As AI and data systems often falter when encountering queer identities and knowledge, reinforcing existing oppressions, queer people have resisted such systems and their normalizing tendencies. This pictorial explores tactics of queering AI through a collaborative zine-making project (i.e. zineography) that challenges generative AI and data systems. We share how we workshopped and materialized queering tactics in zine spreads; analyzed these spreads according to materials, content, and tone; and visualized our analysis as thematic collages. We contribute: (1) tangible characteristics of queering AI and data systems (i.e. materials, tones, and aesthetics); and (2) design opportunities for using zineographies as a radical method for building and collectively sharing knowledge about a marginalized community, including recommendations for enacting queer zineographies. By materializing queering tactics through zine-making, we invite embodied, action-oriented critiques that question dominant techno-solutionist movements and trace queer possibilities outside of their normalizing narratives.

As civic data typically involves multiple stakeholders and institutions, data work often happens across seamful spaces. We use seams as an analytical lens to examine data production in a civic data project mapping extreme heat islands to promote environmental and climate justice. Our analysis calls attention to the work of aligning multiple infrastructures as well as the temporal and political qualities of seamful arrangements. Throughout our participation in planning and executing this civic data project, our attention was consistently called to the seams during moments of breakdown. Examining the conditions of these misalignments, we argue that seams decay as underlying infrastructures shift over time through product development, personnel turnover, and institutional change. Further analyzing the responses and maintenance work needed to sustain or re-create alignment reveals how power dynamics are reinforced or asserted at the seams. Civic design interventions must attend to these temporal and political aspects of seamful spaces when working in collaboration with other city stakeholders.

This paper examines how online fashion resellers, platform workers who buy and resell secondhand goods, negotiate the constraints of algorithmically governed marketplaces through everyday resistance in platform labor. Drawing on four years of digital ethnography of reseller communities including interviews, participant observation, and first person methods, we show how resellers reconfigure this platform labor through worker-led automation and collective patchwork tactics, even when these contravene official platform policies. We argue that such practices constitute forms of worker led everyday resistance that are creative yet compromised, emerging within U.S. consumerism, capitalist value extraction, and imperial entanglements of the secondhand trade. Our findings highlight both the possibilities and the limits of worker led automation and resistance, contributing to HCI debates on platform governance, labor agency, and the contested politics of automation.

This paper examines how infrastructures organize time in ways that unevenly distribute burden, access, and opportunity across communities. We draw on two ethnographic cases: eviction case filings in Atlanta, part of the state’s legal and housing governance infrastructure, and a sexual healthcare intervention in Chicago, situated within the city’s public health services. We advance HCI’s engagement with temporality by demonstrating how infrastructures sediment layers of political, social, and technical decisions over time. We conceptualize infrastructures as stratified formations where earlier allocations of power become materially and procedurally embedded, configuring present-day experiences of public systems. We define temporal arrangements as the patterned ways infrastructures shape and allocate time, producing unequal demands on who waits, who moves, and who must continually adjust. We describe two temporal arrangements—compression and gaps—to show how systems structure and constrain access to care, support, and basic services. By linking inherited infrastructural logics to everyday temporal burdens, we offer HCI a framework for examining how inequities persist through time.

As governments increasingly adopt digital tools, public service chatbots have emerged as a growing communication channel.This paper explores the design considerations and engagement opportunities of public service chatbots, using a 311 chatbot from a metropolitan city as a case study.Our qualitative study consisted of official survey data and 16 interviews examining stakeholder experiences and design preferences for the chatbot.We found two key areas of concern regarding these public chatbots: individual-level and community-level.At the individual level, citizens experience three key challenges: interpretation, transparency, and social contextualization.Moreover, the current chatbot design prioritizes the efficient completion of individual tasks but neglects the broader community perspective.It overlooks how individuals interact and discuss problems collectively within their communities.To address these concerns, we offer design opportunities for creating more intelligent, transparent, community-oriented chatbots that better engage individuals and their communities.

Bird collisions with man-made structures pose a significant threat to bird populations. In the U.S. South, a small group of dedicated volunteers track these deaths with hopes of advocating for local policy requiring the use of bird-safe building materials. In addition to recording observations in a mobile application, volunteers log their efforts and collect the bodies of birds they find to add to university specimen collections. We offer a detailed empirical account of the work done by volunteers to produce (1) a digital record of local bird strikes (2) a log of volunteer monitoring efforts and (3) a collection of bird specimens. Unpacking the multiple forms of data produced by volunteer efforts, we examine how Safe Flight produced data oriented towards advocacy work. We end by discussing implications for data activism, highlighting the link between materiality and charismatic data, and proposing next steps for action citizen science.

