How could AI enter a deeply value-laden realm of human lives? Drawing on key values and practices associated with praying identified through a diary study, we presented our participants with four speculative, conceptual value-sensitive AI systems to “assist” prayer practices. The conceptual designs served as provocations to co-reflect on how AI interventions might shape their praying experiences. Our findings suggest that a sense of authenticity (or a genuine connection to the divine) is a crucial value, while the mere presence of AI was often perceived as diminishing this authenticity, particularly when AI assumed too much agency in guiding prayer practices. Based on our findings, we argue for the importance of AI agent designs that recognize users’ agency in shaping their interaction with AI. We further explore how this may be possible by leveraging interpretive openness, perhaps through AI’s inexplicability as a resource for personal meaning-making, and by recognizing non-use of AI as a legitimate design choice.

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.

Trauma, an emotional response to events with lasting impacts, is a significant public health issue influencing technology interactions. This paper focuses on the sixth principle of trauma-informed care—Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues—by exploring multiple timescales of trauma and generational impacts through two ethnographic vignettes: a trauma-informed healthcare design project in Chicago and environmental advocacy in Borneo, Indonesia. We integrate feminist temporality to understand temporal contingencies in cultural contexts to inform future trauma-informed design and computing work. Our contributions include detailed ethnographic accounts that shift the focus from trauma as an individual event to a historically and communally felt phenomenon, advancing CSCW scholarship by incorporating historicist sensibilities and feminist theorizations of temporality.

We introduce the concept of disorientation as an emerging critical methodological strategy for design research in HCI. Disorientation is a phenomenological concept developed by queer feminist theorist Sarah Ahmed that acknowledges the spatio-embodied ‘orientations’ of societal and cultural norms and the queering potential of ‘disorientations’. We use humanistic close reading to analyze three examples from queer, feminist, and more-than-human work in HCI. Our interpretation focuses on how HCI researchers utilize disorientation as a methodological strategy for questioning norms of technologies as well as generatively, toward alternatives. We discuss the tenets of disorientation and several tactics we saw emerge in practice for other practitioners to build upon. Finally, we reflect on implications for the field, as disorientation requires vulnerability and willingness to undergo change, acknowledges embodied knowledge that emerges before interpretation, and suggests the possibility of generative and alternative orientations stemming from those epistemological commitments.

HCI research applies ethnographic methods to understand and represent practices that involve the use of interactive systems. A subdomain of this work is interpretivist ethnography, which positions the researcher's perspectival view [37] as central to ethnographic research and its epistemic contribution. Given this we ask: How might ethnographic researchers in HCI surface the meaning-making role of their subjectivities in research? We reflect on our prior ethnographic fieldwork on small-scale sustainable farms in Indianapolis, Indiana to bring the ethnographic “I” into focus by articulating our reflections as “impressionist tales'' [64:101-124]. We ground this pursuit in sociologist Andrea Doucet's concept of “gossamer walls” to surface researcher's three reflexive relationships 1) with herself; 2) with participants; and 3) with her epistemic communities [34]. We build on and contribute to postmodern ethnography in HCI to clarify the epistemic virtues and methodological best practices of a more unapologetically subjective ethnographic practice in HCI.

In this paper, we examine how an under-studied group in HCI, rural queer farmers, use the social media platform TikTok to perform rural queer utopias. Queer utopia, coined by queer theorist Jose Muñoz, is a way of using queer aesthetics and performance to expose heterosexual norms and imagine worlds of hopeful queer alternatives. Through close reading and interpretation of TikTok, we examine content made by rural queer farmers on TikTok and ask how it enacts queer utopias. We show these farmers perform queer identity in rural farming spaces which subverts stereotypes of both who is queer and who can farm, and their videos also enact queer political utopias by connecting farming to social justice and radical sustainability. We explore how TikTok offers a sociotechnical stage where queer rural farmers can perform queer utopias in ways that celebrate creative and generative uses of platforms by queer folks.

We ask how historic redlining, a US government run, racially discriminatory practice of assessing and mapping property values for federally subsidized home loan eligibility in the 1930s, is tied to current issues of sustainability. We frame redlining as a historic data practice, tied to ongoing exposure to environmental harms and difficulty building generational wealth in African American communities in Indianapolis. To address this, we made maps to ground interdisciplinary discourse between the authors: two who research sustainable human computer interaction (SHCI) and one who researches sustainable food systems, including issues of food security. Our maps, which combine historical redlining maps and contemporary sustainability issues facing Indianapolis, helped us explore the ongoing impacts of redlining across our disciplines. We develop the term ‘sustainability’ for HCI across racial, socioeconomic, and environmental tensions and reflect on how SHCI's emerging posthuman emphasis on human/non-human relations are associated with human/human challenges like redlining.

Though a taboo topic, women's masturbation is the most effective technique in producing orgasms among all sexual behaviors [37]. This project explores how somaesthetic interaction design can contribute to designing for women's sexual pleasure, challenging androcentric discourses on women's sexuality, and also the desexualization of women with dis/abilities. In the study, the first author, who identifies as a woman with an invisible disability, experiments with other women's masturbatory techniques using her own body as a design resource. She then articulated that intersubjective engagement using her own body as an artistic medium in the form of Embodied Embroidery, a practice inspired by women's artmaking, and which seeks to foreground the aesthetic dimensions of experiential knowledge to support theory-making in design. Guided by three key features of somaesthetic interaction—first-person perspective, intersubjectivity, and articulation—this pictorial contributes to pleasure activism in the domain of HCI and interaction design.

As digital artifacts for women's pleasurable experience, vibrators are sophistically designed, embedded with cutting-edge technology, and popular among women. Yet they are still facing social, cultural, and legal obstacles; they are disappointingly understudied by academia as a topic of research. In this pictorial, we use vibrators as our vehicles to speculate future aesthetic, social, and political ways of being related to female sexuality. Our speculation is based on a critical politico-ontological reading of the contemporary design of vibrators by situating it in the historical, cultural, and visual contexts through an art historical analysis. We find that the contemporary design of vibrators carries gender norms and sexual normativity into the futures that they construct. We call on Interaction Design and HCI to tackle prejudice against vibrators to explore the potential of vibrators to improve sexual autonomy, sexual self-determination, and sexual independence of women, especially women with dis/abilities and the elderly.

