Welcome! I graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Information in July 2020 - my most current updates can be found at richmondywong.com
My research investigates how technology designers and engineers address privacy in their professional practices, and how design methods and approaches can be used to proactively surface, explore, discuss, and critique privacy and other social values-related concerns during the design process. I draw upon work and approaches from science & technology studies, human computer interaction, and speculative and critical design. See More
I am a PhD candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information, working with Professor Deirdre Mulligan and a member of the BioSENSE research group. My research investigates how design methods and approaches can be used to proactively raise privacy and other social values-related concerns in technology design, and be used to explore alternative ways to develop technologies in ways that are cognizant of these issues. I draw upon work and approaches from science & technology studies, human computer interaction, and speculative and critical design.
Most recently, I have done work creating workbooks of speculative design fictions depicting biosensing technologies in a range of scenarios to help reflect on technical, social, and legal aspects of privacy. I have also used these workbooks as probes to engage research participants in discussions about privacy (and other social values), trying to understand how the conceptualize privacy-related issues, and where they see points of intervention to address those issues, whether they be technical, policy, or social interventions.
I graduated from Cornell University in 2014 where I double majored in Information Science and Science & Technology Studies. I completed a senior honors thesis entitled 'Wireless Visions: Creating and Contesting Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Electromagnetic Spectrum,' under the guidance of Prof Steve Jackson, investigating the technical and policy work currently being done to advance new frameworks for sharing radiospectrum frequencies motivated by the prospect of providing more wireless broadband.
I was an intern at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), working with President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and OSTP Awards and Events in the summer of 2012 and was a 2011 Fulbright Summer Institute Participant, spending a month in London studying aspects of British citizenship.
I am also a recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in Computer & Information Science & Engineering.
In my spare time, I enjoy playing and composing music, video editing, and curling with the Bay Area Curling Club and the Cal Curling Group.
Filter:
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 Computer Systems (CHI’20).
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Sandjar Kozubaev, Chris Elsden, Noura Howell, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Nick Merrill, Britta Schulte, and Richmond Y Wong. (2020). Expanding Modes of Reflection in Design Futuring. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI'20)
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James Pierce, Richmond Y. Wong, Nick Merrill. (2020). Sensor Illumination: Exploring Design Qualities and Ethical Implications of Smart Cameras and Image/Video Analytics. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI'20)
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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 Human-Computer Interaction 3, CSCW, Article 119 (November 2019).
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Sarah Fox, Noura Howell, Richmond Wong and Franchesca Spektor. (2019). Vivewell: Speculating Near-Future Menstrual Tracking through Current Data Practices. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '19)
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Project Page
Honorable Mention Award Richmond Y. Wong and Deirdre K. Mulligan. (2019). Bringing Design to the Privacy Table: Broadening "Design" in "Privacy by Design". In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'19).
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James Pierce, Sarah Fox, Nick Merrill, and Richmond Y. Wong. (2018). Differential Vulnerabilities and a Diversity of Tactics: What Toolkits Teach Us about Cybersecurity. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction - CSCW. 2, CSCW, Article 139 (November 2018), 23 pages.
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Honorable Mention Award Richmond Y. Wong, Nick Merrill and John Chuang. (June 2018). When BCIs have APIs: Design Fictions of Everyday Brain-Computer Interface Adoption. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '18).
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James Pierce, Sarah Fox, Nick Merrill, Richmond Y. Wong and Carl DiSalvo. (2018). An Interface without A User: An Exploratory Design Study of Online Privacy Policies and Digital Legalese. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '18).
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Best Paper Award Richmond Y. Wong, Deirdre K. Mulligan, Ellen Van Wyk, James Pierce and John Chuang. (2017). Eliciting Values Reflections by Engaging Privacy Futures Using Design Workbooks. Proceedings of the ACM Human Computer Interaction (CSCW Online First). 1, CSCW, Article 111 (November 2017), 27 pages.