LinkedIn is central to salaried job search and professional networking. In a career development program for adults seeking upward socioeconomic mobility through middle-wage computing work, we aimed to use LinkedIn to find and develop new social ties. However, we could not use the platform for this purpose. Through a participatory research approach, we formed a research team with diverse positionalities to understand why LinkedIn was difficult to use and how it could be better for our program. We analyzed recorded walk-throughs and confirmed our findings with two years of ethnographic field notes and written reflections. Our findings demonstrate that LinkedIn's embedded algorithms and interface design prioritize users with large networks who can afford a LinkedIn Premium subscription. We argue that such platform-embedded power differentials lead to platform-delivered microaggressions. Non-Premium users and users with small networks must endure microaggressions to participate in the salaried labor market. We argue the politics of LinkedIn as a platform are such that its embedded power differentials are beyond our control and unlikely to change. Therefore, we recommend sociotechnical coping and mitigation strategies for career development programs in lieu of design implications for LinkedIn or similar platforms. We contribute a detailed example of how a technology reinforces pre-existing privilege without users' knowledge.

Collisions with man-made structures such as buildings, vehicles, and energy infrastructure are a significant threat to bird populations. Throughout the U.S., groups of volunteers monitor bird-building collisions to better understand the environmental impact of collisions and to advocate for the use of bird-safe building materials. The first author participated in monitoring bird-building collisions in Atlanta during the spring and fall migration seasons of 2023. This pictorial is a reflection on the experience of producing this data based on interviews with volunteers and the experiences and photographs of the first author. We contribute a rich account of the experiential elements of data production and a discussion of more-than-human entanglements in urban spaces.

This paper details an activist court-watching campaign to collect data during eviction hearings, working with a tenant’s rights organization and a legal aid group. Our work provides a thick description of compiling an agonistic data practice that studies up, fleshing out the conception brought forth by previous scholars. We describe this project’s planning, implementation, results, and challenges to demonstrate how designing data production can affect fairness and accountability in the courtroom. From our account, we offer insights for scholars wishing to contribute to data activism projects: to focus on designing data production not data products, to look for affective potential within messy data, and to shift epistemic burdens onto those who may benefit more from the data.

It's no secret that AI systems come with a significant environmental cost. This raises the question: What are the roles and responsibilities of computing professionals regarding the sustainability of AI? Informed by a year-long informal literature review on the subject, we employ stakeholder identification, analysis, and mapping to highlight the complex and interconnected roles that five major stakeholder groups (industry, practitioners, regulatory, advocacy, and the general public) play in the sustainability of AI. Swapping the traditional final step of stakeholder methods (stakeholder engagement) for entanglement, we demonstrate the inherent entwinement of choices made with regard to the development and maintenance of AI systems and the people who impact (or are impacted by) these choices. This entanglement should be understood as a system of human and non-human agents, with the implications of each choice ricocheting into the use of natural resources and climate implications. We argue that computing professionals (AI-focused or not) may belong to multiple stakeholder groups, and that we all have multiple roles to play in the sustainability of AI. Further, we argue that the nature of regulation in this domain will look unlike others in environmental preservation (e.g., legislation around water contaminants). As a result, we call for ongoing, flexible bodies and policies to move towards the regulation of AI from a sustainability angle, as well as suggest ways in which individual computing professionals can contribute to fighting the environmental and climate effects of AI.

Fairness in AI and ML systems is increasingly linked to the proper treatment and recognition of data workers involved in training dataset development. Yet, those who collect and annotate the data, and thus have the most intimate knowledge of its development, are often excluded from critical discussions. This exclusion prevents data annotators, who are domain experts, from contributing effectively to dataset contextualization. Our investigation into the hiring and engagement practices of 52 data work requesters on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk reveals a gap: requesters frequently hold naive or unchallenged notions of worker identities and capabilities and rely on ad-hoc qualification tasks that fail to respect the workers’ expertise. These practices not only undermine the quality of data but also the ethical standards of AI development. To rectify these issues, we advocate for policy changes to enhance how data annotation tasks are designed and managed and to ensure data workers are treated with the respect they deserve.

