�鶹��Ѱ�����

Generative ghosts; co-creation with AI in physical environments; activism and justice; a robotic social dance game for children with cerebral palsy; tides; quilt making; the relationship between stories and material artifacts. The ATLAS community engages in a far broader range of human-computer interaction research than many people realize.��

Over a dozen ATLAS researchers will have their work represented at this year’s�� conference in Singapore, June 13-17, 2026, for over 600 registered attendees. The conference team reviewed 1,154 papers and accepted 248.

The theme of the event this year seeks to look beyond interaction. “In the face of climate change, pandemics, economic and political instability, and the accelerating pace of emerging technologies, the responsibilities of designing interactive systems have expanded well beyond the scope of traditional human-computer interaction.”

ATLAS professor Ellen Do is a conference general co-chair and doctoral consortium co-chair for this year’s conference. She noted, “Not surprisingly, there are a lot of papers on AI and virtual systems (AR, VR, XR) in the program. We can see researchers tackling how we co-create with Generative AI with mixed or extended reality, music, robots or cultural heritage, but also how these technologies impact our everyday lives in conversations, information seeking, education, banking, communications, exercises, and healthcare.”

“​​True to the legacy of DIS, the trend is very much about keeping interactive systems tangible, embodied, and deeply contextualized in physical spaces,” Do continued. “The conference's workshops and papers reflect a heavy emphasis on material learning and ‘digital/material craft.’ The program shows a strong push to move interactive systems out of isolated lab environments and contextualize them in complex, messy, physical ecosystems.”

Do concluded by saying, “The ATLAS presence at DIS 2026 shows how our research spans both deep technological innovation and profound human experience. ATLAS isn't just speculating about the future of interactive systems; our students and faculty are physically building it.”

Papers

Conceptual framework of in-situ co-creation in Editing Reality. The figure illustrates a broader co-creation ecology involving multiple users, a generative system, and the physical environment.

Suibi Che-Chuan Weng,��Shih-Yu Ma,��Sawyer Reinig, Pritalee Kadam,��Ada Yi Zhao, Amy Banić,��Ryo Suzuki,��Ellen Yi-Luen Do

We present Editing Reality, a mixed reality system that enables in-situ co-creation with generative AI directly within physical environments. Rather than treating generation as a one-shot command, the system supports embodied and iterative creation through speech, sketching, and direct manipulation, allowing users to generate, modify, erase, and retexture real-anchored virtual and reconstructed scene elements in place. Using a Research Through Design approach, we investigate how co-creation unfolds through iterative system development, a formative workshop, and expert review. From this process, we articulate a set of designerly framings that characterize in-situ co-creation as a negotiated, spatial, and temporal practice shaped by previews, accumulation, waiting, embodied evaluation, and learning the system as a spatial actor. We instantiate these ideas in a working system and report expert feedback highlighting both its creative potential and its design implications. Our work contributes a conceptual lens for understanding generative AI in mixed reality not as a one-shot automation tool, but as part of an embodied, situated creative process.��
��

Temporary Living Rooms at the 2018 “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck” Hackathon.

[Honorable Mention]

Ricarose Roque, Jaleesa Trapp, Alexis Hope

Within the HCI community, there has been increasing attention to address issues of injustice through participatory and community-engaged approaches. In addition, researchers who conduct this collaborative work with marginalized groups are sharing the institutional vulnerabilities, challenges, and harms that can impact their well-being and their work. In this paper, we argue how the HCI community can learn from the knowledge and strategies of activists who engage in collective action and movement work. In particular, we discuss the role of joy in participatory, community-engaged, and equity-oriented work. Through testimonial authority, we present stories to describe the importance of cultivating joy, how we design for joy, what joy looks like in our work, and how joy can be a sustaining force for researchers and collaborators alike. We end with implications for HCI design and research work with marginalized communities.

��

Demos

User testing Chory Cloth Bot with children with cerebral palsy.

Priyanka Balasubramaniyam,��Casey Lee Hunt,��Brad Gallagher

As children with cerebral palsy grow, they tend to become more socially isolated while their motor and gait skills often decrease or plateau. Thus, exploration of an interaction that assists the children be social and mobile is a critical area for development. This study brings an established approach to assistive technologies for children with Cerebral Palsy--robotics--to a new context, providing social comfort. We adapt evidence-based methods of providing social comfort, dance therapy and cooperative game design, to create Chory Cloth Bot, a robotic social dance game. Then, we present results of user tests of the Chory Cloth Bot prototype with 9 children with cerebral palsy ages [6 - 17], including preliminary findings that suggest increased motivation and social awareness among participants.

��

Workshops

Jiwei Zhou, Raphael Kim, Iohanna Nicenboim, Anton Poikolainen Rosén, Fernanda Soares da Costa,��Netta Ofer, Serena Pollastri, Heidi Biggs, Doenja Oogjes, Bahareh Barati

This workshop invites participants with diverse backgrounds to imagine stories with tides, to explore response‑ability - a notion used by Donna Haraway to cultivate the capacity to respond with other species. As more HCI communities begin to engage with multispecies, we seek to move beyond “responsibility” as a solely human moral property towards relational and reciprocal ways of designing-with them. When the entities we "study" begin to respond to one another, their interactions evolve in ways we cannot fully predict, inviting design practice to stay open and caring for these shifting relations. Using tides as a spatial‑temporal site of inquiry, we will use speculative fabulation to imagine what multispecies response‑ability might look like in place and collectively develop practical guides for examining and incorporating it into design practice.
��

Karen Anne Cochrane, Fiona Bell, Georgia Loewen,��Eldy S. Lázaro Vásquez, Phillip Gough, Ali Mazalek

In this workshop, we explore how material knowledge is taught, learned, and disseminated within HCI research. Through the activity of creating a quilt, the workshop compares how different forms of knowledge circulation—such as tutorials, oral instruction, mentorship, workshops, and community-based collaboration—relate to one another. We invite researchers, educators, designers, and practitioners to engage with themes including pedagogical forms of material knowledge; learning trajectories; tacit, sensory, and biological knowledge in making, care, and maintenance in material practices; access and participation in fabrication; and the design of pedagogical artifacts. Workshop activities revolve around creating quilt patches using different dissemination practices and assembling them into a collective quilt based on similarities and differences in how material knowledge is shared. Through these activities, the workshop aims to explain teaching methods, compare how knowledge is shared, and guide the creation of a simple toolkit for recording material processes.
��

Eldy S. Lázaro Vásquez, Gabrielle Benabdallah, Doenja Oogjes, Samuelle Bourgault, Sylvia Janicki, Heidi Biggs,��Mirela Alistar, Kristina Andersen

This workshop focuses on cases where stories and material artifacts (e.g., swatches, and prototypes) become closely intertwined. Artifacts carry traces of labor, skill, and collaboration, while stories emerge from encounters with materials and practices. Although stories and artifacts often co-exist in HCI and design research, their entanglement as ways of articulating knowledge is not always foregrounded, shaping how design work is shared and understood. Participants will submit and share 2-4 page position stories alongside an artifact or representation. Through small-group discussion and zine-making, the workshop explores how stories are told with and through artifacts, the voices and choices involved, and what vocabularies emerge when stories and materials are brought together. The main outcome is a co-produced Glossary of Design Stories, a zine-based resource for design and HCI researchers that assembles entries from participants’ thing–story pairs to surface relations, vocabularies, and voices that may not easily appear in conventional academic accounts.

��