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Richmond Y. Wong, Ellen Van Wyk and James Pierce. (2017). Real-Fictional Entanglements: Using Science Fiction and Design Fiction to Interrogate Sensing Technologies. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '17).
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Workbook PDF
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Steven Weber and Richmond Y. Wong. (2017). The new world of data: Four provocations on the Internet of Things. First Monday 22(2).
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Richmond Y. Wong and Deirdre K. Mulligan. (2016). These Aren’t the Autonomous Drones You’re Looking for: Investigating Privacy Concerns Through Concept Videos. Journal of Human-Robot Interaction 5(3).
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Richmond Y. Wong and Deirdre K. Mulligan. (2016). When a Product Is Still Fictional: Anticipating and Speculating Futures through Concept Videos. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '16).
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Honorable Mention Award Richmond Y. Wong and Steven J. Jackson. (2015). Wireless Visions: Infrastructure, Imagination, and US Spectrum Policy. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 105-115.
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Elaine Sedenberg, Richmond Wong, and John Chuang. (2018). A window into the soul: Biosensing in public. In Surveillence, Privacy and Public Space, Bryce Clayton Newell, Tjerk Timan, Bert-Jaap Koops (eds.)
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Richmond Y. Wong and Vera Khovanskaya. (2018). Speculative Design in HCI: From Corporate Imaginations to Critical Orientations. In New Directions in Third Wave Human-Computer Interaction: Volume 2 - Methodologies, Michael Filimowicz and Veronika Tzankova (eds.)
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Richmond Wong. (September 2019). Privacy/Values by Design Imaginaries. 4S 2019, New Orleans, LA.
Richmond Wong. (September 2017). Exploring Biosensing Privacy Futures with Design Fiction and Science Fiction. 4S 2017, Boston, MA.
Richmond Wong, Lauren Kilgour. (December 2016). Performing Algorithms: TED Talks and Public Understandings of (Computer) Science. Algorithms in Culture, Berkeley, CA.
Richmond Wong, Deirdre Mulligan. (August 2016). Framing Future Privacy Concerns through Corporate Concept Videos. 4S/EASST 2016, Barcelona, Spain.
Deirdre Mulligan, Leslie Harris, Sebastian Benthall, Richmond Wong. (October 2015) What Really Happened After the Battle Against SOPA and PIPA? Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference, Washington DC.
Richmond Wong. (10 April 2015). Big Data Narratives of Crowd and Cloud. ST Global, Washington DC.
Workshop Organizer Robert Soden, Laura Devendorf, Richmond Y. Wong, Lydia B. Chilton, Ann Light, Yoko Akama. (April 2020). Embracing Uncertainty in HCI. ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing systems (CHI '20 Extended Abstracts).
Workshop Organizer Yaxing Yao, Chhaya Chouhan, Richmond Wong, Pardis Emani-Naeini, Nick Merrill, Xinru Page, Yang Wang, Pamela Wisniewski. (November 2019). Ubiquitous Privacy: Research and Design for Mobile and IoT Platforms. ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW ’19 Companion).
Session Organizer Richmond Wong, Nick Merrill. (March 2019). Engaging Speculative Practices to Probe Values & Ethics in Sociotechnical Systems. Session for Interactivity and Engagement. iConference 2019.
Workshop Organizer Nick Merrill, Richmond Wong, Noura Howell, Luke Stark, Lucian Leahu, Dawn Nafus. (June 2017). Interrogating Biosensing in Everyday Life. ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '17).
