This post is based on a talk about a paper published at the 2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020). The full research paper by Richmond Wong, Vera Khovanskaya, Sarah Fox, Nick Merrill, and Phoebe Sengers “Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds ” can be found here: [Official ACM Version] [Open Access Pre-Print Version]

In our paper, we ask how speculative design can be used to more explicitly center and raise questions about the broader social, technical, and political worlds in which speculative artifacts exist. To do so, we draw connections between speculative design and infrastructure studies, which offers a set of lenses to help ask questions about ongoing relationships and practices needed to maintain and support systems.  We present a set of design tactics to help speculative design researchers make use of the analytical lenses from infrastructure studies.

The HCI community has taken up practices of speculation, such as critical design, speculative design, and design fiction to interrogate emerging technologies. In these techniques. Researchers design conceptual artifacts and experiences to evoke alternative sociotechnical worlds, to explore the possibility of different social values, norms, behaviors, and material configurations.

These practices often focus on creating a speculative product or artifact. For instance, in prior work by several of the authors, we created fictional products including a workplace smart toilet that tracks menstrual cycles and other health information. This is shown in a fictional product catalog, allowing the view to easily think about questions related directly to use. What might it be like if you had to use or interact with this product?

While presenting a speculative product, like a fictional smart toilet, foregrounds questions of direct use (left), we might also be interested in questions that concern practices in the artifact’s “background” (right)

However, other types of questions that we might want to ask remain more implicit, particularly those not about immediate use. For example, how does this impact janitorial and custodial labor needed to maintain the smart toilet? What differential experiences might arise from its long-term use? What regulatory frameworks may emerge around new types of data collection? These questions may not be readily apparent just through the presentation of a speculative artifact, as they happen in the artifact’s “background.”

As designers increasingly use modes of speculation to interrogate questions of broad, societal concern—such as climate change, the role of big tech in political radicalization, and widening income inequalities—there is a need to adapt the speculative design toolbox to include approaches that explicitly focus beyond immediate moments of use, to explore the broad and disparate impacts of technologies as well as the maintenance and repair labor required to keep them working. While an inquisitive designer or viewer might come to these questions on their own, we want to provide some scaffolding for designers who wish to explicitly consider these types of questions through their speculative designs.

Projected Lifeworlds

An artifact and its projected lifeworld

To help us shape our approach, we use the concept of lifeworlds. In philosophy, anthropology, and in some prior HCI literature, lifeworlds are used to refer to the social contexts and experiences that a user has. We build on this, presenting the idea of projected lifeworlds, or the things that must be true, common-sense and taken-for-granted in order for the design to work. In speculative design, the lifeworlds of a potential future or alternative world are projected by a design artifact. However, we find that these projected lifeworlds are often implicit. Attention is often drawn most immediately to the speculative design artifact in the foreground, leaving the lifeworld implicit in the background.

How can we help “fill in” the projected lifeworld?

However, one might be interested in exploring issues that occur in a speculative product’s lifeworld, beyond the artifact and its immediate use. This requires shifting our analytical lens to think about and “fill in” projected lifeworlds more explicitly. We turn to literature from infrastructure studies to help us make this shift in our focus.

Infrastructure Studies

Indeed, HCI’s study of technologies has broadened beyond the immediate user-system relationship. Beyond questions of immediate use, HCI researchers have also begun to examine practices of ongoing maintenance and repair labor, technology policy issues, and political and economic conditions. One set of analytical lenses that scholars have drawn on to ask these questions includes research from science and technology studies on infrastructures.

Briefly, infrastructures are sociotechnical. They include technological components, as well as the social institutions and practices that make them durable, such as standards-setting, maintenance, and repair. Infrastructures support particular forms of human actions while complicating others. For example, the electrical grid is built using technologies like power plants, substations, and dams. It relies on social institutions such as power companies and regulatory agencies that shape and maintain it. Yet, people’s access to, and experience of electrical power is variable. Infrastructures might seem hidden from view, seemingly operating in the background. However, we can see and understand these infrastructures, if we shape our analytical lenses to help bring these arrangements and practices to the forefront.

We reflect on the idea that speculative design is already concerned with infrastructural questions. However these concerns tend to remain implicit, as we often focus on depicting the artifact, and leave the lifeworlds of the artifact implicit. Using insights from infrastructure studies and reviewing existing speculative design work, we present a set of design tactics to help design researchers bring lifeworlds into more explicit focus.

