Social robots in the home bring new privacy risks and concerns for older adults. Yet, current technology privacy mechanisms typically use a one-time and universal consent mechanism (e.g., user agreement checkbox, browser cookie setting, etc.), lacking consideration of how privacy is holistically experienced. Designing for privacy requires a multidimensional approach to support how older adults experience privacy. To investigate older adult-centered privacy mechanisms for social robots, we conducted two participatory design (PD) workshops at local assisted living facilities. Our findings from these workshops suggest that older adults do not treat privacy as static, but as a temporal and situational practice that requires continuous negotiations and revisions. We subsequently conducted a post-PD speculative design (SD) process that extracted three design features for privacy—aware social robots-privacy profiles, real-time privacy feedback, and data ownership tools—that can support older adults’ multidimensional privacy experiences.

Agender euphoria is a new term representing the powerful feelings of happiness, joy, and contentment derived from experiences in gender-free embodiments, spaces, and activities. People with and without agender and adjacent identities (e.g., genderless, gender-free, non-binary, gender-apathetic) may have such experiences under the right circumstances. Video games can offer gender minorities a safe haven for gender euphoric experiences. However, the possibility of agender euphoric experiences was unexplored. We considered this overlooked frame of self-actualization with 142 people who identified as having or desiring agender euphoric experiences. Using the critical incident technique (CIT), we uncovered how games and play experiences create (and inhibit) agender euphoria. We surface this experiential phenomenon and provide empirically-grounded criteria for the design of games to elicit agender euphoric experiences for everyone, but especially agender and agender adjacent players. This work adds to the growing critical literatures on marginalized experiences in games research and human-computer interaction.

Photosensitivity among social media and internet users is an underappreciated risk factor for real physiological harm which can be actively or passively caused by designer and developer choices. Flashing graphics caused by GIFs, video, or even interface animations can trigger nausea, dizziness, migraines, and even seizures. Although there are some guidelines for protections for photosensitive users in W3C's WCAG, these guidelines are often not met by developers, and are insufficient for robust user protection. In this multi-pronged exploratory research project, we work with photosensitive users, design students, and graphics experts to imagine a complete ecosystem of protections which layer vulnerable users at the community, platform, system, and hardware levels. In this paper, we argue for the urgency of reforms in device and internet infrastructure, development practices, design norms, and community behaviors. We then propose an ecosystem of protections which more holistically shield photosensitive users from ambient, accidental, and malicious exposure to flashing graphics.

Accessibility research strives to develop technology that is useful for disabled people, but the research processes that we engage in do not always center disabled people in a way that allows us to shape artifacts so that they benefit disabled communities. In this workshop, we want to address core questions that are relevant in this context: How can research questions be defined in a way that shares power between research teams and technology users? How should research processes be designed to be broadly accessible for disabled people? And what are equitable ways of summarizing and sharing research findings in a way that allows disabled communities to critically appraise findings with us? Through discussion among all attendees, we want to develop a practical guide in disability-centered research that will be made available and further developed as a community resource when engaging in accessibility research.

Research in HCI applied to clinical interventions relies on normative assumptions about which bodies and minds are healthy, valuable, and desirable. To disrupt this normalizing drive in HCI, we define a “counterventional approach” to intervention technology design informed by critical scholarship and community perspectives. This approach is meant to unsettle normative assumptions of intervention as urgent, necessary, and curative. We begin with a historical overview of intervention in HCI and its critics. Then, through reparative readings of past HCI projects in autism intervention, we illustrate the emergent principles of a counterventional approach and how it may manifest research outcomes that are fundamentally divergent from dominant approaches. We then explicate characteristics of “counterventions” – projects that aim to contest dominant sociotechnical paradigms through privileging community and participants in research inquiry, interaction design, and analysis of outcomes. These divergent research imaginaries have transformative implications for how interventionist HCI might be conducted in future.

Autism has become a popular context for accessible technology researchers, yet a majority of HCI projects for autism and ADHD do not engage in participatory methods or otherwise involve disabled stakeholders in the project and research design. Prior inquiry has identified executive function as a common difficulty for which technologies may provide novel benefits. In this study, we explore how autistic adults currently use technologies, broadly defined, to augment executive function and support themselves in day-to-day tasks. We collect qualitative data from narratives elicited during informal asynchronous interviews to conduct a digital ethnomethodology. Following from principles of Design Justice, crip technoscience, and cyborg assemblage theory, we investigate how autistic adults articulate their own sociotechnical environments into technologically mediated assemblages of executive function and interpersonal webs of care. These patterns of sociotechnical formation inform future work in research and design for tools that can mediate executive function for all users.

