VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Ann Light
dblp:35/6584
· DBLP profile ↗
32ranked-venue papers
15as first author
6since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-9145-6609ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 31 · 15 first-author · 6 since 2021Computer networks · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Queer Zineographies: Materializing Tactics for Resisting AI and Data SystemsabstractAs 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. Alexandra Teixeira Riggs, Louie Søs Meyer, Molly O'Reilly-Kime, Tommaso Armstrong, Kay Kender, Ekat Osipova, Anh-Ton Tran, Jordan Taylor, Annabel Rothschild, Imke Grabe, Irene Kaklopoulou, Caitlin Lustig, Sonja Rattay, Liza Shkirando, Fe Simeoni, Grace Leonora Turtle, Ann Light, Carl F. DiSalvo, Oliver L. Haimson |
DIS | 17 |
| 2025 | Co-creating Conditions for Social Justice in Digital Societies: Modes of Resistance in HCI Collaborative EndeavorsabstractIn this article, we report on a 3-year endeavor that fostered 18 collaborations between academic and non-academic organizations to co-create responses to social (in)justice issues in digital societies. The projects and range of individuals and organizations connected to this program offer a snapshot of the state of social justice thinking within the UK digital economy research sector. Our analysis shows how the program’s constellations of actions enacted different modes of resistance attempting to reshape people’s relationship to power dynamics, addressing institutions and exposing systems, and developing and restoring values for social justice. We explore how these efforts invite nuanced understanding of what constitutes resistance in knowledge co-production endeavors and how they helped surface tensions at the intersection of agencies and the distribution of responsibilities. Drawing from our insights and experience, we discuss implications for HCI concerned with the creation of the conditions for social justice in our digital societies. Clara Crivellaro, Lizzie Coles-Kemp, Alan J. Dix, Ann Light |
ACM Trans. Comput. Hum. Interact. | 4 |
| 2024 | Enacting Entanglement: CreaTures, Socio-Technical Collaboration and Designing a Transformative EthosabstractAbstract What happens when we try to enact theory in our practices of collaboration? The CreaTures project spent three years exploring the challenges of conceptualising and enacting entanglement in using creative practice to try and change worldviews towards understandings of interdependence. Acknowledging the backdrop to our work as pressing ecological breakdown, we sought to practice the cultural change we hoped to inspire. We discuss what we learnt about the socio-technical aspects of cooperation in managing entangled engagement as a methodological, as well as ontological, position. We centre this on a case study of how digital technology became a factor in both helpful and surprising ways during the project in response to the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper concludes with reflections on how taking the spatial metaphor of entanglement, rather than scale, has helped us understand agency in our work. In discussing this transdisciplinary project as part of CSCW scholarship, we hope to open a space for questioning dominant techno-economic values and show how alternative philosophy can be enacted in practice in supporting transformation to a different design ethos. Ann Light, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Lara Houston, Andrea Botero |
Comput. Support. Cooperative Work. | 1 |
| 2022 | Processes of Proliferation: Impact Beyond Scaling in Sharing and Collaborative EconomiesabstractWhile scalability and growth are key concerns for mainstream, venture-backed digital platforms, local and location-oriented collaborative economies are diverse in their approaches to evolving and achieving social change. Their aims and tactics differ when it comes to broadening their activities across contexts, spreading their concept, or seeking to make a bigger impact by promoting co-operation. This paper draws on three pairs of European, community-centred initiatives which reveal alternative views on scale, growth, and impact. We argue thatproliferation -- a concept that emphasises how something gets started and then travels in perhaps unexpected ways -- offers an alternative toscaling, which we understand as the use of digital networks in a monocultural way to capture an ever-growing number of participants. Considering proliferation is, thus, a way to reorient and enrich discussions on impact, ambitions, modes of organising, and the use of collaborative technologies. In illustrating how these aspects relate inprocesses of proliferation, we offer CSCW an alternative vision of technology use and development that can help us make sense of the impact of sharing and collaborative economies, and design socio-technical infrastructures to support their flourishing. Airi Lampinen, Ann Light, Chiara Rossitto, Anton Fedosov, Chiara Bassetti, Aniko Bernat, Penny Travlou, Gabriela Avram |
Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact. | 2 |