Design Tactics for Infrastructural Speculations

The paper presents eight design tactics for creating infrastructural speculations

In the paper, we describe eight design tactics for creating infrastructural speculations. These tactics aim to help designers consciously and purposefully place and reflect on the role of infrastructures in their speculative work. Each tactic is grounded in a particular insight from infrastructure studies. Each tactic helps to bring a different aspect of the artifact’s lifeworld into focus. I’ll highlight 3 of these today.

Tactic: Place the same speculative artifact in multiple lifeworlds.

First is “placing the same speculative artifact in multiple lifeworlds.” This builds on the concept of “infrastructural inversion,” an analytical move to foreground the relationships among people, practices, artifacts, and institutions that normally exist in the background of a situation or activity. Similarly, speculative designs can be crafted in ways to emphasize the importance of the background lifeworld as being just as, if not more, important than the speculative artifact itself.

In deploying this tactic, the design researcher takes a single artifact and articulates multiple lifeworlds in which that artifact might make sense. For example, Pierce’s collages of smart products re-deploy existing consumer IoT cameras in ways that suggest alternative lifeworlds, beyond what is depicted in advertising and marketing materials. Pierce uses metaphors of lamps and curtains to speculate lifeworlds where IoT cameras have physical on/off switches, curtain shades, and used like interior lamps for decorative and mood-setting purposes. One can look at these re-deployments to ask what other lifeworlds might make sense for the IoT camera. One might be a lifeworld where IoT cameras are used decoratively and aesthetically like lighting today. Another might be a lifeworld where people adopt, but mistrust their devices. Here, they might use add-ons that subvert surveillance, such as lens covers, on/off switches, and wireless jammers.

This tactic de-centers the speculative artifact as the main unit of analysis, and instead brings our attention to the importance of the lifeworld. By explicitly portraying multiple alternative lifeworlds, design researchers can interrogate how the social meaning of a technology is co-constructed between the artifact and its lifeworld. The diversity of lifeworlds depicted through this tactic also sheds light on the multiplicity of the present reality. Within the world that we inhabit, technologies exist in multiple contexts and may have multiple social meanings.

Tactic: Depict stakeholders beyond users, and relationships beyond use

A second tactic is to “Focus lifeworld descriptions on stakeholders beyond users, and relationships beyond use.” This builds on infrastructures research that focuses on the practices required to support sociotechnical systems, such as maintaining, repairing, managing, selling, regulating, or dismantling systems. This connects with existing HCI design work that looks at other types of relationships between humans and systems beyond that of “use.”

This tactic then, focuses on “uses beyond use.” For example, Stead’s Toaster for Life design fiction presents a speculative networked toaster with sustainable attributes, including the ability to repair, upgrade, customize, recycle, and track component parts. The fiction foregrounds a set of relationships and practices with the toaster that go beyond use. The toaster’s modularity centers repair and maintenance practices as a key mode of interacting with the toaster. The fiction also points to a broader set of stakeholders who interact with the toaster through practices of recycling, fabrication, and tracking of the toaster’s components throughout its lifecycle.

This tactic can be used to explore such questions around the multifaceted relationships and practices related to speculative artifacts. What forms of work might be necessary to maintain and sustain a system across time? Who does this work, and how is it valued?

Tactic: Focus on the bureaucratic mundane — artifacts or organizations representing larger systems of power

The last design tactic I’ll discuss is to “Create mundane artifacts or organizations whose disturbing effects are due to the systems of power and institutions within which they are embedded.” This comes from an understanding that new technologies are deployed in relation to existing institutions and systems of power.

This tactic contrasts with speculative exercises designing intentionally “evil” technologies. Rather than the “evilness” of a technology coming from malicious intent of its designers, the “evilness” arises from the systems of power in which the technology is embedded or adopted.

For instance, a design fiction from my dissertation work depicts an organization, rather than a product. The organizational fiction depicts UX designers at a company, InnerCube. They attempt to surface and address problematic social values related to a harmful use of their platform. But they are stymied by their company management’s desire to not lose a contract with a particular client. They are later are replaced by Anchorton contractors or “ethics strikebreakers” who do the problematic work instead. The negative outcomes from this scenario do not directly arise from a designer’s evil intent, nor from a problematic technical system. Rather, the negative outcomes stem from the organization’s arrangement of power and the encompassing structures of financial reward.