Technology research for neurodivergent conditions is largely shaped by research aims which privilege neuro-normative outcomes. As such, there is an epistemic imbalance in meaning making about these technologies. We conducted a critical literature review of technologies designed for people with ADHD, focusing on how ADHD is framed, the research aims and approaches, the role of people with ADHD within the research process, and the types of systems being developed within Computing and HCI. Our analysis and review is conducted explicitly from an insider perspective, bringing our perspectives as neurodivergent researchers to the topic of technologies in the context of ADHD. We found that 1) technologies are largely used to ‘mitigate’ the experiences of ADHD which are perceived as disruptive to neurotypical standards of behaviour; 2) little HCI research in the area invites this population to co-construct the technologies or to leverage neurodivergent experiences in the construction of research aims; and 3) participant resistance to deficit frames can be read within the researchers’ own accounts of participant actions. We discuss the implications of this status quo for disabled people and technology researchers alike, and close with a set of recommendations for future work in this area.

COVID-19 illness and death has disproportionately impacted marginalized groups the world over. In the United States, Black and Indigenous people have endured the largest risk of death. Disabled and chronically ill people have continued to isolate as their peers “return to normal”, bearing sole liability for their own safety in a society that deems their lives not worth the “sacrifice” of public health measures. While public and institutional policy makers bare personal responsibility for “survival of the fittest” approaches to public health, data science and visualization has contributed to and legitimized many of these eugenic policy decisions through design tropes I characterize as ‘eugenic visuality’. In this paper, I explore how inadequacies and obscurities in COVID-19 data visualization have contributed to and sustained public narratives that devalue marginalized lives for the comfort of white-supremacist and capitalist social norms. While I focus on visualizations and statements provided by the CDC, the implications extend beyond any individual or institution to our collective preconceptions and values. Namely, unexamined biases and unquestioned norms are embedded in data science and visualization, constraining how data is represented and interpreted. These assumptions limit how data can be leveraged in the pursuit of just social policy. Therefore, I propose guiding principles for a Just Visuality in data science and representation, supported by the work of disabled activists and scholars of color.

The demand for machine learning and data science has grown exponentially in recent years. Yet, as the influence of these fields reach farther into daily life, the disparate impacts of these algorithms and models on more marginalized populations have also begun to surface rapidly. To address this emerging crisis, it is necessary to equip the next generation of computer scientists with the ethical tools needed to tackle these issues. Thus, an exploratory study was conducted to investigate how students who are currently enrolled in computing-related programs evaluate and understand the ethical and social impact of technology. 43 students in computing majors were presented with 5 scenarios of different technologies that utilizes machine learning to address potentially sensitive areas (e.g. policing, medical diagnosing). The long-format responses to these scenarios were qualitatively analyzed. Additionally, quantitative analysis was conducted after qualitatively coding the long-format responses into four sentiments. Ultimately, we found that participants were able to decipher the social implications of technology. However, many issues of systemic discrimination were missing from participants' analysis. Alarmingly, our findings also indicated that 50% or more of participants were not exposed to most of the technologies highlighted in the scenarios, which highlights a potential gap in computing curriculum of connecting ethics as well as racial, cultural, and socioeconomic understanding to computer science. Based on these results, we suggest that computing-related curriculum be reevaluated with ethical training in mind.

An ever-increasing body of work within HCI investigates questions of around “Women’s Health” with the aim to disrupt the status quo of defaulting to an implicit norm of cis-male bodies. This laudable and feminist project has the potential to drastically improve the inclusivity and availability of health care. To explore how this research attends to gender, embodiment and identity, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of 17 publications explicitly positioning themselves as works concerned with “Women’s Health”. We find essentialised articulations of embodiment and gender, though little discussion on the intersections of race, class, sexuality and cultural contexts. Through two speculative designs, we illustrate potential responses to our analysis: The Shadow Zine, a reflection of self and the Compass, a token for community care. 1 Our work provides an opportunity to develop a broader frame of gender and health, one that centers (gendered) marginalised health by attending to the power structures of existing medical practices and norms.

SIGACCESS and SIGCHI are being shaped by new members as they integrate feminist theory, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and critical disability studies into the field. What happens when we begin to hold each other accountable to the impact our work has on marginalized users and communities? How do we develop a community of collaborative personal growth and institutional transformation? In this experience report, the authors retell the tangled events that brought them together. Through the passionate witnessing of critical analysis and critique, what might have been a contentious adversarial relationship became a potent partnership devoted to pushing the field toward a transformative future. From our story, we present reflections for the "Prefigurative Politics" of socially conscious computing.