Meaningful connections formed between people and robots are a key factor in sustaining long-term interaction. Yet while onboarding experiences for social robot products are often carefully designed to cultivate these bonds, offboarding receives far less attention. This imbalance can result in abrupt disruptions in human-robot bonds when products reach end-of-life. In this paper, we examine a case study describing the shutdown of Moxie, a social robot designed to support children’s socio-emotional learning. Through a qualitative analysis of the company’s public communications and users’ online reactions to the shutdown, we identify key missed opportunities to prepare and support users throughout the robot’s final interactions. In the absence of a structured offboarding experience, the emotional, technical, and communicative burdens were shifted to parents. Drawing from these findings, we introduce ethical sunsetting recommendations for social robots and offer a reimagined offboarding experience aimed at supporting healthy emotional detachment during product end-of-life.

Teenage years are a critical period for shaping food practices and health behaviors, yet teens remain underrepresented in research on future food and health technologies. This paper reports on design fiction workshops where 20 teens speculated on artifacts such as health-tracking mirrors and food-making machines while reflecting on their eating habits and values. Our analysis shows how teens negotiate their human stances in a techno-centric world, balancing excitement about innovation with concerns over health, control, and responsibility. We contribute to HCI by: (1) identifying teen-specific design considerations for reflective healthy-eating technologies, highlighting “absence” as a protective affordance; (2) reframing food technologies for teens as sites of family care and playful identity work, opening a design space at the intersection of reflection and play; and (3) advancing methodological understanding of youth-centered design fiction by showing how dual-mode speculative workshops can move teen participants beyond solutionist or anti-solutionist positions toward grounded negotiation with sociotechnical systems.

Technological innovations are often recognized for improving accessibility, but are also critiqued for perpetuating exclusionary practices in disability research.In the context of neurodivergence, these tensions are intensified by its diverse and heterogeneous nature, alongside the continuously evolving understanding and awareness surrounding it.As tech startups act as catalysts for innovation, offering technological "solutions" that directly engage with the lived experiences of disabled individuals, a critical question arises: How do the discursive strategies used by these companies reflect and construct broader societal narratives surrounding neurodivergence?This study employs thematic and discourse analysis to examine the websites of 38 startups that claim to enhance the well-being of autistic people.Our analysis identifies three key thematic patterns in the corpus: fears, where startups emphasize urgency and evoke cultural anxieties; hopes, where they pin aspirations for empowerment and inclusion on technological innovation; and oscillations, where portrayals shift between different models of disability, allowing companies to address multiple audiences.These strategies not only influence how autism and care are publicly understood but also shape the design priorities, market logic, and ethical direction of disability-focused technologies.We call for greater attention to how language in disability tech participates in constructing the conditions of care and legitimacy in accessibility studies.

Much research on older people with memory concerns is focused on tracking and informed by the priorities of others. In this paper, we seek to understand the potential that people with memory concerns see in tracking. We conducted interviews with 29 participants with concerns about their memory and engaged in an affective writing approach. We find a range of potentials that can be traced to how participants are already self-tracking. Emotions associated with these potentials vary: from acceptance to resistance, and positive anticipation to aversion. Participants are emotionally motivated to foreclose possibilities in some instances and keep them open in others. While individual and unique, potential is structured by forces that include individual routines, relationships with others, and macro-level institutions and cultural contexts. We reflect on these findings in the context of research on self-tracking with older adults, designing with ambiguity, and forces that structure the experience of living with memory concerns.

Open government data initiatives have the potential to improve civic participation and trust in government by making government data more transparent to and inclusive of citizens. However, it remains under debate if and how open data initiatives can meet these goals. Through a case study of a state-level government open data initiative with rural hunters, we explore the impact that open data had on citizen-government relations and citizen perspectives on data more broadly. Interviews with 14 hunters led to findings that the open data initiative improved feelings of trust and respect between hunters and the government agency behind the open data initiative. Additionally, hunters' involvement with data collection and consumption led them to stake a role in the open data ecosystem and develop critical perspectives on data. We suggest that open data initiatives could better achieve these benefits by valuing citizen expertise in open data contributions and involving citizens more holistically in the open data ecosystem.

We are again thrilled to be able to present the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) community with an issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, containing very interesting and relevant scholarship from its members. This issue includes 211 papers, of which 192 were accepted from the January 2024 cycle, and 19 were accepted from the July 2024 cycle. It reflects great efforts and contributions from external reviewers, Associate Chairs and Editors, who together have conducted a rigorous review process to select contributions of the highest quality advancing the CSCW field. As Track Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing CSCW's tradition of high-quality scholarship across the years.

