Exploring Potentially Abusive Ethical, Social and Political Implications of Mixed Reality Research in HCI

In recent years, Mixed Reality (MR) headsets have increasingly made advances in terms of capability, affordability and end-user adoption, slowly becoming everyday technology. HCI research typically explores positive aspects of these technologies, focusing on interaction, presence and immersive experiences. However, such technological advances and paradigm shifts often fail to consider the ``dark patterns'', with potential abusive scenarios, made possible by new technologies (cf. smartphone addiction, social media anxiety disorder). While these topics are getting recent attention in related fields and with the general population, this workshop is aimed at starting an active exploration of abusive, ethical, social and political scenarios of MR research inside the HCI community. With an HCI lens, workshop participants will engage in critical reviews of emerging MR technologies and applications and develop a joint research agenda to address them

Mechanisms of moral responsibilities: Designing and deploying digital technologies for perpetrators of domestic violence

PhD ThesisWhere prevention and intervention resources should be focused to mitigate domestic violence is an important topic within academic policy and practice. While there are a range of digital tools available to support victim-survivors subject to domestic violence, no tools have been designed to challenge the abusive and harmful behaviours of perpetrators. In this thesis, I explore the experience of how existing and novel technologies used in the context of perpetrator interventions in the third sector within the United Kingdom are being leveraged to rebalance the over-responsibility society bestows on victim-survivors, along with the under-responsibility we ascribe to perpetrators. I accomplish this through developing a conceptual framework that seeks to promote spaces for design and further intervention capable of assisting such organisations in holding perpetrators responsible for their abusive behaviours and facilitating their journey of behaviour and attitude change towards non-violence. Through this work, I conceptualise the compelling moral responsibilities intrinsic to interactions with technological systems between perpetrators and support workers, which I elicit through a focused ethnography. I highlight four spaces of negotiation concerning a person’s responsibility for changing their abusive behaviour, which I refer to as ‘mechanisms’ to convey their fundamental and interconnected nature: self-awareness, acknowledging the extent of harms, providing peer support, and being accountable to demonstrate change. To further investigate these spaces for negotiation, I conducted three studies to understand the contextual dependencies of design that focuses on the responsibility of domestic violence perpetrators through: (1) the development of an interactive storytelling system to promote learning about agency and perspective-taking, (2) the design of a smartphone application to support crisis management and the prevention of physical violence, and (3) the design, deployment and evaluation of an asynchronous peer support process between two groups of perpetrators. The outcomes of this conceptual and empirical inquiry are manifold. First, I provide a detailed account of how responsibility is explored in practice between support workers and perpetrators to suggest design considerations for future systems in this context. Secondly, I provide a conceptual framework to aid researchers and designers in better navigating designing for responsibilities for violent behaviours, and outline implications for how this might be achieved. Finally, I offer a methodological and ethical ii considerations which outlines ways in which support workers and perpetrators can be actively included within the co-design of digital tools while mitigating the elevation of risk. These contributions aim to fundamentally reimagine the roles and possibilities for digital tools within domestic violence, looking beyond today’s victim-focused and security-oriented paradigms to propose a more transformative orientation focused on preventing the harm done by perpetrators

Toxic Text in Personas: An Experiment on User Perceptions

When algorithms create personas from social media data, the personas can become noxious via automatically including toxic comments. To investigate how users perceive such personas, we conducted a 2 × 2 user experiment with 496 participants that showed participants toxic and non-toxic versions of data-driven personas. We found that participants gave higher credibility, likability, empathy, similarity, and willingness-to-use scores to non-toxic personas. Also, gender affected toxicity perceptions in that female toxic data-driven personas scored lower in likability, empathy, and similarity than their male counterparts. Female participants gave higher perceptions scores to non-toxic personas and lower scores to toxic personas than male participants. We discuss implications from our research for designing data-driven personas

Toxic text in personas: An experiment on user perceptions

When algorithms create personas from social media data, the personas can become noxious via automatically including toxic comments. To investigate how users perceive such personas, we conducted a 2 × 2 user experiment with 496 participants that showed participants toxic and non-toxic versions of data-driven personas. We found that participants gave higher credibility, likability, empathy, similarity, and willingness-to-use scores to non-toxic personas. Also, gender affected toxicity perceptions in that female toxic data-driven personas scored lower in likability, empathy, and similarity than their male counterparts. Female participants gave higher perceptions scores to non-toxic personas and lower scores to toxic personas than male participants. We discuss implications from our research for designing data-driven personas.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

From her story, to our story: Digital storytelling as public engagement around abortion rights advocacy in Ireland

Despite the divisive nature of abortion within the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, where access to safe, legal abortion is severely restricted, effecting legislative reform demands widespread public support. In light of a building pro-choice counter-voice, this work contributes to a growing body of HCI research that takes an activist approach to design. We report findings from four design workshops with 31 pro-choice stakeholders across Ireland in which we positioned an exploratory protosite, HerStoryTold, to engender critical conversations around the use of sensitive abortion narratives as a tool for engagement. Our analysis shows how digital storytelling can help reject false narratives and raise awareness of the realities of abortion laws. It suggests design directions to curate narratives that provoke empathy, foster polyvocality, and ultimately expand the engaged community. Furthermore, this research calls for designers to actively support community mobilization through providing 'stepping stones' to activism

Envisioning a Decolonial Digital Mental Health

The field of digital mental health is making strides in the application of technology to broaden access to care. We critically examine how these technology-mediated forms of care might amplify historical injustices, and erase minoritized experiences and expressions of mental distress and illness. We draw on decolonial thought and critiques of identity-based algorithmic bias to analyze the underlying power relations impacting digital mental health technologies today, and envision new pathways towards a decolonial digital mental health. We argue that a decolonial digital mental health is one that centers lived experience over rigid classification, is conscious of structural factors that infuence mental wellbeing, and is fundamentally designed to deter the creation of power differentials that prevent people from having agency over their care. Stemming from this vision, we make recommendations for how researchers and designers can support more equitable futures for people experiencing mental distress and illness

Towards a conceptualisation and critique of everyday life in HRI

This paper focuses on the topic of “everyday life” as it is addressed in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research. It starts from the argument that while human daily life with social robots has been increasingly discussed and studied in HRI, the concept of everyday life lacks clarity or systematic analysis, and it plays only a secondary role in supporting the study of the key HRI topics. In order to help conceptualise everyday life as a research theme in HRI in its own right, we provide an overview of the Social Science and Humanities (SSH) perspectives on everyday life and lived experiences, particularly in sociology, and identify the key elements that may serve to further develop and empirically study such a concept in HRI. We propose new angles of analysis that may help better explore unique aspects of human engagement with social robots. We look at the everyday not just as a reality as we know it (i.e., the realm of the “ordinary”) but also as the future that we need to envision and strive to materialise (i.e., the transformation that will take place through the “extraordinary” that comes with social robots). Finally, we argue that HRI research would benefit not only from engaging with a systematic conceptualisation but also critique of the contemporary everyday life with social robots. This is how HRI studies could play an important role in challenging the current ways of understanding of what makes different aspects of the human world “natural” and ultimately help bringing a social change towards what we consider a “good life.