interactions

July IH '26: ACM Interactive Health Conference (Porto, Portugal) July 5–8, 2026 https://ih.acm.org C&C '26: ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference (London, England, UK) July 13–16, 2026 https://cc.acm.org/2026 IUI '26: ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (Limassol, Cyprus) July 13–16, 2026 https://iui.acm.org/2026 CUI '26: ACM Conversational User Interfaces Conference (Bremen,…

Authors: Elizabeth F. Churchill, Mikael Wiberg Welcome to the latest issue of Interactions. Since CHI 2026 ended, we have been reflecting on the provocations that Pep Gatell, artistic director of the Catalan theater group La Fura dels Baus, offered in his opening keynote, about the notion of frictionless design, one of the central tenets of human-computer interaction.

Authors: Zafer Bilda, Linda Candy Every time a designer describes brainstorming "with" ChatGPT or refers to AI as an assistant, they're importing expectations from human collaboration that don't map onto what's actually happening. These borrowed metaphors, whether copilot, assistant, or collaborator, actively prevent us from seeing the novel interaction patterns that creative practitioners may have already discovered. Why do these collaboration metaphors persist when they don't describe reality?

Authors: Karey Helms Social and environmental justice are overarching commitments in a more-than-human design agenda within HCI. This includes the unmaking of humanist hierarchies that designate some people as more worthy of design and technology than others. Even though children are increasingly recognized as being able to help our planet and its inhabitants flourish, their presence is noticeably absent from more-than-human design in practice.

Authors: Tiffany Knearem My love for languages started in earnest in the early 2000s when I took a Japanese language class to fulfill college requirements. I had long been interested in Japanese culture through art and the aesthetic of landscape architecture, but I didn't fully realize how learning a language could open up an entirely new way of experiencing life—from forming close relationships with native speakers to engaging with foreign-language media.

Authors: Carey Jewitt, Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze, Desiree Foerster, Grant Jun Otsuki The rapid expansion of simulation and sensory manipulation techniques beyond the visual in virtual and mixed reality, including being able to smell and be touched, is central to the future trajectory of digital communication. This sensory turn is primarily predicated on high-fidelity human-centric replication of complex human sensory processing.

Authors: Scott Minneman, Renato Verdugo Contributor: Pep Gatell Curators: Scott Minneman and Renato Verdugo If you skipped CHI 2026 in Barcelona, you missed Pep Gatell opening the conference with a provocative argument: HCI has been playing catch-up to experimental theater for decades.

Authors: Preethi Srinivas, Josh Andres Amara left epidemiology in 2021 after eight years of modeling disease transmission and designing community alert systems. Entering her first UX role at a public health AI start-up, she expected to be an outsider needing to learn a new language. Instead, she discovered she already spoke it. Contact tracing was a participatory design problem; population-level risk communication was content strategy.

Authors: INTR Staff July IH '26: ACM Interactive Health Conference (Porto, Portugal) July 5–8, 2026 https://ih.acm.org C&C '26: ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference (London, England, UK) July 13–16, 2026 https://cc.acm.org/2026 IUI '26: ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (Limassol, Cyprus) July 13–16, 2026 https://iui.acm.org/2026 CUI '26: ACM Conversational User Interfaces Conference (Bremen, Germany) July 21–24, 2026 https://cui.acm.org/2026 COMPASS '26: ACM Conference on...

Authors: Connor Leshner, Michael G. Reynolds There are many facets of gameplay that affect player engagement and decision-making. In this article, we consider the avatar as an underexamined factor of the game experience. Avatars have evolved dramatically over the past 40 years, having shifted from text-only descriptions in multiuser dungeons to three dimensions in Baldur's Gate 3. Advances in the appearance of avatars have coincided with improvements in game graphics and narrative writing.