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Unintended by Design: On the Political Uses of “Unintended Consequences” This paper revisits the term “unintended consequences,” drawing upon an illustrative vignette to show how it is used to dismiss vital ethical and political concerns. Tracing the term to its original introduction by Robert Merton and building on feminist technoscience analyses, we uncover and rethink its widespread usage in popular and scholarly discourses and practices of technology design.
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The Conjoined Spectacles of the “Smart Super Bowl” This essay examines the Super Bowl and the smart city as conjoined spectacles. A focused case study on Super Bowl LIII and its staging in Atlanta, Georgia in 2019 allows us to investigate how the use of cutting-edge smart technologies, including cameras, sensors, artificial intelligence, image recognition, and data collection techniques to secure Mercedes Benz stadium naturalizes a broader anticipatory logic of state and corporate intervention, often evoked in the name of public safety and terrorism-prevention. Together the spectacles of sport and smart technologies gloss over systemic inequality and legitimize security infrastructures as well as related ideas that social problems such as a lack of affordable housing, police brutality, and environmental degradation are best addressed through technological solutions. Foregrounding the conjoined spectacles of the smart city and Super Bowl problematizes seemingly necessary security processes and social relations among people, events, technologies, and cities, inviting further research and discussions necessary for strengthening critical interventions and theorizing in these areas.
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Look Up and Smile! Seeing Beyond Alexa’s Algorithmic Gaze. Echo Look is one latest product by Amazon built on the artificial intelligence agent Alexa designed to be a virtual fashion assistant. This paper draws on feminist theory to critically engage with the premises and promises of this new technology. More specifically, I demonstrate how the introduction of Echo Look is an occasion to think through ethical and political issues at stake in the particular space it enters, in this case no less than what is perceived of (women’s) bodies and what fashion is and does. In addition, the specific domain helps us see this category of technology anew, illuminating its taken-for-granted assumptions. More specifically, it serves as yet another reminder of what algorithms cannot do and of their oppressive potency.
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Doing Justice to Stories: On Ethics and Politics of Digital Storytelling. Researchers and activists are increasingly drawing on the practice of collecting, archiving, and sharing stories to advance social justice, especially given the low cost and accessibility of digital technologies. These practices differ in their aims and scope yet they share a common conviction: that digital storytelling is empowering especially when curating and disseminating life stories of marginalized groups. In this paper, I question this conviction and ask: is it possible that such practices take away from what is found to be meaningful and worthwhile in practices of storytelling and listening, and, if so, how? To answer this question, I argue for a renewed attentiveness to story scenes, highlighting the inherently relational nature of storytelling and listening. I examine this relational nature through a fictional account that exemplifies storied encounters and demonstrates the ethical issues they entail through three themes—reciprocity, responsiveness, and communion—borne out of the plurality of philosophical positions on what it means to relate to another. I explain each of these themes as a starting point for thinking through how digital storytelling may be just, with implications for participatory methods in science and technology studies, design studies, and human-computer interaction inclusive of participatory design, co-design, ethnographic research, and participatory action research.
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Our Bodies in the Path of the Trolley; Or, Why Self-driving Cars Must *Not* Be Programmed to Kill. The discourse around self-driving cars has been dominated by an emphasis on their potential to reduce the number of accidents. At the same time, proponents acknowledge that self-driving cars would inevitably be involved in fatal accidents where moral algorithms would decide the fate of those involved. This is a necessary trade-off, proponents suggest, in order to reap the benefits of this new technology. In this article, I engage this argument, demonstrating how an undue optimism and enthusiasm about this technology is obscuring our ability to see what is at stake and explaining how moving beyond the dominant utilitarian framings around this technology opens up a space for both ethical inquiry and innovative design. I suggest that a genuine caring concern for the many lives lost in car accidents now and in the future—a concern that transcends false binary trade-offs and that recognizes the systemic biases and power structures that make certain groups more vulnerable than others—could serve as a starting point to rethink mobility, as it connects to the design of our cities, the well-being of our communities, and the future of our planet.
