Underground AI? Critical Approaches to Generative Cinema through Amateur FilmmakingAmateurism (e.g., hobbyist and do-it-yourself making) has long helped human-computer interaction (HCI) scholars map alternatives to status quo technology developments, cultures, and practices. Following the 2023 Hollywood film worker strikes, many scholars, artists, and activists alike have called for alternative approaches to AI that reclaim the apparatus for co-creative and resistant means. Towards this end, we conduct an 11-week diary study with 20 amateur filmmakers of 15 AI-infused films, investigating the emerging space of generative cinema as a critical technical practice. Our close reading of the films and filmmakers’ reflections on their processes reveal four critical approaches to negotiating AI use in filmmaking: minimization, maximization, compartmentalization, and revitalization. We discuss how these approaches suggest the potential for underground filmmaking cultures to form around AI with critical amateurs reclaiming social control over the creative possibilities.2025BHBrett A. Halperin et al.University of Washington, Human Centered Design & EngineeringGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Interactive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingCHI
Ontologies in Design: How Imagining a Tree Reveals Possibilities and Assumptions in Large Language ModelsAmid the recent uptake of Generative AI, sociotechnical scholars and critics have traced a multitude of resulting harms, with analyses largely focused on values and axiology (e.g., bias). While value-based analyses are crucial, we argue that ontologies—concerning what we allow ourselves to think or talk about—is a vital but under-recognized dimension in analyzing these systems. Proposing a need for a practice-based engagement with ontologies, we offer four orientations for considering ontologies in design: pluralism, groundedness, liveliness, and enactment. We share examples of potentialities that are opened up through these orientations across the entire LLM development pipeline by conducting two ontological analyses: examining the responses of four LLM-based chatbots in a prompting exercise, and analyzing the architecture of an LLM-based agent simulation. We conclude by sharing opportunities and limitations of working with ontologies in the design and development of sociotechnical systems.2025NHNava Haghighi et al.Stanford University, Computer ScienceHuman-LLM CollaborationTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
The Power of Absence: Thinking with Archival Theory in Algorithmic Design This paper explores the value of archival theory as a means of grappling with bias in algorithmic design. Rather than seek to mitigate biases perpetuated by datasets and automated systems, archival theory offers a reframing of bias itself. Drawing on a range of archival theory from the fields of history, literary and cultural studies, Black studies, and feminist STS, we propose absence—as power, presence, and productive—as a concept that might more securely anchor investigations into the causes of algorithmic bias, and that can prompt more capacious, creative, and joyful future work. This essay, in turn, can intervene into the technical as well as the social, historical, and political structures that serve as sources of bias.2024JSJihan Sherman et al.AI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityAlgorithmic Fairness & BiasDIS
Miracle Machine in the Making: Soulful Speculation with KabbalahWhat does it mean to design for a miracle—an ineffable phenomenon that might just exist in the world, but might also transcend it? Focusing on an esoteric strand of Jewish mystical thought known as Kabbalah, we draw from speculative interview activities with 11 Jewish creative interlocutors to describe a process of designing a "miracle machine." Interweaving foundational Kabbalah literature with design inquiry, we find that lived experiences of miracles span life-saving events, effortful acts of love, and ineffable forms of knowledge. We also learn that people envision miracle machines as natural, cosmic, and sensory systems with transcendent capacities. These insights rework a normative focus on the human mind (cognition) and body (embodiment) by embracing the all-too-often overlooked soul as a design resource. We end with a reflection on what soulful speculation entails and the purview that it expands, reorienting our understanding of what machines are altogether.2023BHBrett A. Halperin et al.Design FictionDIS
Probing a Community-Based Conversational Storytelling Agent to Document Digital Stories of Housing InsecurityDespite the central role that stories play in social movement-building, they are difficult to sustainably document for many reasons. To explore this challenge, this paper describes the design of a community-based conversational storytelling agent (CSA) to document digital stories of housing insecurity. Building on insights from an ongoing grassroots project, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, we share how a study initially focused on CSA-support opened an investigation of the role that artificial intelligence may play in housing justice movements. Drawing from 17 interviews with narrators of housing insecurity experiences and collectors of such stories, we find that collectors perceive opportunities to expand means of documentation with multimedia and multi-language support. Meanwhile, some narrators perceive potential for a CSA to offer therapeutic storytelling experiences and document otherwise unrecorded stories. Yet, CSA encounters also surface perils of machine bias, as well as reduced possibilities of human connections and relations.2023BHBrett A. Halperin et al.University of WashingtonConversational ChatbotsInclusive DesignCHI