No abstract available.

We are delighted to present this issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, which contains scholarship from the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) community. This issue has 293 papers, 94 that were accepted from the April 2021 cycle, 61 that were accepted from the July 2021 cycle, and 138 that were accepted from the January 2022 cycle. It reflects great efforts and contributions from external reviewers, Associate Chairs and Editors, who together have conducted a rigorous review process. As Papers Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing CSCW's tradition of high-quality scholarship during an ongoing global pandemic.

Design 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.

In recent years, Sustainable HCI researchers have begun to investigate “noticing” as a design research method useful in efforts to decenter the human in design. Through an autoethnographic bird watching practice combining field observation, journaling, and making practices, we examine how noticing affects us and our way of relating to birds. We found that bird watching surfaces a feeling of abjection, or a simultaneous repulsion and fascination with a part of oneself one rejects in pursuit of personal growth. Along the way, we honed a practice of attunement through deep listening and field recording, which enabled immersive "ecological" experiences. We offer (1) an account of our method and process, (2) the framework of abjection as an approach to designing amongst the complexity of human/non-human interaction, and (3) reflections on how to design for ecological thinking in the push towards a posthuman design.

Abstract Online activism showcases how available digital tools allow social movements to emerge, scale up, and extend globally by fundamentally enabling new forms of power. This special issue brings together eight research articles that engage with the collaborative efforts embedded in various types of activism by studying features such as the socio-technical systems involved; how the activism is organized; relations between traditional and social media; and the complex network of systems, information, people, values, theories, histories, ideologies, and aesthetics that constitutes such activisms. The articles show the spaces in which this activism materializes, and particularly their situation in several intersecting dimensions including motivation, culture, language, and infrastructure. Together, these articles reflect the methodological breadth required to materialize online activism and the need to develop a more nuanced conceptualization of the media ecologies involved. By mapping out how activism is enabled and constrained by human-computer interfaces, this special issue contributes to open up the black box of online activism.

We are delighted to present this issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, which contains scholarship from the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) community. This issue has 190 papers, 177 submitted in June 2020 and 13 submitted in October 2020. It represents contributions from two Program Committees, including external reviewers, Associate Chairs, and Editors, who together have conducted a rigorous review process. As Papers Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing CSCW's tradition of high-quality scholarship during a global pandemic.

Sustainable HCI (SHCI) researchers have historically looked to small and urban farmers to help situate and extend notions of sustainability within economic, social, and political frameworks. In the face of climate change and the Anthropocene, however, we ask how designing like the alternative farming practices of small and urban farmers might open up new, ecological approaches to agricultural technology. We conducted ethnographic field work with small farmers and their community in Indiana and show how they are challenging "agrilogistics," defined by philosopher Timothy Morton as a strict separation of nature and culture in food production, a separation, he argues, which underlies the substantial agricultural contributions to climate change. Our ethnography led us to suggest new possibilities for design of agricultural technology that support ecological thinking and caring for more-than-human actors through visceral imaginaries, posthuman storytelling, and engaging curiosity, possibilities which may offer ways to disentangle agricultural technology from agrilogistic paradigms.?

The convergence of networked digital infrastructures and built environments have given rise to the "urban user", a conflation of "the user" and "the resident" or "the citizen". The urban user and the city infrastructures are mutually constituted phenomena formed through the interactions between them. In this research, we contribute an ethnographic study that focuses on the everyday interactions between the urban user and water infrastructures in Pune, India. Using Nikhil Anand's concept of "hydraulic citizenship" to analyze our ethnographic data, we showcase the mutually constitutive process of infrastructuring and subjectivization of the "citizen", bringing attention to the ad hoc, heterogeneously constituted water infrastructures in Pune that aspire to be "smart" even before becoming functional infrastructures. In doing so, we hope to expand possible research trajectories within smart city research agendas by decoupling it from Western assumptions and also by linking them to an interactional account of the everyday relationships among residents, infrastructures, and municipalities.

HCI researchers interested in enhancing democracy have introduced methods and technologies that support democratic political processes, such as voting, and more broadly on empowering people to more fully participate in an increasingly technologized world. The aspiration for technologies to support meaningful democratic outcomes is not misplaced. In 2019, headlines around the world announced that Taiwan had become the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage, an impressive political achievement. But it was also an impressive technical achievement, the outcome of a concerted effort to develop responsive and impactful direct democracy platforms. We offer a sociotechnical genealogy of the process, informed by theory of deliberative democracy. We identify three opportunities for future HCI contributions: supporting less visible consensus-es, developing civic journeys, and engaging in deliberative experience design.

Much HCI research seeks to contribute to technological agendas that lead to more just and participative labor relations and practices, yet that research also raises concerns about forms of exploitation associated with them. In this paper, we explore how U.S. independent [indie] game developers' socio-technological practices inject forms of labor, capital, and production into the game development industry. Our findings highlight that indie game development 1) seeks to promote an alternative to business models of game development that depend on free and immaterial labor; 2) builds offline networks at different scales to develop collectives that can sustain their production; and 3) emphasizes how distributed collaboration, co-creation, and the use of free tools and middleware make game production more widely accessible. The research contributes to HCI research that seeks to explicate and mitigate emerging forms of exploitation enabled by new technologies and processes. Our critical review of indie developers' practices and strategies also extends the current conceptualization of labor and technology in CSCW.