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Values as Hypotheses: The Service of Values and Design. Editors’ Note: "For all designers, no matter what methods or processes they use, values are essential. Nassim JafariNaimi, Lisa Nathan, and Ian Hargraves take on this crucial topic in their article “Values as Hypotheses: Design, Inquiry, and the Service of Values.” They refute the separation of values and action, arguing instead that values are to be discovered and affirmed within action. Following philosopher John Dewey’s ideas, the authors posit that values are hypothetical until they are confirmed through activity. They refute the belief that moral values are either unchangeable truths or “local expressions of individual and group preferences,” favoring instead a philoso- phy of plurality that lets values emerge from pragmatic encounters with situations. Their approach is an extremely helpful response to the sticky question of whether values that are pre-ordained and fixed can be integrated into design practice.” [Download]
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Design Challenges for Science Games. The abstract nature of quantum mechanics makes it difficult to visualize. This is one of the reasons it is taught in the language of mathematics. Without an opportunity to directly observe or interact with quantum phenomena, students struggle to develop conceptual understandings of its theories and formulas. In this paper we present the process of designing a digital game that supplements introductory quantum mechanics curricula. We present our design process anchored on three key challenges: 1) drawing upon students’ past experiences and knowledge of classical mechanics while at the same time helping them break free of it to understand the unique qualities and characteristics of quantum mechanics; 2) creating an environment that is accurate in its depiction of the mathematical formulations of quantum mechanics while also playful and engaging for students; and 3) developing characters that are relatable to players but also do not reinforce gender stereotypes. Our design process can serve as a useful resource for educational game designers by providing a model for addressing these challenges.
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Particle in a Box: An Experiential Environment for Learning Introductory Quantum Mechanics. Quantum mechanics (QM) is a foundational subject in many science and engineering fields. It is difficult to teach, however, as it requires a fundamental revision of the assumptions and laws of classical physics and probability. Furthermore, introductory QM courses and texts predominantly focus on the mathematical formulations of the subject and lay less emphasis on its conceptual understanding. Consequently, students struggle to build robust mental models of the concepts. This paper posits that games can provide an effective platform for an experiential and conceptual understanding of introductory QM. Games are particularly suitable for demonstrating QM characteristics because their repetitive nature is conducive to demonstrating probability concepts that form a core part of QM. Games can also immerse students in an engaging environment that motivates them to learn. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a digital game for learning introductory QM concepts. The evaluation of the game indicates an improvement in students’ conceptual understanding of probability. Students also reported an increase in comfort level with key concepts taught in the game.
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MRx as a Participatory Platform. Facilitating and supporting various modes of social interaction has been part of Mixed Reality (MRx)1 design experiments and discourse over the past twenty years. But what vision of social interaction is sought and advanced through Mixed Reality environments? In this paper, I identify two dominant ways that social interaction is envisioned in MRx designs, broadly construed as material and political, and illustrated through a series of examples. I further draw on them to highlight the potentials, boundaries, and limitations of each with regards to the kinds of social interactions that are sought and cultivated through the integration of digital media on physical space. I suggest that as MR becomes mainstream, it is important to go beyond these visions to consider whether and how MRx environments might connect with the economic, social, and cultural specificity of local sites to meaningfully serve the always evolving social needs and purposes of their communities.” [Download]
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MRx: An Interdisciplinary Framework for Mixed Reality Experience Design and Criticism. We explore design strategies for mixed reality (MR) in relation to Milgram's definition, which has been central to its development in the past 20 years. We argue for the need to rethink the technical focus of this definition in order to capture the experiential dimensions of MR and offer a humanistic framework for a growing class of experiences that we label MRx. We list three characteristics of MRx applications (esthetic, performative and social) and provide a context for the three subsequent articles in this special issue. [Download]
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MRx Design and Criticism: The Confluence of Media Studies, Performance, and Social Interaction. In this article, we bring together the lenses of media studies, performance studies and social interaction offered in the other essays in this special issue and discuss their collective contribution towards a more nuanced understanding of MRx. We illustrate this capacity by a brief critical review of a recent MRx environment: Mégaphone. We suggest how the lenses can also contribute to a design vocabulary for future MRx experiences. [Download]
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Building on Bauhaus: Design as the Liberal Art of the Twenty-First Century. The Bauhaus is recognized for its influential role in shaping design practice, giving form to modern styles of architecture, textiles, and a wide range of industrial and graphic products. But is the Bauhaus mode of thinking still relevant to twenty-first-century design? If so, what were its key characteristics and how could they inform contemporary design education, practice, and inquiry?
