VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Phoebe Sengers
dblp:s/PhoebeSengers
· DBLP profile ↗
42ranked-venue papers
5as first author
5since 2021 · last 2024
0000-0002-5778-5262ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 41 · 4 first-author · 5 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 first-authorGraphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 first-author
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Seam Work and Simulacra of Societal Impact in Networking Research: A Critical Technical Practice ApproachabstractThis paper explores how conceptions of societal impact are produced and performed during academic computer science research, by leveraging critical technical practice while building a digital agriculture networking platform. Our findings reveal how everyday practices of envisioning and building infrastructure require working across disciplinary and institutional seams, leading us as computer scientists to continuously reconceptualize the intended societal impact. By self-reflectively analyzing how we accrue resources for projects, produce research systems, write about them, and maintain alignments with stakeholders, we demonstrate that this seam work produces shifting simulacra of societal impact around which the system’s success is narrated. HCI researchers frequently suggest that technical systems’ impact could be improved by motivating computer scientists to consider impact in system-building. Our findings show that institutional and disciplinary structures significantly shape how computer scientists can enact societal impact in their work. This work suggests opportunities for structural interventions to shape the impact of computing systems. Gloire Rubambiza, Phoebe Sengers, Hakim Weatherspoon, Jen Liu |
CHI | 2 |
| 2022 | Seamless Visions, Seamful Realities: Anticipating Rural Infrastructural Fragility in Early Design of Digital AgricultureabstractRural infrastructure is known to be more prone to breakdown than urban infrastructure. This paper explores how the fragility of rural infrastructure is reproduced through the process of engineering design. Building on values in design, we examine how eventual use is anticipated by engineering researchers building on emerging infrastructure for digital agriculture (DA). Our approach combines critically reflective technical systems-building with interviews with other practitioners to understand and address moments early in the design process where the eventual effects of DA systems may be being built-in. Our findings contrast researchers’ visions of seamless farming technologies with the seamful realities of their work to produce them. We trace how, when anticipating future use, the seams that researchers themselves experience disappear, other seams are hidden from view by institutional support, and seams end users may face are too distant to be in sight. We develop suggestions for the design of these technologies grounded in a more artful management of seamfulness and seamlessness during the process of design and development. Gloire Rubambiza, Phoebe Sengers, Hakim Weatherspoon |
CHI | 2 |
| 2022 | Interrupting Merit, Subverting Legibility: Navigating Caste In 'Casteless' Worlds of ComputingabstractRecent work in HCI has shed light on structural issues of inequality in computing. Building on this work, this study analyzes the relatively understudied phenomenon of caste in computing. Contrary to common rhetorics of ‘castelessness,’ we show how computing worlds in India and Indian diasporic communities continue to be shaped and inflected by caste relations. We study how, when and where Dalits (formerly ‘untouchables’) encounter caste in computing. We show how they artfully navigate these caste inscriptions by interpreting, interrupting and ambiguating caste and by finding caste communities. Drawing on the life stories of 16 Dalit engineers and anti-caste, queer-feminist and critical race theories, we argue that a dynamic and performative approach to caste, and other forms of inequality in HCI and computing, emphasizes the artfulness and agency of those at the margins as they challenge structural inequality in everyday life. Lastly, we suggest practical ways of addressing caste to build more open and inclusive cultures of global computing. Palashi Vaghela, Steven J. Jackson, Phoebe Sengers |
CHI | 3 |
| 2021 | Legibility and the Legacy of Racialized Dispossession in Digital AgricultureabstractThis paper examines the causes and consequences of legibility as an organizing principle in the design of digital agriculture (DA) systems in the United States. Legibility refers to systems of governance that use simplified understandings of a situation to control and direct action upon it. Legibility in digital agriculture systems occurs at the confluence of two traditions of legibility: the data-driven model common in the design of digital systems, and tactics for the control of nature and labor that have developed in the United States since the foundation of the colonies. Our argument draws from (1) a historical analysis of broader patterns of agricultural technology and racialized land dispossession in what is now the United States and (2) empirical fieldwork that examines the adoption and maintenance of digital agriculture