The phenomenon of end-user driven technological practices such as DIY making, hacking, crafting, and open design/manufacturing is shaping debates in HCI and CSCW about participatory innovation dynamics. However, prior research also reveals two limitations, namely, unequal participation in decision-making and the neglect of middle-tier "pro-amateur" end users. In this paper, we use independent [indie] game development as a case to explore the above-mentioned two key issues. Specifically, we highlight the importance of small teams, "crafting," and "democracy" in supporting and facilitating middle-tier end-users' engagement with technology. Our focus on indie game developers, an understudied group of middle-tier end users in HCI and CSCW, offers new empirical evidence of the dynamic process through which pro-amateurs can participate in technological innovation. Understanding their practices and the socio-technological challenges that they face, therefore, informs the design of more participatory technologies that both allow hobbyists' and experts' innovation and support the technological practices performed by users who are at the middle-tier. This not only promotes the democratization of technology and bottom-up innovation but also adds nuance to existing literature on end-user driven technological practices.

In the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design, there has been an increasing exploration of technology in relation to the body and in particular around issues associated with "women's health."Much of the work so far has been about ways design and technology can play in supporting transitions to and experiences of motherhood and maternal health, menstruation, domestic violence, abortion, pregnancy loss, intimate anatomical awareness, fertility management, continence care, menopause, voice training for trans-women, gender stereotypes in voice assistants, and reimagining existing practices and technologies, among others.This Special Issue has been put together to bring together various voices and research strands from within this emerging community of researchers in order to discuss the core ideas, approaches, issues, and challenges that are currently pressing for this area of research.This ToCHI Special Issue is the product of two-and-a-half years of labour from the original proposal up to the final collection of articles you see before you now.It has involved multiple

This article addresses itself to two developments in recent HCI research. One is the rising emphasis on women's health, a topic that is often seen as at least partly political. The other development in HCI research is the ongoing interest in supporting democracy and political activism. We present the case of a menstrual cup design project in Taiwan, called the Formoonsa Cup, whose product development led to the change in the legal status of menstrual cups and forcefully challenged a traditional value of hymen maintenance as an expression of “pure” and morally upright womanhood. We argue that this project is significant to HCI research for the following two reasons: first, because the design project is a successful, if complicated, case of political activism, and second, because the design and legalization processes were in part mediated by platform technologies, including social networking, crowdfunding, and direct democracy platforms. Using philosopher Michel Foucault's notion of “subjugated knowledge,” we analyze the case to improve understandings of how design can engage in emancipatory politics in the domain of women's health in HCI. In this case study, we begin with the idea that women's freedom of self-care is the knowledge that is subjugated, though by the end we suggest that subjugated knowledge is a more complex, and troubling, category than this initial evaluation suggests. We also argue that design can critique and intervene when it materializes previously subjugated knowledges and renders them both socially intelligible and politically efficacious.

Informed by considerations from medicine and wellness research, experience design, investigations of new and emerging technologies, and sociopolitical critique, HCI researchers have demonstrated that women's health is a complex and rich topic. Turning these research outputs into productive interventions, however, is difficult. We argue that design is well positioned to address such a challenge thanks to its methodological traditions of problem setting and framing situated in synthetic (rather than analytic) knowledge production. In this paper, we focus on designing for experiences of menopause. Building on our prior empirical work on menopause and our commitment to pursue design informed by women's lived experience, we iteratively generated dozens of design frames and accompanying design crits. We document the unfolding of our design reasoning, showing how good-seeming insights nonetheless often lead to bad designs, while working progressively towards stronger insights and design constructs. The latter we offer as a contribution to researchers and practitioners who work at the intersections of women's health and design.

What makes a city meaningful to its residents? What attracts people to live in a city and to care for it? Today, we might see such questions as concerns for HCI, given the emerging agendas of smart and connected cities, IoT, and ubiquitous computing: city residents' perceptions of and attitudes towards smart city technologies will play a role in technology acceptance. Theories of "placemaking" from humanist geography and urban planning address themselves to such concerns, and they have been taken up in HCI and urban informatics research. This theory offers ideas for developing community attachment, heightening the legibility of the city, and intensifying lived experiences in the city. We add to this body of research with an analysis of several initiatives of City Yeast, a community-based design collective in Taiwan that proposes the metaphor of fermentation as an approach to placemaking. We unpack how this approach shapes their design practice and link its implications to urban informatics research in HCI. We suggest that smart cities can also be pursued by leveraging the knowledge of city residents and helping to facilitate their participation in acts of perceiving, envisioning, and improving their local communities, including but not limited to smart and connected technologies.

Menopause is a major life change affecting roughly half of the population, resulting in physiological, emotional, and social changes. To understand experiences with menopause holistically, we conducted a study of a subreddit forum. The project was informed by feminist social science methodologies, which center knowledge production on women's lived experiences. Our central finding is that the lived experience of menopause is social: menopause is less about bodily experiences by themselves and more about how experiences with the body become meaningful over time in the social context. We find that gendered marginalization shapes diverse social relationships, leading to widespread feelings of alienation and negative transformation - often expressed in semantically dense figurative language. Research and design can accordingly address menopause not only as a women's health concern, but also as a matter of facilitating social support and a social justice issue.

Recent sustainable HCI research has advocated "working with nature" as a potentially efficacious alternative to human efforts to control it: yet it is less clear how to do so. We contribute to the theoretical aspect of this research by presenting an ethnographic study on alternative farming practices, in which the farm is not so much a system but an assemblage characterized by multiple systems or rationalities always evolving and changing. In them, relationships among species alternate between mutually beneficial in one moment (or season), and harmful in the next. If HCI is to participate in and to support working with nature, we believe that it will have to situate itself within such assemblages and temporalities. In this work, we look into nontraditional users (e.g., nonhumans) and emerging forms of uses (e.g., interactions between human and other species) to help open a design space for technological interventions. We offer three ethnographic accounts in which farmers-and ourselves as researchers-learn to notice, respond, and engage in symbiotic encounters with companion species and the living soil itself.