Workshop Position Paper Richmond Wong. (May 2019). Ethics Strikebreaking: Reflecting on Values and Ethics in Design Practice with Design Fiction. CHI 2019, Workshop on CHI4Evil
Poster Presentation Richmond Y. Wong, Deirdre K. Mulligan, and John Chuang. (2017). Using science fiction texts to surface user reflections on privacy. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp '17). 213-216
Workshop Position Paper Rena Coen, Jennifer King, Richmond Wong. (June 2016). The Privacy Policy Paradox. SOUPS 2016, Workshop on Privacy Indicators
Workshop Position Paper Richmond Wong, Deirdre Mulligan. (May 2016). Using Concept Videos and Speculative Design with Privacy by Design. CHI 2016, Bridging the Gap between Privacy by Design and Privacy in Practice Workshop
Scenarios Report Contributing Author (May 2016). Cybersecurity Futures 2020. UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. Available at https://cltc.berkeley.edu/scenarios/
Guest Blog Richmond Wong. (January 2016). Reviewing Danielle Citron’s Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. UC Berkeley Center for Technology, Society & Policy. Available at https://ctsp.berkeley.edu/reviewing-danielle-citrons-hate-crimes-in-cyberspace
Report Nicholas Doty, Ann Drobnis, Deirdre Mulligan, Richmond Wong. (February 2015). Privacy by Design – State of Research and Practice: Workshop 1 Report. Computing Community Consortium. Available at http://cra.org/ccc/events/pbd-state-of-research-and-practice/
Guest Blog Nicholas Doty, Richmond Wong. (February 2015). Privacy by Design Workshop: Concepts and Connections. Computing Community Consortium. Available at http://www.cccblog.org/2015/02/17/privacy-by-design-workshop-concepts-and-connections/
May 2020 - I'm happy to announce that in Fall 2020 I will be joining the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity as a postdoctoral scholar
Jan 2020 - A pre-print of our CHI 2020 paper, Expanding Modes of Reflection in Design Futuring is now available, written with wonderful collaborators Sandjar Kozubaev, Chris Elsden, Britta Schulte, Marie Louise Juul Sondergaard, Noura Howell, and Nick Merrill.
Jan 2020 - Honored to be a 2020 Fellow with the Center for Technology, Society & Policy to start developing a project looking at the intersection of tech companies, public transit, and design futures!
Jan 2020 - A pre-print of our CHI 2020 paper, Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds is now available, written with colleagues Vera Khovanskaya, Sarah Fox, Nick Merrill, and Phoebe Sengers.
Dec 2019 - Very honored and excited to have multiple papers conditionally accepted to CHI 2020! Including my paper bringing together lenses from infrastructure studies & speculative design with Vera Khovanskaya, Sarah Fox, Nick Merrill, and Phoebe Sengers entitled Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds. And a paper co-authored paper with Sandjar Kozubaev, Chris Elsden, Britta Schulte, Marie Louise Juul Sondergaard, Noura Howell, and Nick Merrill, Expanding Modes of Reflection in Design Futuring. Look for pre-prints here soon!
Oct 2019 - Happy to share a pre-print of our upcoming CSCW 2019 paper in which we present an analytic tool to grapple with the value of fairness, This Thing Called Fairness: Disciplinary ConfusionRealizing a Value in Technology, a collaboration with Deirdre Mulligan, Joshua Kroll, and Nitin Kohli.
Sep 2019 - Our workshop, Ubiquitous Privacy: Research and Design for Mobile and IoT Platforms was accepted for CSCW 2019. Consider applying if you are interested in design approaches to privacy!
Aug 2019 - Quoted in Risk Management Magazine on the risks of pregnancy-tracking apps.
May 2019 - A pictorial documenting research done in collaboration with Sarah Fox, Noura Howell, and Franchesca Spektor, Vivewell: Speculating Near-Future Menstrual Tracking through Current Data Practices has been accepted for the DIS 2019 Conference
Mar 2019 - I will be co-leading a Session for Interactivity and Engagement with Nick Merrill at the 2019 iConference, entitled "Engaging Speculative Practices to Probe Values & Ethics in Sociotechnical Systems"
Jan 2019 - My CHI 2019 paper with Deirdre Mulligan, Bringing Design to the Privacy Table: Broadening "Design" in "Privacy by Design" has recieved an Honorable Mention Award
Jan 2019 - I am a 2019 Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity Reserach Grantee and Center for Technology, Society & Policy fellow for projects in collaboration with James Pierce, Sarah Fox, Nick Merrill, Noura Howell, and Franchesca Spektor.
