This pictorial examines Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour and Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer as sites of sonic speculation—designed futures centering Blackness, technology, joy, and resistance through multisensory orchestration. We introduce sonic speculation as a holistic approach where sound, visual design, embodied performance, and technological intervention constitute experiential futures. Through close analysis, we trace how these performances integrate five design dimensions: sonic architectures, visual metaphors of transformation, interactivity and collective embodiment, fashion as technology, and futurist aesthetics. These dimensions address three Afrofuturist concerns: political resistance, Black embodiment, and technology's relationship to Black existence. For interaction designers and HCI scholars, these performances offer insights into multisensory, culturally-grounded speculative design. We demonstrate how large-scale performance design can model interactive systems honoring marginalized communities’ histories while imagining liberatory futures, challenging the field to learn from Black femme artists as design theorists whose practices reveal possibilities current scholarship has yet to theorize.

The work of a game designer often encompasses the entire player experience, from determining game mechanics and writing narrative to addressing technical aspects such as level design and development. Game players and game designers have called for increased racial diversity in the games industry, both in-game and behind the scenes. However, little is known about how working game designers understand, engage with, and design for race. Through semi-structured interviews (n=15), this study explores the creative practices and expertise of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) game designers and developers, primarily based in the United States. We focus on how they conceptualize, approach, and engage with race, both individually and in collaborative teams. We contribute insight into how race is translated into tangible digital and physical representations, and into broader creative and business approaches to race in the games industry.

In this paper, we explore teaching and learning ecological justice in a transformational game design context with sixteen American BIPOC low-income high school students. Participants took part in a three-session workshop in an urban metropolitan area, where we examined the affordances of a culturally relevant curriculum with our students as they learned about ecological justice. Students were tasked with creating narrative-based transformational games using Twine. Findings suggest that integrating culturally relevant pedagogy deepens students’ engagement and encourages them to share their personal experiences in the transformational games they created, leading to a transformational growth within the students themselves. Although, students’ games relied heavily on facts and guilt as persuasive tools, mirroring patterns in existing climate games, some games demonstrated more sophisticated approaches using restricted choices and narrative complexity. We theorize how this relates to our lessons on game design, the usage of Twine and the wider technological community.

Critical consciousness as described by Paolo Freire involves the awareness of systemic inequalities.Critical consciousness is important in dismantling oppressive systems, but can be difficult and uncomfortable to develop.This study investigates how Papers, Please works as a transformational game about border crossing to facilitate the development of players' critical consciousness as well as how players' lived experiences are reflected through their ingame decision-making.We conducted a mixed-methods two-week diary study and phenomenological interviews with 41 participants, many of whom being first-time players.We assess players' experiences through the six qualitative stages of critical consciousness development, which we adopt as a method of assessing learning within critical pedagogies.Using this framework, we suggest that in-game conflicting and reactionary immigration policy changes spark value and moral disequilibrium, which, in turn, may trigger players' reflection on the game's unjust immigration system and lead to critical introspection, motivation, and praxis around border crossing and immigration in the United States.

A long standing goal of usable privacy and security (UPS) research is to align end-user behaviors with expert suggestions, such as through developing tools to increase user control and awareness of security and privacy (S&P) threats. These approaches, while necessary, are not sufficient to combat the ubiquitous slow violence of S&P harms that impede on people’s motivation to change and erode their trust in the institutions in which experts are often entrenched. We propose that we can only effect true change and rebuild trust with users if we first deconstruct our norms of telling users what’s best and expecting them to comply. We draw from concepts in critical computing, design, and games research, to propose a research agenda—“Transformational Provocation”—that involves provoking transformation in not just users’ S&P knowledge, skills, or behaviors, but also their senses of truth, self, relationships, and society. Moreover, we demonstrate the value and application of our framework through illustrative case studies. With this framework, we call upon the UPS community to pursue new design opportunities for engendering organic and enduring intrinsic motivation for people to act on their S&P, both on their own and together.