We are again thrilled to be able to present the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) community with an issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, containing very interesting and relevant scholarship from its members. This issue includes 313 papers, of which 45 were accepted from the January 2024 cycle, 85 were accepted from the July 2025 cycle, and 183 were accepted from the October 2025 cycle. It reflects great efforts and contributions from external reviewers, Associate Chairs and Editors, who together have conducted a rigorous review process to select contributions of the highest quality advancing the CSCW field. As Track Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing CSCW's tradition of high-quality scholarship across the years.

Recent work explores how to educate and encourage users to protect their online privacy. We tested the efficacy of short videos for educating users about targeted advertising on Facebook. We designed a video that utilized an emotional appeal to explain risks associated with targeted advertising (fear appeal), and which demonstrated how to use the associated ad privacy settings (digital literacy). We also designed a version of this video which additionally showed the viewer their personal Facebook ad profile, facilitating personal reflection on how they are currently being profiled (reflective learning). We conducted an experiment (n = 127) in which participants watched a randomly assigned video and measured the impact over the following 10 weeks. We found that these videos significantly increased user engagement with Facebook advertising preferences, especially for those who viewed the reflective learning content. However, those who only watched the fear appeal content were more likely to disengage with Facebook as a whole.

We report on a new ethics course for industry-bound students in a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) professional master's program. The goal is to prepare students to think critically about the technology they design and to drive ethical change within their future organizations. Unlike research-oriented graduate programs, students in professional master's programs primarily seek to enter industry, oftentimes making a career change from a non-computing area. Thus, in addition to supporting students' ethical reasoning skills, ethics pedagogy needs to also help students develop core skills in the technical discipline and be grounded in real-world situations to align with their practice-based goals. To achieve this, we structure our course around three principles: survey (introducing contemporary ethical issues in computing and their social context), stakeholders (considering the multi-faceted nature of ethical decision-making), and skills (developing the technical and communication skills needed to drive ethical change). We hope that our curriculum and reflections will help other instructors connect ethics pedagogy to professional practice in the classroom.

Research papers, in addition to textual documents, are a designed interface through which researchers communicate. Recently, rapid growth has transformed that interface in many fields of computing. In this work, we examine the effects of this growth from a media archaeology perspective, through the changes to figures and tables in research papers. Specifically, we study these changes in computer vision over the past decade, as the deep learning revolution has driven unprecedented growth in the discipline. We ground our investigation through interviews with veteran researchers spanning computer vision, graphics, and visualization. Our analysis focuses on the research attention economy: how research paper elements contribute towards advertising, measuring, and disseminating an increasingly commodified "contribution." Through this work, we seek to motivate future discussion surrounding the design of both the research paper itself as well as the larger sociotechnical research publishing system, including tools for finding, reading, and writing research papers.

We explore the challenges individuals face when seeking like-minded partners to pursue shared interests in small groups, specifically outside the workplace, classroom, or other externally organized contexts. Conducting nine 90-minute semi-structured interviews involving a hypothetical small group formation process, we found four compounding challenges that make it difficult to form and maintain stable groups. In contrast to other kinds of small groups discussed in the literature, the unique "combination" of these challenges bring into focus a class of interest-based small groups we term " shared interest pods ": self-assembled small groups united by shared interests, whose members derive benefits from sustained, synchronous interactions that hinge on the level of fit among them. The need to discover and maintain collective fit, the considerable commitment required for regular interactions, their small size, and the lack of external enforcement, makes shared interest pods fragile and unstable, and an information-rich site for studying dynamics of self-organized consensus-seeking in underexplored areas of Lee and Paine's Model of Coordinated Action, and for considering the tension between supporting personal agency through organic group formation and optimizing stability through algorithmic assignments. A central finding is how dynamics of maintaining and giving up control co-exist in shared interest pods in their search for collective fit. People seek to maintain control over certain aspects of finding fit (e.g. in determining group membership), but are simultaneously willing to give up control to organizers or algorithms under certain conditions (e.g. when balancing desired quality with social and ethical considerations). We discuss design implications for supporting the formation of shared interest pods, and more broadly, for exploring self-organized consensus-seeking in other societal collective decision-making contexts.

While technology has been a valuable ally for social change, we know to a smaller extent its potential for less overt forms of activism, especially in the context of socially sensitive issues. In this paper, we explore the role of photography to bring about social change in Bahrain, an island nation in the Arabian Peninsula. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we describe how professional photographers capturing a controversial religious ritual of the Muslim-minority Shia employed a quiet form of activism we call "comfort activism," small and embodied acts with technology that address areas of comfort/discomfort for themselves and groups with whom they have social ties with. We discuss how comfort activism points design toward advocacy goals such as equality that provide an alternative perspective to cultures---one that prioritizes individuals' agencies and choices instead of static cultural norms and values.

