arXiv subjects

Yasmine Kotturi

Publications and source records attributed to Yasmine Kotturi.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Evaluating Beyond the Screen: Collective Assessment of AI-Generated Business Plans with Resource-Constrained Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs increasingly use end-user generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT for high-stakes documents like loan applications and business plans, where AI-generated errors---a wrong price, a fabricated product---can affect loan or funding outcomes. Current approaches to supporting evaluation of AI-generated text assume a single user assessing output alone, on screen. This can be especially demanding for resource-constrained entrepreneurs, whose digital and AI skills vary widely. In this early-stage work, we explore how evaluation might instead be organized in a group setting and completed as a collective activity. We extended BizChat, an AI-powered business-planning tool, with an evaluation module that links each generated claim to the entrepreneur's original input. We partner with community organizations in Maryland---embedding BizChat within various entrepreneurship programs---where workshop attendees (N=14) evaluated their plans through think-pair-share discussion. Early findings suggest interface scaffolds like claim-to-input links primed attendees with concrete, personal evaluations, which the group setting then extended beyond the screen: attendees requested printed copies, used rubrics to compare across plans, and drew on peers' knowledge to verify what they could not easily judge alone.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

The Capacity to Care: Designing Social Technology for Sustained Engagement With Societal Challenges

People care about climate change, injustice, and humanitarian crises. The challenge is not apathy but capacity: sustained engagement with large-scale problems is psychologically costly, and social media architecture often amplifies awareness while providing few pathways to meaningful action. The result is rising distress, overwhelm, and disengagement -- particularly among young people who encounter global suffering through platforms designed for attention capture rather than constructive response. This workshop examines how social technology design shapes the conditions for sustained engagement with societal challenges. Drawing on Tronto's care ethics framework and research in moral psychology and platform studies, we ask why caring at scale is difficult and how social media can both exacerbate and potentially mitigate this difficulty. Tronto's framework shows that good care requires more than awareness: it demands responsibility, competence, and community. Dominant social media architectures stall the caring process at its earliest phase. We invite researchers and designers to identify platform designs that deplete or support the capacity to care, and to develop design directions for sustainable care: engagement that people can maintain over time without burning out.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Towards Designing for Resilience: Community-Centered Deployment of an AI Business Planning Tool in a Small Business Center

Entrepreneurs in resource-constrained communities often lack time and support to translate ideas into actionable business plans. While generative AI promises assistance, most systems assume high digital literacy and overlook community infrastructures that shape adoption. We report on the community-centered design and deployment of BizChat, an AI-powered business planning tool, introduced across four workshops at a feminist makerspace in Pittsburgh. Through log data (N=30) and interviews (N=10), we examine how entrepreneurs build resilience through collective AI literacy development-encompassing adoption, adaptation, and refusal of AI. Our findings reveal that while BizChat lowered barriers to accessing capital by translating ideas into "business language," this ease raised questions about whether instant AI outputs undermine sensemaking essential to planning. We show how peer support helped entrepreneurs navigate this tension. We contribute design implications, including productive friction, communal scaffolds, and co-optability, for strengthening resilience amid technological change.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Participatory, not Punitive: Student-Driven AI Policy Recommendations in a Design Classroom

Generative AI is reshaping education, yet most university AI policies are written without students and focus on penalizing misuse. This top-down approach sidelines those most affected from decisions that shape their everyday learning, resulting in confusion and fear about acceptable use. We examine how participatory, student-driven AI policy design can address this disconnect. We report on a three-part workshop series in a graduate design course at a minority-serving university in the U.S., where two student leaders facilitated discussions without faculty present. Eight participants shared candid accounts of their AI use, co-authored ten policy recommendations, and visualized them in a zine that circulated across campus. The resulting policies surfaced concerns absent from top-down governance, such as the double standard of requiring students to disclose or abstain from AI use while faculty face no such expectations. We argue that engaging students in AI governance carries value beyond the resulting policies, and offer transferable strategies for fostering participation across disciplines -- a model for calling students in rather than calling students

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Understanding the Challenges of Maker Entrepreneurship

The maker movement embodies a resurgence in DIY creation, merging physical craftsmanship and arts with digital technology support. However, mere technological skills and creativity are insufficient for economically and psychologically sustainable practice. By illuminating and smoothing the path from ``maker" to ``maker entrepreneur," we can help broaden the viability of making as a livelihood. Our research centers on makers who design, produce, and sell physical goods. In this work, we explore the transition to entrepreneurship for these makers and how technology can facilitate this transition online and offline. We present results from interviews with 20 USA-based maker entrepreneurs {(i.e., lamps, stickers)}, six creative service entrepreneurs {(i.e., photographers, fabrication)}, and seven support personnel (i.e., art curator, incubator director). Our findings reveal that many maker entrepreneurs 1) are makers first and entrepreneurs second; 2) struggle with business logistics and learn business skills as they go; and 3) are motivated by non-monetary values. We discuss training and technology-based design implications and opportunities for addressing challenges in developing economically sustainable businesses around making.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

A Node on the Constellation: The Role of Feminist Makerspaces in Building and Sustaining Alternative Cultures of Technology Production