Recently, there has been growing interest in designing future technologies for and with Students of Color (SoC) within HCI scholarship. This study focuses on centering SoC's desire for flourishing as a means of empowerment and prioritizing their positive and meaningful experiences within predominantly white institutions (PWIs) in the United States. Motivated by this, we conducted a two-phase case study with SoC. In the first phase, qualitative semi-structured interviews with 17 SoC were conducted. Findings revealed the development of learned values such as pride, resistance, hope, and aspirations, which facilitated students' strong personal growth and cultural development. In the second phase, we utilized these findings to create a SoC learned values toolkit. This toolkit was used to facilitate five co-design studies with 13 SoC, to imagine future technologies that foster and promote their flourishing. The co-design research resulted in 13 social technology design proposals. Empirical analysis of the co-design sessions demonstrated that participants' desires involved finding safe spaces, accessing resources, connecting with racially similar communities, and building relationships with role models. We further identified an emergent tension between the envisioned technologies for flourishing and the ethical implications of trust, vulnerability, and the spread of misinformation. Resisting design universalism, this paper celebrates the specificity of a design process for our audience of SoC PWI students. We conclude by providing recommendations for future pluriversal designs that prioritize SoC's desire for flourishing.

Machine Learning (ML) is now integrated from everyday technologies to sophisticated infrastructures, providing fast, efficient, and scalable decision-making services, with increasing evidence of ML perpetuating invisible harms and biases. The hidden and socio-technical nature of ML biases can make them difficult to detect and prevent without proper literacy. To investigate this, we developed a novel online multiplayer board game Equality Engine, where players learn about various ML biases and debiasing techniques. We conducted a mixed-method formative playtest case study to solicit feedback from post-secondary students (N = 12) with a range of ML experience. We found that students' self-reported ML bias-debias knowledge improved significantly after playing the game. The game was perceived as easy to use because of the social interaction and immersion the game enabled. Students would also use the game in the future because of the self-reported knowledge gained from the game. Although these positive results may be influenced by measurement bias, our study contributes to the design of an approachable game, which not only facilitates exposure, collaboration, and opportunities for critical reflection on ML biases but also provides recommendations for future game designs that can facilitate ML ethics discourse and literacy among a broader audience.

Video games are celebrated for providing unique interactive experiences that allow players to construct their own narratives through play. However, Black gamers have been repeatedly denied representational agency to craft their own narrative and design game characters that reflect their true selves. To explore how a community of Black gamers has used game modifications (mods) to address representation, we conducted a qualitative study of 22 Black players of "The Sims" life simulation game. We investigate how "Black simmers" create and integrate mods and custom content to represent Black identities and culture in their gameplay through the lens of a 'community of play.' As a sensitizing concept, we also understand participants' testimonies through the lens of Black feminist thought. We found that participants have cultivated a community that exists as a site of theoretical praxis. Further, the community centers mentoring, collective care, storytelling, and Black joy, as well as performs the labor necessary to preserve this gaming space for Black players -- drawing further implications for resisting hegemonic whiteness in the games industry through a pluriversal game design practice.

Responding to Ruberg’s notion of the “queer games avant-garde” where games are made by, for, and about queer gamers [23], we sought out “queer TTRPGs” where queerness is centered in the design of a given tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) system and/or setting. In this study, we curated a ludography of seven queer TTRPGs that support the exploration of queer identity: Thirsty Sword Lesbians [36], Monsterhearts 2 [2], Dream Askew [1], Alice is Missing [29], Sleepaway [8], Lichcraft [19], and Wanderhome [9]. In our content analysis of the game guidebooks, we found that the games guide players through queer play experiences through tenets of queer theory, while using visibility and direct disclosure of the game’s themes to resist the status-quo of erasing queerness in traditional media. We close with reflections on how other game designers can leverage these strategies to support and uplift queer gamers.

Research and design in human-computer interaction centers problem-solving, causing a downstream effect of framing work with and for marginalized communities predominantly from the lens of deficit and damage. Frameworks such as assets-based design and designing for resilience have emerged to highlight the strengths of these communities. However, we observe an additional need to center positive aspects of humanity, such as joy, pleasure, rest, and cultural heritage, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. In this paper, we present three case studies of existing technologies that center BIPOC flourishing to provide an alternative path for HCI. We propose six actionable tenets for designing for flourishing in the everyday: (1) seek opportunities to design for self-actualization, (2) identify and center the desire to flourish, (3) collaborate and distribute power, (4) refrain from damage-centered reductionism, (5) bring the humanity of a community into the design process, (6) and evaluate for self-sustainability.

Engaging diverse participants in HCI research is critical for creating safe, inclusive, and equitable technology. However, there is a lack of guidelines on when, why, and how HCI researchers collect study participants’ race and ethnicity. Our paper aims to take the first step toward such guidelines by providing a systematic review and discussion of the status quo of race and ethnicity data collection in HCI. Through an analysis of 2016–2021 CHI proceedings and a survey with 15 authors who published in these proceedings, we found that reporting race and ethnicity of participants is very rare (<3%) and that researchers are far from consensus. Drawing from multidisciplinary literature and our findings, we devise considerations for HCI researchers to decide why, when, and from whom to collect race and ethnicity data. For truly inclusive, equitable technologies, we encourage deliberate decisions rather than default omissions.