HCI in recent years has shown an increasing interest in decentering humans in design. This decentering is a response to concerns about environmental sustainability, technology obsolescence, and consumerism. Scholars have introduced theoretical notions such as natureculture from feminist technoscience. Yet how such theories translate into material design practices remains an open question. This research seeks to broaden the repertoire of nonanthropocentric design practices in HCI. Specifically, it draws on the natural processes of decomposition as a creative approach to develop and test design tactics. To do so, we curate and critique hundreds of examples of decomposition in architecture, design, textile, crafting, and food making. We observe that decomposition often depends on what we call a "scaffold," and we further propose four variants of it as design tactics: fragmenting, aging, liberating, and tracing. We then tested the tactics over a period of four months in a ceramics studio using diverse materials, with a mixture of successes and failures. We conclude by reflecting on how the design tactics might be deployed in nonanthropocentric HCI/design.

HCI recognizes the importance of visions as both a design and futuring approach and a problem-solving technique. One challenge of visioning work is who can propose and shape IT visions and how they can achieve the widespread buy-in needed to make them efficacious. In this paper, we focus on the potential of making, open design, and open manufacturing for contributing toward, if not fully achieving, the broadening of participation in IT envisioning. We use Taiwan’s MakerPro, a manufacturers and IT R&D community as a case to unpack what collective IT visioning looks like, how it shapes IT agendas concretely, and the implications for open design/open manufacturing research agenda in HCI. Our findings reveal how MakerPro members constructed and developed visions for open design and open manufacturing in Taiwan, obstacles to such visions, and how these obstacles can be collaboratively overcome through a participative and even democratic process. We also show that the collective purposiveness not only defines a regional vision agenda but also embraces an entire nation’s future.

Sex and intimate technologies are important in people’s everyday lives. A class of technologies that is becoming increasingly more prominent in discussions of the future are sex robots. In this article, we present a qualitative analysis of posts from a forum where people describe their interactions with sex dolls and their motivations for using them through text and photographs. Forum users use dolls as a content authoring interface, imbue them with agency, and construct meaningful sexual relationships with them. Implications for the design of future robots and autonomous agents in humans’ everyday lives are discussed. We highlight that sex dolls are used for more than just sex; they provide fertile ground for embodied fictions and care of the self. Future, customizable technologies for sexual intimacy and wellness should account for this use.

We use photography as a research method to cultivate a designerly sensibility of the theoretical concept natureculture, a provocation to transgress the dichotomy of nature and culture. We investigate the visual language of natureculture through an iterative practice of creating, editing, organizing, and reflecting on images. Specifically, we explore natureculture as spatiotemporal movements, sediment-like layers, heterogeneous gatherings, formal homonyms, emotional experiences, and aestheticized expressions of style. Each of these has a materioformal concreteness and symbolic density that supports design ideation on topics such as environmental sustainability, agroecological systems, human-animal cohabitation, urban informatics, and more.

Recent HCI research on social creativity and bottom-up innovation has highlighted how concerted efforts by the government policy and business communities to develop innovation ecosystems are increasingly intertwined with IT research and development. We note that many such efforts focus on cultivating regional advantage [20] in the form of innovation hubs that are situated in and leverage distinct sociocultural histories and geographies. Cultivating regional advantage entails achieving broad consensus about what that region's advantage might be, that is, the construction of a regional advantage imaginary beyond the policies, IT supports, and practices to make it happen. Here, we document how an ongoing public debate among makers and manufacturers in Taiwan as a region-distinguished by direct engagement with design, fabrication, prototyping, and manufacturing processes-are proposing pathways toward a regional advantage that both reflects Taiwan's recent sociocultural and economic histories and also its near future aspirations.

This paper explores the relationship between design and intervention, and how scholars of computing and design might strengthen their repertoire of intervention amidst a pervasive sense of there being "no alternative" to structures of inequality and capitalist expansion. Drawing from the authors' long-term ethnographic research on maker, entrepreneurship, and innovation cultures as well as their engagements with professional communities of computing and design, this paper introduces and theorizes modes of intervention that do not fit familiar images of political action such as the countercultural hero or localized resistance. The paper contributes by expanding the analytical repertoire of an interventionist-oriented social computing scholarship. Specifically, it offers three inter-related analytical sensibilities from feminist and critical race studies-"noticing differently," "walking alongside" and "parasitic resistance"- to support political and activist approaches in CSCW and related fields

This essay addresses the question of how participatory design (PD) researchers and practitioners can pursue commitments to social justice and democracy while retaining commitments to reflective practice, the voices of the marginal, and design experiments “in the small.” I argue that contemporary feminist utopianism has, on its own terms, confronted similar issues, and I observe that it and PD pursue similar agendas, but with complementary strengths. I thus propose a cooperative engagement between feminist utopianism and PD at the levels of theory, methodology, and on-the-ground practice. I offer an analysis of a case—an urban renewal project in Taipei, Taiwan—as a means of exploring what such a cooperative engagement might entail. I argue that feminist utopianism and PD have complementary strengths that could be united to develop and to propose alternative futures that reflect democratic values and procedures, emerging technologies and infrastructures as design materials, a commitment to marginalized voices (and the bodies that speak them), and an ambitious, even literary, imagination.

Recent HCI research has linked social policy to design, e.g., in issues such as public safety, privacy, and social justice. One area where policy, technology, and design intersect is in the vision of the creative economy. In that vision, creativity, distinct local/regional cultural practices, technology, and entrepreneurship synergistically produce social innovation on a scale sufficient to drive economies. Culture and creative industries (CCI) policy specifies how governments intervene to support such clusters. Maker cultures are seen as central to this vision, but comparatively little is known about how makers produce culture. We offer a critical analysis of several encounters between CCI policy in Taiwan and its maker scene. These encounters reveal misalignments that undercut efforts intended to support making. We propose that supporting any creative culture, including making, entails a serious commitment to understanding its culture, including its cultural contents and their means of production. We further argue that scholarly rigor in cultivating cultural appreciation is just as fundamental as scholarly rigor in empirically representing cultural practices when it comes to pursuing such a cultural understanding.