Activists, governments, and academics regularly advocate for more open data. But how is data made open, and for whom is it made useful and usable? In this paper, we investigate and describe the work of making eviction data open to tenant organizers. We do this through an ethnographic description of ongoing work with a local housing activist organization. This work combines observation, direct participation in data work, and creating media artifacts, specifically digital maps. Our interpretation is grounded in D’Ignazio and Klein’s Data Feminism, emphasizing standpoint theory. Through our analysis and discussion, we highlight how shifting positionalities from data intermediaries to data accomplices affects the design of data sets and maps. We provide HCI scholars with three design implications when situating data for grassroots organizers: becoming a domain beginner, striving for data actionability, and evaluating our design artifacts by the social relations they sustain rather than just their technical efficacy.

Data work is often completed by crowdworkers, who are routinely dehumanized, disempowered, and sidelined. We turn to citizen science to reimagine data work, highlighting collaborative relationships between citizen science project managers and volunteers. Though citizen science and traditional crowd work entail similar forms of data work, such as classifying or transcribing large data sets, citizen science relies on volunteer contributions rather than paid data work. We detail the work citizen science project managers did to shape volunteer experiences: aligning science goals, minimizing barriers to participation, engaging communities, communicating with volunteers, providing training and education, rewarding contributions, and reflecting on volunteer work. These management strategies created opportunities for meaningful work by cultivating intrinsic motivation and fostering collaborative work relationships but ultimately limited participation to specific data-related tasks. We recommend management tactics and task design strategies for creating meaningful work for "invisible collar" workers, an understudied class of labor in CSCW.

In this paper, we describe and reflect upon the development of critical consciousness and workplace democracy within an experimental workplace called DataWorks. Through DataWorks, we hire adults from communities historically minoritized in computing education and data careers, and train them in entry-level data skills developed through work on client projects. In this process, workers gain a range of skills. Some of these skills are technical, such as programming for data analysis; some are managerial, such as scoping and bidding projects; others are social, perhaps even political, such as the ability to say "No" to projects. In what follows, we describe a workshop series developed to build the workers' critical literacy and consciousness about their data work, specifically regarding the use of data in machine learning systems. After that, we describe a data project the workers questioned and resisted because they determined the work to be harmful. In that process, they demonstrated and enacted a critical consciousness towards data and machine learning. Reflecting on this enactment of data-focused critical consciousness, we identify themes that characterize a democratic workplace, describe the work of designing for organizational action and institutional relations, and discuss how worker and researcher positionality affects this work. In doing so, we argue for enabling workers to resist and refuse harmful data work and challenge the standard power structures of academic research and data work.

As data plays an increasing role in civic decision making, diverse organizations are facing pressure to engage in data work. The HCI community has explored both the potential of and challenges to integrating robust data practices in mission-driven organizations. At each step – from collection, to storage, to analysis, to maintenance – these organizations need to develop tools and practices that balance internal operational needs and external community priorities. This work reports on an 11 month-long collaboration with a mission-driven hybrid organization that has designed tools and procedures for collecting data that enact an ethic of care. This caring data practice is characterized by defining success through relationships, attending to the social and cultural community context, and protecting vulnerable populations through non-collection. We share the organization’s practices, analyze how they support the organization in providing care, and offer recommendations for building caring data systems.

The Historic Westside Universities Alliance Data Dashboard was created to meet the data equity needs of a group of resource-constrained communities in the Westside neighborhoods of Atlanta. We observed the development of this dashboard by participating as ethnographers and developers of its public safety module. Our ethnography and subsequent situational analysis of the dashboard's infrastructuring process led us to the work that individual stakeholders do in bringing such a dashboard to fruition. These stakeholders, whom we call infrastructural bricoleurs, operate through principles of situated knowledge, partial perspectives, limited power, and located accountability. Our analysis, which builds on concepts of infrastructures, bricolage, and feminist principles of technology design, helps us add further specificity to the work that infrastructural bricoleurs need to do when building civic data dashboards with resource constrained communities. Our findings benefit other researchers studying data infrastructures as well as administrators and practitioners within programs like DSSG (Data Science for Social Good) who are interested in building data infrastructures under similar constraints.