Homelessness presents a long-standing problem worldwide. Like other welfare services, homeless services have gained increased traction in Machine Learning (ML) research. Unhoused persons are vulnerable and using their data in the ML pipeline raises serious concerns about the unintended harms and consequences of prioritizing different ML values. To address this, we conducted a critical analysis of 40 research papers identified through a systematic literature review in ML homelessness service provision research. We found that the values of novelty, performance, and identifying limitations were uplifted in these papers, whereas (in)efficiency, (low/high) cost, fast, (violated) privacy, and (homeless condition) reproducibility valuescollapse. Consequently, unhoused persons were lost (i.e., humans were deprioritized) at multi-level ML abstraction of predictors, categories, and algorithms. Our findings illuminate potential pathways forward at the intersection of data science, HCI and STS by situating humans at the center to support this vulnerable community.

Reducing uncertainty around the nature of racist interactions is one of the key motivations driving individual behaviors for coping with those incidents. However, there are few appropriate technologies to support BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) in engaging in social uncertainty reduction around this vulnerable, sensitive topic. This paper reports on an exploratory design study investigating how social technology might facilitate uncertainty reduction through three “provotypes” - provocative prototypes of user-generated speculative design concepts. U.S.-based participants engaged with the provotypes through an interactive fiction to explore their usefulness in the context of a racist microaggression. Results showed that engaging the provotypes through interactive fiction facilitated complex and productive interactions and critiques. This work contributes a novel method for conducting exploratory design, remote user studies using interactive fiction as well as priorities, tensions, and further information what role, if any, technology might play in managing racist interactions.

Queerness can help redefine interactive technologies and re-conceptualize their design beyond cisheteronormativity. Recently, games have emerged as promising avenues for exploring queerness. In this research-through-design (RtD) effort, we advance queer explorations in games by leveraging queer temporality to evoke and explore feelings of alienation and isolation in a horror game called You're Going To Be Late. We further engage with queer individuals who playtest our game and participate in focus groups to discuss how queer they felt our game was and what they regard as queer game mechanics. Participants had varying experiences while playing our game, ranging from serendipity and wonder to alienation and confusion. The focus groups described queer game mechanics as queer modes of play and often tapped into gender representation. Finally, we show how including and amplifying queer voices in discursive efforts around interactive technology design has implications for transformative and critical reflections that can broadly benefit game design and HCI research.

Content creators are instructed to write textual descriptions of visual content to make it accessible; yet existing guidelines lack specifics on how to write about people’s appearance, particularly while remaining mindful of consequences of (mis)representation. In this paper, we report on interviews with screen reader users who were also Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Non-binary, and/or Transgender on their current image description practices and preferences, and experiences negotiating theirs and others’ appearances non-visually. We discuss these perspectives, and the ethics of humans and AI describing appearance characteristics that may convey the race, gender, and disabilities of those photographed. In turn, we share considerations for more carefully describing appearance, and contexts in which such information is perceived salient. Finally, we offer tensions and questions for accessibility research to equitably consider politics and ecosystems in which technologies will embed, such as potential risks of human and AI biases amplifying through image descriptions.

Ranging from subtle to overt, unintentional to systemic, navigating racism is additional everyday work for many people. Yet the needs of people who experience racism have been overlooked as a fertile ground for better technology. Through a series of workshops we call Foundational Fiction, we engaged BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) in participatory design to identify qualities of technology that can support people coping before, during, and after a racist interaction. Participants developed storyboards for digital tools that offer advice, predict consequences, identify racist remarks and intervene, educate both targets and perpetrators about interpersonal and systemic racism, and more. In the paper we present our workshop method utilizing interactive fiction, participants’ design concepts, prevalent themes (reducing uncertainty and offering comfort), and we provide critical analysis of the complexity of technology in these contexts. This work identifies specific opportunities for exploring anti-racist social tools.

In this short paper, we share our experiences designing a game for and about students of color at predominantly white institutions as a case study for a BIPOC-centric game design process. Through our design process, we encountered tensions in game design. For example, the frequency and relative inconsequence of physically violent death harmfully emphasizing real-world trauma in a game where all the main characters are people of color. We also encountered exciting opportunities in how we might create game experiences truly centering people of color. For example, the surprisingly novel delight of designing and creating slice-of-life narrative scenes in which people of color interact and thrive. We share how we work through these tensions and opportunities in order to open a conversation around game design processes by and for people of color as ways to uplift ourselves and our communities.