systems in rural New York State. We describe the role that legibility historically has played in the development of agricultural systems in the US, and their consequences for who is able to farm and how. This history raises the questions: What is made legible to whom? In that process, what becomes illegible? While legibility promises transparent and environmentally beneficial control, in our fieldwork we find that the demands of legibility are also restructuring the physical landscape, creating additional invisible labor, producing systems that are brittle to real-world conditions on farms, and creating opaque systems that block people from adapting to their circumstances. In reading our fieldwork together with the historical case, we demonstrate the pressures that are shaping the stakes, subject, and objects of legibility in agricultural technology. As more data-driven systems are used for environmental contexts, the CSCW community needs to extend its ways to understand how data-driven systems impact land, labor, and resources. Jen Liu, Phoebe Sengers |
Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact. | 2 |
| 2021 | Speculation and the Design of DevelopmentabstractThis paper examines the role of technoscientific speculation in large-scale development projects in postcolonial spaces, building on recent work in STS, design research, and postcolonial studies in and beyond CSCW. We analyze two historical cases of technology-infused development projects in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador and in Jamaica. We find that speculation in these contexts remixes the constructive stance toward speculation typical for normative technoscience with the critical, contesting orientation of speculative design. Conflicts between these stances are resolved by leveraging fantasy for pragmatic ends, grounding audacious fictions in imported realities, unmooring from conventional understandings of linear technological progress, and using even conservative futures to trouble colonial conventions. Phoebe Sengers, Kaiton Williams, Vera D. Khovanskaya |
Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact. | 1 |
| 2020 | Bottom-Up Organizing with Tools from On High: Understanding the Data Practices of Labor OrganizersabstractThis paper provides insight into the use of data tools in the American labor movement by analyzing the practices of staff employed by unions to organize alongside union members. We interviewed 23 field-level staff organizers about how they use data tools to evaluate membership. We find that organizers work around and outside of these tools to develop access to data for union members and calibrate data representations to meet local needs. Organizers mediate between local and central versions of the data, and draw on their contextual knowledge to challenge campaign strategy. We argue that networked data tools can compound field organizers' lack of discretion, making it more difficult for unions to assess and act on the will of union membership. We show how the use of networked data tools can lead to less accurate data, and discuss how bottom-up approaches to data gathering can support more accurate membership assessments. Vera D. Khovanskaya, Phoebe Sengers, Lynn Dombrowski |
CHI | 2 |
| 2020 | Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating LifeworldsabstractThis paper introduces "infrastructural speculations," an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the "lifeworld" of artifacts-the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds. Richmond Y. Wong, Vera D. Khovanskaya, Sarah E. Fox, Nick Merrill, Phoebe Sengers |
CHI | 5 |
| 2019 | Data Rhetoric and Uneasy Alliances: Data Advocacy in US Labor HistoryabstractTo gain historical perspective on the role of technical expertise in the labor movement, we explore the data-driven practices of mid-century American labor unionists who appropriated techniques from scientific management to advocate for workers. Analyzing the data artifacts and academic writings of the Management Engineering department of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, we describe the rhetorical use of data within a mutual-gains model of participation. We draw insights from the challenges faced by the department, assess the feasibility of implementing these approaches in the present, and identify opportunities for the participatory design of workplace advocacy systems moving forward. Vera D. Khovanskaya, Phoebe Sengers |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 2 |
| 2019 | The Tools of Management: Adapting Historical Union Tactics to Platform-Mediated LaborabstractAt the same time that workers' rights are generally declining in the United States (US), workplace computing systems gather more data about workers and their activities than ever before. The rise of large scale labor analytics raises questions about how and whether workers could use such data to advocate for their own goals. Here, we analyze the historical development of workplace technology design methods in CSCW to show how mid-20th century labor responses to scientific management can inform directions in contemporary digital labor advocacy. First, we demonstrate how specific methodological tendencies from industrial scientific management were adapted to work in CSCW, and then subsequently altered in crowd work and social computing research to more closely resemble industrial approaches. Next, we show how three tactics used by labor unions to strategically engage with industrial scientific management in the mid-20th century can inform data-driven worker advocacy in platform-mediated work. Finally, we discuss how this history shapes our understanding of worker participation and the implications of using worker data for contemporary advocacy goals. Vera D. Khovanskaya, Lynn Dombrowski, Jeffrey M. Rzeszotarski, Phoebe Sengers |
Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact. | 4 |
| 2018 | Diversifying Design ImaginationsabstractThe act of designing technologies does not simply create functionality; it also offers possibilities for action, ways of looking at the world, and modes through which we can relate to one another. How we design technologies reflects what we value; who we think is important, and in what ways; which places, people and possibilities are in our imaginations, and which are not. Current ways of designing technologies frequently narrow these possibilities, in two ways. The first is that technology design is dominated by a narrow demographic: predominantly white and Asian, white collar, highly educated, urban. These designers' ways of imagining new technological worlds are shaped by the worlds they themselves know and value, which are only a small slice of global ways of being. The second is that even as technology design is being increasingly engaged in around the world by and for people outside this demographic, local adaptations are frequently judged and limited by what makes sense from the perspective of Silicon Valley and other urban high-tech centers. Supporting the rich diversity of human experience requires explicitly identifying and appreciating values and experiences outside of mainstream technology design logics. Phoebe Sengers |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 1 |
| 2018 | Intermodulation: Improvisation and Collaborative Art Practice for HCIabstractThis paper integrates theory, ethnography, and collaborative artwork to explore improvisational activity as both topic and tool of multidisciplinary HCI inquiry. Building on theories of improvisation drawn from art, music, HCI and social science, and two ethnographic studies based on interviews, participant observation and collaborative art practice, we seek to elucidate the improvisational nature of practice in both art and ordinary action, including human-computer interaction. We identify five key features of improvisational action -- reflexivity, transgression, tension, listening, and interdependence -- and show how these can deepen and extend both linear and open-ended methodologies in HCI and design. We conclude by highlighting collaborative engagement based on 'intermodulation' as a tool of multidisciplinary inquiry for HCI research and design. Laewoo (Leo) Kang, Steven J. Jackson, Phoebe Sengers |
CHI | 3 |
| 2018 | Design Within a Patriarchal Society: Opportunities and Challenges in Designing for Rural Women in BangladeshabstractThis paper examines the opportunities and issues that arise in designing technologies to support low-income rural women in Bangladesh. Through a qualitative, empirical study with 90 participants, we reveal systemic everyday challenges that women face that form the backdrop against which technology design could potentially happen. We discuss how technology is already impacting women's lives, sometimes by reinforcing their subservient role in society and sometimes used tactically by women to gain a measure of agency. The issues raised by our participants concerning technology's place in their lives provide HCI researchers with valuable guidance about what might (or might not) be appropriate to design for them. We also show how prevalent HCI research and design strategies may fit more poorly than expected into rural women's lives, and we discuss possible alternative design directions, and the ethical and pragmatic trade-offs that they entail. Our contribution is not to "solve" the problem of designing for low-income rural women, but to expand the HCI community's understanding of technology design within deeply patriarchal societies. Sharifa Sultana, François Guimbretière, Phoebe Sengers, Nicola Dell |
CHI | 3 |
| 2017 | Reworking the Gaps between Design and EthnographyabstractSince Dourish's critique of 'implications for design' [15], researchers have asked how design and ethnography should or could relate in HCI. Here we reflect on two experiences with cross-informing ongoing ethnographic investigation with the early stages of research through design. One uses speculative design to reflect on and inform ethnographic fieldwork on busyness in middle-class familes; the other uses speculative design to complement late-stage analysis of a historical ethnography of rural technological infrastructure. Rather than trying to do away with the gap between ethnography and design by seamlessly integrating the two processes, we reworked the relationship between ethnography and design by closing the gap in the temporal workflows while simultaneously maintaining a distinction in the performance of the two roles. We found that this new gap resulted in a series of misunderstandings; but by putting the two roles in active dialogue, we were able leverage misunderstandings into mutual benefit. Vera D. Khovanskaya, Phoebe Sengers, Melissa Mazmanian, Charles Darrah |