We apply Lave & Wenger's construct of a community of practice to identify and position members of the data work community of practice, focusing on members on the periphery who have received less attention - as compared to full practitioners (e.g., data scientists). Reporting on results of interviews with 19 civic workers who perform data work as their main task, we identify an atypical relationship between subject-domain experts (such as our interviewees) and full members of the data work community. Our interviewees may have less computational skill in data work, but they have extensive and varied practices to engage in data contextualization that data scientists and other full community members could learn from. In identifying the attributes of data workers on the periphery, we also hope to call attention to the challenges they face in performing data work in low resources institutions (e.g., governmental, non-profit). Our findings contribute to the larger conversations in human-centered data science about who performs data work and how they go about it, in order to addresses questions of power, fairness, and bias in data-intensive systems.

In this paper, we describe and analyze the data practices of an activist non-profit, the Housing Justice League. We focus on their Tenant Power Hotline, a community outreach tool for tenants facing eviction and seeking organizing support. This research contributes to existing scholarship that examines data practices and the use of information and communication technologies in non-profit and grassroots organizations. To this existing scholarship, we share the structure of a counter-institution: an organization that strives to operate outside the non-profit industrial complex. We then interpret the work of Housing Justice League through the lens of care, identifying homebrewed databases and data fragmentations as negotiations between care and efficiency. We argue that care is enacted through the assemblage of the technical systems, and present tinkering as an alternative approach to developing data practices.?

In this paper, we describe and analyze a workshop developed for a work training program called DataWorks. In this workshop, data workers chose a topic of their interest, sourced and processed data on that topic, and used that data to create presentations. Drawing from discourses of data literacy; epistemic agency and lived experience; and critical race theory, we analyze the workshops’ activities and outcomes. Through this analysis, three themes emerge: the tensions between epistemic agency and the context of work, encountering the ordinariness of racism through data work, and understanding the personal as communal and intersectional. Finally, critical race theory also prompts us to consider the very notions of data literacy that undergird our workshop activities. From this analysis, we offer a series of suggestions for approaching designing data literacy activities, taking into account critical race theory.

Public libraries in the U.S. and around the world are rapidly changing due to expanding technological and social needs of their communities. Furthermore, in recent years, public spaces, including libraries, have faced budgetary and other pressures, putting a strain on the resources available to librarians. As such, public libraries are a compelling cite for uncovering socio-technical entanglements between government services, technology use, public space, and civic participation. In this paper, we report on a qualitative study of librarians in a U.S. urban public library system undergoing substantial renovations and transformations. We frame the work of librarians as a range of infrastructuring practices, which help uncover insights about the socio-material and political conditions of public service in libraries. Using the metaphor of cracking public space open, we contribute a set of design provocations to support an increasingly complex work of public librarians.

The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) aims at securing a lasting impact for technology-based interventions in the context of social inequities. Increasingly, HCI scholars are proposing assets-based design as an effective approach towards this issue. Rather than starting from people's needs and deficits, this approach posits that design should start from a deep understanding of people's assets. A pending issue, however, is how to account for the situated nature of assets; that is, how to decide which asset to leverage and for what design purpose. Drawing from cultural sociology and shifting the emphasis from assets to capacities, we propose Swidler's theory of culture-in-action as an analytical lens for unpacking the complex relationship between capacities, goals, and structural limitations. Leveraging findings from a Participatory Design engagement with 35 Latino immigrant parents for envisioning parent-education technologies, we demonstrate the applicability of this lens. We contribute to HCI scholarship by further discussing 1) how to analyze capacities' design potential, and 2) the methodological particularities for collecting them.

In this paper, we describe how we used workshops as boundary objects that bridged the dual goals of data infrastructure literacy and design. We organized 11 workshops with community leaders from the Westside neighborhoods in Atlanta. The moments of breakdown that took place at the workshops allowed the participants to critically reflect on the socio-technical complexities of the data infrastructure, which scholars have argued is key to data literacy. Additionally, these moments of breakdown also offered us, as designers, insights we could use to reimagine data infrastructures. We contribute an ethnographic analysis of the workshops we organized, along with a preliminary set of data infrastructure literacy guidelines. In doing so, we invite the DIS community to take up such workshops as a way to continue to design data infrastructures, after design.

