Tawfiq Ammari

Karen Joy, Tawfiq Ammari, Alyssa Sheehan

A new generation of AI personal assistants reached consumers in 2023-2024 amid sweeping claims about anticipatory, agentic intelligence. Wearables such as the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin, and subscription services such as Ohai and Docus, promised to learn users' routines and complete tasks across digital platforms. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with nine early adopters, this article asks how users make sense of these systems when the imaginary of an autonomous "second self" meets the recalcitrance of actual devices. Extending uncertainty reduction theory, we specify three forms of uncertainty in initial encounters: functional (what can it do?), relational (how do I get it to do it?), and metaphysical (what is it to me, and what should it remember?). We find that hype continues the pre-domestication of voice assistants; that the most satisfying uses are user-curated constellations of narrow tools rather than standalone "second selves."

Jeongone Seo, Tawfiq Ammari

Older immigrant adults face unique barriers to digital participation, often framed as skill deficits. Through a community-based study with 22 older Korean immigrants in the greater New York area, we reframe these behaviors as active strategies. We identify pragmatic disengagement, where users selectively reject emotionally taxing or linguistically risky technologies, and interdependent navigation, where digital literacy operates as a distributed, relational resource rather than an individual skill. These practices reveal that non-use is often a culturally grounded form of "data refusal" shaped by values of dignity and family obligation. We contribute to CSCW by expanding theories of non-use beyond accessibility, offering design recommendations for "relational infrastructure" that supports dignity-preserving, collaborative engagement for aging immigrant populations.

Tawfiq Ammari

This experience report reflects on researching misophonia as someone who lives with it. Misophonia is an aversive response to everyday sounds (chewing, sniffling, pen clicking) and, for many of us, to associated visual cues (misokinesia). It is poorly recognized clinically and socially. People with misophonia are routinely disbelieved, and they live inside platform surfaces (auto-playing audio, algorithmic ASMR, normalized eating on camera) that turn the sensory environment itself into recurring distress. This report is a re-reading of a prior qualitative study of 16 semi-structured interviews with misophones, conducted in dialogue with my lived experience and my role in the soQuiet Misophonia Research Network. I extend the trauma-informed design (TID) conversation in two ways. First, TID must treat embodied, contested conditions as sources of both sensory and epistemic harm: ongoing trauma produced by the audiovisual surface and by repeated dismissal of users' accounts of their bodies. Second, the closed groups and moderated subreddits participants relied on can reproduce that dismissal when a few moderators decide whose experiences count. I close with implications for ASSETS.