Ambiguous Loss: Facilitating Refugee Families' Sense of Home through AI-Powered Storytelling

Building a sense of home is vital to refugees’ well-being and integration during resettlement. While prior HCI research has highlighted the significance of cultural identity and family bonds in shaping this sense of home, few studies have explored how digital technologies can actively support these dimensions. Informed by ambiguous loss theory, this paper presents a study of Culture Link, a collaborative AI image-generation platform with playful features, designed to foster storytelling and engagement among refugee families in Australia. Seven families participated in a ten-day field trial, where they co-created visual stories by sharing images and narratives. Through thematic analysis of interviews and in-app activities, we identified five aspects of how the platform facilitated the sense of home: memory preservation and re-interpretation, cultural transmission, creativity and playfulness, family engagement, and generational identity divergence. Our findings extend ambiguous loss theory in displacement contexts and contribute to HCI research by demonstrating generative AI as a facilitator for storytelling.