Smart home technologies are beginning to become more widespread and common, even as their deployment and implementation remain complex and spread across different competing commercial ecosystems. Looking beyond the middle-class, single-family home often at the center of the smart home narrative, we report on a series of participatory design workshops held with residents and building managers to better understand the role of smart home technologies in the context of public housing in the U.S. The design workshops enabled us to gather insight into the specific challenges and opportunities of deploying smart home technologies in a setting where issues of privacy, data collection and ownership, and autonomy collide with diverse living arrangements, where income, age, and the consequences of monitoring and data aggregation setup an expanding collection of design implications in the ecosystems of smart home technologies.

Often when we talk about or do critical and speculative design the work is future oriented, looking towards technologies or conditions that are yet to come. While such work is important and compelling, there is also an opportunity to turn the critical and speculative impulse towards our contemporary moment, to consider how design might participate in alternate forms of living now or in the near present. I call this kind of work "design experiments in civics" because it uses design processes and products as a mode of inquiry into how we might differently structure our collective lives. What's more, given the pressing issues we are facing in 2019 there is an urgency to design that looks to address how we might live in the turbulent times. One move to make is to shift from thinking that design might solve the issues of climate-change or democracy or capitalism, and instead look to design as a way to contribute to different configurations of resources and action, through creativity and resourcefulness. In this talk I will share examples from my own work as well as the work of other artists and designers doing these "design experiments in civics." From these projects, I will draw out a set of themes for critical practices aimed at exploring and ¬enabling alternate forms of living and speculating on more diverse forms of togetherness in the contemporary moment and near-present. In particular, for the TEI audience I will address the ways in which explorations of materialities and interactions can express and support alternative collective practices and consider what the unique contributions of this research community might be to broad field of "design experiments in civics."

Researchers in human-centered computing have surfaced a feminist ethic of care in interaction with technologies, in data collection, and in data work. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, we consider how democratic caring might be enacted and sustained through collaborative data work. We employ philosopher Joan Tronto's theory of caring democracy to structure our analysis of a resident-led initiative that uses data to organize and address issues of neglect and abandonment in their neighborhood. Adding to the CSCW literature on sociotechnical systems of care, we look particularly at Tronto's concept of caring democracy where caring needs and the ways in which they are met are an ongoing and inclusive process of assigning and reassigning caring responsibilities, characterized by both equality of voice and freedom from domination. This work develops grounded insight into the practice of democratic caring and how collaborative data work is relevant to this caring practice. We discuss opportunities and challenges for a data-supported caring democracy and address how caring democracy technologies are different from other modern civic technology practices. We conclude with a call to researchers to identify and enact democratic caring experiments in the small.

Privacy policies are critical to understanding one's rights on online platforms, yet few users read them. In this pictorial, we approach this as a systemic issue that is part a failure of interaction design. We provided a variety of people with printed packets of privacy policies, aiming to tease out this form's capabilities and limitations as a design interface, to understand people's perception and uses, and to critically imagine pragmatic revisions and creative alternatives to existing privacy policies.

Optimism and positivity permeate discourses of smart interactive network technologies. Yet we do not have to look too far or too deep to find anxieties knotting up on the horizon and festering below the network's glistening surface. This paper contributes a set of concepts, tactics, and novel design forms for addressing network anxieties generated through a design-led inquiry, or research through design approach. We present three technically grounded metaphors illustrated with examples selected from our exploratory design process. Weaving together concepts from surveillance studies, cultural studies, and other areas of the humanities with our visual and physical design work, we help draw attention to under-addressed concerns within HCI while proposing alternative ways of framing and engaging design issues arising with network technologies.

Data science is an interdisciplinary field that extracts insights from data through a multi-stage process of data collection, analysis and use. When data science is applied for social good, a variety of stakeholders are introduced to the process with an intention to inform policies or programs to improve well-being. Our goal in this paper is to propose an orientation to care in the practice of data science for social good. When applied to data science, a logic of care can improve the data science process and reveal outcomes of "good" throughout. Consideration of care in practice has its origins in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and has recently been applied by Human Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers to understand technology repair and use in under-served environments as well as care in remote health monitoring. We bring care to the practice of data science through a detailed examination of our engaged research with a community group that uses data as a strategy to advocate for permanently affordable housing. We identify opportunities and experiences of care throughout the stages of the data science process. We bring greater detail to the notion of human-centered systems for data science and begin to describe what these look like.

