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PO Box 16122 Collins Street West Victoria, Australia

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[email protected] / [email protected]

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Phone: + (066) 0760 0260 / + (057) 0760 0560

Publications

The Balancing Act of Social Audio Facilitators: When Self-Promotion Overshadows Community Care

The Balancing Act of Social Audio Facilitators: When Self-Promotion Overshadows Community Care

Nazanin Sabri, Yutong Chen, Marissa Lee, Steven P. Dow, Kristen Vaccaro, and Mai ElSherief. In Proceedings of ACM Human-Computer Interaction. Vol 9, CSCW083 (May 2025).

StoryEnsemble: Enabling Dynamic Exploration & Iteration in the Design Process with AI and Forward-Backward Propagation

StoryEnsemble: Enabling Dynamic Exploration & Iteration in the Design Process with AI and Forward-Backward Propagation

Sangho Suh, Michael Lai, Kevin Pu, Steven P. Dow, and Tovi Grossman. In Proceedings of ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST’25), 2025.

Self-Reflective Crowds: Surfacing Wisdom through Emergent Scaffolding

Self-Reflective Crowds: Surfacing Wisdom through Emergent Scaffolding

Ruo Ning (Nancy) Qiu, Annapurna Vadaparty, Suma Vintha, Steven P. Dow. In Proceedings of the ACM Collective Intelligence Conference (CI’25), 2025.

Cueing the Crowd: LLM-Driven Conversational Cues Across Different Meeting Modalities Increase Topical Diversity of Generated Ideas

Cueing the Crowd: LLM-Driven Conversational Cues Across Different Meeting Modalities Increase Topical Diversity of Generated Ideas

Jude Abishek Rayan, Shaokang Jiang, Nishant Balaji, Jinmao Wang, Ian Gross, Cole Biehle, Steven P. Dow. In Proceedings of the ACM Collective Intelligence Conference (CI’25), 2025.

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News

8 Oct 2025
Prof. Dow will appear on a panel for “Storytelling in the Era of AI” hosted by Pactto.com (Oct 8 in Vista, CA)
News & Events
5 Sep 2025
Congrats to Sangho and the StoryEnsemble team for our upcoming UIST 2025 paper on supporting storyboarding with generative AI
News & Events
23 May 2025
Our lab got three new papers into CI’25. Congrats Nancy, Jude, and Jeongeon!
News & Events
28 Apr 2025
Congrats to Tone Xu and Sirui Tao for presenting full papers at CHI 2025 in Japan!
News & Events
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About the lab

UC San Diego’s ProtoLab conducts research at the intersection of social computing and design with the goal of developing tools, processes, and instructional techniques that change the way people solve complex problems creatively and collaboratively. We develop technology related to social media, crowdsourcing, mixed-initiative systems, and physical-digital interactions to enable large-scale online creativity and to study the cognitive, social, and cultural aspects of design.

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Projects

Socio-Technical Environments for Community-Driven Design

The practice of design has been shifting from an expert-led endeavor towards community-driven processes—such as co-design, value-sensitive design, citizen-led science, end-user…

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Enabling Context-Aware Exploratory Search

Search tools provide access to the world’s largest repository of knowledge. However, when exploring vast new areas of information, people often struggle to articulate useful search…

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Leveraging Metadata to Support Collective Ideation

To generate truly creative ideas, one needs to have extensive knowledge of existing ideas. The Internet gives access to many existing ideas, but they are typically not presented in relation to a newly…

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