Recent research in urban informatics has presented the city as both a complex technological center and a diverse cultural, social, and political entity. However, there has been little research into the changing role that nature plays in urban space, particularly when it comes to understanding how animals have adapted to life in technological and networked cities. In the wake of urbanization, new kinds of cohabitation, including increased interactions between humans and animals, has resulted in new challenges for those working in urban informatics. We leverage key concepts in the Anthropocene-naturecultures, hybrids, and decentering the human in design-to unpack the entanglements of animal-human-computer interaction in two design cases: The Big Cat Behavioral Tracking Initiative and The Phenology Clock. We contribute to urban informatics and HCI research by reflecting on ways in which design can promote new forms of cohabitation and support a broader conception of the city that sees animals as an essential part of the urban landscape.

Recent research in CSCW, urban informatics, and sociotechnical systems has proposed new framings and emphases of the city as a locus of research on computing and called for a heightened focus on the entanglements of social policy and design. Yet there are relatively few empirical investigations of actual policy-design entanglements in specific cities, and of those available, non-Western cities are underrepresented. We report an empirical study of the 2010 Taipei International Flora Expo (TIFE) as a case to explore these urban informatics/social computing issues. Specifically, we offer an empirically grounded analysis of design as a mechanism of public futuring and debates, which contributes to a better understanding of "participatory urbanship" [6]; and we do so focusing on a non-Western city, both to ensure a broader representation of urban ways of life and also to de-center Western experiences as the primary basis of urban informatics theory in CSCW.

Self-tracking refers to the use of computational sensing devices that track data about user behavior to provide self-knowledge. Self-tracking devices are often designed to function transparently, with minimal user awareness of the tracking process. Although effective from an information-processing perspective, this invisibility can also background issues of materiality and user experience. Further, research on self-tracking has shown that devices are often abandoned, can cause user anxiety, and reflect hegemonic social norms. Self-tracking is an emerging technology and skilled cultural practice, but its central issues—the space of design possibility, the nature of user needs/experiences, and sociopolitical implications—remain unclear. We present Persuasive Anxiety, a project informed by research through design, critical design, and design deployment studies. We report on the design and longitudinal deployment of three designs—Candy Camera, Melody Bot, and Fractured View—to spark critical dialogue about self-tracking. The project helped reveal some the relationships between self-tracking and destructive social norms, as well as how they might be mitigated; the emergence of self-tracking as a performative cultural skill; and the possibility of bringing digital content authoring tools/research into a closer dialogue with self-tracking to give self-trackers greater agency over this cultural practice.

Abundant HCI research exists on the many assistive technologies that provide help with everyday physical and cognitive tasks. However, while a purely assistive approach often casts aging people in passive roles, recent studies suggest that adults may be ‘flourishing’ way into advanced age, even though implicit ageist prejudices are difficult to eradicate. Negative age-related stereotypes are the hidden and yet urgent issue we address in this study. There is a clear opportunity for an anti-ageist perspective in HCI, an approach that we propose as complementary to assistive technologies: in addition to providing solutions for the aging population, we urgently call for designs about aging, to spark a conversation on age, raise awareness and ultimately contrast ageist stereotypes. We point at empathy as a key element to reconceptualize, at least in part, HCI's contribution to research on aging. We present a design critique of two interactive pieces that, although not without flaws, suggest how future empathy-raising artifacts might be. Our analysis combines pragmatist aesthetics, interaction criticism and ludology, and yields four design tactics (recurring configurations of significant elements) that are generative in bringing about broader design implications towards a different, empathy-based concept of aging in HCI.

Care pervades all interactions between people. Therefore, research that engages with human participants necessarily includes care, both from researchers and participants. These caring relationships are frequently left unaddressed in research reporting, disguising the fact that researchers are also cared for in their interactions with participants. In this paper, we demonstrate how a care ethics perspective helps to bring clarity to the care entanglements that pervade the relationships that develop between researchers and participants. This perspective not only leads to a more complete ability to disclose the position of the researcher in their data, but also provides insights into how we describe the empathic character of these relationships. We analyze the researcher–participant relationships we developed during two separate long-term research engagements—a 19-month ethnography and a 6-month design deployment—using a care ethics perspective. We discuss how researchers and participants navigate a complex set of roles and reflexively engage with interpersonal vulnerabilities and needs for care. We argue that researchers, particularly those who participate in long-term qualitative studies, have to engage authentically with the multiple subject positions they themselves occupy, as well as the multiple subject positions in which their research participants become entangled. This importantly includes researchers’ positions as individuals with human and social needs who participate in reciprocal, caring relationships with their participants. We argue that HCI research can benefit from incorporating a care ethics perspective, particularly in adopting the goals of developing empathic relationships with participants, acknowledging the reflexivity of research and engaging in researcher self-disclosure. Research participants and researchers perform care for each other throughout the research process. This is demonstrated through two long-term research engagements and a care ethics analysis of the relationships that developed between researchers and participants within them. This care ethics perspective enables a more complete form of researcher self-disclosure, and is helpful when attempting to develop an understanding of empathic relationships with participants.

Contributing to research on social activism as a form of collective action, we report on Diba, a sizable group of Chinese nationalists, who overcame the Great Firewall in order to troll Taiwan's political leadership. Diba's political activism can be characterized as negotiating a tension between two seemingly opposed goals. On the one hand is their construction of a pro-PRC message using the tactics of Internet subcultures (memes, trolling, etc.), but toned down to meet standards of civility. On the other hand, by collectively breaching the Great Firewall and establishing Facebook accounts, the group transgressed PRC technical and legal norms, which were designed to prevent unsanctioned collective action. We argue that the Diba Expedition exemplifies the coordinated use of a complex, transnational social media ecology to support and produce a mass-scale event and newsworthy spectacle, loosened if not severed from state control, and a discursively innovative polysemous message targeted at diverse international audiences: civilized trolling.

