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MagHeart: Exploring Playful Avatar Co-Creation and Shared Heartbeats for Icebreaking in Hybrid Meetings
Authors:
Black Sun,
Haiyang Xu,
Ge Kacy Fu,
Liyue Da,
Eve Hoggan
Abstract:
Hybrid meetings often begin with social awkwardness and asymmetric participation, particularly for remote attendees who lack access to informal, co-present interaction. We present MagHeart, a multimodal system that explores symmetric icebreaking in hybrid meetings through playful LEGO-based avatar co-creation and a tangible magnetic device that represents a remote participant's heartbeat as an amb…
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Hybrid meetings often begin with social awkwardness and asymmetric participation, particularly for remote attendees who lack access to informal, co-present interaction. We present MagHeart, a multimodal system that explores symmetric icebreaking in hybrid meetings through playful LEGO-based avatar co-creation and a tangible magnetic device that represents a remote participant's heartbeat as an ambient presence cue. By combining creative co-creation with abstract bio-feedback, MagHeart rethinks how remote participants can become materially and perceptually present during meeting openings. We report findings from a scenario-based exploratory study combining quantitative and qualitative data, examining participants' anticipated engagement, perceived social presence, and future-use intentions from both co-located and remote perspectives. Our results highlight opportunities for playful, embodied icebreakers to support early hybrid interaction, while also surfacing tensions around privacy, distraction, and contextual appropriateness. This work contributes design insights and open questions for future hybrid meeting tools that balance playfulness, embodiment, and social sensitivity.
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Submitted 25 February, 2026; v1 submitted 20 February, 2026;
originally announced February 2026.
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Hey Dashboard!: Supporting Voice, Text, and Pointing Modalities in Dashboard Onboarding
Authors:
Vaishali Dhanoa,
Gabriela Molina León,
Eve Hoggan,
Eduard Gröller,
Marc Streit,
Niklas Elmqvist
Abstract:
Visualization dashboards are regularly used for data exploration and analysis, but their complex interactions and interlinked views often require time-consuming onboarding sessions from dashboard authors. Preparing these onboarding materials is labor-intensive and requires manual updates when dashboards change. Recent advances in multimodal interaction powered by large language models (LLMs) provi…
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Visualization dashboards are regularly used for data exploration and analysis, but their complex interactions and interlinked views often require time-consuming onboarding sessions from dashboard authors. Preparing these onboarding materials is labor-intensive and requires manual updates when dashboards change. Recent advances in multimodal interaction powered by large language models (LLMs) provide ways to support self-guided onboarding. We present DIANA (Dashboard Interactive Assistant for Navigation and Analysis), a multimodal dashboard assistant that helps users for navigation and guided analysis through chat, audio, and mouse-based interactions. Users can choose any interaction modality or a combination of them to onboard themselves on the dashboard. Each modality highlights relevant dashboard features to support user orientation. Unlike typical LLM systems that rely solely on text-based chat, DIANA combines multiple modalities to provide explanations directly in the dashboard interface. We conducted a qualitative user study to understand the use of different modalities for different types of onboarding tasks and their complexities.
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Submitted 3 March, 2026; v1 submitted 14 October, 2025;
originally announced October 2025.
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Participatory AI: A Scandinavian Approach to Human-Centered AI
Authors:
Niklas Elmqvist,
Eve Hoggan,
Hans-Jörg Schulz,
Marianne Graves Petersen,
Peter Dalsgaard,
Ira Assent,
Olav W. Bertelsen,
Akhil Arora,
Kaj Grønbæk,
Susanne Bødker,
Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose,
Rachel Charlotte Smith,
Sebastian Hubenschmid,
Christoph A. Johns,
Gabriela Molina León,
Anton Wolter,
Johannes Ellemose,
Vaishali Dhanoa,
Simon Aagaard Enni,
Mille Skovhus Lunding,
Karl-Emil Kjær Bilstrup,
Juan Sánchez Esquivel,
Luke Connelly,
Rafael Pablos Sarabia,
Morten Birk
, et al. (23 additional authors not shown)
Abstract:
AI's transformative impact on work, education, and everyday life makes it as much a political artifact as a technological one. Current AI models are opaque, centralized, and overly generic. The algorithmic automation they provide threatens human agency and democratic values in both workplaces and daily life. To confront such challenges, we turn to Scandinavian Participatory Design (PD), which was…
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AI's transformative impact on work, education, and everyday life makes it as much a political artifact as a technological one. Current AI models are opaque, centralized, and overly generic. The algorithmic automation they provide threatens human agency and democratic values in both workplaces and daily life. To confront such challenges, we turn to Scandinavian Participatory Design (PD), which was devised in the 1970s to face a similar threat from mechanical automation. In the PD tradition, technology is seen not just as an artifact, but as a locus of democracy. Drawing from this tradition, we propose Participatory AI as a PD approach to human-centered AI that applies five PD principles to four design challenges for algorithmic automation. We use concrete case studies to illustrate how to treat AI models less as proprietary products and more as shared socio-technical systems that enhance rather than diminish human agency, human dignity, and human values.
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Submitted 10 June, 2026; v1 submitted 16 September, 2025;
originally announced September 2025.