Livestreams are now ubiquitous-moving beyond web and mobile-based platforms into products such as fitness machines and smart home assistants. As such, viewership practices have also become varied and diverse: livestreams are used for interactive entertainment, social companionship, and multi-perspective spectatorship for music festivals and sporting events. At the premier in-person gaming livestream event, Games Done Quick (GDQ), attendees engage in a variety of different viewership practices across different event spaces where the livestream is projected on large stage screens, onto walls as peripheral displays, and routed to televisions in hotel venue rooms. This study takes GDQ as an information-rich fieldsite to examine how livestream viewership shifts, changes, and interleaves across physical spaces to provide an expanded livestream experience. From 11 semi-structured interviews with GDQ attendees and participant observations at three GDQ events, we found diverse practices of both direct and indirect viewership: the livestream is viewed in collocation with an audience and stage, but is also used to establish viewership continuity across disjoint spaces, tangentially to shop for interesting moments, as a timekeeping device, and even as a means of auditory obfuscation. To unpack these forms of viewership, we conceptualize livestreams as design material and identify its two key qualities of focality and metacontent. We illustrate how examining livestreams' focality and metacontent qualities allow us to understand the relationship between different livestream configurations and different viewership behaviors, as well as chart out new under-explored design directions for livestreaming that blend physical and digital spaces.

The future of Human-computer interaction (HCI) communication requires researchers to develop a strong understanding of the factors that influence design practitioners. As a step towards building that understanding, based on interviews conducted with veteran web designers, we analyze a corpus of popular web design books published during and shortly after the dot-com boom. Using a combination of ethnographic methods and discourse analysis, we identify the rhetorical strategies in these books and why they were successful in shaping our participants’ ideas about web design. We find that the books exhibit a particular style of technical writing defined by a speech-like techno-masculinity . Despite their short shelf-lives, the books and their writing style contributed to the disciplinary identity of web design which exists today. Studying the history of best practice books is an important opportunity to reflect on the genre of best practices in design, and how we should frame them in the future.

Past CSCW work has examined the role of temporal rhythms in cooperative work and has identified alignment work--the work required to bring dissonant rhythms into alignment--as an important aspect of large-scale collaboration. We ask instead how individual workers interact with temporal rhythms to sustain the conditions that make their work possible--not aligning rhythms, but attuning them. This paper draws on interviews with farmer-knowledge workers, people who engage with both farm work (the work of growing food or raising animals for food, on a commercial or non-commercial basis) and computer-based knowledge work. We identify three ways that farmer-knowledge workers interact with natural and structural rhythms to construct sustainable work-lives: anchoring (tying oneself to a particular rhythm to create accountability and structure), decoupling (loosening or cutting ties with a rhythm to create flexibility), and gap-filling (interweaving complementary rhythms to create balance). Together, these practices constitute attunement work.

Visual design provides the backdrop to most of our interactions over the Internet, but has not received as much analytical attention as textual content. Combining computational with qualitative approaches, we investigate the growing concern that visual design of the World Wide Web has homogenized over the past decade. By applying computer vision techniques to a large dataset of representative websites images from 2003–2019, we show that designs have become significantly more similar since 2007, especially for page layouts where the average distance between sites decreased by over 30%. Synthesizing interviews from 11 experienced web design professionals with our computational analyses, we discuss causes of this homogenization including overlap in source code and libraries, color scheme standardization, and support for mobile devices. Our results seek to motivate future discussion of the factors that influence designers and their implications on the future trajectory of web design.

The success of deep learning has led to intense growth and interest in computer vision, along with concerns about its potential impact on society. Yet we know little about how these changes have affected the people that research and practice computer vision: we as a community spend so much effort trying to replicate the abilities of humans, but so little time considering the impact of this work on ourselves. In this paper, we report on a study in which we asked computer vision researchers and practitioners to write stories about emotionally-salient events that happened to them. Our analysis of over 50 responses found tremendous affective (emotional) strain in the computer vision community. While many describe excitement and success, we found strikingly frequent feelings of isolation, cynicism, apathy, and exasperation over the state of the field. This is especially true among people who do not share the unbridled enthusiasm for normative standards for computer vision research and who do not see themselves as part of the "incrowd." Our findings suggest that these feelings are closely tied to the kinds of research and professional practices now expected in computer vision. We argue that as a community with significant stature, we need to work towards an inclusive culture that makes transparent and addresses the real emotional toil of its members.