Documentation of Research through Design (RtD) processes is essential for capturing and translating design knowledge into broader academic knowledge. Moreover, it can support both design and research objectives internally in RtD projects, as well as external concerns such as project management, knowledge dissemination, and education. In spite of this, RtD documentation has received little sustained attention in prior work. Building on what prior work there is as well as an in-depth analysis of two markedly different cases, we present a framework for planning and evaluating RtD documentation. The framework addresses three core concerns: the medium of documentation, the performativity of documentation, and providing equal support for both research and design.

Existing studies in the field of HCI and CSCW have pointed to the significance to investigate computer-mediated intimacy and brought together concerns in ubiquitous computing, affective technologies, and experience design. However, existing conceptualizations of intimacy in collaborative online systems are largely based on empirical studies of systems that have similar social dynamics and user groups, which could lead to a bias in investigating intimacy. Using Audition, a dance battle Multiplayer Online Game with a popular marriage system, as our field site, we focus on dyadic intimacy in a non-violent online social space that has many young non-Caucasian and female users. We contribute to both confirming and further advancing existing theories of computer-mediated intimacy using this new dataset. We also suggest promising future directions for exploring the subjective intimate experiences in a scientifically defensible way.

HCI research has both endorsed "making" for its innovation and democratization capacity and critiqued its underlying technosolutionism, i.e., the idea that technology provides solutions to complex social problems. This paper offers a reflexive-interventionist approach that simultaneously takes seriously the critiques of making's claims as technosolutionist while also embracing its utopian project as worth reconstituting in broader sociopolitical terms. It applies anthropological theory of the global and feminist-utopianism to the analysis of findings from research on making cultures in Taiwan and China. More specifically, the paper provides ethnographic snippets of utopian glimmers in order to speculatively imagine and explore alternative futures of making worth pursuing, and in so doing re-constitute the utopian vision of making.

The paper offers theoretical support for research through design (RtD) by arguing that in order to legitimize and make use of research through design as research, HCI researchers need to explore and clarify how RtD objects might contribute to knowledge. Leveraging the tradition of aesthetics in the arts and humanities, we argue that while the intentions of the object's designer are important and while annotations are a good mechanism to articulate them, the critical reception of objects is equally foundational to RtD's broader knowledge impacts within HCI. Such a scholarly critical reception is needed precisely because of the potential inexhaustibility of design objects' meanings; their inability to be paraphrased simply and adequately. Offering a multilevel analysis of the (critical) design fiction Menstruation Machine by Sputniko!, the paper explores how design objects co-produce knowledge, by working through complex design problem spaces in non-reductive ways, proposing new connections and distinctions, and embodying design ideas and processes across time and minds.

Communities of making have been at the center of attention in popular, business, political, and academic research circles in recent years. In HCI, they seem to carry the promise of new forms of computer use, education, innovation, and even ways of life. In the West in particular, the maker manifestos of these communities have shown strong elements of a neoliberal ethos, one that prizes self-determination, tech-savvy, independence, freedom from government, suspicion of authority, and so forth. Yet such communities, to function as communities, also require values of collaboration, cooperation, interpersonal support-in a word, care. In this ethnographic study, we studied and participated as members of a hackerspace for 19 months, focusing in particular not on their technical achievements, innovations, or for glimmers of a more sustainable future, but rather to make visible and to analyze the community maintenance labor that helps the hackerspace support the practices that its members, society, and HCI research are so interested in. We found that the maker ethic entails a complex negotiation of both a neoliberal libertarian ethos and a care ethos.

Virtual marriage is a complex social activity in virtual worlds, yet it has received relatively little research attention. What happens when an important relationship such as marriage is transformed into gameplay? In this paper we present an empirical study of how players perceive, experience, and interpret their in-game marriages, especially with regard to representations of gender and sexuality, in an online game (Audition) where a ludological simulation of marriage is centrally embedded in gameplay. Findings reveal that marriage-as-ludic-rule-system and marriage-as-significant-sociocultural-institution provide a double set of gameplay/social/psychosexual resources that players collaboratively learn and perform, and that this negotiation is a source of pleasure, frustration, and meaning in the game. These findings can contribute to understanding the specificity and heterogeneity of players' gender representation in virtual worlds and inform the design of mixed reality games that simulate important life events for learning.

We examine the recent move from a rhetoric of “users” toward one of “makers,” “crafters,” and “hackers” within HCI discourse. Through our analysis, we make several contributions. First, we provide a general overview of the structure and common framings within research on makers. We discuss how these statements reconfigure themes of empowerment and progress that have been central to HCI rhetoric since the field's inception. In the latter part of the article, we discuss the consequences of these shifts for contemporary research problems. In particular, we explore the problem of designed obsolescence, a core issue for Sustainable Interaction Design (SID) research. We show how the framing of the maker, as an empowered subject, presents certain opportunities and limitations for this research discourse. Finally, we offer alternative framings of empowerment that can expand maker discourse and its use in contemporary research problems such as SID.

The use of design as a critical tool to explore design's potential roles in society and the future has emerged as a trend in HCI and design research, but several questions remain open. How can we explain and teach how criticality can be applied to design? How can we assess, compare and give context to critical designs? How should we understand the relationships among practices that bear affinities to critical design, such as speculative design or critical engineering? We argue that many of these issues would be clarified if the HCI and design research communities had a collection of examples that exemplified not just critical design in general, but also its major genres, styles, historical trends, rhetorics, and other distinctions. As a first step in this direction, we detail our efforts to develop a more systematic vocabulary to talk about critical design. After assembling a small operative corpus from a wider inventory of critical designs, we apply poststructuralist semiotic theory to propose a number of analytic distinctions and concepts that could be used-along with others like them-to more systematically and deliberately construct a canon of exemplars and a more mature conceptual vocabulary for critical design.