| 2021 | Designing for Transformative Futures: Creative Practice, Social Change and Climate EmergencyabstractWe discuss three cases of transformative creative practice that aim to address large-scale societal issues related to the climate emergency by taking a series of interconnected, small-scale actions. Drawing on our first-hand perspectives, we reflect on how the cases address such issues by proliferating across different social contexts and supporting creative engagements of diverse stakeholders. We offer this empirical reflection at a time of rapid social and ecological change that has affected all life on the planet. Eco-social challenges and structural inequalities caused by shifts in global economic, political and technological power require new approaches and transformative actions to stabilize and restore ecosystems on which life depends. Our research shows that creative practice in art and design has a critical role to play in these processes of transformation. By discussing the opportunities and challenges encountered by our three cases within their transformative efforts and analyzing how they proliferate across diverse scales, we aim to expand the emerging scholarship on the transformative potential of creative practice. Markéta Dolejsová, Cristina Ampatzidou, Lara Houston, Ann Light, Andrea Botero, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Danielle Wilde, Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Hilary Davis 0001, Felipe Gonzales Gonzales Gil, Ruth Catlow |
Creativity & Cognition | 4 |
| 2021 | Wanting To Live Here: Design After Anthropocentric FunctionalismabstractDesign research has recently turned to theoretical perspectives, including care ethics and posthumanism, to counter the industrial processes that have led to climate crisis. As design theorists and ethnographers of interaction, we researched experimental eco-farming in a community that shared many of these theoretical and ideological commitments. Our goal was not to offer an account of use and provide design implications in support of it. Instead, we chose to identify concrete practices and artifacts that embody the sorts of industrial transformations that we are seeking—even if they are manifest in an imperfect or partial form. We encountered practices focused on community building, local resilience to climate disruptions, experiments in eco-farming, economic survival, and attracting the next generation. One interlocutor translated these concerns into a simple binary, asking, “do we want to live here?” This paper contributes to a design research agenda that might (eventually) provide an affirmative answer. Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Ann Light |
CHI | 3 |
| 2019 | Platforms, Scales and Networks: Meshing a Local Sustainable Sharing EconomyabstractThe “sharing economy” has promised more sustainable use of the world’s finite resources, exploiting latency and promoting renting rather than ownership through digital networks. But do the digital brokers that use networks at global scale offer the same care for the planet as more traditional forms of sharing? We contrast the sustainability of managing idle capacity with the merits of collective local agency bred by caring-based sharing in a locality. Drawing on two studies of neighbourhood sharing in London and analysis of the meshing of local sharing initiatives, we ask how ‘relational assets’ form and build up over time in a neighbourhood, and how a platform of platforms might act as local socio-technical infrastructure to sustain alternative economies and different models of trust to those found in the scaling sharing economy . We close by proposing digital networks of support for local solidarity and resourcefulness, showing how CSCW knowledge on coordination and collaboration has a role in achieving these ends. Ann Light, Clodagh Miskelly |
Comput. Support. Cooperative Work. | 1 |
| 2017 | Mindfulness and Technology: Traces of A Middle WayabstractWe contemplate paths between form and formlessness as a middle way between digital technology for mindfulness, and mindfulness without digital technology, thereby inviting alternative departure points with interactive systems. In doing so, we step into a contested yet potentially fertile arena to challenge the handling, analysis and reporting of the relationship between mindfulness and technology and the methods used to interrogate it. Through the documenting of the authors' own creative practices (video, photography, and gardening), material traces and written vignettes of our experiments are presented to stimulate resonances and evoke mindfulness with readers. We also question the form of conference papers to consider how we can best share formless states of being in discussing their relevance for design. Yoko Akama, Ann Light, Simon J. Bowen |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 2 |
| 2017 | The Meaning of Place in Supporting SocialityabstractWhile social isolation in an ageing population is a concern in many locations, it is greater in towns where divisive local geography and declining investment conspire against meeting places and mutual awareness. This research into the design of location-based tools to support sociality asks whether embedded digital tools that make neighbourhood activities and/or people's movements more visible have the potential to increase serendipitous encounters and deepen a sense of community cohesion. Taking to the streets of a small town to explore if digital tools might improve the situation, we used participatory and provocation methods to inspire engagement with the theme and compare design concepts for sociality. Participants showed great passion for the town and its people, but also caution about publicly revealing even basic information, because of anticipated local consequences. They preferred an indirect approach. We use these insights to analyze "place" and discuss the specifics of designing for sociality in challenging contexts. Ann Light, Katherine Howland, Tom Hamilton, David A. Harley |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 1 |
