Should AI Mimic People? Understanding AI-Supported Writing Technology Among Black UsersAI-supported writing technologies (AISWT) that provide grammatical suggestions, autocomplete sentences, or generate and rewrite text are now a regular feature integrated into many people's workflows. However, little is known about how people perceive the suggestions these tools provide. In this paper, we investigate how Black American users perceive AISWT, motivated by prior findings in natural language processing that highlight how the underlying large language models can contain racial biases. Using interviews and observational user studies with 13 Black American users of AISWT, we found a strong tradeoff between the perceived benefits of using AISWT to enhance their writing style and feeling like ``it wasn't built for us''. Specifically, participants reported AISWT's failure to recognize commonly used names and expressions in African American Vernacular English, experiencing its corrections as hurtful and alienating and fearing it might further minoritize their culture. We end with a reflection on the tension between AISWT that fail to include Black American culture and language, and AISWT that attempt to mimic it, with attention to accuracy, authenticity, and the production of social difference.2025JBJeffrey K Basoah et al.AI & WritingCSCW
Resistive Threads: Electronic Streetwear as Social Movement MaterialInformed by legacies of textile activism, we design Resistive Threads as a wearable probe to investigate potential roles and trajectories of electronic streetwear in US urban social movements. Resistive Threads is an interactive denim jacket that refashions the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project's (Dis)location Black Exodus print zine. The jacket plays audio stories, poetry, and music from embedded speakers when interactive patches sewn with conductive thread are tapped upon. Examining the artifact with 10 community organizers and partners, we find that augmented streetwear may take on the role of a housing organizing instrument or speculative garment. In turn, we discuss how we might learn from textile histories and solidarities to recognize—not rehearse—damage-centered research. We close with a reflection on what makes the electronic aspect of e-textiles meaningful to social movement practice and performance.2024BHBrett A. Halperin et al.Augmentative & Alternative Communication (AAC)Empowerment of Marginalized GroupsDigital Art Installations & Interactive PerformanceDIS
Worlding with Tarot: Design, Divination, and the Technological ImaginationDesign cards have long played an important role in reflection--directing the designer’s gaze toward unasked questions, hidden consequences, and new horizons for speculative futuring. But few questions have been asked about what motivates the design process and how deck designers see their role in inquiry and/or world building. This paper looks to the Tarot deck as one iconic example of such a process. Drawing on interviews with nine Tarot deck creators, we surface themes of Tarot as scaffolding modes of personal and collective growth, forms of carework, and pathways for different ways of knowing. We discuss expanding design inquiry methods for understanding and elevating forms of spiritual connection and care; and moving from anti-appropriation to ante-appropriation.2024RMRebecca Michelson et al.Design FictionDigital Art Installations & Interactive PerformanceDIS
Porous by Design: How Childcare Platforms Impact Worker Personhood, Safety, and ConnectionCare work is always already unequal. It involves looking after others’ physical, psychological, emotional, and developmental needs. Paid care work tends to be conducted in private spaces, lack regulation, and reproduce unequal dynamics between clients and workers. These conditions lead to porous boundaries, a permeability experienced by workers between care and work, professional and personal, and private and public (sectors and spheres). Drawing on interviews with 16 workers who find work using Care.com, we argue that the porous boundaries of care work are reified in new ways through the design and use of emerging digitally mediated matching platforms. This has particular impacts for ranking personhood, reducing worker safety, and increasing atomization. In contrast, we find benefits in the forum-like structure and visible, interactive conversations of other platforms used to access childcare work. We end with a discussion of porousness by design and the trouble of locating design within worker platforms.2024CLCaitlin Lustig et al.Inclusive DesignEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsParticipatory DesignDIS
Care Layering: Complicating Design PatternsOver the past two decades, discussions of design patterns have turned from encouragement (what to do) toward discouragement (what to avoid). Termed dark, deceptive, or otherwise harmful, user experience (UX) patterns that serve to monetize engagement while reproducing and sedimenting structural inequities call for a shifting conversation around UX development and learning. This pictorial uses a visual case study of childcare worker platforms to help critically contextualize largely abstracted or universalizing UX patterns. Developing a form of critical documentation we call Care Layering, we show how approaching UX patterns as embodied and culturally-situated resources sheds light on both limitations and opportunities around gig work platform engagement. We end with a discussion of how Care Layering helps designers work towards greater accountability in UX design.2024MKMaya A Kaneko et al.Mental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesDark Patterns RecognitionEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsDIS
“I Don’t Want to Hide Behind an Avatar”: Self-representation in Social VR among Women in Midlife Social virtual reality (VR) avatars hold promise for allowing people to represent themselves as they want to be seen. But most social VR environments constrain avatar options in ways that limit the accurate presentation of age and promote the assumption of youth. Through individual interviews with ten women in midlife, we explore experiences representing age and other aspects of identity in social VR. Participants expressed a desire to show age and gender with increased nuance: they sought more gradations of color, texture, and body types, and disliked the hypersexualization that resulted from integrated clothing and body parts. As they customized their avatars, participants struggled to depict both physical and personal characteristics, taking into account how others might evaluate their self-perception. These findings highlight opportunities for nuanced representations of physical attributes as well as options for representing the self at other levels: psychological, social, and aesthetic.2023MMMargaret E Morris et al.Identity & Avatars in XROnline Identity & Self-PresentationGender & Race Issues in HCIDIS
