Publications

Farming plays a significant role in the economy by supporting related industries such as food, retail, and local services. Community-based small farms, while offering unique social and cultural benefits, face persistent challenges, including limited access to formal education and underdeveloped infrastructure, which have been discussed in prior research. This study focuses on community-driven factors, such as workarounds for recording critical information and practices for passing down farming knowledge across generations. Through 11 semi-structured interviews with farmers from a small ethnic community, the Hmong, we explore how bonding social capital, rooted in close family and community ties, supports informal knowledge exchange and creates pathways to bridging and linking capital. These relationships help farmers connect to broader networks, resources, and institutions. Our findings highlight opportunities for designing technologies that support and strengthen existing support systems. We discuss how technologies should be designed to reflect the cultural values, unique practices, and intergenerational relationships embedded in community-based farms.

Individuals resettled in a new environment often face challenges in accessing adequate healthcare services, particularly within the complex processes of outpatient clinic care. Cultural differences, language barriers, and low socioeconomic status contribute to these difficulties. While previous studies have identified barriers and proposed technology-mediated solutions for resettled populations, many focus on addressing deficits rather than building on the strengths these communities already possess, which limits the sustainability and relevance of these solutions in everyday life. We conducted two community-based participatory design workshops with 30 Hmong community members in a large metropolitan area in the US. Through this process, we identified four types of assets the community has gradually developed, including intergenerational support for health management and storytelling-based communication practices that facilitate relatable and culturally grounded interactions. We show how participatory design workshops can foster asset-based approaches, and discuss design implications for technologies that leverage patients' existing strengths to support their health management during outpatient visits.

Agriculture is a key sector in the U.S. economy, supporting not only farmers but also industries like food processing and transportation. Due to labor shortages and an aging population, immigrant farmers have become essential to the workforce. However, they face challenges such as outdated tools, reliance on family labor, and uncertain land leases, contributing to economic insecurity. Additionally, their low literacy levels often result in ineffective tracking of crucial information, leading to missed opportunities in crop disease management and budget planning. Through interviews with 7 immigrant farmers and prototyping, we explored their everyday farming practices and identified opportunities for improved record-keeping. Our findings suggest that improved information tracking could facilitate learning, crop management, and community support. This research informs the design of self-tracking technologies tailored to farmers, offering insights into culturally relevant solutions. Based on these findings, the team will develop and deploy a high-fidelity prototype on local farms.

Patient-provider communication is an important aspect of successful healthcare, as it can directly lead to positive health outcomes. Previous studies examined factors that facilitate communication between healthcare providers and patients in socially marginalized communities, especially developing countries, and applied identified factors to technology development. However, there is limited understanding of how providers work with patients from immigrant populations in a developed country. By conducting semi-structured interviews with 15 providers working with patients from an immigrant community with unique cultural characteristics, we identified providers’ effective communication strategies, including acknowledgment, community involvement, gradual care, and adaptive communication practices (i.e., adjusting the communication style). Based on our findings, we highlight cultural competence and discuss design implications for technologies to support health communication in immigrant communities. Our suggestions propose approaches for HCI researchers to identify practical, contextualized cultural competence for their health technology design.

Brand authenticity is a crucial differentiator and a predictor of positive business outcomes. Extending a recent finding from a food marketing study, we examined how the handmade method can increase consumers' perception of brand authenticity through brand humanization, warmth/competence perception, and reduced psychological distance. A single-factor two-level online experiment (n=378) revealed that the brand's handmade claim positively influences authenticity. The key mediator was humanization enhanced by the handmade claim. Participants humanized the handmade brand more, which then increased perceived warmth and competence and decreased the psychological distance of the brand. These perceptions further increased perceived brand authenticity. This study provides insights for fashion and apparel brands that often utilize handmade techniques. Theoretical implications are discussed and directions for future studies are suggested.

