Jennifer G. Kim

People with autistic siblings often serve as informal caregivers from an early age, and might anticipate taking on a primary guardian role in the future. What are the unique needs of siblings, and what can be done to better support them? Could an online community help? This work aims to understand the experiences of people with autistic siblings through 12 semi-structured interviews with adults, and suggests designs for an online community tailored to them. We find that siblings’ lives have three primary phases: living at home with their autistic sibling, living independently, and potentially taking on a role as primary caretaker for their sibling. We focus on adults in the middle stage, who reflect on past and current support needs. A key challenge for community support environments is understanding how to allow an appropriate amount of venting, but prevent members from feeling overwhelmed by negativity. We present design recommendations for a lifelong online community that supports neurotypical siblings in balancing their personal identity with their evolving role as a caregiver, through life-stage sensitive and emotionally supportive interactions. Understanding the need for life-stage sensitive support in this demographic may provide insights into the need for life-stage-differentiated design for other groups.

The rapid advancement of generative AI (GenAI) is expanding access to songwriting, offering a new medium of self-expression for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) individuals. However, emerging technologies that support DHH individuals in expressing themselves through music have largely been evaluated in single-session settings and often fall short in helping users unfamiliar with songwriting convey personal narratives or sustain engagement over time. This paper explores songwriting as an extended, music-based journaling practice that supports sustained emotional reflection over multiple sessions. We introduce SoulNote, a GenAI system enabling DHH to engage in iterative songwriting. Grounded in user-centered design, including a design workshop, a preliminary study, and a multi-session diary study, our findings show that ongoing songwriting with SoulNote facilitated emotional growth across three dimensions: self-insight, emotion regulation, and everyday attitudes toward emotions and self-care. Overall, this work demonstrates how GenAI can support marginalized communities by transforming creative expression into a daily practice of self-discovery and reflection.

In remote psychotherapy, challenges arising from remote client-therapist interactions can impact the therapeutic alliance and overall outcomes. HCI research has focused on leveraging sensing technology to bridge gaps in remote interactions. In this work, we investigate the values and risks of integrating sensing technology in remote psychotherapy, specifically to capture and interpret non-verbal cues, by conducting a speculative design study with both clients and therapists. Our findings reveal that sensing technology has the potential to facilitate self-reflection in therapy. The sharing of tracked non-verbal cues could also possibly foster mutual disclosure, supporting therapists' judgments and balancing power dynamics between clients and therapists. However, clients and therapists were concerned about the accuracy of sensing systems, potential privacy threats, and additional cognition burden. Our insights into system values imply how sensing technology could potentially balance power dynamics in client-therapist relationships as well as general interpersonal relationships. We also emphasize the increased considerations in sensing-technology-empowered communication for remote psychotherapy than in non-vulnerable settings.

Co-design of technology encourages participation and decision-making input of end-users. In the case of technologies for individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD), the end-users are historically left out of the design process. Further deepening the disconnect between this group and technology, they are also excluded from formal technology design knowledge sharing, such as college courses. To address this, our study investigates the efficacy of a formal classroom adaptation of co-design activities to encourage learning and participation. Through collaboration between educators and designers, we adopted user-centered co-design activities to facilitate knowledge and application of technological design methods within a class of 13 students with IDD. Findings uncovered factors contributing to co-teaching collaboration planning and reflection between educators and designers, and ways that activities can provide accessible collaborative learning environments for students with IDD by supporting collaboration, cognitive engagement, and meta-cognition. We discuss how these factors can support successful co-teacher collaborations that promote student empowerment. Finally, we contribute collaborative co-teaching strategies for educational co-design activities for individuals with IDD.