Tad Hirsch

CHI at the barricades: an activist agenda?

Technology plays an increasingly important role in enabling activist agendas, supporting activist activities and self-organization, bringing people together on causes they support and developing tools and platforms to scaffold activist activities. This panel explores both the role of HCI in activism and activism in HCI.

Exploring Mobile Devices as Personal Public Displays

We present design research on personal public displays: mobile and wearable displays that direct user designated content towards other collocated individuals. We built display software that projects text and image on the outer facing side of a two-screen laptop and used this prototype as a design probe with three different groups: (1) attendees at a 300-person conference, (2) eight office workers, and (3)twenty design students. We analyze how users crafted content for the displays, identifying that in close-knit groups, the social pressure to appear witty with text postsled to a preference for using images. The mobility afforded by the display allowed users to explore new relationships between physical location and digital content, and we also discuss how by standers observed the displays and re-purposed the messages for use with other outsiders. We conclude with a discussion of potential applications for future design and research work.

Expanding the design space for intimacy: supporting mutual reflection for local partners

The design space for intimate partners has largely been populated with technologies that support distant partners via abstracted presence. We seek to expand the design space to include a wider range of potential users and designs. To this end, we present findings from qualitative interviews with Family Studies experts in the form of a stage-based model of couple connection---Re-pattern, Reflect, Re-story, Reconnect. From this analysis, we identify two new regions in the couples design space, local partners and deep interpersonal sharing. Finally, we share the design of a technology that sits at the intersection of these regions. These findings present new opportunities for designers of intimate collaborative technologies.

Probing bus stop for insights on transit co-design

Social computing provides a new way for citizens to engage with their public service. Our research investigates how social computing might support citizens co-design their transit service. We conducted a field study with public transit riders, exploring the issues and controversies that reveal conflicting communities. Our analyses revealed three insights. First, encourage citizens to share what they see as the rationale for current service offerings. Second, encourage citizens to share the consequences of current services and of proposed changes and new designs. Third, focus on producing a shared citizen and service provider understanding of what the goals and mission of the public service should be.

Social Justice and Design: Power and oppression in collaborative systems

The study of power and oppression is and has always been integral to CSCW research. From studies of less visible forms of maintenance practice to understanding the effects of categorization on users of social media, scholars highlight the ways in which certain publics are marginalized through systems that purport to serve them. Alongside this, researchers taking up participatory action research approaches and interventionist modes of inquiry have begun to question these arrangements, through design oriented projects. This panel brings together CSCW scholars active in theorizations and enactments of design for social justice to examine and debate social change oriented research. Together, they imagine a practice where agendas are made clear and academic institutions, collaborators of field sites, and the scholarly community are mutually responsive and responsible for the outcomes of their research work.

What's for Lunch?: A Socio-ecological Approach to Childcare Nutrition

This paper presents a qualitative study of food-related practices among 16 childcare providers in the Puget Sound, and suggests opportunities for design intervention to promote healthy eating by young children. This paper makes two contributions to interactive systems design. We present childcare as an underexplored site for future research and design. We also describe social ecology systems theory, an approach to qualitative research from the public health field that is relatively uncommon in design research. We believe that the socio-ecological perspective is particularly applicable to design research that addresses human service provisioning, and may also prove useful in describing human cognition and designing interactive systems more generally.

Surreptitious Communication Design

This essay presents “surreptitious communication design” (SCD), a framework for design in contentious political contexts. SCD is concerned with crafting messages that are meaningful for intended recipients, but illegible and/or inaccessible for adversaries who seek to undermine communications or harm participants. Borrowing concepts from cryptography and information theory, SCDs key theoretical concerns are described, as are several of the strategies and tactics through which it is operationalized. Two recent anti-human trafficking projects are compared, one developed from an SCD perspective, the other from a traditional mass communications approach. Finally, SCD is considered in relation to the burgeoning “Design for Good” movement.