| 2017 | Crowdfunding Platforms and the Design of Paying PublicsabstractCrowdfunding enables groups to self-fund the changes they want to make in the world. In other words, digital financial platforms are proving capable of supporting new relations between groups of people as well as offering new ways to organize money. Taking an HCI lens, we look at how some crowdfunding platform owners are approaching social innovation, not only at the level of supporting individual community initiatives, but at the broader level of using their platform to change societal behavior. Through four case studies, we show how crowdfunding has been chosen as a tool to redesign society by promoting environmental or social sustainability. We argue that the groups constituted through these interactions are not merely "crowds", but deliberate constellations built round a thing of interest (or "paying publics"). Our interviews with managers and owners explore how interactions with and around platforms work to achieve these ends and we conclude with design considerations. Ann Light, Jo Briggs |
CHI | 1 |
| 2016 | Situated Encounters with Socially Engaged Art in Community-based DesignabstractWith the increased relevance of digital technologies in civil life comes the challenge of how to design research for citizen engagement. Drawing from three reflexive case studies presenting socially engaged arts (SEA) projects, we describe how, as artists, collaborators and researchers, we engaged in socially inclusive community-based projects. We argue that our roles required us to be both flexible and to adopt critical openness in practices of collaborative social facilitation. We conclude with insights to inform community-based research and enable nurturing and inclusive engagement in research design for the exploration of near-future digital technologies. Rachel Clarke 0001, Jo Briggs, Ann Light, Peter C. Wright |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 3 |
| 2015 | Ageing Well with CSCW
Ann Light, Tuck Wah Leong, Toni Robertson |
ECSCW | 1 |
| 2015 | The beginnings, middles and endings of participatory research in HCI: An introduction to the special issue on 'perspectives on participation'
John Vines, Rachel Clarke 0001, Ann Light, Peter C. Wright |
Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. | 3 |
| 2014 | Understanding performative interactions in public settingsabstractInteractive digital technologies pervade our shared spaces in personal, mobile, infrastructural and other embedded forms. These changes challenge the ways we understand and investigate the relationships between people, computing and settings. Responding to this situation—where ubiquitous computing is not only personal but also public, and where digital interactions may happen anywhere — this special issue explores how HCI research can use the strengths of an intersection of theory, practice and innovation in order to best address this conjunction of interactive technologies, public spaces and people interacting with or within both. \n \nWith this shift to interaction happening in public spaces, people can no longer be seen as just ‘users’ but have to be understood as acting assemblages of bodies and technologies in the space they inhabit. This shift highlights the need to understand users in every setting—including those at desks and at work—as socially and culturally situated humans with agency. While this is not a new research development, this special issue speculates on and discusses how the shift to ‘everywhere interactions’ makes it important for research in human–computer interaction to reach beyond existing conventions. With this work comes a need to understand the interacting human as a situated body that is at any moment also a possible spectacle: as a body, a human and a user who engages with technology in response to the situation while also being a ‘performance’ for others to witness. Understanding people as actors in their context allows us to regard every user as a ‘performing body’ and a ‘performing subject’, and it enables us to analyse the performative aspects of interaction in many other situations than those where we design for actually staged performances in a defined performance space or stage. In this sense, ‘performative interaction’ is both concerned with technologies for on-stage performers using technologies as part of artistic expression, and an analytical frame for understanding every situation in which people engage with technologies (in public space). The question becomes: where and in which situations is this analytical frame relevant and useful? Julie R. Williamson, Lone Koefoed Hansen, Giulio Jacucci, Ann Light, Stuart Reeves |
Pers. Ubiquitous Comput. | 4 |