CHI | 2 |
| 2016 | The Case of the Strangerationist: Re-interpreting Critical Technical PracticeabstractWe describe a method for critically informed development of new technical systems by combining analysis of historical discourse with critical technical practice. We take the case of social recommender systems, a class of algorithms that calculate which people should be recommended to whom. We demonstrate similarities between limitations of "social network" rhetoric in contemporary social matching algorithms and discourse on planning in Artificial Intelligence. We develop an algorithm for social matching that recombines "lost" ideas from the history of AI, orienting around situated behavior and algorithmic transparency. By implementing this approach in a functioning prototype called "the Strangerationist", we examine directly how conceptual commitments inform low-level technical decisions, and how available technologies shape conceptual vision. Our goal is not to design a "better" algorithm but to explore the challenges and opportunities of weaving together historical discourse and critical analysis of values embedded in technology with the experience of designing it. Vera D. Khovanskaya, Maria Bezaitis, Phoebe Sengers |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 3 |
| 2015 | Expanding and Refining Design and Criticality in HCIabstractThe term 'critical design' is on the upswing in HCI. We analyze how discourses around 'critical design' are diverging in Design and HCI. We argue that this divergence undermines HCI's ability to learn from and appropriate the design approaches signaled by this term. Instead, we articulate two ways to broaden and deepen connections between Design and HCI: (1) develop a broader collective understanding of what these design approaches can be, without forcing them to be about 'criticality' or 'critical design,' narrowly construed; and (2) shape a variation of design criticism to better meet Design practices, terms, and ways of knowing. James Pierce 0001, Phoebe Sengers, Tad Hirsch, Tom Jenkins, William W. Gaver, Carl F. DiSalvo |
CHI | 2 |
| 2015 | Constructing and constraining participation in participatory arts and HCI
Hrönn Brynjarsdóttir, Carl F. DiSalvo, Phoebe Sengers, Thomas Lodato |
Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. | 3 |
| 2014 | No easy compromise: sustainability and the dilemmas and dynamics of changeabstractSustainable HCI grapples with how to use technology design to make social change. This is made difficult by recurring dilemmas about how to truly make change, like how to increase the scale and duration of design impact. In this essay, we reflect on our own journey to better understand design for social change by taking inspiration from two groups that have long engaged in making change towards sustainability -- simple living and organic farm families. We describe 5 key dilemmas that both the families and HCI designers struggle with and reflect on how we can learn from families' practices to negotiate these dilemmas. We contribute a deepened understanding of the dilemmas of and opportunities for making change for sustainable HCI. Maria Håkansson, Phoebe Sengers |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 2 |
| 2014 | Freaky: performing hybrid human-machine emotionabstractThis paper explores the possibility of using statistical classification of physiological signals into emotion categories as a resource for open-ended human interpretation of emotion. Typically, design studies for affect assume either that it is possible for computers to objectively identify users' emotions, or that emotion is completely subjective and thus rely solely on human interpretation. By drawing on the feminist concept of performativity, we explain how to conceive of computational representations and human actors as co-constructing emotions. Through a case study of Freaky, a system that uses such models of emotion to sup-port human interpretation, we demonstrate how machine learning models of affect can be constructed and incorporated in systems designed for open-ended user interpretation of affect. Qualitative results from a user deployment show that a performative approach to modeling emotion is possible. We thus demonstrate the potential of performative theories to be generative of new computational and design practices that support hybrid human-machine enactments of emotion. Lucian Leahu, Phoebe Sengers |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 2 |
| 2013 | Beyond being green: simple living families and ICTabstractMotivated by a need in sustainable HCI for studies of everyday practices, and a belief that a holistic view on sustainability is crucial to deeper understanding of how to design ICT to support sustainability, we here present a qualitative study of 11 simple living families in the US. Simple living refers to a lifestyle which is voluntarily simple out of concern for both the environment and quality of life. Our goal was to learn about a holistic view on sustainability and the role of ICT in helping and hindering families to live simply. The study contributes new insights about how holistic sustainability could be a valuable lens for HCI, revealing that sustainability is important to a wider range of areas in HCI than previously discussed. We conclude with implications for HCI for how to support sustainable practices beyond being "about" being green. Maria Håkansson, Phoebe Sengers |
