Austin Toombs

The Proper Care and Feeding of Hackerspaces: Care Ethics and Cultures of Making

Communities of making have been at the center of attention in popular, business, political, and academic research circles in recent years. In HCI, they seem to carry the promise of new forms of computer use, education, innovation, and even ways of life. In the West in particular, the maker manifestos of these communities have shown strong elements of a neoliberal ethos, one that prizes self-determination, tech-savvy, independence, freedom from government, suspicion of authority, and so forth. Yet such communities, to function as communities, also require values of collaboration, cooperation, interpersonal support-in a word, care. In this ethnographic study, we studied and participated as members of a hackerspace for 19 months, focusing in particular not on their technical achievements, innovations, or for glimmers of a more sustainable future, but rather to make visible and to analyze the community maintenance labor that helps the hackerspace support the practices that its members, society, and HCI research are so interested in. We found that the maker ethic entails a complex negotiation of both a neoliberal libertarian ethos and a care ethos.

now that's definitely a proper hack: self-made tools in hackerspaces

Cultures of making - that is, social practices of hacking, DIY, tinkering, repair, and craft - continue to rise in prominence, and design researchers have taken note, because of their implications for sustainability, democratization, and alternative models of innovation, design, participation, and education. We contribute to this agenda by exploring our findings on self-made tools, which we encountered in a 9-month ethnographic study of a hackerspace. Self-made tools embody issues raised in two discourses that are of interest in design research on making: tools and adhocism. In this paper, we explore ways that tools and adhocism interface with each other, using our findings as a material to think with. We find that this juxtaposition of concepts helps explain a highly generative creative practice - tool-making - within the hackerspace we studied.

Flow of Competence in UX Design Practice

UX and design culture are beginning to dominate corporate priorities, but despite the current hype there is often a disconnect between the organizational efficiencies desired by executives and the knowledge of how UX can or should address these issues. This exploratory study addresses this space by reframing the concept of competence in UX to include the flow of competence between individual designers and the companies in which they work. Our reframing resulted in a preliminary schema based on interviews conducted with six design practitioners, which allows this flow to be traced in a performative way on the part of individuals and groups over time. We then trace this flow of individual and organizational competence through three case studies of UX adoption. Opportunities for use of this preliminary schema as a generative, rhetorical tool for HCI researchers to further interrogate UX adoption are considered, including accounting for factors that affect adoption.

A tribute to Mad skill: expert amateur visuality and world of Warcraft Machinima

In this paper, we look at the prominent World of Warcraft machinima community as an expert amateur online com-munity and present a multi-part study of a canon of the most successful works (i.e., machinima videos) produced by this community. By focusing our study on its roughly 300 most successful examples, the determination of which we explain in the paper, we are able to highlight the evolv-ing visual practices, tools, and aesthetic sensibilities of the community. Chiefly, our study identifies how creativity support tools and visual practices are inextricably linked and mutually support the in-kind development of the other. For WoW machinima and its producers, the affordance of creativity tools and the cultivation of visual skill synced at key moments and in powerful ways to support the rapid growth, experimentation, and refinement of amateur exper-tise at the individual and community levels.

HCI's Making Agendas

In this survey, we examine how making emerged as an interdisciplinaryarena of scholarship, research and design that connects entrepreneurs,designers, researchers, critical theorists, historians, anthropologists,computer scientists and engineers. HCI is one among many other fieldsand domains that has declared having a stake in making. And yet,a lot of what and who defines making is happening outside the familiarresearch laboratory or design studio. We take this article as anopportunity to reflect on HCIs relationship to making and how this relationshiphas changed over the last years. Making, we argue, presentsHCI with the opportunity to question and revisit underlying principlesand long-held aspirations and values of the field. Exactly because HCIand making share some fundamental ideals such as user empowermentand the democratization of participation and technology production,making confronts us with both the potential and the unintended consequencesof our own work.

HCIxDementia Workshop: Engaging People Living with Dementia

Increasingly, HCI researchers are recognizing the challenges and opportunities of designing with and for people living with dementia. Recent critiques have highlighted the limited ways people with dementia are engaged in the research and design process. The second CHI HCIxDementia workshop will focus on engagement with and by people living with dementia. Through interactions with local community organizations and people living with dementia, workshop attendees will explore design possibilities. Building on open questions from the CHI 2017 workshop, this workshop will address how HCI researchers can support people living with dementia in engaging as leaders and with research, industry, and the community.

Appropriated or Inauthentic Care in Gig-Economy Platforms: A Psycho-linguistic Analysis of Uber and Lyft

In this late breaking work, we present preliminary results from a portion of an auto-ethnography in which an HCI scholar drove for both Uber and Lyft over the course of 4 months, recording his thoughts about the driving experience as well as his experiences with-and emails from-both platforms. The first phase of results we present here are based on several text analyses of the collected emails, as well as a preliminary examination of field notes in relation to these emails. We found that while Uber and Lyft participate in the gig economy in almost identical ways, the difference in tone apparent through each platforms messaging could lead to conflicting experiences for drivers. We identify implications for the potential future analyses of our autoethnographic data in relation to this psycholinguistic analysis.

Designing for Everyday Care in Communities

Recent HCI scholarship has begun to incorporate the concept of care as an alternative design lens, moving beyond health care or social care to consider care as a fundamental relational quality of life. This one-day workshop brings together researchers to find a shared understanding of the ways in which interpersonal care and interdependence could be supported through technology design in community contexts. The goal is to raise issues and increase sensitivity towards care, with the ultimate aim of impacting design practices-including how one might design community interactions with and for care. Participants will learn together how such a focus could impact their own research, while mapping and articulating how research and design in HCI-related fields can and does integrate care into sociotechnical systems more broadly.

Meaning Reconstruction as an Approach to Analyze Critical Dimensions of HCI Research

A critical tradition has taken hold in HCI, yet research methods needed to meaningfully engage with critical questions in the qualitative tradition are nascent. In this paper, we explore one critical qualitative research approach that allows researchers to probe deeply into the relationships between communicative acts and social structures. Meaning reconstruction methods are described and illustrated using examples from HCI research, demonstrating how social norms can be traced as they are claimed and reproduced. We conclude with implications for strengthening rigorous critical inquiry in HCI research, including the use of extant critical research methods to document transparency and thick description.