Table of Contents

VOLUME XXIX.5 September - October 2022

  • WELCOME
    • Who we are and what we have: Designing with minoritized communities

      Lucy Pei, Marisol Wong-Villacres, Sheena Erete, Daniela Rosner, Alex Taylor, Mikael Wiberg

      Is technology design for everyone? Across the history of computing, we can see how many initial efforts focused on the design of workplace computing tools and consumer products, where a human-centered approach entailed finding and satisfying the needs of a user in a resource-rich setting. But who is pictured…

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  • What are you reading?
    • What are you reading? Jade Vu Henry

      Jade Henry

      What are you reading? Jade Vu Henry

      What does it mean to be a "good" researcher? How does one carry out rigorous and collaborative ethical research that promotes more-just and sustainable societies? To grapple with these questions, I have been reading the works of Eve Tuck, professor of critical race and Indigenous studies at the University…

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  • Blog@IX
    • Speech is human and multifaceted. Our approach to studying it should be the same

      Arathi Sethumadhavan, Joe Garvin, Ben Noah

      Speech is human and multifaceted. Our approach to studying it should be the same

      Whether it's the friendly virtual assistant in your smart speaker, the autogenerated captions on your YouTube video, or the software (https://www.nuance.com/index.html) that physicians (https://www.suki.ai) use to dictate clinical notes, voice AI has become a fixture of modern life. It's the promise of hands-free convenience: Simply speak naturally, and the…

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  • Exhibit X
    • Inspiring capsule wardrobe practices using illustrated design fictions and role-playing

      Zaiqiao Ye, Zitao Zhang, Eli Blevis

      A capsule wardrobe is a collection of clothes with a limited number of items that have good qualities. It requires people to take an introspective approach when buying, wearing, and recycling clothes. What follows is an illustrated design fiction that describes the procedure of creating a capsule wardrobe with…

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  • Columns
    • Behavior-driven testing of big data exploration tools

      Leilani Battle

      Behavior-driven testing of big data exploration tools

      Companies, governments, and institutions all over the world use massive datasets to make decisions that affect our daily lives, such as how climate change is addressed, who is protected from Covid-19, or which investments to prioritize to maximize a company's growth. A major focus of visualization research is to…

    • Beautiful (im)perfections are us

      Daria Loi

      Beautiful (im)perfections are us

      Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional [1]. I grew up in a country where the myth of perfection is everyone's daily staple. From Palladio's symmetry to Vitruvius's six principles…

    • Deliverance through design

      Gopinaath Kannabiran

      Deliverance through design

      What can't design do? Here I sketch a critical provocation about deliverance through design, wherein deliverance is constituted by the act of setting free from and uses the rhetoric of being rescued out of. Contemporary secular knowledge practices, specifically in technology-related public discourses, tend to harness and yet downplay…

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  • Making/breaking
    • Designing for connection with local threatened species

      Nick Kelly, Gareth Kindler, James Watson, Tim Carden

      Designing for connection with local threatened species

      Australia—like much of the world—is facing a biodiversity crisis. Hundreds of species are in danger of extinction due to the destruction and degradation of their habitats. Populations of threatened species have more than halved since 1985. To have a chance at survival, these species require federal government recovery plans…

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  • Forums
    • Boundary/border: On the generativity of opacity

      Luiza de O. Martins

      Boundary/border: On the generativity of opacity

      What does it mean to stay with opacity, to reject the impulse toward legibility? What can exist in the crevices, in the in-between spaces of that which we cannot simply measure with our own parameters, or the parameters we were given and taught to value? With opacity, we are…

    • Building space for feminist solidarity

      Patricia Garcia, Alejandra Gonzalez, Mikayla Buford, Sheena Erete, Jakita Thomas, Yolanda Rankin

      Building space for feminist solidarity

      In the past decade, feminist theory has gained traction within the HCI community as a critical design approach [1,2]. Despite the push for feminist solidarity, however, prior feminist HCI work has largely been conducted on a single-axis analysis of power that focuses on gender and fails to address issues…

    • Practical routes in the UX of AI, or sharing more beaten paths

      Henriette Cramer

      Practical routes in the UX of AI, or sharing more beaten paths

      The practice of the UX of AI has been going on for a while. The origins-of-AI summer at Dartmouth was in 1956. HCI's SIGCHI has turned 40, with CHI as a conference officially starting in 1983. This forum, focused on the intersection of UX and AI, has been running…

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  • Community square
    • Mentoring across SIGCHI