CHI | 2 |
| 2013 | Introduction to the special issue on practice-oriented approaches to sustainable HCIabstractSince Blevis's seminal paper [Blevis 2007] in 2007, environmental sustainability has established itself as a mainstream concern for HCI. After an initial flurry of excitement about the potential for existing HCI techniques, such as persuasive computing and interaction design, to contributemeaningfully to increasing sustainability, we have begun to recognize that the complexity and apparent intractability of working towards sustainability is providing serious challenges to current HCI ways of approaching problems. For example, some are working to deepen the engagement between HCI and established approaches of environmental psychology [Froehlich et al. 2010] and behavioral theory [Hekler et al. 2013] in order to develop more rigorous methods and theoretical connections for pursuing sustainability. Others are deploying and evaluating eco-feedback technologies at a scale not yet common in HCI [Erickson et al. 2013] to get a better sense of their effects and potentialities. Thus, sustainability is becoming not simply a problem that HCI can contribute to solving, but also an opportunity to understand the limits of HCI as it is currently constituted and to develop new possibilities for the discipline. James Pierce 0001, Yolande A. A. Strengers, Phoebe Sengers, Susanne Bødker |
ACM Trans. Comput. Hum. Interact. | 3 |
| 2012 | Autobiographical design in HCI research: designing and learning through use-it-yourselfabstractDesigning a system with yourself as a target user and evaluating the design through your own self-usage is commonly considered a questionable approach in HCI research. Perhaps for this reason, HCI research including extensive self-usage of a design is underdocumented. Yet such self-usage does happen and many researchers have found great value in the lessons learned from it. Our goal in this paper is to bring these hidden practices to light and offer guidelines for how HCI researchers can usefully engage in what we term 'autobiographical design'---design research drawing on extensive, genuine usage by those creating or building a system. Through interviews with HCI experts who have engaged in variations of autobiographical design, we draw out the possibilities and limitations of autobiographical design methods and lay out best practices for its use as an HCI research method. Carman Neustaedter, Phoebe Sengers |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 2 |
| 2012 | Sustainably unpersuaded: how persuasion narrows our vision of sustainabilityabstractIn this paper we provide a critical analysis of persuasive sustainability research from 2009-2011. Drawing on critical sociological theory of modernism, we argue that persuasion is based on a limited framing of sustainability, human behavior, and their interrelationship. This makes supporting sustainability easier, but leads to characteristic patterns of breakdown. We then detail problems that emerge from this narrowing of vision, such as how the framing of sustainability as the optimization of a simple metrics places technologies incorrectly as objective arbiters over complex issues of sustainability. We conclude by suggesting alternative approaches to move beyond these problems. Hrönn Brynjarsdóttir, Maria Håkansson, James Pierce 0001, Eric P. S. Baumer, Carl F. DiSalvo, Phoebe Sengers |
CHI | 6 |
| 2011 | "I lie to myself that i have freedom in my own schedule": productivity tools and experiences of busynessabstractThis paper examines the relationship between experiences of busyness in everyday life and the use of productivity tools, including planners, calendars and to-do lists. Field study findings demonstrate that American individuals across a demographic range have internalized a cultural emphasis of busyness as a moral value to construct positive identities as busy individuals. At the same time, they struggle with a sense of conflict around busyness, reflected in real-life experiences of clashing priorities, fantasies of downtime, and struggles with anxiety, guilt, and loss of control. Our findings also point to the ways digital and non-digital productivity tools are embedded in experiences and coping practices around busyness. Grounded in our observations we propose design principles for productivity tools that support users' identities as busy people but also address some of the perils of the American busyness ethic. Gilly Leshed, Phoebe Sengers |
CHI | 2 |