We report on a research through design study of how our everyday objects, augmented with technologies, could contribute to disseminating people's lifestyle values in public. We developed Jarvis, a hybrid object combining a glass jar with a location-tracking system. The Jarvis endeavors to make lifestyle values visible, while sometimes hiding its values across different places. As a design research artifact, the Jarvis seeks to spark meaningful interactions as zero-waste practitioners carry it around in their daily routines in public. The data visualized through the Jarvis demonstrate how users' values are spread out locally. 18 zero-waste followers participated in a week-long deployment with a design probe followed by post-deployment interviews. Our findings highlight the role of different agencies in circulating values represented by the Jarvis. We discuss our methodological insights on hybrid objects, and how the circulation of values may inform us about the alternative roles of technologies in speaking for our lifestyle values.

Techlash encapsulates a breaking point reached with the critique of technology companies. To investigate how this whirlwind of rage, inquiry, and accountability affects the lives of tech workers, we conducted interviews with 19 tech workers. Our methodological approach and contribution adopts a style of writing and analysis associated with anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, where we focus on the affective textures of everyday life in an attempt to redirect the temptation to representational thinking to a slowed ethnographic practice. This paper dwells on the affects of tech workers facing critique and scrutiny. Through this approach, we find that emotional habitus conditions the possibilities of personal and political action and inaction in response to critique. By emotional habitus, we refer to the emotional dispositions honed among tech workers by tech culture's rationality and optimism. This habitus must shift if people are to access new ways of relating and acting. We argue for more fruitful attitudes and practices in relation to critique.

introduction Introduction: Performing Rurality with Computing Share on Authors: Norman Makoto Su Indiana University Bloomington Indiana University BloomingtonView Profile , Jean Hardy Michigan State University Michigan State UniversityView Profile , Morgan Vigil-Hayes Northern Arizona University Northern Arizona UniversityView Profile , Tiffany Veinot University of Michigan University of MichiganView Profile , Rob Comber KTH Royal Institute of Technology KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 28Issue 3July 2021 Article No.: 16epp 1–13https://doi.org/10.1145/3461832Online:03 July 2021Publication History 0citation126DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads126Last 12 Months126Last 6 weeks17 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Sanctions play an essential role in enforcing and sustaining social norms. On social networking sites (SNS), sanctions allow individuals to shape community norms on appropriate privacy respecting behaviors. Existing theories of privacy assume the use of such sanctions but do not examine the extent and effectiveness of sanctioning behaviors. We conducted a qualitative interview study of young adults (N=23), and extend research on collective boundary regulation by studying sanctions in the context of popular SNS. Through a systematization of sanctioning strategies, we find that young adults prefer to use indirect and invisible sanctions to preserve strong-tie relationships. Such sanctions are not always effective in helping the violator understand the nature of their normative violation. We offer suggestions on supporting online sanctioning that make norms more visible and signal violations in ways that avoid direct confrontation to reduce the risk of harming on-going social relationships.

The adoption of design fiction into design research has recently been expanding within the HCI community. Design fiction workshops have fruitfully facilitated users and researchers discussing and creating future technologies by exposing differing viewpoints. Yet, most scholarship focuses on the ostensibly successful outputs of these workshops. It remains unclear exactly what sort of interaction dynamics are instigated by design fiction in collaborative design. How might design fiction affect what we consider in design, and how is this reflected in the ensuing design? To fill this gap, our study examines design fictions across five workshops where diverse participants created futuristic autobiographies, a method to elicit values, and built diegetic prototypes both individually and collaboratively. We detail their design processes and unpack three kinds of soft conflicts that arose between participants and allowed them to bring up and discuss differing values regarding technology in society. Reflecting on our workshops, we discuss their implications on how one might employ design fiction in collaborative design.

Recent years have seen increased investment in data-driven farming through the use of sensors (hardware), algorithms (software), and networking technologies to guide decision making. By analyzing the discourse of 34 startup company websites, we identify four future visions promoted by data-driven farming startups: the vigilant farmer who controls all aspects of her farm through data; the efficient farmer who has optimized his farm operations to be profitable and sustainable; the enlightened farmer who achieves harmony with nature via data-driven insights; and the empowered farmer who asserts ownership of her farm's data, and uses it to benefit herself and her fellow farmers. We describe each of these visions and how startups propose to achieve them. We then consider some consequences of these visions; in particular, how they might affect power relations between the farmer and other stakeholders in agriculture--farm workers, nonhumans, and the technology providers themselves.

