Seeing Like a Toolkit: How Toolkits Envision the Work of AI EthicsNumerous toolkits have been developed to support ethical AI development. However, toolkits, like all tools, encode assumptions in their design about what work should be done and how. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative analysis of 27 AI ethics toolkits to critically examine how the work of ethics is imagined and how it is supported by these toolkits. Specifically, we examine the discourses toolkits rely on when talking about ethical issues, who they imagine should do the work of ethics, and how they envision the work practices involved in addressing ethics. Among the toolkits, we identify a mismatch between the imagined work of ethics and the support the toolkits provide for doing that work. In particular, we identify a lack of guidance around how to navigate labor, organizational, and institutional power dynamics as they relate to performing ethical work. We use these omissions to chart future work for researchers and designers of AI ethics toolkits.2023RWRichmond Y. Wong et al.AI EthicsCSCW
Monitoring Pets, Deterring Intruders, and Casually Spying on Neighbors: Everyday Uses of Smart Home CamerasThe increased adoption of smart home cameras (SHCs) foregrounds issues of surveillance, power, and privacy in homes and neighborhoods. However, questions remain about how people are currently using these devices to monitor and surveil, what the benefits and limitations are for users, and what privacy and security tensions arise between primary users and other stakeholders. We present an empirical study with 14 SHC users to understand how these devices are used and integrated within everyday life. Based on semi-structured qualitative interviews, we investigate users’ motivations, practices, privacy concerns, and social negotiations. Our findings highlight the SHC as a perceptually powerful and spatially sensitive device that enables a variety of surveillant uses outside of basic home security—from formally surveilling domestic workers, to casually spying on neighbors, to capturing memories. We categorize surveillant SHC uses, clarify distinctions between primary and non-primary users, and highlight under-considered design directions for addressing power imbalances among primary and non-primary users.2022NTNeilly H. Tan et al.University of WashingtonPrivacy by Design & User ControlSmart Home Interaction DesignSmart Home Privacy & SecurityCHI
Tactics of Soft Resistance in User Experience Professionals’ Values WorkUser experience (UX) professionals’ attempts to address social values as a part of their work practice can overlap with tactics to contest, resist, or change the companies they work for. This paper studies tactics that take place in this overlap, where UX professionals try to re-shape the values embodied and promoted by their companies, in addition to the values embodied and promoted in the technical systems and products their companies produce. Through interviews with UX professionals working at large U.S.-based technology companies and observations at UX meetup events, this paper identifies tactics used towards three goals: (1) creating space for UX expertise to address values; (2) making values visible and relevant to other organizational stakeholders; and (3) changing organizational processes and orientations towards values. This paper analyzes these as tactics of resistance: UX professionals seek to subvert or change existing practices and organizational structures towards more values-conscious ends. Yet, these tactics of resistance often rely on the dominant discourses and logics of the technology industry. The paper characterizes these tactics as partial or “soft,” but also argues that they nevertheless hold possibilities for enacting values-oriented changes.2021RWRichmond Y. WongReflections on Tech and CSCWCSCW
Using Design Fiction Memos to Analyze UX Professionals' Values Work Practices: A Case Study Bridging Ethnographic and Design Futuring MethodsMultiple methods have been used to study how social values and ethics are implicated in technology design and use, including empirical qualitative studies of technologists’ work. Recently, more experimental approaches such as design fiction explore these themes through fictional worldbuilding. This paper combines these approaches by adapting design fictions as a form of memoing, a qualitative analysis technique. The paper uses design fiction memos to analyze and reflect upon ethnographic interviews and observational data about how user experience (UX) professionals at large technology companies engage with values and ethical issues in their work. The design fictions help explore and articulate themes about the values work practices and relationships of power that UX professionals grapple with. Through these fictions, the paper contributes a case study showing how design fiction can be used for qualitative analysis, and provides insights into the role of organizational and power dynamics in UX professionals’ values work.2021RWRichmond Y. WongUniversity of California BerkeleyTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIDesign FictionUser Research Methods (Interviews, Surveys, Observation)CHI
Timelines: A World-Building Activity for Values AdvocacyThis paper presents Timelines, a design activity to assist values advocates: people who help others recognize values and ethical concerns as relevant to technical practice. Rather than integrate seamlessly into existing design processes, Timelines aims to create a space for critical reflection and contestation among expert participants (such as technology researchers, practitioners, or students) and a values advocate facilitator to surface the importance and relevance of values and ethical concerns. The activity's design is motivated by theoretical perspectives from design fiction, scenario planning, and value sensitive design. The activity helps participants surface discussion of broad societal-level changes related to a technology by creating stories from news headlines, and recognize a diversity of experiences situated in the everyday by creating social media posts from different viewpoints. We reflect on how decisions on the activity's design and facilitation enables it to assist in values advocacy practices.2021RWRichmond Y. Wong et al.University of California BerkeleyPrivacy by Design & User ControlParticipatory DesignDesign FictionCHI