| 2014 | Family Rituals and the Potential for Interaction Design: A Study of ChristmasabstractDrawing on a field study with eight families in northern England, we explore the traditions and rituals carried out at Christmas, looking at the artifacts and processes that constitute family life at this time of year. In addition to individual differences, a common pattern emerges: an extended preparation is carried out by the hosting household over a few weeks to set up the celebration and build expectations; preparation gives way to a short but intense celebration shared with the family or intimate friends; then decorations are stored and there is a return to normal life. The celebration is across generations, and everyone takes part. We note examples of new and evolving rituals. Starting from the three identified phases, we discuss the theoretical and technical implications of our findings for the design of more sympathetic technology that holds potential for augmenting family rituals sensitively and possibly creating new ones. Daniela Petrelli, Ann Light |
ACM Trans. Comput. Hum. Interact. | 2 |
| 2012 | Digital Christmas: an exploration of festive technologyabstractElaborating on the result of a field study of Christmas traditions in eight British households, we explore the design of technology specifically aimed at augmenting existing practices. Four concepts that favoured playfulness and engagement across generations were discussed in a workshop with eight people who took part in the initial field study. The importance of being connected and spending time together in a way that reinforces the family bonding was evident. The enthusiasm demonstrated during the workshop for some proposals and participants' engagement in revisiting those that did not feel right to produce better concepts seems to demonstrate there is space for interaction design that is ethnographically motivated and aesthetically harmonious with the meaning of home. Daniela Petrelli, Simon J. Bowen, Nick Dulake, Ann Light |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 4 |
| 2012 | Perspectives on participation: evaluating cross-disciplinary tools, methods and practicesabstractThis workshop brings together a cross-disciplinary community of researchers and practitioners interested in participative practice and interactive systems design. The workshop addresses growing fascination with participation across interaction design, community informatics, the arts, science and social science, and asks workshop participants to reflect on the ethics and efficacy of the tools and methods used in these diverse practices. The aim of the workshop will be to map out a critical framework exploring the qualities of participation from multiple disciplines. The workshop outcomes will outline how cross-disciplinary perspectives on participation can contribute to participatory and user-centred interaction design. John Vines, Rachel Clarke 0001, Tuck Wah Leong, Peter C. Wright, Ann Light, Ole Iversen |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 5 |
| 2011 | Democratising technology: making transformation using designing, performance and propsabstractThis study of personal transformation is offered as HCI increasingly seeks to change behavior with persuasive products. Performance-derived improvisation methods were used to inspire a sense of agency with ICT in people marginalized from digital design. A case study of an older person's experience shows the techniques supporting her to reconceive her response to technology. In particular, we analyze how using a "prop" as a design artifact allows her to imagine new possibilities and take a more assertive role. Ann Light |
CHI | 1 |
| 2011 | HCI as heterodoxy: Technologies of identity and the queering of interaction with computersabstractAs digital technologies are woven more closely into identity formation, society needs ways to keep tools flexible to many versions of self-presentation and avoid perpetuating the political status quo through conservative and apolitical designing. This paper explores one route, drawing on Queer Theory to look at resistance to computer formalisation of identity through queering. Several case studies explore how we might apply the oblique route to design of a range of technologies that help users define themselves. In particular, forgetting, obscuring, cheating and eluding are activities held up to counter computer strengths and offer a more flexible vision of interaction design for the future. Ann Light |
Interact. Comput. | 1 |
| 2011 | The politics of representing cultures in ubiquitous media: challenging national cultural norms by studying a map with Indian and British users
Ann Light |
Pers. Ubiquitous Comput. | 1 |
| 2010 | Tracing design(ed) authority in critical modes of makingabstractThe workshop will consider the ways in which authority is distributed throughout the design process, what kind of authority inheres in design, and also the ways that we design authority into processes and materials. We will explore the relationship between particular critical modes of making and the forms of authority that they construct. Marisa Leavitt Cohn, Tobie Kerridge, Ann Light, Silvia Lindtner, Matt Ratto |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 3 |