Participatory Design and Power in Misinformation, Disinformation, and Online Hate ResearchAs a research tradition, participatory design (PD) tends to focus on power dynamics where researchers hold greater power than participants. This paper uses design fiction to consider what this tendency overlooks by examining settings where participants may exist in multiple power relationships simultaneously implicated by the research, specifically focusing on the contexts of misinformation, disinformation, and online hate (M/D/OH). Drawing from existing literature in M/D/OH, we present a series of imaginary method abstracts that prompt questions for researchers to reflect on as they adapt PD techniques for new, different contexts. We highlight three value tensions—authenticity, reciprocity, and impact—integral to sustaining a concern for responsibility in PD scholarship. We end with reflections and potential considerations for responsibly applying PD and design fiction methods in M/D/OH settings.2023JSJoseph Schafer et al.Misinformation & Fact-CheckingCyberbullying & Online HarassmentParticipatory DesignDIS
Autospeculation: Reflecting on the Intimate and Imaginative Capacities of Data AnalysisGiven decades of Human computer interaction (HCI) research focused on scientific empiricism, it can be hard for the field to acknowledge that data analysis is both an emotional and speculative process. But what does it mean for this process of data analysis to embrace its situated and speculative nature? In this paper, we explore this possibility by building on decades of HCI mixed methods that root data analysis in design. Drawing on an autoethnographic design inquiry, we examine how data analysis can work as an implicating process, one that is not only critically grounded in a designer’s own situation but also offers modes of imagining the world otherwise. In this analysis, we find that autobiographical design can help HCI scholars to respond to current critiques of speculative design by grounding and rendering more personal certain kinds of speculation, opening a space for diverse voices to emerge.2023BKBrian Kinnee et al.University of WashingtonTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIDesign FictionCHI
Understanding AR Activism: An Interview Study with Creators of Augmented Reality Experiences for Social ChangeThe rise of consumer augmented reality (AR) technology has opened up new possibilities for interventions intended to disrupt and subvert cultural conventions. From defacing corporate logos to erecting geofenced digital monuments, more and more people are creating AR experiences for social causes. We sought to understand this new form of activism, including why people use AR for these purposes, opportunities and challenges in using it, and how well it can support activist goals. We conducted semi-structured interviews with twenty people involved in projects that used AR for a social cause across six different countries. We found that AR can overcome physical world limitations of activism to convey immersive, multilayered narratives that aim to reveal invisible histories and perspectives. At the same time, people experienced challenges in creating, maintaining, and distributing their AR experiences to audiences. We discuss open questions and opportunities for creating AR tools and experiences for social change.2022RSRafael M.L. Silva et al.University of WashingtonAR Navigation & Context AwarenessActivism & Political ParticipationInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingCHI
Crafting Everyday Resistance through Lightweight DesignThis pictorial examines the relationship between inquiry and activism within academic settings through the design of protest artifacts. Inspired by lineages of feminist print production, we illustrate our own process of creating simple acts of resistance through electronic posters and buttons. Naming these interventions “lightweight design interactions,” we hold on to the ways design practice might work as modest, partial, and incremental shifts in the circumstances through which design futures unfold. Lightweight design interactions encourage us as design researchers to look beyond the bold creation of alternatives (new design artifacts) to the subtle nurturing of the circumstances that make alternatives possible.2020SFSarah E. Fox et al.Empowerment of Marginalized GroupsTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIDesign FictionDIS
The Promise of Empathy: Design, Disability, and Knowing the 'Other'This paper examines the promise of empathy, the name commonly given to the initial phase of the human-centered design process in which designers seek to understand their intended users in order to inform technology development. By analyzing popular empathy activities aimed at understanding people with disabilities, we examine the ways empathy works to both powerfully and problematically align designers with the values of people who may use their products. Drawing on disability studies and feminist theorizing, we describe how acts of empathy building may further distance people with disabilities from the processes designers intend to draw them into. We end by reimagining empathy as guided by the lived experiences of people with disabilities who are traditionally positioned as those to be empathized.2019CBCynthia L. Bennett et al.University of WashingtonUniversal & Inclusive DesignInclusive DesignEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsCHI
Parody in Place: Exposing Socio-spatial Exclusions in Data-Driven Maps with Design ParodyThis paper describes the development of Parody in Place, a design parody that depicts Seattle neighborhoods with typographic arrangements derived from data generated by technology platforms such as Yelp and Zillow. The project invites inquiry into what technology corporations make matter and where, in ways that challenge the neutrality of neighborhood-based data. We designed the subject of our parody, a mock company called Dork Posters, to explore how the modes of parody by which the system operates expose socio-spatial exclusions both contested and propagated by digital platforms. Our interventions reveal shifts in response toward mapping techniques, from ambivalence to curiosity. We used Dork Posters to question reductionist techniques of data aggregation and ad hoc theories of data provenance. Our engagements also prompted reflection on the politics of measurement: how data sources shape result- ing insights and valuations. We end by discussing possibilities for expanding the design research program within human-computer interaction through parody.2018SFSarah Fox et al.University of WashingtonInclusive DesignDeveloping Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)Design FictionCHI