Feminist makerspaces offer community led alternatives to dominant tech cultures by centering care, mutual aid, and collective knowledge production. While prior CSCW research has explored their inclusive practices, less is known about how these spaces sustain themselves over time. Drawing on interviews with 18 founders and members across 8 U.S. feminist makerspaces as well as autoethnographic reflection, we examine the organizational and relational practices that support long-term endurance. We find that sustainability is not achieved through growth or institutionalization, but through care-driven stewardship, solidarity with local justice movements, and shared governance. These social practices position feminist makerspaces as prefigurative counterspaces - sites that enact, rather than defer, feminist values in everyday practice. This paper offers empirical insight into how feminist makerspaces persist amid structural precarity, and highlights the forms of labor and coalition-building that underpin alternative sociotechnical infrastructures.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Design for Hope: Cultivating Deliberate Hope in the Face of Complex Societal Challenges

Design has the potential to cultivate hope in the face of complex societal challenges. These challenges are often addressed through efforts aimed at harm reduction and prevention -- essential but sometimes limiting approaches that can unintentionally narrow our collective sense of what is possible. This one-day, in-person workshop builds on the first Positech Workshop at CSCW 2024 by offering practical ways to move beyond reactive problem-solving toward building capacity for proactive goal setting and generating pathways forward. We explore how collaborative and reflective design methodologies can help research communities navigate uncertainty, expand possibilities, and foster meaningful change. By connecting design thinking with hope theory, which frames hope as the interplay of ``goal-directed,'' ``pathways,'' and ``agentic'' thinking, we will examine how researchers might chart new directions in the face of complexity and constraint. Through hands-on activities including problem reframing, building a shared taxonomy of design methods that align with hope theory, and reflecting on what it means to sustain hopeful research trajectories, participants will develop strategies to embed a deliberately hopeful approach into their research.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

BizChat: Scaffolding AI-Powered Business Planning for Small Business Owners Across Digital Skill Levels

Generative AI can help small business owners automate tasks, increase efficiency, and improve their bottom line. However, despite the seemingly intuitive design of systems like ChatGPT, significant barriers remain for those less comfortable with technology. To address these disparities, prior work highlights accessory skills -- beyond prompt engineering -- users must master to successfully adopt generative AI including keyboard shortcuts, editing skills, file conversions, and browser literacy. Building on a design workshop series and 15 interviews with small businesses, we introduce BizChat, a large language model (LLM)-powered web application that helps business owners across digital skills levels write their business plan -- an essential but often neglected document. To do so, BizChat's interface embodies three design considerations inspired by learning sciences: ensuring accessibility to users with less digital skills while maintaining extensibility to power users ("low-floor-high-ceiling"), providing in situ micro-learning to support entrepreneurial education ("just-in-time learning"), and framing interaction around business activities ("contextualized technology introduction"). We conclude with plans for a future BizChat deployment.

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arXiv2024

Exploring the Role of Social Support when Integrating Generative AI into Small Business Workflows

Small business owners stand to benefit from generative AI technologies due to limited resources, yet they must navigate increasing legal and ethical risks. In this paper, we interview 11 entrepreneurs and support personnel to investigate existing practices of how entrepreneurs integrate generative AI technologies into their business workflows. Specifically, we build on scholarship in HCI which emphasizes the role of small, offline networks in supporting entrepreneurs' technology maintenance. We detail how entrepreneurs resourcefully leveraged their local networks to discover new use cases of generative AI (e.g., by sharing accounts), assuage heightened techno-anxieties (e.g., by recruiting trusted confidants), overcome barriers to sustained use (e.g., by receiving wrap-around support), and establish boundaries of use. Further, we suggest how generative AI platforms may be redesigned to better support entrepreneurs, such as by taking into account the benefits and tensions of use in a social context.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

"This really lets us see the entire world:" Designing a conversational telepresence robot for homebound older adults

In this paper, we explore the design and use of conversational telepresence robots to help homebound older adults interact with the external world. An initial needfinding study (N=8) using video vignettes revealed older adults' experiential needs for robot-mediated remote experiences such as exploration, reminiscence and social participation. We then designed a prototype system to support these goals and conducted a technology probe study (N=11) to garner a deeper understanding of user preferences for remote experiences. The study revealed user interactive patterns in each desired experience, highlighting the need of robot guidance, social engagements with the robot and the remote bystanders. Our work identifies a novel design space where conversational telepresence robots can be used to foster meaningful interactions in the remote physical environment. We offer design insights into the robot's proactive role in providing guidance and using dialogue to create personalized, contextualized and meaningful experiences.

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arXiv2024

Deconstructing the Veneer of Simplicity: Co-Designing Introductory Generative AI Workshops with Local Entrepreneurs

Generative AI platforms and features are permeating many aspects of work. Entrepreneurs from lean economies in particular are well positioned to outsource tasks to generative AI given limited resources. In this paper, we work to address a growing disparity in use of these technologies by building on a four-year partnership with a local entrepreneurial hub dedicated to equity in tech and entrepreneurship. Together, we co-designed an interactive workshops series aimed to onboard local entrepreneurs to generative AI platforms. Alongside four community-driven and iterative workshops with entrepreneurs across five months, we conducted interviews with 15 local entrepreneurs and community providers. We detail the importance of communal and supportive exposure to generative AI tools for local entrepreneurs, scaffolding actionable use (and supporting non-use), demystifying generative AI technologies by emphasizing entrepreneurial power, while simultaneously deconstructing the veneer of simplicity to address the many operational skills needed for successful application.

cs.HC↗