The human-computer interaction community has made some efforts toward racial diversity, but the outcomes remain meager. We introduce critical race theory and adapt it for HCI to lay a theoretical basis for race-conscious efforts, both in research and within our community. Building on the theory's original tenets, we argue that racism is pervasive in everyday socio-technical systems; that the HCI community is prone to "interest convergence", where concessions to inclusion require benefits to those in power; and that the neoliberal underpinnings of the technology industry itself propagate racism. Critical race theory uses storytelling as a means to upend deep-seated assumptions, and we relate several personal stories to highlight ongoing problems of race in HCI. The implications: all HCI research must be attuned to issues of race; participation of underrepresented minorities must be sought in all of our activities; and as a community, we cannot become comfortable while racial disparities exist.

Over 35% of Americans belong to racial minority groups. Racism targeting these individuals results in a range of harmful physical, psychological, and practical consequences. The present work aims to shed light on the current sense-making and support-seeking practices exhibited by targets of racism, as well as to identify the core needs and barriers that future socio-technical interventions could potentially address. The long-term goal of this work is to understand how CSCW researchers and designers could best support members of marginalized groups to make sense of and to seek support for experiences with racism. Narrative episode interviews with targets of racism revealed a number of key entry points for intervention. For example, participants' personal stories confirmed that uncertainty, both about the nature and consequences of the experience of racism, is a key motivator for support-seeking. In addition, despite the need for support, participants largely do not trust public forms of social media for support-seeking. We discuss how participants' accounts of the complex labor involved in determining who "gets it" in identifying potential supporters, and in navigating the complexities of trust and agency in sharing their experiences, present clear implications for the design of new socio-technical platforms for members of racial minority groups.

This paper introduces flash organizations: crowds structured like organizations to achieve complex and open-ended goals. Microtask workflows, the dominant crowdsourcing structures today, only enable goals that are so simple and modular that their path can be entirely pre-defined. We present a system that organizes crowd workers into computationally-represented structures inspired by those used in organizations - roles, teams, and hierarchies - which support emergent and adaptive coordination toward open-ended goals. Our system introduces two technical contributions: 1) encoding the crowd's division of labor into de-individualized roles, much as movie crews or disaster response teams use roles to support coordination between on-demand workers who have not worked together before; and 2) reconfiguring these structures through a model inspired by version control, enabling continuous adaptation of the work and the division of labor. We report a deployment in which flash organizations successfully carried out open-ended and complex goals previously out of reach for crowdsourcing, including product design, software development, and game production. This research demonstrates digitally networked organizations that flexibly assemble and reassemble themselves from a globally distributed online workforce to accomplish complex work.

The physical constraints of smartwatches limit the range and complexity of tasks that can be completed. Despite interface improvements on smartwatches, the promise of enabling productive work remains largely unrealized. This paper presents WearWrite, a system that enables users to write documents from their smartwatches by leveraging a crowd to help translate their ideas into text. WearWrite users dictate tasks, respond to questions, and receive notifications of major edits on their watch. Using a dynamic task queue, the crowd receives tasks issued by the watch user and generic tasks from the system. In a week-long study with seven smartwatch users supported by approximately 29 crowd workers each, we validate that it is possible to manage the crowd writing process from a watch. Watch users captured new ideas as they came to mind and managed a crowd during spare moments while going about their daily routine. WearWrite represents a new approach to getting work done from wearables using the crowd.

We introduce flash teams, a framework for dynamically assembling and managing paid experts from the crowd. Flash teams advance a vision of expert crowd work that accomplishes complex, interdependent goals such as engineering and design. These teams consist of sequences of linked modular tasks and handoffs that can be computationally managed. Interactive systems reason about and manipulate these teams' structures: for example, flash teams can be recombined to form larger organizations and authored automatically in response to a user's request. Flash teams can also hire more people elastically in reaction to task needs, and pipeline intermediate output to accelerate completion times. To enable flash teams, we present Foundry, an end-user authoring platform and runtime manager. Foundry allows users to author modular tasks, then manages teams through handoffs of intermediate work. We demonstrate that Foundry and flash teams enable crowdsourcing of a broad class of goals including design prototyping, course development, and film animation, in half the work time of traditional self-managed teams.