HCI, politics and the city: Engaging with urban grassroots movements for reflection and action

Grassroots initiatives enable communities of stakeholders to transform urban landscapes and impact broader political and cultural trajectories. In this twoday workshop, we present opportunities to engage HCI research with activist communities in Vancouver, the city hosting CHI’11. Working directly with local activist organizations, we explore the processes, materials, challenges, and goals of grassroots communities. Our bottom-up approach, including explorations of urban spaces and activist headquarters, participatory design sessions, reflection, critique and creative design of political artifacts will bring together a diverse group of HCI researchers, activists and artists. The workshop will result in concrete strategies for bottom-up activism and serve to inform the design of future interactive systems in the domain of political computing

Tactics for HCI Design Interventions with Nonprofit Organizations

Thirty HCI practitioners participated in a CHI 2011 workshop [7], intending to directly engage with the processes, goals, and challenges of six Vancouver area nonprofit organizations. Analysis of the workshop documentation allowed us to track instances of reciprocal interaction between stakeholders. Findings revealed that various design tactics were productive in enabling collaborators to improve their focus on addressing key challenges they face. This case study contributes new knowledge – tactics to conduct and evaluate HCI Design Interventions with nonprofits, as well as, helping to expand the emerging intersection of political computing and human-computer interaction

HCI policy and the smart city

While the idea of the ‘Smart City’ has attracted increasing attention from academia, industry, and government this interest has largely had a technical and technological focus. This paper identifies some of the important political and policy challenges facing the idea, the discourse, of a ‘smart city’ as a means to optimise HCI input into the ‘smart city’ debate. It then addresses that gap by detailing a research project that explored how experts in smart city research and development in the UK context responded to this policy challenge. Experts were asked questions regarding their prior experience with the “smart city”, their understandings of what it means for a city to be smart, and what policy potentials they've recognised in the smart city. The paper analyses and offers a synthesis of the responses collected throughout the research with the current policies concerning various smart city proximity, thereby providing a critical assessment of the values underlying the smart city. The paper aims to explore and present some of the policy possibilities for UK smart cities that are potentially useful for politicians, policy makers, planners, academics, and technology companies. I believe that these perspectives for policy development can be used to inform responsible development, spatially and socially inclusive technologies, and ultimately more resilient and liveable cities

Designing Trans Technology: Defining Challenges and Envisioning Community-Centered Solutions

Transgender and non-binary people face substantial challenges in the world, ranging from social inequities and discrimination to lack of access to resources. Though technology cannot fully solve these problems, technological solutions may help to address some of the challenges trans people and communities face. We conducted a series of participatory design sessions (total N = 21 participants) to understand trans people’s most pressing challenges and to involve this population in the design process. We detail four types of technologies trans people envision: technologies for changing bodies, technologies for changing appearances / gender expressions, technologies for safety, and technologies for finding resources. We found that centering trans people in the design process enabled inclusive technology design that primarily focused on sharing community resources and prioritized connection between community members.Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG)Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153781/1/designing_trans_technologies_paper___camera_ready v2.pdfDescription of designing_trans_technologies_paper___camera_ready v2.pdf : Main articl

Technology and the Politics of Mobility: Evidence Generation in Accessible Transport Activism

Digital technologies offer the possibility of community empowerment via the reconfiguration of public services. This potential relies on actively involved citizens engaging with decision makers to pursue civic goals. In this paper we study one such group of involved citizens, examining the evidencing practices of a rare disease charity campaigning for accessible public transport. Through fieldwork and interviews, we highlight the ways in which staff and volunteers assembled and presented different forms of evidence, in doing so reframing what is conceived as 'valid knowledge'. We note the challenges this group faced in capturing experiential knowledge around the accessibility barriers of public transport, and the trade-offs that are made when presenting evidence to policy and decision makers. We offer a number of design considerations for future HCI research, focusing on how digital technology might be configured more appropriately to support campaigning around the politics of mobility

