Norman Makoto Su

From Third to Surveilled Place: The Mobile in Irish Pubs

A home away from home, the pub is synonymous with good conversation. Yet, the art of conversation in pubs is changing with the ubiquity of mobile phones. We present a qualitative study spanning over three years describing experiences and rhetoric surrounding the relationship that mobiles have and should have with our conversation in the pub. We found that mobile phones are able to enhance conversation but can also cause a disruption to the informal and adhoc nature of pubs. The use of Facebook on mobile phones has also changed pubs from what Oldenburg terms a third space to a space that is potentially being surveilled. We suggest future designs should not necessarily discourage or encourage mobile use in pubs, but rather provoke us into reflecting on how intertwined modern conversation is with mobile technology in the context of the pub space.

Mundanely miraculous: the robot in healthcare

As both hero and villain, robots have played prominent roles in media such as films and books. Now, robots are no longer hidden away from the public conscious in fictive worlds or real-life factories. Robots are becoming a real part of our everyday encounters in environments such as healthcare settings. In this paper, we describe a discourse analysis of 60 YouTube videos that showcase robots in healthcare activities. Our narrative weaves three discourses that construct visions of the healthcare robot: (1) the miraculous robot as the robot that enhances patient care; (2) the mundane robot as the innocuous robot that integrates into the workflow seamlessly; and (3) the preternatural robot as the robot that is miraculous but never mundane. We propose several contrary visions to this dominant narrative of healthcare robots as a framework for future fieldwork that, we argue, should investigate the institutions of robotics.

Integrating Roboticist Values into a Value Sensitive Design Framework for Humanoid Robots

A good body of work in HRI has investigated how to design humanoids to effectively serve users needs. This user centered approach has proved fruitful, but there exists relatively little work examining the intent and values of the roboticists themselves. Furthermore, we know little of how the values of roboticists influence their own designs. Such knowledge could help designers better reflect on whether their designs effectively convey particular ethics to their users. In this study, we analyzed 27 interviews of pioneer humanoid roboticists, seeking to identify the values of such roboticists. Our results suggest that roboticists values are shaped by a dominant engineering-based background that emphasizes robotics as a field of integration (especially humanoids). Roboticists also see robots as testbeds for learning about humans themselves. We advocate a VSD approach for humanoids that goes beyond engineering disciplines and forces values to the forefront of discussion.

Expanding the Design Horizon for Self-Driving Vehicles: Distributing Benefits and Burdens

With over one billion vehicles in the world today, the motorized road vehicle is the pillar of modern society. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the automobile has revolutionized our spaces, practices, cultures, and identities through a complex matrix of technical, financial, economic, political, and social linkages. Visions of automobile use have always shaped its design, manufacture, and production. Now, motorized road transport is set to revolutionize our society once again on a huge scale. Recent technological developments in propulsion, telecommunications, sensing, and in-vehicle computing technology are expanding the range of vehicles? capabilities. A technological convergence is underway, moving towards self-driving vehicle (SDV) technology. These vehicles will utilize computational algorithms, sensors, and communication devices to automatically navigate a variety of environments with limited or no intervention from human drivers.

Reconsidering Nature: The Dialectics of Fair Chase in the Practices of American Midwest Hunters

In this paper, we describe an ethnographic study consisting of 14 interviews with hunters and participant observations in the American Midwest. We find that the ethos of fair chase serves to unite an eclectic group of hunters under a single moral compass. Fair chase posits, for example, that hunters must not have an improper advantage over animals. The actual practices of hunters in different communities (e.g., communities revolving around different weapons or professions), however, reveals a series of opposing points of view among hunters at large on what actually constitutes fair chase. We suggest that an understanding of fair chase and its dialectics can constructively problematize nature for human-computer interaction.

Driving the self-driving vehicle: Expanding the technological design horizon

Drawing perspectives from science and technology studies, philosophy of science, and literature from ethics and social justice, this paper examines the promises and challenges in the development of self-driving vehicle (SDV) technology. We start with the premise that the combination of different computing technologies embedded in SDVs is a powerful tool for efficiency in communications, information gathering, processing, and storage. However, by focusing on efficiency, SDVs provide a new mode of industrialized transportation whose users can only choose between transportation services, but have little or no say about the broader social implications of the technology. We argue that perspectives from social justice and ethics show that SDVs have implications beyond transportation, with profound consequences for users and societies. In particular, values such as privacy, security, and responsibility may be changed for good or bad, in both the short and long-term. The examination of these changes, while the technology is still under foundational development, is as urgent as it is needed.

Understanding the Aesthetic Evolution of Websites: Towards a Notion of Design Periods

In art and music, time periods like classical and impressionist are powerful means for academics and practitioners to compare and contrast artifacts that share aesthetics or philosophies. While web designs have undergone changes for 25 years, we lack theories to describe or explain these changes. In this paper, we take a first step towards identifying and understanding the design periods of websites. Drawing from humanistic HCI methods, we asked subject experts of web design to critically analyze a dataset of prominent websites whose lifetimes span over a decade. These informed judgments reveal a set of key markers that signal shifts in design periods. For instance, advances in display technologies and changes in company strategies help explain how design periods demarcated by particular layout templates and navigation models arise. We suggest that designers and marketers can draw inspiration from website designs curated into design periods. Future work should examine the utility of applying design periods to any computationally embedded artifact that is an interaction design.

Configuring the User: "Robots have Needs Too"

Users have played a prominent role as objects of study in HCI, CSCW, and HRI (Human-Robot Interaction). Researchers have begun to problematize the asymmetric relationship between technical experts and users. In this paper, we focus on how roboticists-borrowing a term from Steve Woolgar-configure their robot users. Instead of focusing on what roboticists think of their robots or what users think of robots, we ask, What do roboticists think of users Utilizing two exercises we call futuristic stories and value index cards, we conducted semi-structured interviews with roboticists to examine their discourse on robotics, robots, and users. We found that roboticists framed users as inevitably transforming from a naïve user to a sensible user equipped to handle their ideal, utilitarian robot. Our findings illustrate that roboticists and designers need to make transparent what forms of future users they desire and expect in their design processes.

Integrating Roboticist Values into a Design Framework for Humanoid Robots

Our proposed two-part study on the perspectives of roboticists pursues a holistic, value-sensitive approach to robot design. We first describe a pilot study to uncover the patterns of values ingrained in humanoid designs. These findings will inform our next study to interview roboticists. While user-centered approaches of HRI literature give us insight on making user-friendly robots, our work seeks to create a design framework to assist roboticists in reflecting on their values and intentions during their design processes.

A Design Approach for Authenticity and Technology

Todays sensor-rich and socially-networked world forces us to ask whether technology is moving us away from an authentic life. We all have different views on what constitutes an authentic life with technology and, through our actions, try to stay true to those views. We describe a design approach called Designing for Authenticity that draws from the existentialist philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. It allows researchers engaged in immersive fieldwork to articulate the possible patterns of authentic living with technology. It also outlines a strategy to design artifacts that indirectly communicate to users the experiences of those living in different modes of authenticity. Yet, our approach gives the designers own informed convictions weight in advocating that one should commit to a spiritual life-view with technology. To illustrate our approach, we subject previously published research on Irish traditional musicians to our designing for authenticity approach.