Critical Design has emerged as an important concept in HCI research and practice. Yet researchers have noted that its uptake has been limited by certain lacks of intellectual infrastructure theories, methodologies, canons and exemplars, and a community of practice. We argue that one way to create this infrastructure is to cultivate a community adept at reading that is, critically interpreting and making reasoned judgments about critical designs. We propose an approach to developing close readings of critical designs, which are both evidence-based and carefully reasoned. The approach highlights analytical units of analysis, the relevance of design languages and social norms, and the analytical contemplation of critical aspects of a design. It is intended to be relatively easy to learn, to try out, and to teach, in the hopes of inviting more members of the HCI community to engage in this practice. We exemplify the approach with readings of two critical designs and reflect on different ways that a design might serve a critical purpose or offer a critical argument about design, society, and the future.

Cultures of making - that is, social practices of hacking, DIY, tinkering, repair, and craft - continue to rise in prominence, and design researchers have taken note, because of their implications for sustainability, democratization, and alternative models of innovation, design, participation, and education. We contribute to this agenda by exploring our findings on self-made tools, which we encountered in a 9-month ethnographic study of a hackerspace. Self-made tools embody issues raised in two discourses that are of interest in design research on making: tools and adhocism. In this paper, we explore ways that tools and adhocism interface with each other, using our findings as a material to think with. We find that this juxtaposition of concepts helps explain a highly generative creative practice - tool-making - within the hackerspace we studied.

Designing for sociable systems requires, among other abilities, a sensitivity to the meanings, structures, and nuances of technology-mediated experiences that are simultaneously felt by users to be intimate and also social. Such a sensitivity is not easily acquired, and design researchers have recommended the use of social theories to guide designers' readings of technology-mediated social experiences. We use philosopher Michel Foucault's theory of identity (and social power, discourse, sexuality, creativity, and style) known as "the care of the self," as a scaffold with which to produce a sensitive interpretation of the intimacy (and expert social creative) practices of adult users of the virtual world Second Life (SL). This reading sheds light on several skilled and creative intimacy practices in SL. It also offers a philosophically grounded hermeneutic strategy for designers interested in analyzing intimate experiences.

We examine skeuomorphs - holdovers from previous functional material requirements - as they pertain to the design of tangible interactions. We offer several definitions of skeuomorphs from different disciplines, seeking to distinguish among different types and uses to explore skeuomorphs' potential value for designing tangible user interfaces. Through critical analysis of several skeuomorphic designs, both GUI and TUI, we show that skeuomorphs are far from being limited to mere sensual metaphors; some types of interaction can be characterized as skeuomorphic. Finally, we offer three specific ways that skeuomorphic evolution can be present in design, with diverse implications for materiality, user experience, and style.

Creativity is an important part of any design process. However, as interaction design becomes more focused on experiential elements, new, tangible, materials for interfaces of the number and complexity of creative decisions required to design an interface has increased. This paper takes the concept of style, from art theory, and applies it to the experiential design of tangible interfaces as a means to understand how creativity is constrained, organized, and interpreted in the design and use of these novel interactions.

Critical design is a research through design methodology that foregrounds the ethics of design practice, reveals potentially hidden agendas and values, and explores alternative design values. While it seems to be a timely fit for today's socially, aesthetically, and ethically oriented approaches to HCI, its adoption seems surprisingly limited. We argue that its central concepts and methods are unclear and difficult to adopt. Rather than merely attempting to decode the intentions of its originators, Dunne and Raby, we instead turn to traditions of critical thought in the past 150 years to explore a range of critical ideas and their practical uses. We then suggest ways that these ideas and uses can be leveraged as practical resources for HCI researchers interested in critical design. We also offer readings of two designs, which are not billed as critical designs, but which we argue are critical using a broader formulation of the concept than the one found in the current literature.

In recent years, HCI has shown a rising interest in the creative practices associated with massive online communities, including crafters, hackers, DIY, and other expert amateurs. One strategy for researching creativity at this scale is through an analysis of a community's outputs, including its creative works, custom created tools, and emergent practices. In this paper, we offer one such case study, a historical account of World of Warcraft (WoW) machinima (i.e., videos produced inside of video games), which shows how the aesthetic needs and requirements of video making community coevolved with the community-made creativity support tools in use at the time. We view this process as inhabiting different layers and practices of appropriation, and through an analysis of them, we trace the ways that support for emerging stylistic conventions become built into creativity support tools over time.

In this paper, we look at the prominent World of Warcraft machinima community as an expert amateur online com-munity and present a multi-part study of a canon of the most successful works (i.e., machinima videos) produced by this community. By focusing our study on its roughly 300 most successful examples, the determination of which we explain in the paper, we are able to highlight the evolv-ing visual practices, tools, and aesthetic sensibilities of the community. Chiefly, our study identifies how creativity support tools and visual practices are inextricably linked and mutually support the in-kind development of the other. For WoW machinima and its producers, the affordance of creativity tools and the cultivation of visual skill synced at key moments and in powerful ways to support the rapid growth, experimentation, and refinement of amateur exper-tise at the individual and community levels.

With the rise of massive scale, globally distributed creative communities, such as Deviant Art, Etsy, and Minecraft, the role of creative leadership in sociotechnical systems is worth investigating. This paper presents a case study of one strategy Etsy, one such online creative community, uses to articulate the creative dispositions of the community's exemplar members: Featured Seller interviews. For this study, we report on a combined content analysis and close reading of Featured Seller interviews on Etsy.com, followed up with member check interviews. Our analysis highlights the demographics of featured sellers, the ways in they express their identities and creative processes, and how they position themselves within the broader Etsy community. Our findings demonstrate that Etsy's administrators provide both a platform and scaffolding for community leaders to co-articulate with them the creative ideals they believe will strengthen the bonds of the Etsy community.

Constructive design research is a form of research where design activity is a central research activity. One type of constructive design research is critical design, which seeks to disrupt or transgress social and cultural norms. Critical design's advocates have turned to critical theory as an intellectual resource to support their approach. Interestingly, critical design processes remain under-articulated in the growing design research literature. In this paper, we first explain why critical design is so hard to describe as a design practice or process. We then describe two critical design case studies we undertook and the effects we observed them having when place in the field. After sharing our breakdowns and breakthroughs along the way, we offer reflections on designing for provocativeness, the value of deep relationships between researchers and research participants, and the need to plan for and go with a fluid and emergent research plan --- with the goal of helping clarify critical design as an approach.

