Mitigating Exploitation: Indie Game Developers’ Reconfigurations of Labor in TechnologyMuch HCI research seeks to contribute to technological agendas that lead to more just and participative labor relations and practices, yet that research also raises concerns about forms of exploitation associated with them. In this paper, we explore how U.S. independent [indie] game developers’ socio-technological practices inject forms of labor, capital, and production into the game development industry. Our findings highlight that indie game development 1) seeks to promote an alternative to business models of game development that depend on free and immaterial labor; 2) builds offline networks at different scales to develop collectives that can sustain their production; and 3) emphasizes how distributed collaboration, co-creation, and the use of free tools and middleware make game production more widely accessible. The research contributes to HCI research that seeks to explicate and mitigate emerging forms of exploitation enabled by new technologies and processes.Our critical review of indie developers’ practices and strategies also extends the current conceptualization of labor and technology in CSCW.2020GFGuo Freeman et al.Work: Companies, P2P, and FreelancingCSCW
Join.Love: A Sociotechnical Genealogy of the Legalization of Same-Sex MarriageHCI researchers interested in enhancing democracy have introduced methods and technologies that support democratic political processes, such as voting, and more broadly on empowering people to more fully participate in an increasingly technologized world. The aspiration for technologies to support meaningful democratic outcomes is not misplaced. In 2019, headlines around the world announced that Taiwan had become the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage, an impressive political achievement. But it was also an impressive technical achievement, the outcome of a concerted effort to develop responsive and impactful direct democracy platforms. We offer a sociotechnical genealogy of the process, informed by theory of deliberative democracy. We identify three opportunities for future HCI contributions: supporting less visible consensus-es, developing civic journeys, and engaging in deliberative experience design.2020JBJeffrey Bardzell et al.Indiana University BloomingtonActivism & Political ParticipationCommunity Engagement & Civic TechnologyTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
Parting the Red Sea: Sociotechnical Systems and Lived Experiences of MenopauseMenopause 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.2019ALAmanda Lazar et al.University of Maryland, College ParkElderly Care & Dementia SupportGender & Race Issues in HCIEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsCHI
Symbiotic Encounters: HCI and Sustainable AgricultureRecent sustainable HCI research has advocated "working with nature" as a potentially efficacious alternative to human efforts to control it: yet it is less clear how to do so. We contribute to the theoretical aspect of this research by presenting an ethnographic study on alternative farming practices, in which the farm is not so much a system but an assemblage characterized by multiple systems or rationalities always evolving and changing. In them, relationships among species alternate between mutually beneficial in one moment (or season), and harmful in the next. If HCI is to participate in and to support working with nature, we believe that it will have to situate itself within such assemblages and temporalities. In this work, we look into nontraditional users (e.g., nonhumans) and emerging forms of uses (e.g., interactions between human and other species) to help open a design space for technological interventions. We offer three ethnographic accounts in which farmers—and ourselves as researchers—learn to notice, respond, and engage in symbiotic encounters with companion species and the living soil itself.2019SLSzu-Yu (Cyn) Liu et al.Indiana UniversityDeveloping Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)Sustainable HCIHuman-Nature Relationships (More-than-Human Design)CHI
Smart and Fermented Cities: An Approach to Placemaking in Urban InformaticsWhat makes a city meaningful to its residents? What attracts people to live in a city and to care for it? Today, we might see such questions as concerns for HCI, given the emerging agendas of smart and connected cities, IoT, and ubiquitous computing: city residents' perceptions of and attitudes towards smart city technologies will play a role in technology acceptance. Theories of "placemaking" from humanist geography and urban planning address themselves to such concerns, and they have been taken up in HCI and urban informatics research. This theory offers ideas for developing community attachment, heightening the legibility of the city, and intensifying lived experiences in the city. We add to this body of research with an analysis of several initiatives of City Yeast, a community-based design collective in Taiwan that proposes the metaphor of fermentation as an approach to placemaking. We unpack how this approach shapes their design practice and link its implications to urban informatics research in HCI. We suggest that smart cities can also be pursued by leveraging the knowledge of city residents and helping to facilitate their participation in acts of perceiving, envisioning, and improving their local communities, including but not limited to smart and connected technologies.2019GFGuo Freeman et al.Clemson UniversitySmart Cities & Urban SensingCommunity Engagement & Civic TechnologyCHI