Jan 2019 - My paper with Deirdre Mulligan, Bringing Design to the Privacy Table: Broadening "Design" in "Privacy by Design" has been accepted to CHI 2019
Oct 2018 - My CSCW 2018 paper with Deirdre Mulligan, Ellen Van Wyk, James Pierce, and John Chuang, Eliciting Values Reflections by Engaging Privacy Futures Using Design Workbooks, has received a Best Paper Award
Sep 2018 - Research done in collaboration with James Pierce, Sarah Fox, and Nick Merrill, Differential Vulnerabilities and a Diversity of Tactics: What toolkits teach us about cybersecurity, has been accepted to CSCW 2018
Jul 2018 - A book chapter in collaboration with Elaine Sedenberg and John Chuang on biosensing privacy in public spaces has been published, A window into the soul: Biosensing in public
Jul 2018 - Along with collaborator Vera Khovanskaya, our chapter Speculative Design in HCI: From Corporate Imaginations to Critical Orientations has been published as a part of the book New Directions in Third Wave Human-Computer Interaction: Volume 2 - Methodologies
Jun 2018 - My paper When BCIs have APIs: Design Fictions of Everyday Brain-Computer Interface Adoption with I School co-authors Nick Merrill and John Chuang has recieved an honorable mention award at the 2018 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '18)
May 2018 - Our pictorial, An Interface without A User: An Exploratory Design Study of Online Privacy Policies and Digital Legalese, has been accepted to the 2018 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '18), with collaborators James Pierce, Sarah Fox, Nick Merrill, and Carl DiSalvo
Mar 2018 - My paper When BCIs have APIs: Design Fictions of Everyday Brain-Computer Interface Adoption with I School co-authors Nick Merrill and John Chuang has been accepted to the 2018 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '18)
Mar 2018 - I am honored to have recieved a UC Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) Award from the GSI Teaching & Resource Center for my work in Prof. Deirdre Mulligan's Technology and Delegation course in Fall 2017.
Jan 2018 - I am a 2018 joint Research Grantee of the Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity and Center for Technology, Society & Policy, along with collaborators James Pierce, Sarah Fox, Noura Howell, and Nick Merrill
Dec 2017 - My CSCW 2018 paper, "Eliciting Values Reflections by Engaging Privacy Futures Using Design Workbooks" with Deirdre Mulligan, Ellen Van Wyk, James Pierce, and John Chuang is now available in the ACM Digital Library
Nov 2017 - I presented a talk covering 2 recent papers, Interrogating Biosensing Privacy Futures with Design Fiction (video), at the Berkeley I School's PhD Research Reception
Sep 2017 - My paper Eliciting Values Reflections by Engaging Privacy Futures Using Design Workbooks, with Deirdre Mulligan, Ellen Van Wyk, James Pierce, and John Chuang, will be published in November in CSCW 2018 Online First in the Proceedings of the ACM Human Computer Interaction.
Sep 2017 - I will be presenting a poster at Ubicomp discussing work done with Deirdre Mulligan and John Chuang.
Aug 2017 - I will be speaking at 4S in Boston, discussing my paper Exploring Biosensing Privacy Futures with Design Fiction and Science Fiction during the Sensing Subjectivities panel.