Smart cities are one area of interactive systems design where the technologies and services of the Internet of Things (IoT) have the potential to serve public interest. In this paper we present a design research project that explores the use of IoT technologies-specifically environmental sensing-to support urban foraging. We describe the design of a simple proof-of-concept sensing platform to monitor the relative ripeness of fruit in trees, and reflect upon its potential effectiveness for urban foraging. From the project, we draw out themes for designing in the context of smart cities, including questioning the presumed "smartness" of IoT systems, and highlight issues in designing to support diverse community economies.

This design inquiry engages concerns set within the frame of network anxieties. Our work projects and engages negative affective dimensions of digital networks including anxiety, exhaustion, overstimulation, overload, paranoia, unease, distrust, fear, and creepiness. We do this by designing alternative Internet metaphors and then applying these metaphors to the design of IoT (Internet of Things) technologies to generate speculative design proposals.

Civic technology, or civic tech, encompasses a rich body of work, inside and outside HCI, around how we shape technology for, and in turn how technology shapes, how we govern, organize, serve, and identify matters of concern for communities. This study builds on previous work by investigating how civic leaders in a large US city conceptualize civic tech, in particular, how they approach the intersection of data, design and civics. We encountered a range of overlapping voices, from providers, to connectors, to volunteers of civic services and resources. Through this account, we identified different conceptions and expectation of data, design and civics, as well as several shared issues around pressing problems and strategic aspirations. Reflecting on this set of issues produced guiding questions, in particular about the current and possible roles for design, to advance civic tech.

As human computer interaction design research continues to expand domains, civics is emerging as an important subject through which to explore how computation shapes our public lives. In this paper we present and reflect upon a series of research through design (RtD) projects that investigate speculative civic contexts. From this, we identify and discuss tactics that can be employed in RtD projects: RtD as Representations of Systems Yet-to-Come, RtD as Prototyping Systems and RtD as Use of a System. Then we identify and discuss thematic interpretations of civics that emerged through our designs: Mediated Civics, Computed Civics, and Proxied Civics. This work contributes to discourses of speculative design, research through design, and those of civics in human computer interaction design research.

Social computing-or computing in a social context-has largely concerned itself with understanding social interaction among and between people. This paper asserts that ignoring material components-including computing itself-as social actors is a mistake. Computing has its own agenda and agencies, and including it as a member of the social milieu provides a means of producing design objects that attend to how technology use can extend beyond merely amplifying or augmenting human actions. In this paper, we offer examples of projects that utilize the capacity of object-oriented publics to both analyze the conditions and consequences around existing publics and engage with matters of concern inherent to emerging publics. Considering how computing as an actor contributes to the construction of publics provides insight into the design of computational systems that address issues. We end by introducing the idea of the object ecology as a way to coordinate design approaches to computational publics.

The term 'critical design' is on the upswing in HCI. We analyze how discourses around 'critical design' are diverging in Design and HCI. We argue that this divergence undermines HCI's ability to learn from and appropriate the design approaches signaled by this term. Instead, we articulate two ways to broaden and deepen connections between Design and HCI: (1) develop a broader collective understanding of what these design approaches can be, without forcing them to be about 'criticality' or 'critical design,' narrowly construed; and (2) shape a variation of design criticism to better meet Design practices, terms, and ways of knowing.

Science studies scholar Bruno Latour suggests that contemporary democracy is shifting from "matters of fact"to "matters of concern": contentious conditions entwined with everyday life. What is the role of human-computer interaction (HCI) design in this shift' In this paper we draw from five design projects to explore how design can express matters of concern by communicating the factors and consequences of issues. In the process, we consider the role of design in contributing to the formation of publics and discuss an emerging orientation to publics in HCI design.

short-paper Share on Commentaries on the special issue on practice-oriented approaches to sustainable HCI Authors: Carl Disalvo Georgia Institute of Technology Georgia Institute of TechnologyView Profile , Johan Redström Umeå Institute of Design Umeå Institute of DesignView Profile , Matt Watson University of Sheffield University of SheffieldView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 20Issue 4September 2013 Article No.: 26pp 1–15https://doi.org/10.1145/2509404.2509408Published:17 September 2013Publication History 6citation715DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations6Total Downloads715Last 12 Months25Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Over the past decade, a diverse community of biologists, artists, engineers and hobbyists has emerged to pursue biology projects outside of traditional laboratories. Though still in its nascent form, this DIYbio (Do It Yourself Biology) movement has given rise to a host of technical innovations and sharing mechanisms that enable hobbyists to experiment with organic materials. As these developments continue to expand science practice beyond professional settings and into hackspaces, art studios and private homes, HCI research is presented with a range of new opportunities and concerns.

