Woman-Centered Design through Humanity, Activism, and Inclusion

Women account for over half of the global population, however, continue to be subject to systematic and systemic disadvantage, particularly in terms of access to health and education. At every intersection, where systemic inequality accounts for greater loss of life or limitations on full and healthy living, women are more greatly impacted by those inequalities. The design of technologies is no different, the very definition of technology is historically cast in terms of male activities, and advancements in the field are critical to improve women's quality of life. This article views HCI, a relatively new field, as well positioned to act critically in the ways that technology serve, refigure, and redefine women's bodies. Indeed, the female body remains a contested topic, a restriction to the development of women's health. On one hand, the field of women's health has attended to the medicalization of the body and therefore is to be understood through medical language and knowledge. On the other hand, the framing of issues associated with women's health and people's experiences of and within such system(s) remain problematic for many. This is visible today in, e.g., socio-cultural practices in disparate geographies or medical devices within a clinic or the home. Moreover, the biological body is part of a great unmentionable, i.e., the perils of essentialism. We contend that it is necessary, pragmatically and ethically, for HCI to turn its attention toward a woman-centered design approach. While previous research has argued for the dangers of gender-demarcated design work, we advance that designing for and with women should not be regarded as ghettoizing, but instead as critical to improving women's experiences in bodily transactions, choices, rights, and access to and in health and care. In this article, we consider how and why designing with and for woman matters. We use our design-led research as a way to speak to and illustrate alternatives to designing for and with women within HCI.QC 20200930</p

Digital Mental Health and Social Connectedness

A detailed understanding of the mental health needs of people from refugee backgrounds is crucial for the design of inclusive mental health technologies. We present a qualitative account of the digital mental health experiences of women from refugee backgrounds. Working with community members and community workers of a charitable organisation for refugee women in the UK, we identify social and structural challenges, including loneliness and access to mental health technologies. Participants' accounts document their collective agency in addressing these challenges and supporting social connectedness and personal wellbeing in daily life: participants reported taking part in community activities as volunteers, sharing technological expertise, and using a wide range of non-mental health-focused technologies to support their mental health, from playing games to supporting religious practices. Our findings suggest that, rather than focusing only on individual self-care, research also needs to leverage community-driven approaches to foster social mental health experiences, from altruism to connectedness and belonging

'We Can Send A Man To The Moon But We Can't Control The Temperature In Our office'; A Considerate Approach To Workplace Thermal Comfort by Older Women

From Fanger's seminal work on thermal comfort in the 1970s, standards governing temperatures in the workplace enshrine clothing level calculations based on full business suits, and building regulations developed using only male metabolic data, locking in a default male perspective. Even later work that highlights gender biases with regard to metabolism calculation, inclusive of both genders has focused on younger women, and the voices of older working women are missing from this discourse. We invited women over 45 to explore what they find important in workplace thermal comfort, and how devices and interfaces might meet their needs and also encourage thermal adaptivity. Our study highlights factors such as 'fresh air', and the importance of empathy to fellow inhabitants. We bring new voices to the thermal comfort discourse which supports reducing energy use in the workplace, improving thermal environments and ensuring the needs of a diverse, aging workforce are considered

Longing to be the Mountain : A Scoping Review about Nature-Centric, Health-Minded Technologies

Engaging with nature enriches people's life greatly, and it is a particularly powerful wellbeing activity. Unsurprisingly, researchers in HCI and beyond seek to augment and extend the relationship people have with nature through technology, to positively enhance their health as a result. In this paper, we report on a scoping review that examines research exploring health, nature, and technology research. By charting 29 papers from the last five years, we produce a situated snapshot of the current research landscape and identify three trends within the paper pool: Despite the potential for rich, experiential engagements, human-nature interaction is often understood as an endeavour that is 1) universal, 2) flattened and 3) disconnected from everyday life. We reflect on our findings to outline design opportunities for human-nature interaction that extend and re-orientate it; to design for multi-dimensional caring experiences that allow for a more-than-just-human understanding of nature.Peer reviewe

Wann braucht Ethnografie eine Einverständniserklärung? Praktische Antworten auf ethische Fragen zu ethnografischen Methoden in der HCI-Forschung

