Phoebe Sengers

Reflective design

As computing moves into every aspect of our daily lives, the values and assumptions that underlie our technical practices may unwittingly be propagated throughout our culture. Drawing on existing critical approaches in computing, we argue that reflection on unconscious values embedded in computing and the practices that it supports can and should be a core principle of technology design. Building on a growing body of work in critical computing, reflective design combines analysis of the ways in which technologies reflect and perpetuate unconscious cultural assumptions, with design, building, and evaluation of new computing devices that reflect alternative possibilities. We illustrate this approach through two design case studies.

Staying open to interpretation: engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) often focuses on how designers can develop systems that convey a single, specific, clear interpretation of what they are for and how they should be used and experienced. New domains such as domestic and public environments, new influences from the arts and humanities, and new techniques in HCI itself are converging to suggest that multiple, potentially competing interpretations can fruitfully co-exist. In this paper, we lay out the contours of the new space opened by a focus on multiple interpretations, which may more fully address the complexity, dynamics and interplay of user, system, and designer interpretation. We document how design and evaluation strategies shift when we abandon the presumption that a specific, authoritative interpretation of the systems we build is necessary, possible or desirable.

Mapping the landscape of sustainable HCI

With the recent growth in sustainable HCI, now is a good time to map out the approaches being taken and the intellectual commitments that underlie the area, to allow for community discussion about where the field should go. Here, we provide an empirical analysis of how sustainable HCI is defining itself as a research field. Based on a corpus of published works, we identify (1) established genres in the area, (2) key unrecognized intellectual differences, and (3) emerging issues, including urgent avenues for further exploration, opportunities for interdisciplinary engagement, and key topics for debate.

Sustainably unpersuaded: how persuasion narrows our vision of sustainability

In this paper we provide a critical analysis of persuasive sustainability research from 2009-2011. Drawing on critical sociological theory of modernism, we argue that persuasion is based on a limited framing of sustainability, human behavior, and their interrelationship. This makes supporting sustainability easier, but leads to characteristic patterns of breakdown. We then detail problems that emerge from this narrowing of vision, such as how the framing of sustainability as the optimization of a simple metrics places technologies incorrectly as objective arbiters over complex issues of sustainability. We conclude by suggesting alternative approaches to move beyond these problems.

How HCI interprets the probes

We trace how cultural probes have been adopted and adapted by the HCI community. The flexibility of probes has been central to their uptake, resulting in a proliferation of divergent uses and derivatives. The varying patterns of adaptation of the probes reveal important underlying issues in HCI, suggesting underacknowledged disagreements about valid interpretation and the relationship between methods and their underlying methodology. With this analysis, we aim to clarify discussions around probes, and, more importantly, around how we define and evaluate methods in HCI, especially those grounded in unfamiliar conceptions of how research should be done.

Fit4life: the design of a persuasive technology promoting healthy behavior and ideal weight

This is a critical design paper offering a possible scenario of use intended to provoke reflection about values and politics of design in persuasive computing. We describe the design of a system - Fit4Life - that encourages individuals to address the larger goal of reducing obesity in society by promoting individual healthy behaviors. Using the Persuasive Systems Design Model [26], this paper outlines the Fit4Life persuasion context, the technology, its use of persuasive messages, and an experimental design to test the systems efficacy. We also contribute a novel discussion of the ethical and sociocultural considerations involved in our design, an issue that has remained largely unaddressed in the existing persuasive technologies literature [29].

Affect: from information to interaction

While affective computing explicitly challenges the primacy of rationality in cognitivist accounts of human activity, at a deeper level it relies on and reproduces the same information-processing model of cognition. In affective computing, affect is often seen as another kind of information - discrete units or states internal to an individual that can be transmitted in a loss-free manner from people to computational systems and back. Drawing on cultural, social, and interactional critiques of cognition which have arisen in HCI, we introduce and explore an alternative model of emotion as interaction: dynamic, culturally mediated, and socially constructed and experienced. This model leads to new goals for the design and evaluation of affective systems - instead of sensing and transmitting emotion, systems should support human users in understanding, interpreting, and experiencing emotion in its full complexity and ambiguity.

In-car gps navigation: engagement with and disengagement from the environment

Although in-car GPS navigation technology is proliferating, it is not well understood how its use alters the ways people interpret their environment and navigate through it. We argue that GPS-based car navigation might disengage people from their surrounding environment, but also has the potential to open up novel ways to engage with it. We present an ethnographically-informed study with GPS users, showing evidence for practices of disengagement as well as new opportunities for engagement, illustrating our findings using rich descriptions from the field. Grounded in our observations we propose design principles for GPS systems that support richer experiences of driving. We argue that for a fuller understanding of issues of disengagement and engagement with the environment we need to move beyond a focus on the (re)design of GPS devices, and point to future directions of work that embrace a broader perspective.

Environmental sustainability and interaction

By its nature, the discipline of human computer interaction must take into consideration the issues that are most pertinent to humans. We believe that the CHI community faces an unanswered challenge in the creation of interactive systems: sustainability. For example, climate scientists argue that the most serious consequences of climate change can be averted, but only if fundamental changes are made. The goal of this SIG is to raise awareness of these issues in the CHI community and to start a conversation about the possibilities and responsibilities we have to address issues of sustainability.

Introduction to the special issue on practice-oriented approaches to sustainable HCI

Since Bleviss seminal paper [Blevis 2007] in 2007, environmental sustainability has established itself as a mainstream concern for HCI. After an initial flurry of excitement about the potential for existing HCI techniques, such as persuasive computing and interaction design, to contributemeaningfully to increasing sustainability, we have begun to recognize that the complexity and apparent intractability of working towards sustainability is providing serious challenges to current HCI ways of approaching problems. For example, some are working to deepen the engagement between HCI and established approaches of environmental psychology [Froehlich et al. 2010] and behavioral theory [Hekler et al. 2013] in order to develop more rigorous methods and theoretical connections for pursuing sustainability. Others are deploying and evaluating eco-feedback technologies at a scale not yet common in HCI [Erickson et al. 2013] to get a better sense of their effects and potentialities. Thus, sustainability is becoming not simply a problem that HCI can contribute to solving, but also an opportunity to understand the limits of HCI as it is currently constituted and to develop new possibilities for the discipline.