Ghosts in the Smart Home

We are in the midst of a ‘post-anthropocentric’ turn in design, research and technology. The term refers to a renewed interest in a wide range of concepts, theoretical perspectives, and methodologies. Ghosts in the Smart Home is a post-anthropocentric experiment which manifests as a film whose cast of characters are all internet connected ‘smart’ devices. The motivation is to prototype and establish new ways to see, to be, and to know, which respond to the 21st century’s complex socio-technical system

The seven year glitch:Unpacking beauty and despair in malfunction

I(am)MEI: 013709002488246. I was born in many countries - my accelerometer came from Germany, my battery from China, the lithium in my battery was mined in Chile, my gyroscope from Switzerland, my camera... from Japan. I was assembled carefully from these component parts, and had two less than careful owners before R picked me up from a reseller, and brought me back to his house in London, UK. We had a good time together - at first: he revelled in my speed and ability to find things, we viewed the world via a lens with infinite options. But I was not built to last. This is my story

Justicia algorítmica y autodeterminación deliberativa

Si la democracia consiste en posibilitar que todas las personas tengan iguales posibilidades de influir en las decisiones que les afectan, las sociedades digitales tienen que interrogarse por el modo de conseguir que los nuevos entornos hagan factible esa igualdad. Las primeras dificultades son conceptuales: entender cómo se configura la interacción entre los humanos y los algoritmos, en qué consiste el aprendizaje de estos dispositivos y cuál es la naturaleza de sus sesgos. Inmediatamente después nos topamos con la cuestión ineludible de qué clase de igualdad estamos tratando de asegurar, teniendo en cuenta la diversidad de concepciones de la justicia que hay en nuestras sociedades. Si articular ese pluralismo no es un asunto que pueda resolverse con una técnica agregativa, sino que requiere compromisos políticos, entonces una concepción deliberativa de la democracia parece la más apta para conseguir esa igualdad a la que aspiran las sociedades democráticas

More-Than Human Centred Design:Considering Other Things

This paper responds to contemporary design contexts that frequently contain complex interdependencies of human and non-human actants. To adequately represent these perspectives requires a shift towards More-Than Human Centred Design. The Internet of Things (IoT) is one context that demonstrates this need. The 'things' within such networks transcend their physical forms and extend to include algorithms, humans, data, business models, etc. and each imports independent-but-interdependent motivations and perspectives. Therefore, we use the IoT to clarify our proposition and to convey our three contributions. First, we review the expanding corpus of contemporary Human-Computer Interaction research that seeks to expand the notion of Human Centred Design by moving beyond the dominant anthropocentric perspective. Second, we introduce a novel design metaphor, 'constellations', which allows both the interdependencies and independent perspectives to be considered. Third, we provide an account of a speculative design to demonstrate how it may be put into practice

A Death in the Timeline: Memory and Metadata in Social Platforms

This paper explores a Life Event post from Facebook as a point of departure for critical data studies to understand how social media metadata shapes digital cultural memory and the disciplining of data subjects. I discuss some possible interventions that can contribute to our understanding of metadata’s role in the critical study of data, and in particular, how user generated metadata created in social platforms authored by state actors features in to new forms of information control, civic engagement, and networked information technologies. This discussion includes traditional concepts of concern and analysis for information and archival scholars, including creating data as a new form of belonging in society, collection tools and access policies, and the representation of events with metadata, such as death or state-sanctioned violence. In developing these concepts through a reading of a Life event that announces death and state power over life as it is represented in a social platform, I seek to expand the modes that information scholars use to address issues of time, context, and memory in digital archives and metadata emerging from social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Pre-print first published online 12/20/201

The Instrumentalised User: Human, Computer, System

Humans who encounter social media platforms have a role to play. They are expected to generate content, a demand starkly illustrated by a mid-2010s Facebook prompt: “Write something.” This essay recuperates the history of this role, the “instrumentalised user,” and traces its development from the mid-1960s to the present. Drawing on evidence from scholarly texts in ergonomics, media studies, computer science, psychology, Human-Computer Interaction, and political economy, the essay traces the instrumentalised user’s emergence from decades of efforts to characterise and problematise those actors who encounter computing. Using Actor-Network Theory to show how humans and computing machinery were imagined to work together, the essay reveals that social media’s efforts to extract labour from its users are the heirs to a recurring theme in computer and internet history

Where is the human? Bridging the gap between AI and HCI

In recent years, AI systems have become both more powerful and increasingly promising for integration in a variety of application areas. Attention has also been called to the social challenges these systems bring, particularly in how they might fail or even actively disadvantage marginalised social groups, or how their opacity might make them difficult to oversee and challenge. In the context of these and other challenges, the roles of humans working in tandem with these systems will be important, yet the HCI community has been only a quiet voice in these debates to date. This workshop aims to catalyse and crystallise an agenda around HCI's engagement with AI systems. Topics of interest include explainable and explorable AI; documentation and review; integrating artificial and human intelligence; collaborative decision making; AI/ML in HCI Design; diverse human roles and relationships in AI systems; and critical views of AI