This tactic calls attention to systems of power and inequality of the past and present. It calls on us as design researchers to grapple with how those systems might persist in the futures we imagine. Notably, this tactic is not about creating grand futuristic dystopias. Instead, it seeks to recognize the current and past dystopias that people face in their everyday lives, surface the systems of power that (re)create those dystopias, and imagine how those might be (re)configured in the future. This tactic examines how infrastructures enable or constrain action in ways that can at first seem subtle, but cause enduring, large-scale effects. This helps a design researcher explore how through forms of institutional power, technologies can constrain or shape action in uneven ways. What are the seemingly mundane practices of people embedded in organizations responsible for creating or maintaining technical systems? What are the effects of those actions, particularly if they lead to harmful outcomes?

Discussion

Each of the infrastructural speculation design tactics helps foreground a different aspect of a projected lifeworld. Together the tactics we present provide strategies for thinking beyond initial moments of design and use. They open up a broader set of stakeholders, practices, institutions, and related systems for speculative inquiry. The tactics help shift our focus from immediate uses of artifacts to the broader lifeworlds in which they sit. By making different aspects of the lifeworlds more explicit, the tactics help can designers shift how they see a speculative artifact and its relation to the lifeworld. I’ll highlight two of these shifts here.

Types of analytical shifts the design tactics can help us make

First, we can shift from thinking about whether a system is working or broken, to looking at ongoing relations and practices surrounding a system. Infrastructures are never universally working or broken on their own. Rather, infrastructures may work for some but not for others. Labor and work are required to make an infrastructure function at a local level. The design tactics draw attention to the relations and practices surrounding technical artifacts: How might a technical artifact work partially for some, but not for others? What practices and relationships might be necessary for a system to function?

Second, the focus on everyday practices means that we can think about the multiple ways people relate to technologies in both beneficial and harmful ways. People encounter technologies in the mundanity of everyday life and new technologies get adopted and appropriated by and into existing institutions and systems of power. This is different that dystopian speculations of the future, which tend to flatten experiences – everyone has a similar harmful experience. Moreover, dystopic speculations have been critiqued by scholars such as Oliviera& Martins, Sondergaard & Hansen, and Tonkinwise, for hiding questions of race, class, and gender; and for pushing societal harms into an imagined future, not recognizing how people in the present already experience injustice and suffering. Rather than erasing differences, infrastructural speculations draw attention to differences and the imaginaries, institutions, and power structures that support and enforce them.

While speculative designs imply a lifeworld surrounding a speculative artifact, infrastructural speculations re-focus design researchers’ explicit attention to the careful crafting and analysis of the lifeworld itself. Drawing on concepts of infrastructures, the design tactics we present offer a variety of strategies for re-focusing attention on the lifeworlds that tend to operate in the “background” of speculative design. This brings into focus practices and relationships beyond use; multiplicity of experiences; and the longstanding power that infrastructural systems have to classify, sort, and affect human experiences. Infrastructural speculations are of pertinent importance as designers increasingly use modes of speculation to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, beyond moments of immediate invention and design, and beyond moments of individuals’ use.

Paper Citation:
Richmond Y. Wong, Vera Khovanskaya, Sarah E. Fox, Nick Merrill, and Phoebe Sengers. 2020. Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–15. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376515 

From some recent conversations that I’ve had, I’ve been reflecting on what I might put on a reading list or syllabus to try to introduce someone to HCI perspectives on “values in design” and thought I’d put them together here! Some of this draws on the syllabus from “Technology and Delegation,” the Berkeley School of Information graduate course I helped teach with Deirdre Mulligan for a couple years.

These are predominantly pieces that I’ve found useful for my own thinking, or useful in a teaching context. As such, it’s a necessarily partial list. So thoughts/feedback/additions welcome – feel free to reach out at ryw9 {at} berkeley.edu

Introducing Values in Design

Some higher level and survey pieces to orient ourselves. (I’m assuming that people have already bought into the idea that technologies are not neutral. If not, I might point to Madeleine Akrich’s “The De-Scription of Technical Objects” or  Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” as intro pieces that point to the ways technical artifacts can be enrolled in promoting certain values and politics).