Doufu, Rice Wine, and 面饼: Supporting the Connections between Precision and Cultural Knowledge in CookingThe digital codification and measurement of food preparation has made strong contributions to HCI food research, whether through ingredient manipulation, workflow management, or recipe interaction. But prior work has shown that technical developments that emphasize precise gourmet practices tend to overlook the importance of cultural knowledge. Drawing on an integrative autobiographical design approach, we describe an open-source hardware toolkit that we developed to examine the process of integrating precision techniques with ritual cooking practices across three recipes: flour skin, rice wine, and doufu. Our work points to the importance of understanding precision as a cultural process with roots in personal and familial experience. We end with a reflection on the particular knowledge-forms that come from cultivating cultural relationships to fabrication processes and their implications for reading digital fabrication processes as meaningfully relational.2023DLDanli Luo et al.University of WashingtonUniversal & Inclusive DesignFood Culture & Food InteractionCHI
Useful Uselessness? Teaching Robots to Knit with HumansThis pictorial uses imagery of human-robot collaboration, or cobots, as a site to examine the potential of queer use within design research. Through close documentation of our process, we reflect on acts of teaching a commercially available robot to knit with us—a messy and seemingly unproductive process. However, this uselessness of the chosen task allows us to re-consider the idealization of robotic collaboration. We question the optimization of a largely human labor force and the associated drive to increase efficiency within a range of sectors, from the service industry to industrial production. Building on non-use literatures examining technological limits, and drawing on performative explorations and critique, we show how knitting enlarges our capacity to visualize what might be a suitable use case for cobots.2020PTPat Treusch et al.Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC)Shape-Changing Materials & 4D PrintingDesign FictionDIS
The Care Work of AccessCurrent approaches to AI and Assistive Technology (AT) often foreground task completion over other encounters such as expressions of care. Our paper challenges and complements such task-completion approaches by attending to the care work of access—the continual affective and emotional adjustments that people make by noticing and attending to one another. We explore how this work impacts encounters among people with and without vision impairments who complete tasks together. We find that bound up in attempts to get things done are concerns for one another and how well people are doing together. Reading this work through emerging disability studies and feminist STS scholarship, we account for two important forms of work that give rise to access: (1) mundane attunements and (2) non-innocent authorizations. Together these processes work as sensitizing concepts to help HCI scholars account for the ways that intelligent ATs both produce access while sometimes subverting people with disabilities.2020CBCynthia L. Bennett et al.Carnegie Mellon University & University of WashingtonVisual Impairment Technologies (Screen Readers, Tactile Graphics, Braille)Cognitive Impairment & Neurodiversity (Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia)Universal & Inclusive DesignCHI
Who Gets to Future? Race, Representation, and Design Methods in AfricatownThis paper draws on a collaborative project called the Africatown Activation to examine the role design practices play in contributing to (or conspiring against) the flourishing of the Black community in Seattle, Washington. Specifically, we describe the efforts of a community group called Africatown to design and build an installation that counters decades of disinvestment and ongoing displacement in the historically Black Central Area neighborhood. Our analysis suggests that despite efforts to include community, conventional design practices may perpetuate forms of institutional racism: enabling activities of community engagement that may further legitimate racialized forms of displacement. We discuss how focusing on amplifying the legacies of imagination already at work may help us move beyond a simple reading of design as the solution to systemic forms of oppression.2019JOJasper Tran O'Leary et al.University of WashingtonGender & Race Issues in HCIEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