      SIGCHI Executive Committee

      Mentoring across SIGCHI

      Nurturing strengths and capacities across SIGCHI requires a robust, committed culture around mentoring. Many of us have been fortunate to cultivate strong ties with those we call mentors, whether older or younger than us, across diverse career stages, with similar or different institutional affiliations, toward short- and long-term goals,…

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  • Space
    • Design Beku: Glimpses into our situated practice of collective design

      Naveen Bagalkot

      Design Beku: Glimpses into our situated practice of collective design

      Design Beku (https://designbeku.in/) is a collective that strives to make design and technology more locally rooted, contextually relevant, and ethical [1]. Since 2016, we have been working with the women community health navigators (HNs) trained and supported by MAYA Health (https://bit.ly/3oZBb9a) in and around Channapatna, a town in India…

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  • Features
    • Critical perspectives on ABCD: A conversation with Akwugo Emejulu

      Akwugo Emejulu, Lucy Pei, Aakash Gautam

      Critical perspectives on ABCD: A conversation with Akwugo Emejulu

      We spoke with Akwugo Emejulu, a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, to learn more about her critique of assets-based community development (ABCD) [1]. ABCD is a community development framework that has been a source of inspiration for some of the assets-based design work…

    • Latine health and development in the digital age: Assets-based inclusive design as a social movement

      J. Hernandez, Veronica Ahumada-Newhart

      Latine health and development in the digital age: Assets-based inclusive design as a social movement

      As Latina sociotechnical researchers, we live in two separate societies floating among multiple cultural domains—academia and working-class, English-speaking and Spanish-speaking, credit-card-only and cash-only businesses, technology-mediated and in-person work environments, among others. Daily transitions to and from multiple domains have made us aware of the inequitable distribution of assets and…

    • Assets and community engagement: A roundtable with HCI researchers and designers

      Lucy Pei, Edgard Quijano, Angela Smith, Reem Talhouk, Frederick van Amstel

      Assets and community engagement: A roundtable with HCI researchers and designers

      This article provides views from HCI scholars and designers with deep commitments and varied experience in community-centered work around the world. In a roundtable, Frederick van Amstel, Edgard David Rincón Quijano, Angela D.R. Smith, and Reem Talhouk shared their perspectives on community engagement and assets-based versus deficit-based approaches. —…

    • What community asset mapping can teach us about power and design

      Alejandra Gonzalez, Jessa Dickinson, Aakriti Chugh, Travis Rejman, Burrell Poe, Sheena Erete

      What community asset mapping can teach us about power and design

      As designers and researchers in HCI, it's our nature to solve problems. We work hard to spot pain points and user frustrations, and we develop the skills to fix deficiencies within our software, our devices, and even within the smallest interactions of our everyday lives. When we broaden our…

    • A new enemy in the old home? How smart homes will change the experience of home for the elderly

      Nadine Felber, Hamed Alavi

      A new enemy in the old home? How smart homes will change the experience of home for the elderly

      A common wish—in fact, maybe the most important wish—among the elderly is to live as long as possible in their own home. Home, in this context, denotes a place someone is familiar with, has control over, and that is sheltered from unwanted outside influence or scrutiny [1]. For older…

    • Between metaphor and meaning: AI and being human

      Maya Ganesh

      Between metaphor and meaning: AI and being human

      At the time of writing this article, a debate broke out on Twitter among noted AI practitioners. The chief scientist at a California tech company tweeted, "it may be that large neural networks are slightly conscious" (https://bit.ly/3Blgo7L). A thread of responses quickly formed. How was consciousness even being defined?…

    • Connecting seniors in marginalized communities during Covid-19

      Shital Desai, Pablo Vivanco, Deborah Fels

      Connecting seniors in marginalized communities during Covid-19

      The community of Jane and Finch (also known as Black Creek) is a high-density, multicultural, low-income neighborhood in northwest Toronto, Ontario. Home to people from more than 70 countries, with 100 languages spoken [1], the area has been described as having more immigrants, more single-parent households, higher rates of…

    • Where’s my jetpack? Waiting for the revolution in statistical analysis software

      Philip Kortum

      Where’s my jetpack? Waiting for the revolution in statistical analysis software

      In the 1950s, science writers envisioned a future in which individual citizens would own and use jetpacks as a primary mode of transportation. The vision was that the jetpack would free highways of congestion and allow personal mobility on a scale never before seen. Importantly, it became a metaphor…

    • (Un) scaling computing

      Ida Larsen-Ledet, Ann Light, Airi Lampinen, Joanna Saad-Sulonen, Katie Berns, Negar Khojasteh, Chiara Rossitto