Family-owned businesses are vital to local economies but face challenges competing with larger firms. This study examines how consumer perceptions of family ownership and business size influence trust, focusing on morality as a mediator. Drawing on consumer inference theory, we propose that family ownership and small size serve as extrinsic cues fostering trust through perceived morality, authenticity, ethicality, and benevolence. An online experiment (N=389) revealed that family ownership and small size positively affect trust, which in turn strengthens attitudes and behavioral intentions. Morality mediated the effect of family ownership on trust via authenticity but not through ethicality or benevolence. While size did not moderate these effects, it influenced trust independently through authenticity and benevolence. These findings highlight the importance of emphasizing morality and authenticity to enhance consumer trust in family-owned and small businesses.

Oral presentation at Fashion And Play Symposium

Immigrant communities in the US are affected by Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), such as lack of educational opportunities, low income, lower rates of health insurance, and limited English proficiency; together, these drive immense health disparities. The lack of providers' motivation to work in underserved communities also reduces the quality of healthcare services. HCI and healthcare researchers strive to address immigrants' unmet healthcare needs by developing emerging technologies. However, there is limited understanding of effective strategies, especially how technologies can effectively be designed to increase providers' understanding of working with socially marginalized communities and their motivations to enhance practices. The goal of our larger study is to examine different perspectives on the immigrant community's health management and identify design implications for improved access to care for marginalized communities. As an initial step, we discuss findings from interviews with 15 health providers working in underserved community settings and explore future directions. This study presents design implications for better assisting healthcare providers to achieve improved motivation for working with underserved populations, thereby facilitating patient care.

The uncanny valley effect has sparked interest in fields such as humanoid robotics and hyper-realistic virtual animation. Nonetheless, proof of its existence in artificial intelligence (AI) news anchors remains limited. This study examined the existence and effect of the uncanny valley in AI news anchors. Particularly, it delved into human perception and behavior during interactions with AI news anchors. Results showed that AI news anchors failed to establish emotional bonds with audiences, and thus fell within the uncanny valley. Audiences were sensitive to minor defects and oddities in the AI news anchors, and felt eerie while watching them. Findings of this study can be used to formulate guidelines for the design of the appearance and behavior of not only AI news anchors but all humanoid AI characters.

With the rapid development of natural human-computer interaction technologies, gesture-based interfaces have become popular. Although gesture interaction has received extensive attention from both academia and industry, most existing studies focus on hand gesture input, leaving foot-gesture-based interfaces underexplored, especially in scenarios where the user’s hands are occupied for other interaction tasks such as washing the hair in smart shower rooms. In such scenarios, users often have to perform interactive tasks (e.g., controlling water volume) with their eyes closed when water and shampoo liquid flow along with their head to eyes area. One possible way to address this problem is to use eyes-free (rather than eyes-engaged), foot-gesture-based interactive techniques that allow users to interact with the smart shower system without visual involvement. Through our online survey, 71.60% of the participants (58/81) have the requirements of using foot-gesture-based eyes-free interactions during showers. To this end, we conducted a three-phase study to explore foot-gesture-based interaction to achieve eyes-free interaction in smart shower rooms. We first derived a set of user-defined foot gestures for eyes-free interaction in smart shower rooms. Then, we proposed a taxonomy for foot gesture interaction. Our findings indicated that end-users preferred single-foot (76.1%), atomic (73.3%), deictic (65.0%), and dynamic (76.1%) foot gestures, which markedly differs from the results reported by previous studies on user-defined hand gestures. In addition, most of the user-defined dynamic foot gestures involve atomic movements perpendicular to the ground (40.1%) or parallel to the ground (27.7%). We finally distilled a set of concrete guidelines for foot gesture interfaces based on observing end-users’ mental model and behaviors when interacting with foot gestures. Our research can inform the design and development of foot-gesture-based interaction techniques for applications such as smart homes, intelligent vehicles, VR games, and accessibility design.