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.

Casters commentate on a live, streamed video game for a large online audience. Drawing from 20 semi-structured interviews with amateur casters of either Dota 2 or Rocket League video games and over 20 hours of participant observations, we describe the distinctive practices of two types of casters, play-by-play and color commentary. Play-by-play casters are adept at improvising a rich narrative of hype on top of live games, whereas color commentators methodically prepare to fill in the gaps of live play with informative analysis. Casters often start out alone, relying upon reflective practice to hone their craft. Through examining challenges faced by amateur casters, we identified three design opportunities for game designers to support casters and would-be casters as first-class users. Such designs would provide an antidote to the challenges faced by amateur casters: those of the lack of social support for casting, camerawork, and data availability.

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.

Games Done Quick (GDQ) is both a week-long video game speedrunning marathon and a successful charity event, raising more than $1.5 million USD in each of its past five events. To understand GDQ's success as an online charity event, we conducted 18 semi-structured interviews with GDQ speedrunners, attendees, hosts, and online viewers, analyzed past donation data, and conducted 72 hours of in-person participant observations at a live GDQ event. We found that central to every GDQ event is "the couch" which reconstructs the environment of a living room. Viewers do not simply donate to support the charity or in response to the technical prowess and ingenuity of speedrunners, but to actively interact with and be part of the couch experience, the ideal social milieu of speedrunning. Building upon previously identified motivations of why viewers donate to online live streamers, our work contributes to understanding how collocated gatherings can reinforce and amplify the cultural and social aspects of online subcultures (even heterogeneous ones) to encourage charitable giving. This opens opportunities for design that evoke a visceral level of engagement with charity events similar to that observed at GDQ.

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 present a study on a group of people who, upon adopting a new lifestyle movement, have discovered and constructed alternative aspects of space. Drawing on 23 interviews with minimalists and participant observations of their Meetup meetings, we highlight the central role of empty space in their lives at home. Our findings show how empty space for minimalists emerge as a new, hitherto unknown space in the home and the ways minimalists seek to create, maintain, and stay sensitive to these empty spaces. Empty spaces for minimalists signify their achievements, exudes aesthetic appeal, and provide a sanctuary away from city life. We propose new opportunities for design based on our findings of empty space. We suggest that design should consider supporting the practices and values that revolve around the absence of artifacts.

The Technology on the Trail workshop will examine the encroachment of technology into hiking and outdoor adventures, with a focus on identifying and developing ways for technology to support positive and mutually beneficial connections among people. These connections include both intentional ones helpful in collecting scientific data, supporting the environment, maintaining safety, and sharing via social media. We will also explore more opportunistic connections, such as those that are leveraged when tracking and sharing biometric or geotemporal data. With the inclusion of technology in places where it is not used and sometimes not welcome, there will be mismatches of ethics and values that must be considered in the design and use of technology. The workshop will examine existing and emerging challenges of bringing technology onto the trail and reflect on ways to understand, design, and deploy appropriate technological solutions moving forward.

In this paper, we motivate and introduce Futuristic Autobiographies, a method inspired by design fiction for eliciting values and perspectives on the future of technologies from participants such as users, designers, and researchers. Futuristic autobiographies are the creative work of the researchers and participants. Grounded in empirical and background work, researchers pose several stories involving the participant as a character about a future state with robots. Participants are then asked to weave fictional autobiographies to explain what led to this future state. Via a case study in which futuristic autobiographies were used with 23 roboticists, we detail the process involved in developing and implementing this method. When futuristic autobiographies are employed and carefully crafted from background research, they allow informants to speak for themselves on how their practices and values are intertwined now and in the future. We highlight both the benefits and challenges of futuristic autobiographies as a way to elicit rich stories about values. We argue that futuristic autobiographies are a promising addition to the current qualitative methods toolkit used in HRI.

We describe more than 19 months of ethnographic fieldwork with people who have embraced minimalism, a lifestyle movement focused on reducing modern life's clutter. We found that for minimalists, the home is a central but porous site for making and staging their values around objects. The home's porous boundary allows minimalists to reinforce their values around objects for others and themselves, but it also necessitates adopting strategies to assert their values when objects---entangled with others' values---move in and out the boundaries of the home. Drawing from our fieldwork, we introduce the concept of the porous boundary. "Porosity" impels us to consider the coupling of objects with values as we do boundary practices for the home. A porous boundary perspective, we argue, can open new design spaces in the development of novel technologies for the home.