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“We found no violation!”: Twitter's Violent Threats Policy and Toxicity in Online Discourse Threat moderation on social media has been subject to much public debate and criticism, especially for its broadly permissive approach. In this paper, we focus on Twitter's Violent Threats policy, highlighting its shortcomings by comparing it to linguistic and legal threat assessment frameworks. Specifically, we foreground the importance of accounting for the lived experiences of harassment—how people perceive and react to a tweet—a measure largely disregarded by Twitter's Violent Threats policy but a core part of linguistic and legal threat assessment frameworks. To illustrate this, we examine three tweets by drawing upon these frameworks. These tweets showcase the racist, sexist, and abusive language used in threats towards those who have been marginalized. Through our analysis, we highlight how content moderation policies, despite their stated goal of promoting free speech, in effect, work to inhibit it by fostering an online toxic environment that precipitates self-censorship in fear of violence and retaliation. In doing so, we make a case for technology designers and policy makers working in the sphere of content moderation to craft approaches that incorporate the various nuanced dimensions of threat assessment toward a more inclusive and open environment for online discourse. CONTENT WARNING: This paper contains strong and violent language. Please use discretion when reading, printing, or recommending this paper.
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Beyond Motivation and Memorization:
Fostering Scientific Inquiry with Games Given the rise of scientific misinformation, there is a critical need for students to learn the practices
of scientific inquiry along with scientific concepts. In this work-in-progress paper, we posit that digital games are conducive
to learning both as they enable collaborative virtual scientific experimentation and modeling. We put forward design guidelines
for games that facilitate such learning. We then illustrate one instance of employing these guidelines in the design of Psi and
Delta, a collaborative science game to help students learn the basic concepts of quantum mechanics through inquiry.
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Uber in Bangladesh: the Tangled Web of Mobility and Justice Ridesharing services have been viewed as heralding the next generation of mobility and recognized for their potential to provide an alternate and more flexible model of work. These services have also been variously critiqued for their treatment of employees, low wages, and other concerns. We present a qualitative investigation of the introduction of Uber in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Using interview data from drivers and riders, and conducting content analysis of riders’ Facebook posts, we highlight how Uber’s introduction into Dhaka’s existing transportation infrastructure influenced experiences and practices of mobility in the city. Drawing on the perspectives of Iris Marion Young, we demonstrate that the introduction of Uber in Dhaka reinforces existing modes of oppression and introduces new ones, even as it creates room for creative modes of resistance. Finally, we discuss how algorithms’ opacity and veneer of objectivity manifest in everyday contexts and practices of riders and drivers, call for deepening the lens of postcolonial computing, and make a case for stronger connections between technology deployment and policy.
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Heart Sense: Experiments in Design as a Catalyst for Feminist Reflections on Embodiment This paper presents the design of a series of experimental data visualizations aimed at reflection and conversation about embodied interactions and physiological data. Taking heart rate as the point of entry, these visualization challenge binaries such as matter/meaning, subjectivity/objectivity, and self/other. More specifically, we present three visualizations. The first one illustrates physiological interaction with emotionally engaging material. The second one explores the experience of time by centring the rate of heartbeats. The third one foregrounds the impact of the environment on physiology and its role in creating a kind of embodied social connection. Together, these three visualizations open up space for new problem formulations and design explorations in and around the themes of data, embodiment, and visualization that are distinctly feminist in their orientation.
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Parental controls: reimagining technologies for parent-child interaction. This article questions existing approachesin designing parental controls and puts forward a hypothesisto reimagine technologies tomediate parent-child interactions. First, we present an overview of the current parental controls. Second, we explain the gradual shift away from the idea of ‘harmful’ digital media in parental mediation studies and introduce previous work in CSCW and HCI that has proposed solutions to support discussionsabout digital media between parents and children. Then, we hypothesize that an emphasis on collaboration and mutual learning might help researchers and designers to rethink and reimagine technologies that support parent-child interactions with and through digital media. Finally, we share our findings of two co-creation workshops with children and parents on ways to instill parental involvement in children’s digital media use. The workshop yielded insights on the differing views between parents and children about how technologies might instill long-term negotiations based on parents’ and children’s experiences,enriched by real-use data.