| 2011 | Fit4life: the design of a persuasive technology promoting healthy behavior and ideal weightabstractThis is a critical design paper offering a possible scenario of use intended to provoke reflection about values and politics of design in persuasive computing. We describe the design of a system - Fit4Life - that encourages individuals to address the larger goal of reducing obesity in society by promoting individual healthy behaviors. Using the Persuasive Systems Design Model [26], this paper outlines the Fit4Life persuasion context, the technology, its use of persuasive messages, and an experimental design to test the system's efficacy. We also contribute a novel discussion of the ethical and sociocultural considerations involved in our design, an issue that has remained largely unaddressed in the existing persuasive technologies literature [29]. Stephen Purpura, Victoria Schwanda Sosik, Kaiton Williams, William Stubler, Phoebe Sengers |
CHI | 5 |
| 2011 | Making epistemological trouble: Third-paradigm HCI as successor scienceabstractEpistemological issues have long been debated by feminist philosophers aiming to answer the question, ''what difference does it make to take gendered points of view seriously in the construction of knowledge?'' Coming out of this history, a strand of work in feminist science studies has argued for the necessity of ''successor science:'' new forms of science based in standpoint epistemology, i.e. a recognition of the necessarily situated points of view of scientific knowledge-makers. In this paper, we argue that such a successor science has already come into being within the field of HCI, though it is perhaps not recognized as such by its practitioners. In particular, we identify a cluster of research we term the 'third paradigm.' This cluster of research cuts across HCI research areas as typically organized by topic area. Instead, this research shares an underlying epistemological orientation closely aligned with standpoint epistemology, focused around an acknowledgment of the social, cultural, and physical situatedness of both users and analysts. Feminist philosophers of science argue that a logical outcome of standpoint epistemology is the need for science to reflexively grapple with the limitations of its own ways of knowing; we conclude such an outcome may also be in store for the third paradigm. Steve Harrison 0001, Phoebe Sengers, Deborah G. Tatar |
Interact. Comput. | 2 |
| 2010 | Mapping the landscape of sustainable HCIabstractWith the recent growth in sustainable HCI, now is a good time to map out the approaches being taken and the intellectual commitments that underlie the area, to allow for community discussion about where the field should go. Here, we provide an empirical analysis of how sustainable HCI is defining itself as a research field. Based on a corpus of published works, we identify (1) established genres in the area, (2) key unrecognized intellectual differences, and (3) emerging issues, including urgent avenues for further exploration, opportunities for interdisciplinary engagement, and key topics for debate. Carl F. DiSalvo, Phoebe Sengers, Hrönn Brynjarsdóttir |
CHI | 2 |
| 2009 | Nourishing the ground for sustainable HCI: considerations from ecologically engaged artabstractSustainable HCI is now a recognized area of human-computer interaction drawing from a variety of disciplinary approaches, including the arts. How might HCI researchers working on sustainability productively understand the discourses and practices of ecologically engaged art as a means of enriching their own activities? We argue that an understanding of both the history of ecologically engaged art, and the art-historical and critical discourses surrounding it, provide a fruitful entry-point into a more critically aware sustainable HCI. We illustrate this through a consideration of frameworks from the arts, looking specifically at how these frameworks act more as generative devices than prescriptive recipes. Taking artistic influences seriously will require a concomitant rethinking of sustainable HCI standpoints - a potentially useful exercise for HCI research in general. Carl F. DiSalvo, Kirsten Boehner, Nicholas A. Knouf, Phoebe Sengers |
CHI | 4 |
| 2008 | Subjective objectivity: negotiating emotional meaningabstractAffective computing systems face challenges in relating objective measures with subjective human experiences. Many systems have either focused on objective measures as a substitute for subjective experience (e.g. skin conductance as a direct representation of arousal) or have abandoned objective measures to focus purely on subjective experience. In this paper, we explore how to negotiate the relationship between objective signals and subjective experiences by highlighting the role of human interpretation. Our approach is informed by a reflective analysis drawing on the arts and the humanities and by a participatory study examining the emergence of emotional meaning. We demonstrate the potential of our approach for interactive affective systems through a series of conceptual designs that embody these understandings. Lucian Leahu, Steve Schwenk, Phoebe Sengers |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 3 |
| 2008 | Taming the situationist beastabstractThe interplay between arts and HCI has become increasingly commonplace in the past years, offering new opportunities for approaching interaction, but also raising challenges in integrating methods and insights from across a great disciplinary divide. In this paper, we examine the ways Situationist art practice has been used as an inspiration for HCI design. We argue that methods from Situationist art practice have often been picked up without regard for their underlying sensibility: reflection and improvisation in an activist socio-political context. We describe an experiment in incorporating Situationist sensibility in design and use it to elucidate the challenges that face HCI in truly integrating the arts. Lucian Leahu, Jennifer Thom-Santelli, Claudia Pederson, Phoebe Sengers |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 4 |
