Ellie Harmon

Stories of the Smartphone in everyday discourse: conflict, tension & instability

As the smartphone proliferates in American society, so too do stories about its value and impact. In this paper we draw on advertisements and news articles to analyze cultural discourse about the smartphone. We highlight two common tropes: one calling for increased technological integration, the other urging individuals to dis-integrate the smartphone from daily life. We examine the idealized subject positions of these two stories and show how both simplistic tropes call on the same overarching values to compel individuals to take opposing actions. We then reflect on the conflicts individuals experience in trying to align and account for their actions in relation to multiple contradictory narratives. Finally, we call for CHI researchers to tell and provoke more complicated stories of technologies and their relationships with values in conversations, publications, and future designs.

Reflecting on health: a system for students to monitor diet and exercise

Using an iterative design process, we designed and evaluated a system for college students to encourage the development and maintenance of healthy diet and exercise habits. The system has three components: a camera phone application to support photographic diet and exercise journaling, an automatic workout tracking application for exercise machines in the gym, and a visualization application to support users as they reflect on their diet and exercise activities.

Disempowered by Data: Nonprofits, Social Enterprises, and the Consequences of Data-Driven Work

Organizations across many sectors are under intense pressure to become data-driven. Yet, for mission-driven organizations, the path to becoming and value of being data-driven is not always clear. We present results from an interview-based study of the role of data in the monitoring and evaluation practices of mission-driven organizations. Instead of leading to productive and empowering data-driven decision making, monitoring and evaluation work is characterized by the erosion of autonomy, data drift, and data fragmentation. Together, these consequences of monitoring and evaluation practices play into a cycle of increasing disempowerment for the mission-driven organization. These findings suggest that the design of information systems should work towards empowering organizations in ways that make sense for their unique data needs and those of their constituents.

Circumscribed Time and Porous Time: Logics as a Way of Studying Temporality

In this paper, we introduce the notion of a temporal logic to characterize sets of organizing principles that perpetuate particular orientations to the lived experience of time. We identify a dominant temporal logic, circumscribed time, which has legitimated time as chunkable, single-purpose, linear, and ownable. We juxtapose this logic with the temporal experiences of participants in three ethnographic datasets to identify a set of alternative understandings of time -- that it is also spectral, mosaic, rhythmic, and obligated. We call this understanding porous time. We posit porous time as an expansion of circumscribed time in order to provoke reflection on how temporal logics underpin the ways that people orient to each other, research and design technologies, and normalize visions of success in contemporary life.

Designing Against the Status Quo

In this one-day workshop, we interrogate design strategies of troubling, friction, queering, and contestation that aim to question the status quo. In ways that are playful, heretical, theoretical, and applied we examine tactics that make space for alternative values to emerge in everyday life. Recent design strategies in this space include Lights adaptation of feminist and queer theory in proposing design that troubles and queers the status quo, Korn and Voidas adaptation of anthropological theory and theories of the everyday to call for design that causes friction, and DiSalvos formulation of adversarial design as a way of challenging conventional politics. As we design interactive systems that, on the one hand, seek to be accountable in responding to current and future societal challenges, and, on the other, are becoming ever more complex, we ask what trends in destabilizing and rethinking may help us innovate in both method and outcome.

Competing Currencies: Designing for Politics in Units of Measurement

We present results of a qualitative study of the information systems used by college and university food banks and find that their inventory systems are characterized by the patchwork use of multiple units of measurement-currencies-collected at different points in their workflow for different stakeholders. Considerations of whether to track information by item count, points, monetary value, or weight are immensely political and privilege some stakeholders over others. We contribute to an emergent body of research in computer-supported cooperative work about the ways in which the politics of measurement influences the design of organizational information systems through an explanation of the ways that these different currencies embody politics and stymie design at the most mundane level of the information system-the unit of measurement.