(Re-)Framing Menopause Experiences for HCI and DesignInformed 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.2019JBJeffrey Bardzell et al.Indiana UniversityElderly Care & Dementia SupportReproductive & Women's HealthCHI
HCI’s Making AgendasThis survey offers a critical review of making as a topic of HCI research, set into both historical and intellectual contexts. It surveys and critiques two primary HCI research agendas for making: the promise of democratization of technology that making holds forth, and the development of new tools and infrastructures in support of making. It investigates how maker identities are created and enacted, considering the extents to which making is coopted by capitalism; is linked to broader movements in repair, handwork, DIY, and everyday creativity; and is a form of contemporary cultural production. It surveys critiques of making as well as the ways in which making itself produces critiques. It concludes with a call for making research in HCI to become more reflexive about its making agenda. Specifically, it argues that double-down on its commitments to democracy, while being more proactive about matters of social justice, inclusion, and a broadening of values; and it argues that HCI should more proactively shape the maker “narrative” in line with these commitments.2018JBJeffrey Bardzell et al.Indiana UniversityMakerspace CultureEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsCHI
Utopias of Participation: Feminism, Design, and the FuturesThis essay addresses the question of how participatory design researchers and practitioners can pursue commitments to social justice and democracy while retaining commitments to reflective practice, the voices of the marginal, and design experiments “in the small.” I argue that contemporary feminist utopianism has, on its own terms, confronted similar issues, and I observe that it and participatory design pursue similar agendas, but with complementary strengths. I thus propose a cooperative engagement between feminist utopianism and participatory design at the levels of theory, methodology, and on-the-ground practice. I offer an analysis of a case—an urban renewal project in Taipei, Taiwan—as a means of exploring what such a cooperative engagement might entail. I argue that feminist utopianism and participatory design have complementary strengths that could be united to develop and to propose alternative futures that reflect democratic values and procedures, emerging technologies and infrastructures as design materials, a commitment to marginalized voices (and the bodies that speak them), and an ambitious, even literary, imagination.2018SBJeffrey BardzellIndiana UniversityTeleoperated DrivingParticipatory DesignCHI
Design for Sexual Wellbeing in HCIThis workshop focuses on the design of digital interactive technology for promoting sexual wellbeing as a fundamental human rights issue and social justice concern in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Sexuality related topics have garnered much interest in recent years and there is a need to explicitly engage with the intersections of sexuality and social justice as applicable to the design and development of digital interfaces and interactive experiences. This one day workshop will raise intersectional issues, identify research gaps, gather resources, and share innovation strategies for designing sociotechnical interfaces that promote sexual wellbeing in HCI.2018GKGopinaath Kannabiran et al.Indiana University BloomingtonInclusive DesignEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
Cross-Strait Frenemies: Chinese Netizens VPN in to Facebook TaiwanContributing to research on social activism as a form of collective action, we report on Diba, a sizable group of Chinese nationalists, who overcame the Great Firewall in order to troll Taiwan’s political leadership. Diba’s political activism can be characterized as negotiating a tension between two seemingly opposed goals. On the one hand is their construction of a pro-PRC message using the tactics of Internet subcultures (memes, trolling, etc.), but toned down to meet standards of civility. On the other hand, by collectively breaching the Great Firewall and establishing Facebook accounts, the group transgressed PRC technical and legal norms, which were designed to prevent unsanctioned collective action. We argue that the Diba Expedition exemplifies the coordinated use of a complex, transnational social media ecology to support and produce a mass-scale event and newsworthy spectacle, loosened if not severed from state control, and a discursively innovative polysemous message targeted at diverse international audiences: civilized trolling.2018SYYukun Yang et al.Cross-Cultural PerspectivesCSCW
