Sensitive Research, Practice, and Design in HCI

New research areas in HCI examine complex and sensitive research areas, such as crisis, life transitions, and mental health. Further, research in complex topics such as harassment and graphic content can leave researchers vulnerable to emotional and physical harm. There is a need to bring researchers together to discuss challenges across sensitive research spaces and environments. We propose a workshop to explore the methodological, ethical, and emotional challenges of sensitive research in HCI. We will actively recruit from diverse research environments (industry, academia, government, etc.) and methods areas (qualitative, quantitative, design practices, etc.) and identify commonalities in and encourage relationship-building between these areas. This one-day workshop will be led by academic and industry researchers with diverse methods, topical, and employment experiences

Lifelines

There is an imbalance across design disciplines in how the user is theorised, represented and ultimately configured. It is suggested that normative user-centred design, as practiced in product design and human-computer interaction (HCI), can lead to a lack-based approach which, when applied in a health and wellbeing context, tends to align unreflexively with a medicalised view of the person. In contrast, the use of self in research is a concept well-developed in health care ethics and care professions, while the interpersonal relationship is valued and analysed in psychotherapy and counselling research and practice. Inspired by these, this article presents a discussion on the sometimes deeply relational nature of doing design with users when viewed through the lens of the Person-Centred Approach (PCA) (Rogers 1961/1967). A case study is used to illustrate an encounter of relational depth as experienced by students working directly with individuals to design prosthetics. Lifelines is a creative project brief developed by Jivan Astfalck (2008; 2011), which asks students to represent ten significant moments in their own lives through the creative use of materials and found objects. In this case, the brief was altered so that another person (the ‘user’) would be represented. The aim was that the student designers would experience moving beyond implicit conceptions of the user as defined by a need or perceived (dis)ability, and that the intimate and personal nature of identifying and representing significant moments would raise questions about expectations of objectivity in design and research.  The case study demonstrates that working in this way can be experienced as profoundly moving, with powerful moments of personal transformation and interpersonal growth. In discussion, it is suggested that through such moments of encounter, it becomes possible to examine the qualities of the relational in action, and to analyse not only problematic processes of othering, but also their converse - meetings at relational depth. The Lifelines brief is proposed as a transformative way for designers to re-engage with the whole person, as both substantial (self-realising) and relational (in time, with others and the world), and as one creative exercise in a potential suite of tools for the strengthening of the “ethical reflex” necessary in Design and HCI (Vandenberghe and Slegers 2016, 514)

An evidence synthesis of covert online strategies regarding intimate partner violence

This systematic review synthesises evidence of how people use the internet to deploy covert strategies around escaping from, or perpetrating, Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). Online tools and services can facilitate individuals leaving abusive relationships, yet they can also act as a barrier to departure. They may also enable abusive behaviours. A comprehensive literature search of published and unpublished studies in electronic databases was conducted. Two researchers independently screened abstracts and full-texts for study eligibility and evaluated the quality of included studies. The systematic review includes 22 studies (9 qualitative and 11 cross-sectional studies, a Randomized control trial and a Non-randomized study), published between 2004 and 2017. Four covert behaviours linked to covert online strategies around IPV were identified: presence online, granular control, use of digital support tools and services, stalking and surveillance. The same technology that provides individuals with easy access to information and supportive services related to IPV, such as digital devices, tools and services, also enables perpetrators to monitor or harass their partners. This review takes a rigorous interdisciplinary approach to synthesising knowledge on the covert strategies adopted by people in relation to IPV. It has particular relevance to practitioners who support survivors in increasing awareness of the role of digital technologies in IPV, to law enforcement agencies in identifying new forms of evidence of abuse, and in enabling designers of online/social media applications to take the needs and vulnerabilities of IPV survivors into account

On Activism and Academia: Reflecting Together and Sharing Experiences Among Critical Friends

In recent years HCI and CSCW work has increasingly begun to address complex social problems and issues of social justice worldwide. Such activist-leaning work is not without problems. Through the experiences and reflections of an activist becoming academic and an academic becoming an activist, we outline these difficulties such as (1) the risk of perpetuating violence, oppression and exploitation when working with marginalised communities, (2) the reception of activist-academic work within our academic communities, and (3) problems of social justice that exist within our academic communities. Building on our own experiences, practices and existing literature from a variety of disciplines we advocate for the possibility of an activist-academic practice, outline possible ways forward and formulate questions we need to answer for HCI to contribute to a more just world

A Human-Centered Approach to Improving Adolescent Online Sexual Risk Detection Algorithms

Computational risk detection has the potential to protect especially vulnerable populations from online victimization. Conducting a comprehensive literature review on computational approaches for online sexual risk detection led to the identification that the majority of this work has focused on identifying sexual predators after-the-fact. Also, many studies rely on public datasets and third-party annotators to establish ground truth and train their algorithms, which do not accurately represent young social media users and their perspectives to prevent victimization. To address these gaps, this dissertation integrated human-centered approaches to both creating representative datasets and developing sexual risk detection machine learning models to ensure the broader societal impacts of this important work. In order to understand what and how adolescents talk about their online sexual interactions to inform study designs, a thematic content analysis of posts by adolescents on an online peer support mental health was conducted. Then, a user study and web-based platform, Instagram Data Donation (IGDD), was designed to create an ecologically valid dataset. Youth could donate and annotate their Instagram data for online risks. After participating in the study, an interview study was conducted to understand how youth felt annotating data for online risks. Based on private conversations annotated by participants, sexual risk detection classifiers were created. The results indicated Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Random Forest models outperformed in identifying sexual risks at the conversation-level. Our experiments showed that classifiers trained on entire conversations performed better than message-level classifiers. We also trained classifiers to detect the severity risk level of a given message with CNN outperforming other models. We found that contextual (e.g., age, gender, and relationship type) and psycho-linguistic features contributed the most to accurately detecting sexual conversations. Our analysis provides insights into the important factors that enhance automated detection of sexual risks within youths\u27 private conversations