The Panopticon and the performance arena: HCI reaches within

The impact of new technologies is hard to predict. We suggest the value of theories of performativity in understanding dynamics around the convergence of biomedical and information technology. Drawing on the ideas of Butler and Foucault, we discuss a new, internal, context for HCI and raise potentially disturbing issues with monitoring health. We argue that by adopting explicitly social framings we can see beyond the idea of medical interventions to tools for wellbeing and recognize more of the implications of looking within

Performance and …

In titling our chapter 'Performance and...' our intention is not to privilege performance studies over theatre studies or drama but rather to call to attention the longstanding proposition that performance (studies) 'resists or rejects definition' (Schechner, Richard, 1998, 'What Is 'Performance Studies' Anyway?' in: P. Phelan and J. Lane (eds.), The Ends of Performance, NYU Press, p. 360) and as such highlight the potential it holds for interdisciplinary scholarship and the way in which the idea of performance has been conceived fluidly and expansively, both key concerns of all the volumes reviewed here. We are, we hope, at a point in the development of performance and theatre studies where there is an understanding, acceptance and exploration of the mutually constructive and beneficial interweaving of these two 'traditions' of scholarship within the broader field of drama. In the books we look at, both 'theatre' and 'performance' are brought to bear on the matters at hand almost interchangeably, with established text-based dramas taking their place alongside works in the performance art tradition to further arguments pertaining to a variety of disciplines. Such plurality of approach is a defining feature of the works we have chosen to discuss and binds them to a common purpose: the exploration of drama/theatre/performance in, with and between other disciplines and discourses in the pursuit of illuminating the world around us in more meaningful ways

User agency as a feminist frame in human computer interaction and information science

User agency within sociotechnical contexts supports both feminist reflexivity in HCI research, and the feminist ethnographic tradition present within Information Science. User agency as a unifying scholarly frame between these two disciplines that in turn expand our understanding of gender identity formation within information and computing environments

Youth and intimate media cultures: gender, sexuality, relationships, and desire as storytelling practices in social networking sites

This paper investigates how young people give meaning to gender, sexuality, relationships, and desire in the popular social networking site (SNS) Netlog. In arguing how SNSs are important spaces for intimate politics, the extent to which Netlog is a space that allows contestations of intimate stories and a voicing of difference is questioned. These intimate stories should be understood as self-representational media practices; young people make sense of their intimate stories in SNSs through media cultures. Media cultures reflect how audiences and SNS institutions make sense of intimacy. This paper concludes that intimate stories as media practices in the SNS Netlog are structured around creativity, anonymity, authenticity, performativity, bricolage and intertextuality. The intimate storytelling practices focusing on creativity, anonymity, bricolage and intertextuality are particularly significant for a diversity of intimacies to proliferate

Piecing Together Performance: Collaborative, Participatory Research-Through-Design for Better Diversity in Games

Digital games are a multi-billion-dollar industry whose production and consumption extend globally. Representation in games is an increasingly important topic. As those who create and consume the medium grow ever more diverse, it is essential that player or user-experience research, usability, and any consideration of how people interface with their technology is exercised through inclusive and intersectional lenses. Previous research has identified how character configuration interfaces preface white-male defaults [39, 40, 67]. This study relies on 1-on-1 play-interviews where diverse participants attempt to create “themselves” in a series of games and on group design activities to explore how participants may envision more inclusive character configuration interface design. Our interview findings describe specific points of tension in the process of creating characters in existing interfaces and the sketches participant-collaborators produced challenge the homogeneity of current interface designs. This project amplifies the perspective of diverse participant-collaborators to provide constructive implications and a series of principles for designing more inclusive character configuration interfaces, which support more diverse stories and gameworlds by reconfiguring the constraints that shape those stories and gameworlds

Piecing together performance: collaborative, participatory research-through-design for better diversity in games.

Digital games are a multi-billion-dollar industry whose production and consumption extend globally. Representation in games is an increasingly important topic. As those who create and consume the medium grow ever more diverse, it is essential that player or user-experience research, usability, and any consideration of how people interface with their technology is exercised through inclusive and intersectional lenses. Previous research has identified how character configuration interfaces preface white-male defaults. This study relies on 1-on-1 play-interviews where diverse participants attempt to create "themselves" in a series of games and on group design activities to explore how participants may envision more inclusive character configuration interface design. Our interview findings describe specific points of tension in the process of creating characters in existing interfaces and the sketches participant-collaborators produced challenge the homogeneity of current interface designs. This project amplifies the perspective of diverse participant-collaborators to provide constructive implications and a series of principles for designing more inclusive character configuration interfaces, which support more diverse stories and gameworlds by reconfiguring the constraints that shape those stories and gameworlds

Queering Online Place: LGBT+ Performances Motivate Social Media Design

Despite political advances, LGBT+ experiences on social media are affected by a history of marginalization. LGBT+ people adjust the presentation of their gender and sexual identities in response to social pressures, but their level of visibility differs between social media. We interviewed seventeen LGBT+ students at a socially-conservative university to investigate: (1) how do social media affect LGBT+ user experience of managing self presentation; and (2) how do social media affect participation in LGBT+ communities? We found that LGBT+ users prefer to present their identities through sharing photos and political articles. LGBT+ users benefit from impersonal communities on reddit and more personal bonds on Tumblr. LGBT+ users rely on the perceived difficulty-of-use of a social network to an intolerant audience to gauge how visible they can be. We develop implications for design that motivate queer social media, which give people abilities to define their visibility on social media, in contrast with the HCI design principle of indiscriminate ‘making visible’