• Cory Knobel and Geoffrey C. Bowker. 2011. Values in design. Communications of the ACM 54, 26. https://doi.org/10.1145/1965724.1965735
• Helen Nissenbaum. 2001. How computer systems embody values. Computer 34, 3: 120–119. https://doi.org/10.1109/2.910905
• Katie Shilton. 2018. Values and Ethics in Human-Computer Interaction. Foundations and Trends® in Human–Computer Interaction 12, 2: 107–171. https://doi.org/10.1561/1100000073 

What Are Values?

What are values? How are they viewed in different disciplines? Ranging from the more universal views of human rights, to more situated and contextual perspectives, to the law’s distinction between substantive and procedural values.

• United Nations. Guiding principles on business and human rights: implementing the United Nations” protect, respect and remedy” framework. UN. pp. 13-22
• Christopher A. Le Dantec, Erika Shehan Poole, and Susan P. Wyche. 2009. Values as lived experience: Evolving value sensitive design in support of value discovery. In Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems – CHI 09, 1141. https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518875 
• Nassim JafariNaimi, Lisa Nathan, and Ian Hargraves. 2015. Values as Hypotheses: Design, Inquiry, and the Service of Values. Design Issues 31, 4: 91–104. https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI_a_00354
• Koops, Bert-Jaap. “Criteria for Normative Technology: An Essay on the Acceptability of ‘Code as Law’ in Light of Democratic and Constitutional Values.” REGULATING TECHNOLOGIES, Brownsword & Yeung, eds (2007): 157-174. (Sections 4-7)

Conceptualizing the Values Problem

There are lots of different ways we might think about “cutting the cake” of a given values problem. We can look at the same problem space from lots of perspectives using different methods. These papers provide some tools and frameworks to help us think about different approaches to the problem space.

• Katie Shilton, Jes A. Koepfler, and Kenneth R. Fleischmann. 2014. How to see values in social computing: Methods for Studying Values Dimensions. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW ’14), 426–435. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531625
• Deirdre K. Mulligan, Colin Koopman, and Nick Doty. 2016. Privacy is an essentially contested concept: a multi-dimensional analytic for mapping privacy. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 374, 2083. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2016.0118
• Deirdre K. Mulligan, Joshua A. Kroll, Nitin Kohli, and Richmond Y. Wong. 2019. This Thing Called Fairness: Disciplinary confusion realizing a value in technology. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, CSCW: 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359221

User Centered Design

A brief overview of how user and human centered design has thought about human actions historically, as well as some contemporary examples of human centered design in products and services.

• Donald A. Norman. 1988.  The Psychopathology of Everyday Things, Chapter 1 in The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books, New York.
• IDEO’s Human Centered Design Kit Methods
• Public Policy Lab’s methods page, and skim some of their case studies.

Value Sensitive Design

VSD methods can be seen as an attempt to broaden the purview of user & human centered design to explicitly consider social values in the design process.

• Batya Friedman, Peter H. Kahn, and Alan Borning. 2008. Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems. In The Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics, Kenneth Einar Himma and Herman T. Tavani (eds.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 69–101. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-7844-3_4 
• Batya Friedman, David G. Hendry, and Alan Borning. 2017. A Survey of Value Sensitive Design Methods. Foundations and Trends® in Human–Computer Interaction 11, 2: 63–125. https://doi.org/10.1561/1100000015
• Batya Friedman and David Hendry. 2012. The envisioning cards: a toolkit for catalyzing humanistic and technical imaginations. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’12), 1145–1148. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208562

Critically Oriented Design Approaches

Some design approaches use design practices towards other ends than “solving problems”, such as surfacing and re-framing problems, asking questions, or articulating alternative social and technical configurations of the world.

• Bill Gaver and Heather Martin. 2000. Alternatives: exploring information appliances through conceptual design proposals. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’00): 209–216. https://doi.org/10.1145/332040.332433
• Phoebe Sengers, Kirsten Boehner, Shay David, and Joseph Jofish Kaye. 2005. Reflective Design. In 4th decennial conference on Critical computing: between sense and sensibility (CC ’05), 49–58. https://doi.org/10.1145/1094562.1094569
• Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. 2013. Beyond Radical Design? Chapter 1 in Speculative Everything. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Matt Malpass. 2016. Critical Design Practice: Theoretical Perspectives and Methods of Engagement. The Design Journal 19, 3: 473–489. https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2016.1161943
• Karin Hansson, Laura Forlano, Jaz Hee Jeong Choi, Carl Disalvo, Teresa Cerratto Pargman, Shaowen Bardzell, Silvia Lindtner, and Somya Joshi. 2018. Provocation, conflict, and appropriation: The role of the designer in making publics. Design Issues 34, 4: 3–7. https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00506

What Does it Mean to Use “Design”?

