Nick Merrill

schoolUniversity of California - Berkeleybar_chart#822 Global Rank

Total Papers

HCI Rank

#822

Research Areas

Years Active

Recent Publications

Reflections Towards an Ecology of Internet Connectivity: Three Speculative Scenarios Involving Foot Pedals

HCI's dominant assumptions of always-on and relatively ubiquitous internet connectivity often overlook other potential configurations of connectivity, which may embody alternative social values and politics, or promote alternative types of technology practices. Building on research exploring alternate configurations…

CHI '23CorrespondingSmart Home Interaction Design +2

Accidentally Evil: On Questionable Values in Smart Home Co-Design

An ongoing mystery of HCI is how do well-intentioned designers consistently enable products with unintentionally evil consequences. Using “questionable values” as a lens, we retell and analyze four design scenarios for smart homes that were created by participants with an IoT toolkit we designed. The selected design s…

CHI '235th+ AuthorGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video) +1

The Entoptic Field Camera as Metaphor-Driven Research-through-Design with AI Technologies

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are widely deployed in smartphone photography; and prompt-based image synthesis models have rapidly become commonplace. In this paper, we describe a Research-through-Design (RtD) project which explores this shift in the means and modes of image production via the creation and…

CHI '213rd AuthorExplainable AI (XAI) +1

Machine Learning Uncertainty as a Design Material: A Post-Phenomenological Inquiry

Design research is important for understanding and interrogating how emerging technologies shape human experience. However, design research with Machine Learning (ML) is relatively underdeveloped. Crucially, designers have not found a grasp on ML uncertainty as a design opportunity rather than an obstacle. The technic…

DIS '20CorrespondingExplainable AI (XAI) +3

Security Fictions: Bridging Speculative Design and Computer Security

This paper begins with an observation: that threat identification is an intrinsically speculative practice. It requires imagining possible futures. Drawing on methods from speculative design, this paper presents an improvisational role-playing game designed to help software developers identify security threats. It dep…

CHI '205th+ AuthorParticipatory Design +1

Expanding Modes of Reflection in Design Futuring

Design futuring approaches, such as speculative design, design fiction and others, seek to (re)envision futures and explore alternatives. As design futuring becomes established in HCI design research, there is an opportunity to expand and develop these approaches. To that end, by reflecting on our own research and exa…

CHI '20CorrespondingPrivacy by Design & User Control +2

Sensor Illumination: Exploring Design Qualities and Ethical Implications of Smart Cameras and Image/Video Analytics

Drawing analogies between smart cameras and electric lighting, we highlight and extrapolate design trends towards always-on sensing in intimate contexts, and the functional expansion of smart cameras as general-purpose and multi-functional devices. Employing a research through design (RtD) approach, we extrapolate the…

CHI '204th AuthorTechnology Ethics & Critical HCI +1

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces "infrastructural speculations," an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad…

CSCW '183rd AuthorPrivacy and Security

Differential Vulnerabilities and a Diversity of Tactics: What Toolkits Teach Us about Cybersecurity

We investigate cybersecurity toolkits, collections of public facing materials intended to help users achieve security online. Through a qualitative analysis of 41 online toolkits, we present a set of key design dimensions: agentive scale (who is responsible for security), achievability (can security be achieved), and…

CHI '181st AuthorBrain-Computer Interface (BCI) & Neurofeedback +1

From Scanning Brains to Reading Minds: Talking to Engineers about Brain-Computer Interface

We presented software engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area with a working brain-computer interface (BCI) to surface the narratives and anxieties around these devices among technical practitioners. Despite this group's heterogeneous beliefs about the exact nature of the mind, we find a shared belief that the content…

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