Managerial Visions: Stories of Upgrading and Maintaining the Public Restroom with IoTThis paper examines the entangled development of governance strategies and networked technologies in the pervasive but under-examined domain of public restrooms. Drawing on a mix of archival materials, participant observation, and interviews within and beyond the city of Seattle, Washington, we look at the motivations of public restroom facilities managers as they introduce (or consider introducing) networked technology in the spaces they administer. Over the course of the research, we found internet of things technologies—or, connected devices imbued with computational capacity—became increasingly tied up with cost-reducing efficiencies and exploitative regulatory techniques. Drawing from this case study, we develop the concept of managerial visions: ways of seeing that structure labor, enforce compliance, and define access to resources. We argue that these ways of seeing prove increasingly critical to HCI research as it attends to computer-mediated collaboration beyond white-collar settings.2019SFSarah E. Fox et al.University of California, San DiegoContext-Aware ComputingHome Energy ManagementCHI
From HCI to HCI-Amusement: Strategies for Engaging what New Technology Makes OldNotions of what counts as a contribution to HCI continue to be contested as our field expands to accommodate perspectives from the arts and humanities. This paper aims to advance the position of the arts and further contribute to these debates by actively exploring what a "non-contribution" would look like in HCI. We do this by taking inspiration from Fluxus, a collective of artists in the 1950's and 1960's who actively challenged and reworked practices of fine arts institutions by producing radically accessible, ephemeral, and modest works of "art-amusement." We use Fluxus to develop three analogous forms of "HCI-amusements," each of which shed light on dominant practices and values within HCI by resisting to fit into its logics.2019LDLaura Devendorf et al.University of Colorado BoulderDigital Art Installations & Interactive PerformanceInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingCHI
Disruptive Improvisations: Making Use of Non-Deterministic Art Practices in HCIThe goal of this one-day workshop is to open space for disruptive techniques and strategies to be used in the making, prototyping, and conceptualizations of the artifacts and systems developed and imagined within HCI. Specifically, this workshop draws on strategies from art, speculative design, and activism, as we aim to productively “trouble” the design processes behind HCI. We frame these explorations as "disruptive improvisations" — tactics artists and designers use to make the familiar strange or creatively problematize in order to foster new insights. The workshop invites participants to inquire through making and take up key themes as starting points to develop disruptive improvisations for design. These include modesty, scarcity, uselessness, no-technology, and failure. The workshop will produce a zine workbook or pamphlet to be distributed during the conference to bring visibility to the role these tactics of making in a creative design practices.2018KAKristina Andersen et al.Design FictionCHI
Lessons from the Woodshop: Cultivating Design with Living MaterialsThis paper describes an eighteen-month ethnography of timber framing at a tiny house construction program in Port Townsend, Washington. This case exposes the intricate, ongoing processes that define a project where people learn to imagine, create, and ultimately maintain living materials. This case sheds light on the nature and scope of interaction design with living materials, an area of growing significance to HCI scholarship on new materials, sustainable design, and digital fabrication. Drawing from this project, we distill five lessons for design with living, finite materials. We end by discussing three emerging areas for HCI: designing for material recuperation, collaborating with more-than-human actors, and approaching material properties as prototyping sites.2018KDKristin N Dew et al.University of WashingtonShape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsSustainable HCIEcological Design & Green ComputingCHI
Making Core Memory: Design Inquiry into Gendered Legacies of Engineering and CraftworkThis paper describes the Making Core Memory project, a design inquiry into the invisible work that went into assem-bling core memory, an early form of computer information storage initially woven by hand. Drawing on feminist tradi-tions of situated knowing, we designed an electronic quilt and a series of participatory workshops that materialize the work of the core memory weavers. With this case we not only broaden dominant stories of design, but we also reflect on the entanglement of predominantly male, high status labor with the ostensibly low-status work of women’s hands. By integrating design and archival research as a means of cultural analysis, we further expand conversations on design research methods within human-computer inter-action (HCI), using design to reveal legacies of practice elided by contemporary technology cultures. In doing so, this paper highlights for HCI scholars that worlds of hand-work and computing, or weaving and space travel, are not as separate as we might imagine them to be.2018DRDaniela K. Rosner et al.University of WashingtonGender & Race Issues in HCIDigital Art Installations & Interactive PerformanceTextile Art & Craft DigitizationCHI