| 2008 | In-car gps navigation: engagement with and disengagement from the environmentabstractAlthough in-car GPS navigation technology is proliferating, it is not well understood how its use alters the ways people interpret their environment and navigate through it. We argue that GPS-based car navigation might disengage people from their surrounding environment, but also has the potential to open up novel ways to engage with it. We present an ethnographically-informed study with GPS users, showing evidence for practices of disengagement as well as new opportunities for engagement, illustrating our findings using rich descriptions from the field. Grounded in our observations we propose design principles for GPS systems that support richer experiences of driving. We argue that for a fuller understanding of issues of disengagement and engagement with the environment we need to move beyond a focus on the (re)design of GPS devices, and point to future directions of work that embrace a broader perspective. Gilly Leshed, Theresa Velden, Oya Y. Rieger, Blazej J. Kot, Phoebe Sengers |
CHI | 5 |
| 2008 | Interactionist AI and the promise of ubicomp, or, how to put your box in the world without putting the world in your boxabstractIn many ways, the central problem of ubiquitous computing -- how computational systems can make sense of and respond sensibly to a complex, dynamic environment laden with human meaning -- is identical to that of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Indeed, some of the central challenges that ubicomp currently faces in moving from prototypes that work in restricted environments to the complexity of real-world environments -- e.g. difficulties in scalability, integration, and fully formalizing context -- echo some of the major issues that have challenged AI researchers over the history of their field. In this paper, we explore a key moment in AI's history where researchers grappled directly with these issues, resulting in a variety of novel technical solutions within AI. We critically reflect on six strategies from this history to suggest technical solutions for how to approach the challenge of building real-world, usable solutions in ubicomp today. Lucian Leahu, Phoebe Sengers, Michael Mateas |
UbiComp | 2 |
| 2008 | The disenchantment of affect
Phoebe Sengers, Kirsten Boehner, Michael Mateas, Geri Gay |
Pers. Ubiquitous Comput. | 1 |
| 2008 | Interfaces with the ineffable: Meeting aesthetic experience on its own termsabstractA variety of approaches have emerged in HCI that grapple with the ineffable, ill-defined, and idiosyncratic nature of aesthetic experience. The most straightforward approach is to transform the ineffable aspects of these experiences into precise representations, producing systems that are well-defined and testable but may miss the fullness of the experienced phenomenon. But without formal models and codified methods, how can we design and evaluate for a phenomenon we aren't sure can be adequately captured? In this article, we present a case study of a system for reflection and awareness of emotional presence that was, in a sense, lived into being. Through system design, use, and evaluation we recount how the system evolved into something that enhanced rather than impoverished the sympathetic awareness of another. In discussing the strategies and results of the case study, we examine what it means for the HCI community to not only design for aesthetic experiences but also bring aesthetics into the practice of HCI. Kirsten Boehner, Phoebe Sengers, Simeon Warner |
ACM Trans. Comput. Hum. Interact. | 2 |
| 2007 | How HCI interprets the probesabstractWe trace how cultural probes have been adopted and adapted by the HCI community. The flexibility of probes has been central to their uptake, resulting in a proliferation of divergent uses and derivatives. The varying patterns of adaptation of the probes reveal important underlying issues in HCI, suggesting underacknowledged disagreements about valid interpretation and the relationship between methods and their underlying methodology. With this analysis, we aim to clarify discussions around probes, and, more importantly, around how we define and evaluate methods in HCI, especially those grounded in unfamiliar conceptions of how research should be done. Kirsten Boehner, Janet Vertesi, Phoebe Sengers, Paul Dourish |
CHI | 3 |
| 2007 | Provoking sociabilityabstractIn this study, we explore the potential usefulness of disturbing, uncomfortable systems, demonstrating that provocative technology can have a positive effect on social relationships. We designed and evaluated an agent-based system that collects user information by asking seemingly benign questions, and then uses it to spread false, strange gossip throughout an office space. We show that provocative interaction on-line can improve off-line sociability. Brooke E. Foucault, Helena M. Mentis, Phoebe Sengers, Devon Welles |