Apr 2017 - My paper with Ellen Van Wyk and James Pierce, 'Real-Fictional Entanglements: Using Science Fiction and Design Fiction to Interrogate Sensing Technologies' was accepted to the 2017 ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) Conference
Mar 2017 - We will be hosting a workshop on interrogating biosensing at DIS 2017 in Edinburugh in June. See our CfP for more information
Feb 2017 - I will be speaking at the February Privacy Lab talking about the Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity scenarios of cybersecurity in the year 2020
Feb 2017 - My paper with Steve Weber, The new world of data: Four provocations on the Internet of Things, has been published in First Monday
Dec 2016 - My paper with Deirdre Mulligan, These Aren’t the Autonomous Drones You’re Looking for: Investigating Privacy Concerns Through Concept Videos, has been published in the Journal of Human-Robot Interaction
Dec 2016 - Co-presented with Lauren Kilgour at the Algorithms in Culture Conference analyzing how algorithms are represented in TED Talks
Sep 2016 - Presented at 4S/EASST 2016, presenting work done by me and Deirdre Mulligan on Framing Future Privacy Concerns through Corporate Concept Videos
Aug 2016 - I will be co-leading a Social Science Matrix Research Team with Anne Jonas this semester entitled 'Assembling Critical Practices in the Social Sciences' to explore the connections and relationships between critical practices and theories from different disciplines
June 2016 - Participated in the Workshop on Privacy Indicators and the Workshop on the Future of Privacy Notices and Indicators at the 2016 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security
Jun 2016 - Presented my paper with Deirdre Mulligan, 'When a Product Is Still Fictional: Anticipating and Speculating Futures through Concept Videos', at the 2016 ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) Conference
May 2016 - Presented a workshop position paper with Deirdre Mulligan, 'Using Concept Videos and Speculative Design with Privacy by Design' at the CHI 2016 Bridging the Gap between Privacy by Design and Privacy in Practice Workshop
Apr 2016 - My paper with Deirdre Mulligan, 'When a Product Is Still Fictional: Anticipating and Speculating Futures through Concept Videos', was accepted to the 2016 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference
Apr 2016 - I was awarded a 2016 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in Computing & Information Science & Engineering: Computer Security and Privacy
Mar 2016 - I will be moderating a panel on The Future of User Centered Design at this year's Berkeley I School InfoCamp
Feb 2016 - Contributed to a blog post covering privacy by design and tech policy events during early 2016.
Jan 2016 - Reviewed Danielle Citron's Hate Crimes in Cyberspace on the Berkeley Center for Technology, Society & Policy Blog.
Feb 2015 - Contributed to a guest blog post on Computing Community Consortium Blog with Nick Doty on a February Privacy by Design Workshop
Jan 2015 - My paper with Steve Jackson, Wireless Visions: Infrastructure, Imagination, and U.S. Spectrum Policy has received an honorable mention best paper award at CSCW 2015
Read more blog posts on The Bytegeist Blog on Wordpress.
Posted on May 09, 2020
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Posted on February 14, 2020
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What are different ways we (as researchers, designers, community members, etc.) engage with other stakeholders?
Privacy
Contestability
These help contextualize values issues in longer-term and structural relations of power and harm.
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?
How might we consider values (and associated practices of labor) over longer periods of time?
Posted on July 04, 2019
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).
Read more blog posts on The Bytegeist Blog on Wordpress.
May 2020 - I'm happy to announce that in Fall 2020 I will be joining the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity as a postdoctoral scholar
Jan 2020 - A pre-print of our CHI 2020 paper, Expanding Modes of Reflection in Design Futuring is now available, written with wonderful collaborators Sandjar Kozubaev, Chris Elsden, Britta Schulte, Marie Louise Juul Sondergaard, Noura Howell, and Nick Merrill.
Jan 2020 - Honored to be a 2020 Fellow with the Center for Technology, Society & Policy to start developing a project looking at the intersection of tech companies, public transit, and design futures!
Jan 2020 - A pre-print of our CHI 2020 paper, Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds is now available, written with colleagues Vera Khovanskaya, Sarah Fox, Nick Merrill, and Phoebe Sengers.
© 2022, Richmond Wong
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