CHI 2019 Annotated Bibliography (Part 1)

After the 2019 CHI conference (technically the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) and writing about our own paper on design approaches to privacy, I wanted to highlight other work that I found interesting or thought provoking in a sort of annotated bibliography. Listed in no particular order, though most relate to one or more themes that I’m interested in (privacy, design research, values in design practice, critical approaches, and speculative design).

(I’m still working through the stack of CHI papers that I downloaded to read, so hopefully this is part 1 of two or three posts).

• James Pierce. 2019. Smart Home Security Cameras and Shifting Lines of Creepiness: A Design-Led Inquiry. Paper 45, 14 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300275 — Pierce uses a design-led inquiry to illustrate and investigate three data practices of IoT products and services (digital leakage, hole-and-corner applications, and foot-in-the-door devices), providing some conceptual scaffolding for thinking about how privacy emerges differently in relation to varying technical (and social) configurations. Importantly, I like that Pierce is pushing design researchers to go beyond conceptualizing privacy as “creepiness”, through his exploration of three tropes of data practices.
• Renee Noortman, Britta F. Schulte, Paul Marshall, Saskia Bakker, and Anna L. Cox. 2019. HawkEye — Deploying a Design Fiction Probe. Paper 422, 14 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300652 — Building on Shulte’s concept of a “design probe,” Noortman et al. participants interact with a (beautifully designed!) control panel in the home over 3 weeks to act in the role of a caregiver in a design fiction about dementia care. The paper furthers the use of design fiction as a participatory and embodied experience, and as a data collection tool for research. The authors provide some useful reflections on the ways participants imagined and helped build out the fictional world in which they were participating.
• Yaxing Yao, Justin Reed Basdeo, Smirity Kaushik, and Yang Wang. 2019. Defending My Castle: A Co-Design Study of Privacy Mechanisms for Smart Homes. Paper 198, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300428 — Yao et al. use co-design techniques to explore privacy concerns and potential privacy mechanisms with a range of participants (including diversity in age). Some interesting ideas arise from participants, such as creating an IoT “incognito mode,” as well as raising concerns about accessibility for these systems. Sometimes tensions arise, with participants wanting to trust IoT agents like Alexa as a ‘true friend’ who won’t spy on them, yet harboring some distrust of the companies creating these systems. I like that the authors point to a range of modalities for where we might place responsibility for IoT privacy — in the hardware, apps, platform policy, or operating modes. It’s a nice tie into questions others have asked about how responsibility for privacy is distributed, or what happens when we “handoff” responsibility for protecting values from one part of a sociotechnical system to another part.
• Kristina Andersen and Ron Wakkary. 2019. The Magic Machine Workshops: Making Personal Design Knowledge. Paper 112, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300342 — Andersen and Wakkary outline a set of workshop techniques to help participants generate personal materials. I appreciate the commitments made in the paper, such as framing workshops as something that should benefit participants themselves, as well as researchers, in part by centering the workshop on the experience of individual participants. They propose a set of workshop elements; it’s nice to see these explicated here, as they help convey a lot of tacit knowledge about running workshops (the details of which are often abbreviated in most papers’ methods sections). I particularly like the “prompt” element to help provide a quick initial goal for participants to engage in while situating the workshop. While the example workshops used in the paper focus on making things out of materials, I’m curious if some of the outlined workshop elements might be useful in other types of workshop-like activities.
• Laura Devendorf, Kristina Andersen, Daniela K. Rosner, Ron Wakkary, and James Pierce. 2019. From HCI to HCI-Amusement: Strategies for Engaging what New Technology Makes Old. Paper 35, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300265 — Devendorf et al. start by (somewhat provocatively) asking what it might be like to explore a “non-contribution” in HCI. The paper walks through a set of projects and works its way to a set of reflections about the norms of HCI research focusing on the “technological new,” asking what it might mean instead to take the present or the banal more seriously. The paper also starts to ask what types of epistemologies are seen as legitimate in HCI. The paper calls for “para-research” within HCI as a way to focus attention on what is left out or unseen through dominant HCI practices.
• Colin M. Gray and Shruthi Sai Chivukula. 2019. Ethical Mediation in UX Practice. Paper 178, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300408 — Through a set of case study observations and interview, Gray and Chivukula study how ethics are conducted in practice by UX designers. The paper provides a lot of good detail about ways UX designers bring ethics to the forefront and some of the challenges they face. The authors contribute a set of relationships or mediators, connecting individual designers’ practices to organizational practices to applied ethics.
• Sarah E. Fox, Kiley Sobel, and Daniela K. Rosner. 2019. Managerial Visions: Stories of Upgrading and Maintaining the Public Restroom with IoT. Paper 493, 15 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300723 — Through interviews, participant observations, and analysis of media materials, Fox et al. investigate managerial labor in regulating access to public bathroom resources. They craft a story of regulation (in a broad sense), about how the bathroom’s management is entangled among local politics and on-the-ground moral beliefs, corporate values, imagined future efficiencies through technology, and strategic uses of interior and technological design. This entanglement allows for particular types of control, allowing some access to resources and making it harder for others.
• William Gaver, Andy Boucher, Michail Vanis, Andy Sheen, Dean Brown, Liliana Ovalle, Naho Matsuda, Amina Abbas-Nazari, and Robert Phillips. 2019. My Naturewatch Camera: Disseminating Practice Research with a Cheap and Easy DIY Design. Paper 302, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300532 — Gaver et al. detail a DIY nature camera, shown in partnership with a BBC television series and built by over 1000 people. Interestingly, while similar tools could be used for citizen science efforts, the authors are clear that they are instead trying to create a type of public engagement with research that focuses on creating more intimate types of encounters, and engaging people with less technical expertise in making. The cameras help create intimate “encounters” with local wildlife (plus the paper includes some cute animal photos!).
• Sandjar Kozubaev, Fernando Rochaix, Carl DiSalvo, and Christopher A. Le Dantec. 2019. Spaces and Traces: Implications of Smart Technology in Public Housing. Paper 439, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300669 — Kozubaev et al.’s work adds to a growing body of work questioning and reframing what the “home” means in relation to smart home technology. The authors conduct design workshops with residents (and some managers) in US public housing, providing insight into housing situations where (1) the “home” is not a single-family middle class grouping, and (2) the potential end users of smart home technologies may not have control or consent over the technologies used, and are already subject to various forms of state surveillance.
• Shruthi Sai Chivukula, Chris Watkins, Lucca McKay, and Colin M. Gray. 2019. “Nothing Comes Before Profit”: Asshole Design In the Wild. Paper LBW1314, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312863 — This late breaking work by Chivukala et al investigates the /r/assholedesign subreddit to explore the concept of “asshole design,” particularly in comparison to the concept of “dark patterns.” They find that asshole design uses some dark pattern strategies, but that dark patterns tend to trick users into doing certain things, while asshole design often restricts uses of products and more often include non-digital artifacts. I think there may be an interesting future regulatory discussion about asshole design (and dark patterns). On one hand, one might consider whether dark pattern or asshole design practices might fit under the FTC’s definition of “unfair and deceptive practices” for possible enforcement action against companies. On the other, as some legislators are introducing bills to ban the use of dark patterns — it becomes very important to think carefully about how dark patterns are defined, and what might get included and excluded in those definitions; the way that this work suggests a set of practices related to, but distinct from, dark patterns could help inform future policy discussions.

Originally published at http://bytegeist.wordpress.com on July 5, 2019.