This paper aims to enrich the design research community's notions of quality by turning to the techniques and values of master craftspeople. We describe and analyze interviews conducted with elite craft practitioners in the US and Taiwan to consider how they perceive and produce quality. The crafters articulate a consensus view of interaction with integrity. American participants tend to frame their understanding of quality in terms of self-expression through a creative interaction with materials, while participants from Taiwan emphasize the role of communities in establishing---and benefitting from---craft quality. As HCI continues to turn to design approaches on account of their strengths producing works of socio-cultural relevance and value, our study sheds light on the qualities of interacting with integrity, the pleasures of self-expression through creative interaction with materials, and the practical benefits of positioning creative work in relation to the material resources, aesthetic tastes, and socio-economic needs of a public.

In spite of decades of research on virtual worlds, our understanding of one popular form of virtual world behavior - raiding - remains limited. Raiding is important because it entails intense, high-risk, and complex collaborative behaviors in computer-mediated environments. This paper contributes to CSCW literature by offering a longitudinal analysis of raiding behavior using system data manually collected from the game world itself, comparing two raiding teams as they worked through the same content. Supplemented with interviews and chat transcripts, this research sheds light on what actually happens during raids across four different temporal scales: seconds, hours, days, and months. It also distinguishes between behaviors that are imposed by the system design and those chosen by players. Finally, it derives two viable raiding styles from the data.

In the past decade, HCI has become increasingly preoccupied with the deeply subjective qualities of interaction: experience, embodiment, pleasure, intimacy, and so on, an agenda sometimes grouped under the heading of "third-wave HCI"."Analytically understanding and designing for such qualities has been an ongoing challenge to the field, in part because its established theories and methodologies are comparatively weak at understanding and being responsive to human subjectivity. In this paper, we present a case study of a group of designers who have, in the past few years, revolutionized their domain - sex toys - by combining embodied pleasure, intimate experience, health and wellness, emerging technologies, high-quality design processes, and social activism. We consider the implications this case could have for researchers innovating on especially third-wave HCI design theories, methodologies, and processes.

With substantial efforts in ubiquitous computing, ICT4D, and sustainable interaction design, among others, HCI is increasingly engaging with matters of social change that go beyond the immediate qualities of interaction. In doing so, HCI takes on scientific and moral concerns. This paper explores the potential for feminist social science to contribute to and potentially benefit from HCI's rising interest in social change. It describes how feminist contributions to debates in the philosophy of science have helped clarify relationships among objectivity, values, data collection and interpretation, and social consequences. Feminists have proposed and implemented strategies to pursue scientific and moral agendas together and with equal rigor. In this paper, we assess the epistemologies, methodologies, and methods of feminist social science relative to prior and ongoing research efforts in HCI. We conclude by proposing an outline of a feminist HCI methodology.

The topic of sexuality has been increasingly researched inside the field of HCI. At the same time, and for many reasons, research gaps remain. In this paper, we present a critical analysis of 70 works on this topic spanning the past two decades to understand how we as an academic field talk about sexuality. We use Foucauldian discourse analysis to identify and analyze the various rules of knowledge production on this topic inside our field. By doing so, we expose not only existing gaps in current research literature, but we also gain an understanding of why some of them exist. We suggest some opportunities to make the field more amenable to this kind of research and point out future research directions on sexuality inside the field of HCI.

Journal Article IwC Special Issue "Feminism and HCI: New Perspectives" Special Issue Editors' Introduction Get access Shaowen Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, United States Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Elizabeth F. Churchill Elizabeth F. Churchill Yahoo! Research, United States Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Interacting with Computers, Volume 23, Issue 5, September 2011, Pages iii–xi, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0953-5438(11)00089-0 Published: 01 September 2011

Feminism is a natural ally to interaction design, due to its central commitments to issues such as agency, fulfillment, identity, equity, empowerment, and social justice. In this paper, I summarize the state of the art of feminism in HCI and propose ways to build on existing successes to more robustly integrate feminism into interaction design research and practice. I explore the productive role of feminism in analogous fields, such as industrial design, architecture, and game design. I introduce examples of feminist interaction design already in the field. Finally, I propose a set of femi-nist interaction design qualities intended to support design and evaluation processes directly as they unfold.

In this paper we present a critical analysis of player accounts of intimacy and intimate experiences in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW). Our analysis explores four characteristics that players articulated about their virtual intimate experiences: the permeability of intimacy across virtual and real worlds, the mundane as the origin of intimacy, the significance of reciprocity and exchange, and the formative role of temporality in shaping understandings and recollections of intimate experiences. We also consider the manifest ways that WoW's software features support and encourage these characteristics.

Cyberinfrastructure is a rapidly growing area of global research and funding with a history of emphasizing the role technology will play in changing scientific work practices. This paper proposes a practice-theoretic perspective that is informative to cyberinfrastructure research and design. To illustrate the relevancy of a practice-theoretic perspective to cyberinfrastructure, this paper presents a critical review of 160 cyberinfrastructure research papers and reports published in the last decade through a perspective of embodied practice. After relating common cyberinfrastructure research themes through a focus on embodied practice, we propose a series of early implications for design aimed at incorporating the lessons of embodied practice into the design and development of future cyberinfrastructure applications.

Gaming has attracted growing interest in both CSCW and HCI in recent years. We contribute to this line of research by analyzing collaboration in 5-person instance runs in World of Warcraft, an aspect of the game that is considered routine and mundane work by players yet remains largely unexamined in current literature. Using a combination of ethnographic observation, interview, chat and video log analysis, we unpack the conditions under which players can produce the most effective outcomes while having fun, and offer a three-level model of successful instance runs.