CHI | 3 |
| 2007 | Enhancing ubiquitous computing with user interpretation: field testing the home health horoscopeabstractDomestic ubiquitous computing systems often rely on inferences about activities in the home, but the open-ended, dynamic and heterogeneous nature of the home poses serious problems for such systems. In this paper, we propose that by shifting the responsibility for interpretation from the system to the user, we can build systems that interact with people at humanly meaningful levels, preserve privacy, and encourage engagement with suggested topics. We describe a system that embodies this hypothesis, using sensors and inferencing software to assess 'domestic wellbeing' and presenting the results to inhabitants through an output chosen for its ambiguity. In a three-month field study of the system, customised for a particular volunteer household, users engaged extensively with the system, discussing and challenging its outputs and responding to the particular topics it raised. William W. Gaver, Phoebe Sengers, Tobie Kerridge, Joseph Kaye, John Bowers 0001 |
CHI | 2 |
| 2007 | How emotion is made and measured
Kirsten Boehner, Rogério Abreu de Paula, Paul Dourish, Phoebe Sengers |
Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. | 4 |
| 2006 | Staying open to interpretation: engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluationabstractHuman-Computer Interaction (HCI) often focuses on how designers can develop systems that convey a single, specific, clear interpretation of what they are for and how they should be used and experienced. New domains such as domestic and public environments, new influences from the arts and humanities, and new techniques in HCI itself are converging to suggest that multiple, potentially competing interpretations can fruitfully co-exist. In this paper, we lay out the contours of the new space opened by a focus on multiple interpretations, which may more fully address the complexity, dynamics and interplay of user, system, and designer interpretation. We document how design and evaluation strategies shift when we abandon the presumption that a specific, authoritative interpretation of the systems we build is necessary, possible or desirable. Phoebe Sengers, William W. Gaver |
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems | 1 |
| 2006 | Historical Analysis: Using the Past to Design the Future
Susan Wyche, Phoebe Sengers, Rebecca E. Grinter |
UbiComp | 2 |
| 2005 | Making by making strange: Defamiliarization and the design of domestic technologiesabstractThis article argues that because the home is so familiar, it is necessary to make it strange, or defamiliarize it, in order to open its design space. Critical approaches to technology design are of both practical and social importance in the home. Home appliances are loaded with cultural associations such as the gendered division of domestic labor that are easy to overlook. Further, homes are not the same everywhere---even within a country. Peoples' aspirations and desires differ greatly across and between cultures. The target of western domestic technology design is often not the user, but the consumer. Web refrigerators that create shopping lists, garbage cans that let advertisers know what is thrown away, cabinets that monitor their contents and order more when supplies are low are central to current images of the wireless, digital home of the future. Drawing from our research in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Asia, we provide three different narratives of defamiliarization. A historical reading of American kitchens provides a lens with which to scrutinize new technologies of domesticity, an ethnographic account of an extended social unit in England problematizes taken-for-granted domestic technologies, and a comparative ethnography of the role of information and communication technologies in the daily lives of urban Asia's middle classes reveals the ways in which new technologies can be captured and domesticated in unexpected ways. In the final section of the article, we build on these moments of defamiliarization to suggest a broad set of challenges and strategies for design in the home. Genevieve Bell, Mark Blythe, Phoebe Sengers |
ACM Trans. Comput. Hum. Interact. | 3 |
| 2003 | Sense and sensibility: evaluation and interactive artabstractHCI evaluation methods are useful for improving the design of interactive systems, yet they may be rejected by nontraditional technology disciplines such as media art. We have developed a two-tiered evaluation model that responds to the concerns of interactive artists and have used it to improve the design of an interactive artwork, the Influencing Machine, exploring issues in affective computing. The method was interpretive, focusing on giving the artists a grounded feeling for how the machine was interpreted and their message was communicated. We describe the resulting design of the Influencing Machine and the reactions of users. The study itself is part of the art piece - together these activities achieve the goal of the artists: to provoke our cultural notions of whether a machine can "have emotions". Kristina Höök, Phoebe Sengers, Gerd Andersson |
CHI | 2 |
| 1999 | Designing Comprehensible Agents
Phoebe Sengers |
IJCAI | 1 |