Drawing from fieldwork of 14 small food farms in the Midwest, we describe the on-the-ground, practical challenges of doing and communicating sustainability when local food production is not well-supported. We illustrate how farmers enact learned and honed tactics of sustainability at key sites such as farmers' markets and the Internet with consumers. These tactics reveal tensions with dominant discourse from government, Big Ag, and popular culture. The success of these tactics depends on farmers having fortitude--control, resilience, and the wherewithal to be exemplars of sustainability. In our discussion, we highlight how the local farmers' social movement work constitutes loosely organized small groups connecting others to an amorphous idea of a sustainable society--one that sustains an environmental, economic, local, cultural, and physical way of life. Using Fine's concept of tiny publics, we identify design opportunities for supporting this less directed kind of social movement.

In art and music, time periods like "classical" and "impressionist" are powerful means for academics and practitioners to compare and contrast artifacts that share aesthetics or philosophies. While web designs have undergone changes for 25 years, we lack theories to describe or explain these changes. In this paper, we take a first step towards identifying and understanding the design periods of websites. Drawing from humanistic HCI methods, we asked subject experts of web design to critically analyze a dataset of prominent websites whose lifetimes span over a decade. These informed judgments reveal a set of key markers that signal shifts in design periods. For instance, advances in display technologies and changes in company strategies help explain how design periods demarcated by particular layout templates and navigation models arise. We suggest that designers and marketers can draw inspiration from website designs curated into design periods. Future work should examine the utility of applying design periods to any computationally embedded artifact that is an interaction design.

In this paper, we describe an ethnographic study consisting of 14 interviews with hunters and participant observations in the American Midwest. We find that the ethos of "fair chase" serves to unite an eclectic group of hunters under a single moral compass. Fair chase posits, for example, that hunters must not have an improper advantage over animals. The actual practices of hunters in different communities (e.g., communities revolving around different weapons or professions), however, reveals a series of opposing points of view among hunters at large on what actually constitutes fair chase. We suggest that an understanding of fair chase and its dialectics can constructively problematize nature for human-computer interaction.

Users have played a prominent role as "objects of study" in HCI, CSCW, and HRI (Human-Robot Interaction). Researchers have begun to problematize the asymmetric relationship between technical experts and users. In this paper, we focus on how roboticists-borrowing a term from Steve Woolgar-"configure" their robot users. Instead of focusing on what roboticists think of their robots or what users think of robots, we ask, "What do roboticists think of users'" Utilizing two exercises we call futuristic stories and value index cards, we conducted semi-structured interviews with roboticists to examine their discourse on robotics, robots, and users. We found that roboticists framed users as inevitably transforming from a naïve user to a sensible user equipped to handle their ideal, utilitarian robot. Our findings illustrate that roboticists and designers need to make transparent what forms of future users they desire and expect in their design processes.

Today's sensor-rich and socially-networked world forces us to ask whether technology is moving us away from an authentic life. We all have different views on what constitutes an authentic life with technology and, through our actions, try to stay true to those views. We describe a design approach called "Designing for Authenticity" that draws from the existentialist philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. It allows researchers engaged in immersive fieldwork to articulate the possible patterns of authentic living with technology. It also outlines a strategy to design artifacts that indirectly communicate to users the experiences of those living in different modes of authenticity. Yet, our approach gives the designer's own informed convictions weight in advocating that one should commit to a spiritual life-view with technology. To illustrate our approach, we subject previously published research on Irish traditional musicians to our designing for authenticity approach.

A good body of work in HRI has investigated how to design humanoids to effectively serve users' needs. This user centered approach has proved fruitful, but there exists relatively little work examining the intent and values of the roboticists themselves. Furthermore, we know little of how the values of roboticists influence their own designs. Such knowledge could help designers better reflect on whether their designs effectively convey particular ethics to their users. In this study, we analyzed 27 interviews of pioneer humanoid roboticists, seeking to identify the values of such roboticists. Our results suggest that roboticists' values are shaped by a dominant engineering-based background that emphasizes robotics as a field of integration (especially humanoids). Roboticists also see robots as testbeds for learning about humans themselves. We advocate a VSD approach for humanoids that goes beyond engineering disciplines and forces values to the forefront of discussion.

Our proposed two-part study on the perspectives of roboticists pursues a holistic, value-sensitive approach to robot design. We first describe a pilot study to uncover the patterns of values ingrained in humanoid designs. These findings will inform our next study to interview roboticists. While user-centered approaches of HRI literature give us insight on making user-friendly robots, our work seeks to create a design framework to assist roboticists in reflecting on their values and intentions during their design processes.