Expanding Modes of Reflection in Design FuturingDesign 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 examining related work, we contribute five modes of reflection. These modes concern formgiving, temporality, researcher positionality, real-world engagement, and knowledge production. We illustrate the value of each mode through careful analysis of selected design exemplars and provide questions to interrogate the practice of design futuring. Each reflective mode offers productive resources for design practitioners and researchers to articulate their work, generate new directions for their work, and analyze their own and others' work.2020SKSandjar Kozubaev et al.Geogria Institute of TechnologyParticipatory DesignDesign FictionCHI
Sensor Illumination: Exploring Design Qualities and Ethical Implications of Smart Cameras and Image/Video AnalyticsDrawing 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 these trends using speculative scenarios, materialize the scenarios by designing and constructing lighting-inspired smart camera fixtures, and self-experiment with these fixtures to introduce and exacerbate privacy and security issues, and inspire creative workarounds and design opportunities for sensor-level regulation. We synthesize our insights by presenting 8 smart camera sensing design qualities for addressing privacy, security, and related social and ethical issues.2020JPJames Pierce et al.University of California, Berkeley & California College of the ArtsPrivacy by Design & User ControlPrivacy Perception & Decision-MakingResearch Ethics & Open ScienceCHI
Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating LifeworldsThis 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 societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the "lifeworld" of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds.2020RWRichmond Y. Wong et al.University of California, BerkeleyTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIDesign FictionCHI
Bringing Design to the Privacy Table: BroadeningIn calls for privacy by design (PBD), regulators and privacy scholars have investigated the richness of the concept of "privacy." In contrast, "design" in HCI is comprised of rich and complex concepts and practices, but has received much less attention in the PBD context. Conducting a literature review of HCI publications discussing privacy and design, this paper articulates a set of dimensions along which design relates to privacy, including: the purpose of design, which actors do design work in these settings, and the envisioned beneficiaries of design work. We suggest new roles for HCI and design in PBD research and practice: utilizing values- and critically-oriented design approaches to foreground social values and help define privacy problem spaces. We argue such approaches, in addition to current "design to solve privacy problems" efforts, are essential to the full realization of PBD, while noting the politics involved when choosing design to address privacy.2019RWRichmond Y. Wong et al.University of California, BerkeleyPrivacy by Design & User ControlPrivacy Perception & Decision-MakingParticipatory DesignCHI
This Thing Called Fairness: Disciplinary Confusion Realizing a Value in TechnologyThe explosion in the use of software in important sociotechnical systems has renewed focus on the study of the way technical constructs reflect policies, norms, and human values. This effort requires the engagement of scholars and practitioners from many disciplines. And yet, these disciplines often conceptualize the operative values very differently while referring to them using the same vocabulary. The resulting conflation of ideas confuses discussions about values in technology at disciplinary boundaries. In the service of improving this situation, this paper examines the value of shared vocabularies, analytics, and other tools that facilitate conversations about values in light of these disciplinary specific conceptualizations, the role such tools play in furthering research and practice, outlines different conceptions of ``fairness''deployed in discussions about computer systems, and provides an analytic tool for interdisciplinary discussions and collaborations around the concept of fairness. We use a case study of risk assessments in criminal justice applications to both motivate our effort--describing how conflation of different concepts under the banner of ``fairness'' led to unproductive confusion--and illustrate the value of the fairness analytic by demonstrating how the rigorous analysis it enables can assist in identifying key areas of theoretical, political, and practical misunderstanding or disagreement, and where desired support alignment or collaboration in the absence of consensus.2019DMDeirdre K. Mulligan et al.AICSCW
Differential Vulnerabilities and a Diversity of Tactics: What Toolkits Teach Us about CybersecurityWe 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 interventional stage (when are security measures taken). Recognizing toolkits as socially and culturally situated, we surface ways in which toolkits construct security as a value and, in so doing, how they construct people as (in)secure users. We center the notion of differential vulnerabilities, an understanding of security that recognizes safety as socially contingent, adversaries as unstable figures, and risk as differentially applied based on markers of relational position (e.g. class, race, religion, gender, geography, experience). We argue that differential vulnerabilities provides a key design concern in future security resources, and a critical concept for security discourses.2018JPJames Pierce et al.Privacy and SecurityCSCW
Eliciting Values Reflections by Engaging Privacy Futures Using Design WorkbooksAlthough “privacy by design” (PBD)—embedding privacy protections into products during design, rather than retroactively—uses the term “design” to recognize how technical design choices implement and settle policy, design approaches and methodologies are largely absent from PBD conversations. Critical, speculative, and value-centered design approaches can be used to elicit reflections on relevant social values early in product development, and are a natural fit for PBD and necessary to achieve PBD’s goal. Bringing these together, we present a case study using a design workbook of speculative design fictions as a values elicitation tool. Originally used as a reflective tool among a research group, we transformed the workbook into artifacts to share as values elicitation tools in interviews with graduate students training as future technology professionals. We discuss how these design artifacts surface contextual, socially-oriented understandings of privacy, and their potential utility in relationship to other values levers.2018RWRichmond Y. Wong et al.Privacy in Social MediaCSCW