In this paper we provide a critical analysis of persuasive sustainability research from 2009-2011. Drawing on critical sociological theory of modernism, we argue that persuasion is based on a limited framing of sustainability, human behavior, and their interrelationship. This makes supporting sustainability easier, but leads to characteristic patterns of breakdown. We then detail problems that emerge from this narrowing of vision, such as how the framing of sustainability as the optimization of a simple metrics places technologies incorrectly as objective arbiters over complex issues of sustainability. We conclude by suggesting alternative approaches to move beyond these problems.

With the recent growth in sustainable HCI, now is a good time to map out the approaches being taken and the intellectual commitments that underlie the area, to allow for community discussion about where the field should go. Here, we provide an empirical analysis of how sustainable HCI is defining itself as a research field. Based on a corpus of published works, we identify (1) established genres in the area, (2) key unrecognized intellectual differences, and (3) emerging issues, including urgent avenues for further exploration, opportunities for interdisciplinary engagement, and key topics for debate.

This paper describes six creativity support tools we developed to foster community engagement and expression with robotics and sensing, assessing the benefits and shortcomings of each tool. From the descriptions of these tools and their uses, we highlight two issues. The first is the challenge of, and a general strategy for, enabling informed speculation with unfamiliar technologies. The second issue is that in enabling such speculation, the research process is opened to significant shifts in trajectory. These shifts concomitantly serve as markers of technological fluency and challenge the research project, reinforcing the value of a community co-design approach.

One of the problems with empathic research methods in interaction design is that the leap between findings about people and design is often left undocumented. In this paper, we describe a microsketching, a method for producing rapid concept sketches that emphasizes creative exploration of the aesthetic and interactive possibilities of the individual elements of a technology, rather than seeking to develop a complete product. We discuss the use of microsketching within the design process, and provide a case study of its use with an experienced designer and in a design studio course. We discuss how microsketching can be used to scaffold the leap between data collection and design, to quickly introduce designers outside of the research team to the elements of the design problem, and to teach novice interaction designers how to design the interface and interaction for complex products and systems.

Sustainable HCI is now a recognized area of human-computer interaction drawing from a variety of disciplinary approaches, including the arts. How might HCI researchers working on sustainability productively understand the discourses and practices of ecologically engaged art as a means of enriching their own activities? We argue that an understanding of both the history of ecologically engaged art, and the art-historical and critical discourses surrounding it, provide a fruitful entry-point into a more critically aware sustainable HCI. We illustrate this through a consideration of frameworks from the arts, looking specifically at how these frameworks act more as generative devices than prescriptive recipes. Taking artistic influences seriously will require a concomitant rethinking of sustainable HCI standpoints - a potentially useful exercise for HCI research in general.

In this paper we present the MapMover project as a case study into the use and design of an interactive system for collective expression. Informed by analysis and reflection we advance the concept of constructed publics: publics that are established, shaped, and maintained through the actions and influence of others. We conclude by discussing the relevance of constructed publics as a theorectical frame for the analysis and evaluation of projects in the domains of urban computing and exploratory design in HCI.

Domestic service robots have long been a staple of science fiction and commercial visions of the future. Until recently, we have only been able to speculate about what the experience of using such a device might be. Current domestic service robots, introduced as consumer products, allow us to make this vision a reality.This paper presents ethnographic research on the actual use of these products, to provide a grounded understanding of how design can influence human-robot interaction in the home. We used an ecological approach to broadly explore the use of this technology in this context, and to determine how an autonomous, mobile robot might "fit" into such a space. We offer initial implications for the design of these products: first, the way the technology is introduced is critical; second, the use of the technology becomes social; and third, that ideally, homes and domestic service robots must adapt to each other.

This paper presents a robot search task (social tag) that uses social interaction, in the form of asking for help, as an integral component of task completion. We define socially distributed perception as a robot's ability to augment its limited sensory capacities through social interaction.

Current technology literacy trends in the United States show declining interest and engagement in technological fields of study. We propose a roadmap by which robotics applications can enliven technology education and capture the interest of new students. We also describe our current efforts to design appropriate technologies and apply them at the middle school, high school, and college levels