After the previous sections, we might reflect a bit on the politics and knowledge claims involved in using different types of design practices. And reflect on when we might turn to other mechanisms and practices beyond design.

• Christo Sims. 2017. The Politics of Design, Design as Politics. In The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway and Genevieve Bell (eds.). Routledge, New York, 439–447. http://quote.ucsd.edu/sims/files/2017/02/Sims-2017-The-Politics-of-Design-Design-as-Politics.pdf 
• Lilly Irani. 2018. “Design Thinking”: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies. Catalyst. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v4i1.29638
• Richmond Y. Wong and Deirdre K. Mulligan. 2019. Bringing Design to the Privacy Table: Broadening “Design” in “Privacy by Design” Through the Lens of HCI. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300492
• Eric P.S. Baumer and M. Six Silberman. 2011. When the implication is not to design (technology). In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’11), 2271. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979275

Incorporating Stakeholders

What are different ways we (as researchers, designers, community members, etc.) engage with other stakeholders?

• Meg Young, Lassana Magassa, and Batya Friedman. 2019. Toward inclusive tech policy design: a method for underrepresented voices to strengthen tech policy documents. Ethics and Information Technology 21, 2: 89–103. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-019-09497-z
  • Diverse Voices Guide: http://techpolicylab.uw.edu/news/diverse-voices-guide/
• Lilly C Irani and M. Six Silberman. 2013. Turkopticon: Interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’13), 611. https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2470742
• R. Stuart Geiger. 2016. Bot-based collective blocklists in Twitter: the counterpublic moderation of harassment in a networked public space. Information, Communication & Society 19, 6: 787–803. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1153700 

Values Case Studies

Privacy

• Batya Friedman, Ian Smith, Peter H. Kahn, Sunny Consolvo, and Jaina Selawski. 2006. Development of a Privacy Addendum for Open Source Licenses: Value Sensitive Design in Industry. In Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’06), 194–211. https://doi.org/10.1007/11853565_12 
• Pam Briggs and Lisa Thomas. 2015. An Inclusive, Value Sensitive Design Perspective on Future Identity Technologies. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 22, 5: 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1145/2778972

Contestability

• Tad Hirsch, Kritzia Merced, Shrikanth Narayanan, Zac E. Imel, and David C. Atkins. 2017. Designing Contestability: Interaction design, machine learning, and mental health. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems – DIS ’17, 95–99. https://doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064703

Justice & Feminist Perspectives

These help contextualize values issues in longer-term and structural relations of power and harm.

• Lynn Dombrowski, Ellie Harmon, and Sarah Fox. 2016. Social Justice-Oriented Interaction Design. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ’16), 656–671. https://doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901861
• Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard and Lone Koefoed Hansen. 2018. Intimate Futures: Staying with the Trouble of Digital Personal Assistants through Design Fiction. In Proceedings of the 2018 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2018 – DIS ’18, 869–880. https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196766
• Mariam Asad. 2019. Prefigurative Design as a Method for Research Justice. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, CSCW: 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359302 

Organizational Contexts

How might we consider the organizational, social, and cultural contexts in which we try to apply the methods and tools we’ve discussed? What challenges might occur?

• Colin M. Gray and Shruthi Sai Chivukula. 2019. Ethical Mediation in UX Practice. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI ’19, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300408
• Philip E Agre. 1997. Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI. Social Science Technical Systems and Cooperative Work Beyond the Great Divide: 1–17. http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/critical.html
• Katie Shilton. 2013. Values Levers: Building Ethics into Design. Science, Technology, & Human Values 38, 3: 374–397. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243912436985

Values in the Longer Term

How might we consider values (and associated practices of labor) over longer periods of time?

• Lara Houston, Steven J Jackson, Daniela K Rosner, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Meg Young, and Laewoo Kang. 2016. Values in Repair. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI ’16, 1403–1414. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858470
• Daisy Yoo, Katie Derthick, Shaghayegh Ghassemian, Jean Hakizimana, Brian Gill, and Batya Friedman. 2016. Multi-lifespan Design Thinking: Two Methods and a Case Study with the Rwandan Diaspora. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI ’16, 4423–4434. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858366

After the 2019 CHI conference (technically the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) and blogging 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.