Taking action in a changing world

In the last hours of CHI 2017, a group of researchers from universities and businesses across the northern hemisphere sat down together to consider “Taking Action in a Changing World”. The title of the special interest group (SIG) is significant; it speaks of having an impact, of the politics on which we wish to have an impact, and also the dynamism of the structures and systems around us. There is no special mention of technology. In other words, it is a departure from business-as-usual HCI

STEM Educational Outreach and Indigenous Culture: (Re)Centering for Design Scholarship

Integrating Indigenous culture into STEM education is a critical process in building pathways to justice and diversifying design. This process serves to (re)center our conceptions of STEM education by challenging strictly Western notions of STEM, representing an opportunity for learning not just in curricular design, but in technological design as well. Postcolonial computing scholars have critically examined design processes, highlighting the dominance of Western knowledge undergirding cross-cultural design. However, such efforts have yet to fully leverage insights from national curricular (re) centering initiatives. We take up this opportunity through a qualitative case study of an educational outreach organization in British Columbia, Canada, a subsidiary of a nation-wide effort in curricular integration of Indigenous and Western STEM material. Applying postcolonial computing thought, we offer enrichments to theory by providing an empirical basis for a) integrating resiliency, b) politicization in design, and c) arguments for (re)centering epistemological authority in computing. These contributions both enrich theory and enhance the practice of cross-cultural design by encouraging and exploring an Indigenous (re)centering of our understanding of both curricular and technological design

Sculpting reality from our dreams: Prefigurative design for civic engagement

At their core, organizing and activist work are about envisioning and working towards an alternative, more just political future. Various digital tools are used to support activist work, however these tools engage with values that are at odds with activist practices: where many activists do work in the service of social justice and equity, the digital tools they use are often corporate made, and thus support the status quo, i.e. profit generation, cis-heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, oppression. The ideals underlying activists’ equitable visions—of a more accessible and just future—drive their practices. This intentional alignment falls under the purview of prefigurative politics, where political work “express[es] the political ‘ends’ of their actions through their ‘means.’” [53] If activists envision a more democratic future, they adopt more equitable practices in the present in anticipation of building a more equitable future. This dissertation explores the role of digital tools to contribute to—to prefigure—alternative, more radical political values. My work uses design research and anarchist literature to explore the opportunities that ICTs offer in support of radically progressive political organizing. This work offers prefigurative design as an approach for designers and practitioners who work with communities in service of progressive political change. Prefigurative design is an orientation within HCI design and research that encourages critical reflection of research and design practices to better align design artifacts and processes with anarchist goals of anti-oppression and collective liberation, ultimately building counter-structures to replace existing institutions complicit in violence and oppression.Ph.D

A City in Common: Explorations on Sustained Community Engagement with Bottom-up Civic Technologies

Large technology companies and city councils are increasingly developing smart city programmes: augmenting urban environments with smart and ubiquitous computing devices, to transform how cities are run. At a smaller scale, communities of citizens are appropriating technologies to tackle matters of concern and to effect positive change from the bottom-up. HCI researchers are also deploying civic technology in the wild, sometimes collaborating with these communities, in the pursuit of both scientific and societal impact. However, little is known about how impactful they have been, and the extent to which they have meaningfully engaged communities in the long term. The goal of this PhD is to identify the factors that can guide the design and deployment of engaging, sustainable and impactful civic technology interventions, from the perspective of the communities that they are intended to benefit. Three case studies are presented: an ethnographic study of an existing civic technology, and two design and evaluation studies of novel interventions. A set of themes was derived from the studies that highlight factors that are positively associated to engagement, sustainability and impact. Based on these themes and on experience from deploying interventions, a framework was developed and validated. It comprises six key phases: identification of matters of concern, framing, co-design of community technologies, deployment, orchestration, and evaluation. In line with a new wave of civically engaged HCI and participatory methods, the framework puts people at the heart of socio-technical innovation and technology in the service of the common good by fostering the development of a commons: a pool of community managed resources. Using this approach, the thesis explores how researchers, entrepreneurs, artists, city councils and communities can collaborate to address community issues using digital technologies. It further suggests how citizens can be supported to develop skills that will allow them to appropriate the intervention for their own situated purposes