Content moderation systems for social media have had numerous issues of bias, in terms of race, gender, and ability among many others. One proposal for addressing such issues in automated decision making is by designing for contestability, whereby users can shape and influence how decisions are made. In this study, we conduct a series of participatory design workshops with participants from communities that have experienced problems with social media content moderation in the past. Together with participants, we explore the idea of designing for contestability in content moderation and find that users' designs suggest three fruitful, practical avenues: adding representation, improving communication, and designing with compassion. We conclude with design recommendations drawn from participants' proposals, and reflect on the challenges that remain.

Algorithmic prioritization is a growing focus for social media users. Control settings are one way for users to adjust the prioritization of their news feeds, but they prioritize feed content in a way that can be difficult to judge objectively. In this work, we study how users engage with difficult-to-validate controls. Via two paired studies using an experimental system -- one interview and one online study -- we found that control settings functioned as placebos. Viewers felt more satisfied with their feed when controls were present, whether they worked or not. We also examine how people engage in sensemaking around control settings, finding that users often take responsibility for violated expectations -- for both real and randomly functioning controls. Finally, we studied how users controlled their social media feeds in the wild. The use of existing social media controls had little impact on user's satisfaction with the feed; instead, users often turned to improvised solutions, like scrolling quickly, to see what they want.

This paper discusses “The Cybernetics Thought Collective: A History of Science and Technology Portal Project,” a collaborative effort among four institutions that maintain archival records vital to the exploration of cybernetic history — the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the American Philosophical Society, the British Library, and MIT. With recent grant funding from the NEH, the multi-institutional team is developing a prototype web-portal and analysis-engine to provide access to archival material related to the development of the field of cybernetics, which influenced the development of modern computing and provided a common language to articulate similar questions about behavior across disciplines — regardless of whether the subject of study was animal, machine, or social group. The project is also enabling the digitization of the personal archives of four founders of cybernetics — Heinz von Foerster, W. Ross Ashby, Warren S. McCulloch, and Norbert Wiener. Using computational methods based on advanced machine-learning algorithms to yield network and entity relationships maps from the digitized texts, this project seeks to create access to archival material that enables humanities scholars to better understand the development of cybernetic ideas and to enable scientists and engineers to reuse and access cybernetic data.

Many online platforms use curation algorithms that are opaque to the user. Recent work suggests that discovering a filtering algorithm's existence in a curated feed influences user experience, but it remains unclear how users reason about the operation of these algorithms. In this qualitative laboratory study, researchers interviewed a diverse, non-probability sample of 40 Facebook users before, during, and after being presented alternative displays of Facebook's News Feed curation algorithm's output. Interviews revealed 10 "folk theories' of automated curation, some quite unexpected. Users who were given a probe into the algorithm's operation via an interface that incorporated "seams,' visible hints disclosing aspects of automation operations, could quickly develop theories. Users made plans that depended on their theories. We conclude that foregrounding these automated processes may increase interface design complexity, but it may also add usability benefits.

Our daily digital life is full of algorithmically selected content such as social media feeds, recommendations and personalized search results. These algorithms have great power to shape users' experiences, yet users are often unaware of their presence. Whether it is useful to give users insight into these algorithms' existence or functionality and how such insight might affect their experience are open questions. To address them, we conducted a user study with 40 Facebook users to examine their perceptions of the Facebook News Feed curation algorithm. Surprisingly, more than half of the participants (62.5%) were not aware of the News Feed curation algorithm's existence at all. Initial reactions for these previously unaware participants were surprise and anger. We developed a system, FeedVis, to reveal the difference between the algorithmically curated and an unadulterated News Feed to users, and used it to study how users perceive this difference. Participants were most upset when close friends and family were not shown in their feeds. We also found participants often attributed missing stories to their friends' decisions to exclude them rather than to Facebook News Feed algorithm. By the end of the study, however, participants were mostly satisfied with the content on their feeds. Following up with participants two to six months after the study, we found that for most, satisfaction levels remained similar before and after becoming aware of the algorithm's presence, however, algorithmic awareness led to more active engagement with Facebook and bolstered overall feelings of control on the site.

As semiconductor process technology scales down, interconnect planning presents ever-greater challenges to designers. In this paper, we analyze, evaluate, and compare various metrics with optimized wire configurations in the contexts of different design criteria: delay minimization, delay-power minimization, and delay2-power minimization. We show how various design criteria influence the configuration, performance, and power consumption of repeated wires.

Prior knowledge is a critical resource for design, especially when designers are striving to generate new ideas for complex problems. Systems that improve access to relevant prior knowledge and promote reuse can improve design efficiency and outcomes. Unfortunately, such systems have not been widely adopted indicating that user needs in this area have not been adequately understood. In this paper, we report the results of a contextual inquiry into the practices of and attitudes toward knowledge management and reuse during early design. The study consisted of interviews and surveys with professional designers in the creative domains. A novel aspect of our work is the focus on early design, which differs from but complements prior works' focus on knowledge reuse during later design and implementation phases. Our study yielded new findings and implications that, if applied, will help bring the benefits of knowledge management systems and reuse into early design activity.

Creativity support tools are set an especially difficult task when they are applied to art/science collaboration. Not because of any fundamental incompatibility between the disciplines, but because creativity support tools are rarely supple enough to manage dramatically shifting requirements at various stages of design or handle the diversity of artifacts that might be generated. Traditional methods of evaluation of collaborative support tools may not address these aspects. This workshop aims to examine three specific areas open to expanded modes of evaluation; the social aspects of tools and tool use, how artifacts are created and manipulated in support tools, and how the expanding contexts of art/science collaborations may be rapidly changing support tool requirements.