Persuasive Anxiety: Designing and Deploying Material and Formal Explorations of Personal Tracking DevicesSelf-tracking refers to the use of computational sensing devices that track data about user behavior to provide self-knowledge. Self-tracking devices are often designed to function transparently, with minimal user awareness of the tracking process. Although effective from an information-processing perspective, this invisibility can also background issues of materiality and user experience. Further, research on self-tracking has shown that devices are often abandoned, can cause user anxiety, and reflect hegemonic social norms. Self-tracking is an emerging technology and skilled cultural practice, but its central issues—the space of design possibility, the nature of user needs/experiences, and sociopolitical implications—remain unclear. We present Persuasive Anxiety, a project informed by research through design, critical design, and design deployment studies. We report on the design and longitudinal deployment of three designs—Candy Camera, Melody Bot, and Fractured View—to spark critical dialogue about self-tracking. The project helped reveal some the relationships between self-tracking and destructive social norms, as well as how they might be mitigated; the emergence of self-tracking as a performative cultural skill; and the possibility of bringing digital content authoring tools/research into a closer dialogue with self-tracking to give self-trackers greater agency over this cultural practice.2018SGShad Gross et al.Health and Self-TrackingCSCW
Approaching Engagement towards Human-Engaged ComputingDebates regarding the nature and role of HCI research and practice have intensified in recent years, given the ever increasingly intertwined relations between humans and technologies. The framework of Human-Engaged Computing (HEC) was proposed and developed over a series of scholarly workshops to complement mainstream HCI models by leveraging synergy between humans and computers with its key notion of “engagement”. Previous workshop meetings found “engagement” to be a constructive and extendable notion through which to investigate synergized human-computer relationships, but many aspects concerning the core concept remain underexplored. This SIG aims to tackle the notion of engagement considered through discussions of four thematic threads. It will bring together HCI practitioners and researchers from different disciplines including Humanities, Design, Positive Psychology, Communication and Media Studies, Neuroscience, Philosophy and Eastern Studies, to share and discuss relevant knowledge and insights and identify new research opportunities and future directions.2018KNKavous Salehzadeh Niksirat et al.Kochi University of TechnologyTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIParticipatory DesignCHI
Bottom-Up Imaginaries: The Cultural-Technical Practice of Inventing Regional Advantage through IT R&DRecent HCI research on social creativity and bottom-up innovation has highlighted how concerted efforts by the government policy and business communities to develop innovation ecosystems are increasingly intertwined with IT research and development. We note that many such efforts focus on cultivating regional advantage [20] in the form of innovation hubs that are situated in and leverage distinct sociocultural histories and geographies. Cultivating regional advantage entails achieving broad consensus about what that region’s advantage might be, that is, the construction of a regional advantage imaginary beyond the policies, IT supports, and practices to make it happen. Here, we document how an ongoing public debate among makers and manufacturers in Taiwan as a region—distinguished by direct engagement with design, fabrication, prototyping, and manufacturing processes—are proposing pathways toward a regional advantage that both reflects Taiwan’s recent sociocultural and economic histories and also its near future aspirations.2018GFGuo Freeman et al.University of CincinattiMakerspace CultureDeveloping Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)CHI
Design and Intervention in the Age of 'No Alternative'This paper explores the relationship between design and intervention, and how scholars of computing and design might strengthen their repertoire of intervention amidst a pervasive sense of there being “no alternative” to structures of inequality and capitalist expansion. Drawing from the authors’ long-term ethnographic research on maker, entrepreneurship, and innovation cultures as well as their engagements with professional communities of computing and design, this paper introduces and theorizes modes of intervention that do not fit familiar images of political action such as the countercultural hero or localized resistance. The paper contributes by expanding the analytical repertoire of an interventionist-oriented social computing scholarship. Specifically, it offers three inter-related analytical sensibilities from feminist and critical race studies—“noticing differently,” “walking alongside” and “parasitic resistance”— to support political and activist approaches in CSCW and related fields.2018SLSilvia Lindtner et al.Feminist PerspectivesCSCW