actual usage shaped digital awareness and wellbeing. Participants often underestimated productivity and social media while overestimating entertainment app use. They showed a 10% improvement in positive affect, rating WellScreen as moderately useful. Interviews revealed that structured reflection supported recognition of patterns, adjustment of expectations, and more intentional engagement with technology. Our findings highlight the promise of lightweight reflective interventions for supporting self-awareness and intentional digital engagement, offering implications for designing digital wellbeing tools.

Stepping into a caregiving role for an aging loved one often means navigating conflicting demands of daily life. While prior Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research has investigated tools to support the logistics of caregiving, less attention has been directed to boundaries: how caregivers manage them alongside other obligations. Through 15 semi-structured interviews with caregivers of older adults, we unpack caregivers’ boundary negotiation, examining how caregivers use boundaries to manage multiple responsibilities and how uncertainty about their roles shapes boundary negotiation. Employing “boundary ambiguity” as an analytical lens, our findings reveal how caregivers use strategies of internal reframing—how they think about their roles—and external negotiation—how they interact with others—to manage their unstable, permeable, and elastic boundaries in everyday life. We discuss how inherent, ongoing boundary ambiguity shapes caregivers’ experiences, concluding with design implications for digital technologies that enhance caregivers’ agency and support boundary negotiations for caregivers and care recipients.

As CSCW research increasingly engages with communities, sensitive topics, and participatory methods, the emotional and ethical labor carried by researchers demands greater attention. While care ethics, affective labor, and feminist methodologies have gained ground within CSCW, conversations around researcher care remain limited and often informal. This SIG will explore the challenges and support needed to undertake emotionally demanding research journeys, particularly given the increasing distress and conflict in the global geopolitical landscape. We invite researchers to reflect on and share practices, challenges, and imaginaries of care for ourselves and our collaborators, alongside our participants. By underscoring the importance of researcher care and fostering a supportive network, this SIG aims to strengthen the resilience of the CSCW community.

This workshop focuses on remote care and wellbeing as we transition into a world increasingly adopting hybrid lifestyles and modes of operation. Care and care work have predominantly been researched in traditionally in-person interpersonal contexts. The burgeoning uptake and incorporation of information and communication technologies towards remote care have created new workflows and resulted in emerging questions around the definitions and scope of care practice in response. The confluence of technological, sociocultural, geopolitical, and climatic realities of the current day brings into focus the need to unpack the idea of “care,” and the role that HCI researchers could play in creating equitable futures of remote and hybrid care. This workshop will focus on questions such as “What does holistic wellbeing look like in the era of hybrid caregiving?” and “How does environmental care factor into our research practice?” We invite researchers and practitioners from academia and industry in this workshop to reflect on these questions and advance the future of remote care work at CHI.

There has been a growing interest in reproductive health and intimate wellbeing in Human-Computer Interaction, increasingly from an ecological perspective. Much of this work is centered around women’s experiences across diverse settings, emphasizing men’s limited engagement and need for greater participation on these topics. Our research responds to this gap by investigating cisgender men’s experiences of cultivating sexual health literacies in an urban Indian context. We leverage media probes to stimulate focus group discussions, using popular media references on men’s fertility to elicit shared reflection. Our findings uncover the role that humor and masculinity play in shaping men’s perceptions of their sexual health and how this influences their sense of agency and participation in heterosexual intimate relationships. We further discuss how technologies might be designed to support men’s participation in these relationships as supportive partners and allies.

The growing platformization of health has spurred new avenues for healthcare access and reinvigorated telemedicine as a viable pathway to care. Telemedicine adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic has surfaced barriers to patient-centered care that call for attention. Our work extends current Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research on telemedicine and the challenges to remote care, and investigates the scope for enhancing remote care seeking and provision through telemedicine workflows involving intermediation. Our study, focused on the urban Indian context, involved providing doctors with videos of remote clinical examinations to aid in telemedicine. We present a qualitative evaluation of this modified telemedicine experience, highlighting how workflows involving intermediation could bridge existing gaps in telemedicine, and how their acceptance among doctors could shift interaction dynamics between doctors and patients. We conclude by discussing the implications of such telemedicine workflows on patient-centered care and the future of care work.

Social and cultural taboos frequently prevent meaningful conversation around gendered health and wellbeing, across the globe and to varying degrees. Safe spaces can offer potential avenues to nurture non-judgmental environments for dialogue and opportunities for learning to talk through taboos. To this end, we curated an online safe space on WhatsApp-with 35 participants of Indian origin-to facilitate conversations around diverse topics related to gendered health and wellbeing. We observed participant activity for two weeks, before conducting in-depth interviews with 10 participants to better understand their experiences of engaging within the WhatsApp group. We use the lens of Legitimate Peripheral Participation to examine how peripheral and core members of the community drew on new audiences and support systems as they questioned existing structures upholding taboos. We discuss scafolding mechanisms that could enhance learning about taboo topics in online safe spaces, and the tensions of anonymity in such learning spaces.

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) have long studied how technology can support material and relational aspects of care work, typically in clinical healthcare settings. More recently, we see increasing recognition of care work such as informal healthcare provision, child and elderly care, organizing and advocacy, domestic work, and service work. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored long-present tensions between the deep necessity and simultaneous devaluation of our care infrastructures. This highlights the need to attend to the broader social, political, and economic systems that shape care work and the emerging technologies being used in care work. This leads us to ask several critical questions: What counts as care work and why? How is care work (de)valued, (un)supported, or coerced under capitalism and to what end? What narratives drive the push for technology in care work and whom does it benefit? How does care work resist or build resilience against and within oppressive systems? And how can we as researchers advocate for and with care and caregivers? In this one-day workshop, we will bring together researchers from academia, industry, and community-based organizations to reflect on these questions and extend conversations on the future of technology for care work.

Human trafficking and forced labor are global issues affecting millions of people around the world. This paper describes an initiative that we are currently undertaking to understand the role technology can play to support the critical-agency of migrant workers in these situations of severe exploitation. Building on five consultations with more than 170 direct and indirect stakeholders in Thailand, the paper presents the co-design, development, and evaluation of Apprise, a mobile app to support the identification of victims of human trafficking using a Value Sensitive Design approach. It also provides a critical reflection on the use of digital technology in the initial screening of potential victims of human trafficking, to understand in what ways Apprise can support the critical agency of migrant workers in vulnerable situations.