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Fostering Organizational Change through Co-Designing Collaborative Media. It is widely accepted within the fields of Design and Human-Computer Interaction that designing products in collaboration with end users can lead to more useful, usable, and desirable products. Less explored is the co-design process's potential to change organizational culture through introduction and illustration of its central principles at work: such as prioritizing participants needs and experiences; mutual learning; and sustainability into organizations' practices and processes. This poster presents a case study on how the process of co-designing a collaborative digital application introduced change within the processes and practices of an autism support service organization in the US towards a human-centered approach.
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| [7] |
A Novel Interactive Paradigm for Teaching Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics (QM) is the foundation for science and engineering disciplines as diverse as physics, materials science, chemistry, and nanotechnology. However, educators face major challenges in teaching QM concepts to students given the abstract and non-experiential nature of QM. To address the above challenges we are creating a virtual environment governed by the laws of quantum mechanics as a way to engage alternative ways of teaching and learning QM. In our current prototype, the students begin in a classical world that is governed by laws found in our everyday experiences. Here, they encounter potential and kinetic energies, the conservation of energy, the predictability of position, and the continuous nature of energies allowed. They later move into a nanoscale environment in which energies are quantized, electrons can tunnel through potential barriers, and only probabilities are known. The juxtaposition of these two worlds enables students to compare classical and quantum mechanics.
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Collective Intelligence or Group Think? Engaging Participation Patterns in World without Oil. This article presents an analysis of participation patterns in an Alternate Reality Game, World Without Oil. This game aims to bring people together in an online environment to reflect on how an oil crisis might affect their lives and communities as a way to both counter such a crisis and to build collective intelligence about responding to it. We present a series of participation profiles based on a quantitative analysis of 1554 contributions to the game narrative made by 322 players. We further qualitatively analyze a sample of these contributions. We outline the dominant themes, the majority of which engage the global oil crisis for its effects on commute options and present micro-sustainability solutions in response. We further draw on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of this space to discuss how the design of the game, specifically its framing of the problem, feedback mechanism, and absence of subject-matter expertise, counter its aim of generating collective intelligence, making it conducive to groupthink.
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| [9] |
Crafting Meaningful Participation: Analyzing Contribution Patterns in an Alternate Reality Game. This article presents an analysis of participation patterns of an Alternate Reality game World Without Oil. This game aims to bring people together in an online environment to reflect and share insights about oil dependence. We present a series of participation profiles based on a quantitative analysis of 1554 contributions to the game narrative made by 322 players. We build on these profiles to suggest a preliminary outline of design challenges for building effective interactive learning environments that foster meaningful participation.
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Interactive Visualizations for Teaching Quantum Mechanics and Semiconductor Physics. The theory of Quantum Mechanics (QM) provides a foundation for many fields of science and engineering; however, its abstract nature and technical difficulty make QM a challenging subject for students to approach and grasp. This is partly because complex mathematical concepts involved in QM are difficult to visualize for students and the existing visualization are minimal and limited. We propose that many of these concepts can be communicated and experienced through interactive visualizations and games, drawing on the strengths and affordances of digital media. A game environment can make QM concepts more accessible and understandable by immersing students in nano-sized worlds governed by unique QM rules. Furthermore, replayability of games allows students to experience the probabilistic nature of QM concepts. In this paper, we present a game and a series of interactive visualizations that we are developing to provide students with an experiential environment to learn quantum mechanics. We will discuss how these visualizations and games can enable students to experiment with QM concepts, compare QM with classical physics, and get accustomed to the often counterintuitive laws of QM.
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Exploring the Character of Participation in Social Media: The Case of Google Image Labeler. Social media are transforming interpersonal and social interactions, enabling new forms of engagement and participation. However, we know little about how the specific design qualities of social media affect social interaction in these environments. Considering the diversity of social media today, there is a need to engage with specific cases to discern possible patterns of relationship between designed characteristics of social media and the character of participation in them. To illustrate, this paper draws on a case study of the game, "Google Image Labeler." The design of the game is studied through a close reading of arguments made by its designers followed by an Internet study of what users and critics say about their interactions with the game. These studies, in conjunction with theories of social interaction by John Dewey and Robert Putnam, provide a foundation for a critical stance toward the quality of participation in this game that informs design theory and practice.