| 2009 | Geezers, turbines, fantasy personas: making the everyday into the futureabstractThis paper describes how a project to challenge digital exclusion resulted in GeezerPower: an artwork that is both a statement about reusable technologies and about older people's continuing interest in the world of the future. We use the story of its production to illustrate and reflect on new methods for engaging people in decisions about the design of technology. And we explore how creative practice informed the design of an intervention workshop inspired by performance art and an exhibition of artists collaborating with older people. We conclude with some comments on marginalization, engagement and envisioning futures. Ann Light, Gini Simpson, Lois Weaver, Patrick G. T. Healey |
Creativity & Cognition | 1 |
| 2009 | Research Project as Boundary Object: Negotiating the Conceptual Design of a Tool for International Development
Ann Light, Theresa Dirndorfer Anderson |
ECSCW | 1 |
| 2009 | The Panopticon and the Performance Arena: HCI Reaches within
Ann Light, Peter C. Wright |
INTERACT (2) | 1 |
| 2008 | Communication Spaces
Patrick G. T. Healey, Graham White 0001, Arash Eshghi, Ahmad J. Reeves, Ann Light |
Comput. Support. Cooperative Work. | 5 |
| 2008 | Transports of delight? What the experience of receiving (mobile) phone calls can tell us about design
Ann Light |
Pers. Ubiquitous Comput. | 1 |
| 2007 | Sharing Perspectives on Community-Centered Design and International Development
Mike Best, Andrew M. Dearden, Susan M. Dray, Ann Light, John C. Thomas, Celeste Buckhalter, Dan Greenblatt, Shanks Krishnan, Nithya Sambasivan |
INTERACT (2) | 4 |
| 2007 | Socially Responsible Design in the Context of International Development
Andrew M. Dearden, Lynne Dunckley, Mike Best, Susan M. Dray, Ann Light, John C. Thomas |
INTERACT (2) | 5 |
| 2006 | Adding method to meaning: a technique for exploring peoples' experience with technologyabstractThis paper suggests a method for gathering and interpreting people's accounts of experiences with technology to inform design. The method combines an interviewing technique that seeks to collect detailed retrospective accounts with discourse analysis as a way of making sense of them. After a description of what each part might contribute, a study looking at what happens when people enter text into websites demonstrates some possibilities of the method. Finally the applicability of the method is discussed. Ann Light |
Behav. Inf. Technol. | 1 |
| 2004 | Designing to persuade: the use of emotion in networked mediaabstractThis commentary looks first at the paradigm shift taking place in analysis of people's interactions with digital products and services—from evaluating performance to researching experience—in line with trends towards the connectivity, mobility and domestication of devices. It then asks what impact this shift has on our understanding of emotion and technology use; exploring the rise of ‘generative’ situations, in particular when the producer of a networked service has different intentions from the user's and the stimulation of affect may be considered desirable. The author's work analysing the emotional impact of the design of networked media is outlined. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the ethics of manipulation. Ann Light |
Interact. Comput. | 1 |
| 2001 | Beyond the interface: users' perceptions of interaction and audience on websitesabstractDynamic pages and the increasing number of functions that websites can perform are changing users' relations with the Web. Little has been reported on how the experience of using this kind of interactive site differs from the ‘point and click’ interactivity of the early Web. This paper reports on a qualitative study of users who entered text while visiting a website of their choice. It shows how the process brought with it two levels of awareness: that of the interface, and that of the social context beyond the interface. The paper goes on to describe the perception of audience that emerged from analysing users' accounts. It also gives details of the data collection method, which is based on the work of Vermersch and has not been widely used outside France for analysing interaction with computers. The implications for website design are considered. Ann Light, Ian Wakeman |
Interact. Comput. | 1 |
| 1998 | Towards a Design Methodology for Adaptive ApplicationsabstractWe describe an abstract architecture of adaptive applications, and indicate where we believe crucial design decisions must be made.We illustrate the use of the abstract model in the design and implementation ofan image proxy, and describe the studies required in determining the appropriate design points.In particular, even though adaptation to resource constraints is generally considered a systems probleu the adaptation is visible to the user in changes in utility, and so the user must be involved in designing the application.Finally, we discuss the politics that creep in when dwigners change the semantics of applications. Adapting to Constraints: Choices in Application Design An adaptive application is one in which the application changes its behaviour according to the perceived constraints in Ille envitnnnlent, so fl,rto nlaintain the semantics of the application for the lise~If we take the above definition as our starting point, then we 133 -----..-. . ... . . . . Malcolm McIlhagga, Ann Light, Ian Wakeman |
MobiCom | 2 |