      (Un) scaling computing

      The tech industry thinks in terms of scale. Growing, expanding the user base, and developing smaller hardware to cram more processing power into smaller spaces are rarely questioned drivers of digital innovation. Companies with revenue larger than most countries seek planetary monopolies. Mainstream narratives associate big data with useful…

    • Citational justice and the politics of knowledge production

      The Citational Justice Collective, Syed Ahmed, Sareeta Amrute, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Nicola Bidwell, Tawanna Dillahunt, Sane Gaytán, Naveena Karusala, Neha Kumar, Rigoberto Guzmán, Maryam Mustafa, Bonnie Nardi, Lisa Nathan, Nassim Parvin, Beth Patin, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Rebecca Rouse, Katta Spiel, Soraia Prietch, Ding Wang, Marisol Wong-Villacrés

      Citational justice and the politics of knowledge production

      Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow. — Sara Ahmed [1] Ahmed reminds us that just citational practices recognize the knowledge…

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  • Dialogues
    • Elevating strengths and capacities: The different shades of assets-based design in HCI

      Marisol Wong-Villacres, Sheena Erete, Aakash Gautam, Azra Ismail, Neha Kumar, Lucy Pei, Wendy Roldan, Veronica Ahumada-Newhart, Karla Badillo-Urquiola, J. Hernandez, Anthony Poon, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Vivian Motti

      Elevating strengths and capacities: The different shades of assets-based design in HCI

      As researchers working in different subareas within human-computer interaction, but with a shared commitment to work with communities facing historical inequities, we—the collective authors—have been keen to explore alternative approaches to designing with communities. In particular, we are enthusiastic about moving away from focusing on a community's needs toward…

    • Critical perspectives on ABCD: A conversation with Akwugo Emejulu

      Akwugo Emejulu, Lucy Pei, Aakash Gautam

      Critical perspectives on ABCD: A conversation with Akwugo Emejulu

      We spoke with Akwugo Emejulu, a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, to learn more about her critique of assets-based community development (ABCD) [1]. ABCD is a community development framework that has been a source of inspiration for some of the assets-based design work…

    • Latine health and development in the digital age: Assets-based inclusive design as a social movement

      J. Hernandez, Veronica Ahumada-Newhart

      Latine health and development in the digital age: Assets-based inclusive design as a social movement

      As Latina sociotechnical researchers, we live in two separate societies floating among multiple cultural domains—academia and working-class, English-speaking and Spanish-speaking, credit-card-only and cash-only businesses, technology-mediated and in-person work environments, among others. Daily transitions to and from multiple domains have made us aware of the inequitable distribution of assets and…

    • Assets and community engagement: A roundtable with HCI researchers and designers

      Lucy Pei, Edgard Quijano, Angela Smith, Reem Talhouk, Frederick van Amstel

      Assets and community engagement: A roundtable with HCI researchers and designers

      This article provides views from HCI scholars and designers with deep commitments and varied experience in community-centered work around the world. In a roundtable, Frederick van Amstel, Edgard David Rincón Quijano, Angela D.R. Smith, and Reem Talhouk shared their perspectives on community engagement and assets-based versus deficit-based approaches. —…

    • What community asset mapping can teach us about power and design

      Alejandra Gonzalez, Jessa Dickinson, Aakriti Chugh, Travis Rejman, Burrell Poe, Sheena Erete

      What community asset mapping can teach us about power and design

      As designers and researchers in HCI, it's our nature to solve problems. We work hard to spot pain points and user frustrations, and we develop the skills to fix deficiencies within our software, our devices, and even within the smallest interactions of our everyday lives. When we broaden our…

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  • Calendar
    • Calendar

      INTR Staff

      September Mensch und Computer '22 (Darmstadt, Germany) September 4–7, 2022 https://muc2022.mensch-und-computer.de/de/ Audio Mostly '22 (St. Pölten, Austria) September 6–9, 2022 https://audiomostly.com/2022/ MobileHCI '22: ACM International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction (Vancouver, Canada) September 28 – October 1, 2022 https://mobilehci.acm.org/2022/ October ACM Multimedia '22: 30th ACM International Conference on…

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  • Exit
    • A letter to the city: “Jail is not my home”

      Kirsten Leenaars, Nia Easley

      A letter to the city: “Jail is not my home”

      Contributor: Kirsten Leenaars [email protected] Curator/Editor: Nia Easley A Letter to the City: "Jail is not my home" is the second collaboration between Circles & Ciphers (http://www.circlesandciphers.org/), a hip hop—based restorative justice organization in Rogers Park, Chicago, and Chicago-based Dutch artist Kirsten Leenaars. The video project is based on letters…

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