A home away from home, the pub is synonymous with good conversation. Yet, the art of conversation in pubs is changing with the ubiquity of mobile phones. We present a qualitative study spanning over three years describing experiences and rhetoric surrounding the relationship that mobiles have and should have with our conversation in the pub. We found that mobile phones are able to enhance conversation but can also cause a disruption to the informal and adhoc nature of pubs. The use of Facebook on mobile phones has also changed pubs from what Oldenburg terms a third space to a space that is potentially being surveilled. We suggest future designs should not necessarily discourage or encourage mobile use in pubs, but rather provoke us into reflecting on how intertwined modern conversation is with mobile technology in the context of the pub space.

Drawing perspectives from science and technology studies, philosophy of science, and literature from ethics and social justice, this paper examines the promises and challenges in the development of self-driving vehicle (SDV) technology. We start with the premise that the combination of different computing technologies embedded in SDVs is a powerful tool for efficiency in communications, information gathering, processing, and storage. However, by focusing on efficiency, SDVs provide a new mode of industrialized transportation whose users can only choose between transportation services, but have little or no say about the broader social implications of the technology. We argue that perspectives from social justice and ethics show that SDVs have implications beyond transportation, with profound consequences for users and societies. In particular, values such as privacy, security, and responsibility may be changed for good or bad, in both the short and long-term. The examination of these changes, while the technology is still under foundational development, is as urgent as it is needed.

We describe the design and deployment of the first system ever to dynamically track and publish records of folk music playing. TuneTracker is a software system that has been, at time of writing, deployed at a pub in Dublin, Ireland for five months. It captures, stores, and posts the names of tunes played in Irish traditional music sessions on a public website. This paper makes two contributions: (1) drawing from a two year ethnographic study of trad musicians, it details the design and development of a system to track and publish traditional musicians' practices while respecting the ethos of tradition, and (2) it presents a discussion of professional musicians' reactions to having their music practices surveilled. This latter fieldwork revealed divergent viewpoints on the effect that TuneTracker would have on local sessions and the process of tradition.

The routines of information work are commonplace yet difficult to characterize. Although cognitive models have successfully characterized routine tasks within which there is little variation, a large body of ethnomethodological research has identified the inherent nonroutineness of routines in information work. We argue that work does not fall into discrete classes of routine versus nonroutine; rather, task performance lies on a continuum of routineness, and routineness metrics are important to the understanding of workplace multitasking. In a study of 10 information workers shadowed for 3 whole working days each, we utilize the construct of working sphere to model projects/tasks as a network of humans and artifacts. Employing a statistical technique called T-pattern analysis, we derive measures of routineness from these real-world data. In terms of routineness, we show that information workers experience archetypes of working spheres. The results indicate that T-patterns of interactions with information and computational media are important indicators of facets of routineness and that these measures are correlated with workers' affective states. Our results are some of the first to demonstrate how regular temporal patterns of media interaction in tasks are related to stress. These results suggest that designs of systems to facilitate so-called routine work should consider the degrees to which a person's working spheres fall along varying facets of routineness.

In its heyday, the video arcade was a social scene to prove one's video gaming prowess. The introduction of a revolutionary head-to-head fighting game called "Street Fighter II" in 1991 ushered in an era of competitive video gaming with unparalleled complexity. An influx of copy-cat games and the arrival of consoles with capabilities rivaling coin-ops led to the arcade's demise. However, the release of "Street Fighter IV" (SF4) has brought about a revival. I report on the cultural practices of hardcore gaming that have revolved around SF4. SF4's release on both the console (which enables fighting others online) and the arcade has engendered a new set of challenges in constructing what it means to be competitive and legitimate in the world of head-to-head fighting games. I observe that the "enrolment" of an ecology of technological artifacts allows players to translate braggadocio from the arcade, a central phenomenon in competitive gaming.

This paper introduces a new representation for describing routine tasks, called temporal task footprints. Routines are characterized by their temporal regularity or rhythm. Temporal pattern analysis (T-patterns) can be used to isolate frequent recurrent patterns in routine tasks that appear repeatedly in the same temporal configuration. Using tf-idf statistics, each task can then be defined in terms of its temporal task footprint, a ranked list of temporal patterns along with their typical frequencies. Experimental evaluations using data of 29 days observing and logging 10 subjects showed that temporal task footprints of application windows, email and document usage outperform decision tree and SVMs in recognizing the subjects' tasks.