Die Forschung im Bereich der Mensch-Computer-Interaktion (HCI) nutzt ein zunehmend breiter werdendes Methodenspektrum für eine sich immer weiter auffächernde Bandbreite von Forschungsfeldern. Zahlreiche Studien verlassen für die Datenerhebung den vertraut-kontrollierbaren Kosmos von Laboren und Versuchsständen, um stattdessen im Feld mehr über das Verhalten einer NutzerInnengruppe im „natürlichen“ Kontext zu erfahren. Für jede Forschung gelten unabhängig von Feld und Methode die forschungsethischen Grundprinzipien der Freiwilligkeit, Benefizienz und Gerechtigkeit. Um das Freiwilligkeits-Prinzips in der Forschungspraxis zu gewährleisten, stellt der Einsatz von Einverständniserklärungen als informierte Zustimmung bzw. Informed Consent (IC) einen kritischen Punkt für jedes Studiendesign dar. Für viele qualitative Methoden besteht in Bezug auf das Gebot des IC in der HCI Forschung eine direkte Analogie zu der etablierten Ethikpraxis für quantitative Methoden. Die Ethnografie nimmt hier jedoch eine gewisse Sonderstellung ein. Begründet in ihrem methodischen Kernansatz der in-situ Beobachtung stellt insbesondere das Thema IC immer wieder eine ethische und forschungspraktische Herausforderung dar, da es bei einer feldbasierten und damit interaktionsoffenen Forschung schwieriger ist festzustellen, welche der beteiligten Personen als direkte ForschungsteilnehmerInnen zu konzeptualisieren sind bzw. von welchen Personen ein IC in welcher Form gebraucht wird. Dieser Artikel rückt die Frage nach einem sinnvollen und ethisch korrekten Einsatz von IC in ethnografischen Studien im HCI Bereich ins Zentrum der Betrachtung. Mit der Skala der situationsangemessenen Privatsphärenerwartung und IC (SPIC-Skala) wird ein praxistauglicher Lösungsansatz vorgestellt, der sich bereits in zahlreichen Forschungsprojekten im HCI Kontext bewährt hat. Kernargument der SPIC-Skala ist, dass Forschende sich in ihren IC Maßnahmen an den situationsabhängigen Privatsphärenerwartungen von beteiligten Personen orientieren sollten. Eine solche Wahrung der Privatsphärenerwartungen sehen wir als forschungspraktische Operationalisierung des Freiwilligkeits-Prinzips in offenen Forschungssituationen. Dass ein solches Schema jedoch kein „Freifahrtschein“ sein kann, und immer wieder aufs Neue für den eigenen Kontext geprüft werden muss, wird in einem abschließenden Fazit diskutiert

Human-Centred Smart Buildings: Reframing Smartness Through the Lens of Human-Building Interaction

PhD ThesisSmart buildings backed by data and algorithms promise reduced energy use and increased value for businesses and occupants. Yet, this has typically been considered from an engineering and systems perspective. Given increasing integration of sensing and ubiquitous computing technologies in modern built environments, a growing HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) and Human-Building Interaction (HBI) community has begun to advocate for the human-centred design of building technologies. This dissertation argues that there is a need for an inclusive, socially just and sustainable HBI agenda, to enable smarter buildings and facilities management. Deconstructing ‘smart’ rhetoric within HCI/HBI discourse and highlighting the values and ethics underpinning it, I argue that existing approaches to ‘smartness’ privilege automation and efficiency over the needs of human occupants. I undertake a qualitative inquiry into the roles of data and digital technologies in human-centred smart buildings through three case studies: i) How retrofitted environment sensors facilitate smarter energy auditing practices. I contribute a methodology for using sensor toolkits in auditing, technical design of the BuildAX sensing platform, and insights into sensoraugmented audits and how future standards might support these. ii) How data and digital technologies foster collective experiences of thermal comfort for office workers. I contribute a data elicitation interview method, design of the ThermoKiosk experience survey system, and considerations for integrating office tensions into workplace comfort management. iii) How HBI can support agency and participation in the everyday management and adaptation of a contemporary smart building. I contribute a ‘building walks’ method to elicit conversations on the future of building technologies, new understandings of how student occupants conceptualise and evaluate spaces, and how buildings of the future might better enable occupant agency. Through these, I contribute a re-framing of smartness to be more human-centred, including concerns for collaboration, inclusion, and human decision-making which does not consider occupants a ‘problem’ to be solved. The results of the case studies are synthesised into a set of six principles for the design of technology within human-centred smart buildings, re-grounding the field of HBI in the philosophy of environmental and social justice

Reimagining the cycle: interaction in self-tracking period apps and menstrual empowerment

FemTech, technology often in the forms of apps developed to specifically target female health issues, have billions of users globally. Yet, despite the popularity of e.g., period trackers or pregnancy apps, we know little about the potential impact of these technologies, often developed outside controlled and regulated healthcare. How interactive technology is designed, and in our case the cycle represented through the design, has the potential to shape women's understanding of menstruation. In this study we analyse the interaction design of nine of the most downloaded menstruation apps, asking how commercial menstruation apps represent the cycle through their interaction design. While previous research has criticized these types of apps for lacking privacy and for enforcing normative ideals on women, they are often marketed in terms of female empowerment and users do indeed seem to find them very useful for period and fertility tracking. However, the term 'empowerment' is today used broadly and is known for having many potential meanings. Even within the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), 'empowerment' is used frequently but rarely explicitly defined. The question then becomes what empowerment could mean for menstruation tracking. In order to begin exploring the way menstruation and the period is represented in current apps and the way that future apps could design for empowerment, we engage in a comparative design investigation using what we call critical app-walkthrough methodology where an app's design is explored comprehensibly at one point in time and apps interacted with over a longer time period through researcher use-diares. Our results center around three ways in which these apps represent the cycle to users through design. We analyse; (1) interface metaphors used to represent the temporality of bleeding, (2) datafication of menstruation through input and output for intimate data tracking, and (3) the ways fertility predictions convey certainty over uncertainty. In a second step, we then explore what empowerment could mean for period trackers and how design could support empowering experiences. Finally, we present four design sensitivities meant to inspire designers to design for other types of period tracking experiences that might better empower bleeders. These are: support lived temporalities, embrace uncertainty, empower the self, and design less