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Breakaway: An Ambient Display Designed to Change Human Behavior. This article presents Breakaway, an ambient display that encourages people, whose job requires them to sit for long periods of time, to take breaks more frequently. Breakaway uses the information from sensors placed on an office chair to communicate in a non-obtrusive manner how long the user has been sitting. Breakaway is a small sculpture placed on the desk. Its design is inspired by animation arts and theater, which rely heavily on body language to express emotions. Its shape and movement reflect the form of the human body; an upright position reflecting the body's refreshed pose, and a slouching position reflecting the body's pose after sitting for a long time. An initial evaluation shows a correlation between the movement of the sculpture and when participants took breaks, suggesting that ambient displays that make use of aesthetic and lifelike form might be promising for making positive changes in human behavior.
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| [1] |
Smart Technologies and Feminist Intelligence. |
| [2] |
Heart Time: Reflections on Physiology and Embodiment. |
| [3] |
Smart yet (in)Sensible? Feminist Critical Perspectives on “Smart Cities.” |
| [4] |
Communicating Evidence toward Policy Change: An Intervention Approach to Address the Science to Service Gap. |
| [5] |
Seeing through time – The Sweet Auburn Digital Media Initiative. |
| [6] |
Experience and Conversation in Making (Critical Making: Material Practices, Design, and STS I: Experiences and Experiments). |
| [7] |
World Without Oil and the Challenge of Cultivating Educational Experiences. |
| [8] |
Entertained but Misinformed? Play and Prevarication in Alternate Reality Games.. |
| [9] |
Writing, Performance, Design: Frameworks for Understanding & Creating New Narratives in Augmented Reality. |
| [10] |
Civic Logon: Exploring Technologies for Civic Engagement. |
| [11] |
Design Theory and Ethics: Affinities and Connections. |
| [12] |
Design Principles and Experiences of Use. |
| [1] |
New Technologies, Old Dogmas: Why We Need to Ignite Our Ethical Imagination. |
| [2] |
Generic Codes, Storied Care. |
| [3] |
Cars, Fashion, and the False Promise of Algorithmic Judgement. |
| [4] |
Algorithms, Mobility, & Justice. |
| [5] |
Heart Beats: Biological Data and Feminist Sciences. |
| [6] |
Ethical Inquiry and Design Imagination. |
| [7] |
AI, Work and Leadership. |
| [8] |
Design, Ethics, and the Smart City. |
| [9] |
Ethical Inquiry and Design Imagination. |
| [10] |
Heart Sense: Design as a Catalyst for Feminist Reflections on Embodiment. |
| [11] |
Moral Algorithms: the New Media of Mobility. |
| [12] |
Exposing the Myth of Algorithmic Morality or, why self-driving cars should *not* be programmed to kill. |
| [13] |
Probing Design and Democracy through the Lens of Participatory Media. |
| [14] |
The Data of Experience and the Experience of Data: A Design
Perspective on Digital Scholarship. |
| [15] |
Participatory Media and Democracy: a Critical Perspective. |
| [16] |
Tracing the Challenges and Opportunities of Locative Participatory Media. |
| [17] |
Feminism and Feminist Approaches in Social Computing Workshop. |
| [18] |
Participatory Media and Democracy: a Critical Perspective. |
| [19] |
Engaging the Concept and Ideal of Democracy in Contemporary Design Discourse. |
| [20] |
Examining the Quality of Social Interaction in Participatory Media. |
| [21] |
Design and Democracy: Expression, Participation, and Community in Contemporary Products. |
| [22] |
The Social Dimension of Augmented Reality. |
| [23] |
Organizations and Social Media: Hypotheses for Organizing. |
| [24] |
The Idea of Liberty and the Form of Social Interaction. |
| [1] |
A story of paradise: interactive, digitally enhanced, and radioactive. |
| [2] |
Review of World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Frank Foer. |
| [3] |
Smart yet (in)Sensible? Feminist Critical Perspectives on Smart Cities. |
| [4] |
Society for Social Studies of Science Backchannels Interview on the Future of Self-driving Cars. |
| [5] |
Play It Seriously: Engaging the Sustainability Agenda with Alternate Reality Games. |
| [6] |
Meta-making: Crafting the Conversation of Values and Design. |