Today's employees are expected to be adept at the usage of multiple communication mediums. With secretaries now regarded as a frivolous luxury, people have essentially become professional "secretaries" of their own interactions. A large body of research in the HCI and CSCW literature has examined how information workers have appropriated certain communication mediums in order to accomplish work. However, how people must combine and integrate a multitude of media adroitly throughout a limited workday (approximately 8 hours) has been relatively ignored. Namely, I propose to examine through a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques the temporal and sequential interdependence of different kinds of media. I will examine how/why such media combos arise and their psychological affects in the workplace.

Our study on a community of knowledge management (KM) practitioners in the aerospace industry reveals challenges in the dissemination of KM concepts and tools. In this paper, we identify four reasons: (1) disparity of the community's stated purpose and the actual motives of its members; (2) multidisciplinary nature of KM; (3) unique characteristics of the aerospace industry and its engineering culture and (4) adoption of preferred or recommended solutions provided by chosen reference groups rather than a grounded approach. In particular, we address the issues in promoting recommended ideas and tools by chosen reference groups in work organizations without fully understanding work practices.

Nomadic work, an extreme form of mobile work, is becoming increasingly prevalent in organizations. Yet so far there has not been enough research attention on the particular challenges that nomadic workers face in order to design support for their work practices. We employed ethnographic interviews and observations to understand nomadic work practices. Drawing from strategies for survival of pastoralist nomads to guide our design investigation, we focus on an integrated perspective of nomadic work involving challenges related to assembling actants, seeking resources, and integrating with others in the organization. We discovered that nomadic workers need to continually seek out and compete for resources to maintain their mobile offices. They also face challenges in integrating into the organization to maintain visibility and to synchronize with others for meeting. We discuss the design recommendations that emerged from our investigation.

There is a growing literature on managing multitasking and interruptions in the workplace. In an ethnographic study, we investigated the phenomenon of communication chains, the occurrence of interactions in quick succession. Focusing on chains enable us to better understand the role of communication in multitasking. Our results reveal that chains are prevalent in information workers, and that attributes such as the number of links, and the rate of media and organizational switching can be predicted from the first catalyzing link of the chain. When chains are triggered by external interruptions, they have more links, a trend for more media switches and more organizational switches. We also found that more switching of organizational contexts in communication is associated with higher levels of stress. We describe the role of communication chains as performing alignment in multitasking and discuss the implications of our results.

Knowledge management (KM) remains an anomaly in most corporations today. Critics call KM a fad of the 1990s, whereas supporters claim KM is actively evolving. Our work examines the disciplinary rhetoric of KM: how is it that practitioners of KM seek to legitimize their field in the corporate world? We focus on practitioners in the aerospace industry and their forum. We argue that this forum serves as a hub for constructing KM's legitimacy. Our two year ethnography traces the rhetorical strategies utilized by informants in and out of a professional community to legitimize KM as discipline in the aerospace industry.

With the advent of tiny networked devices, Mark Weiser's vision of a world embedded with invisible computers is coming to age. Due to their small size and relative ease of deployment, sensor networks have been utilized by zoologists, seismologists and military personnel. In this paper, we investigate the application of sensor networks to the film industry. In particular, we are interested in augmenting film and video footage with sensor data. Unobtrusive sensors are deployed on a film set or in a television studio and on performers. During a filming of a scene, sensor data such as light intensity, color temperature and location are collected and synchronized with each film or video frame. Later, editors, graphics artists and programmers can view this data in synchronization with film and video playback. For example, such data can help define a new level of seamless integration between computer graphics and real world photography. A real-time version of our system would allow sensor data to trigger camera movement and cue special effects. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of the first part of our embedded film set environment, the augmented recording system. Augmented recording is a foundational component for the UCLA Hypermedia Studio's research into the use of sensor networks in film and video production. In addition, we have evaluated our system in a television studio.

As of now, it is not uncommon for one to use multiple computers in separate places such as at home, office or school. A number of applications currently exist to allow a user to easily access and control these computers remotely via a notebook computer or web page. Unfortunately, even with such solutions, it is rather inconvenient, for example, to try accessing your computer while walking downtown or riding a train. On the other hand, considering that cellular phones have been accepted as multi-function devices capable of karaoke, digital photography and web browsing in countries like Japan, it may prove beneficial to support remote PC access on a cellular phone. With this in mind, we created Rajicon, a system to provide an easy to use interface to remotely operate a PC's GUI operating system via a cellular phone. Rajicon supports image based navigation of a remote PC's desktop and mouse/key operations. In addition, Rajicon provides functions for keyboard shortcuts, specialized window adjustment operations and text extraction. We have performed extensive evaluations with five subjects and discuss the results in this paper. We also discuss the lead author's latest adaption of Rajicon to a PDA.