Making a makerspace: Reimagining makerspaces for women's participation

This thesis investigated how makerspaces can be designed in more inclusive ways to promote participation by women. It identified three core qualities – appropriate labelling, the configuration of learning, and turning ambitions into an artefact - that foster women’s participation and growth into confident and competent makers. This thesis also demonstrates how the configuration of new spaces, which facilitate engagement with new tools and materials, can lead to new areas of design, allowing new opportunities for self-expression, dialogue and reflection between participants, participants and researchers, and participants and the items they create

Exploring the making activities of women in crisis situations

Engaging in 'making' activities has been shown to have a positive impact on health and wellbeing. In this paper we present our work in progress towards an understanding of the making activities of a group of seven women in different crisis situations. Through self-reported probe kits and semi-structured contextual interviews, we found that our participants were involved in making for two main reasons -- as a way to serve their own healing process and as a potential business/entrepreneurial activity. We discuss implications of these findings and as part of our future work we describe our plans to conduct co-making workshops for designing tools that can support and empower women in crisis situations

What is Human-Centered about Human-Centered AI? A Map of the Research Landscape

The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across a wide range of domains comes with both high expectations of its benefits and dire predictions of misuse. While AI systems have largely been driven by a technology-centered design approach, the potential societal consequences of AI have mobilized both HCI and AI researchers towards researching human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI). However, there remains considerable ambiguity about what it means to frame, design and evaluate HCAI. This paper presents a critical review of the large corpus of peer-reviewed literature emerging on HCAI in order to characterize what the community is defining as HCAI. Our review contributes an overview and map of HCAI research based on work that explicitly mentions the terms 'human-centered artificial intelligence' or 'human-centered machine learning' or their variations, and suggests future challenges and research directions. The map reveals the breadth of research happening in HCAI, established clusters and the emerging areas of Interaction with AI and Ethical AI. The paper contributes a new definition of HCAI, and calls for greater collaboration between AI and HCI research, and new HCAI constructs.</p

Using self-reported experiences to explore the issues of women in crisis situations

Within Australia women are more likely to experience poverty than their male counterparts, where certain negative life events could potentially place women in a crisis situation. This paper describes the use of a self-reported probe kit in a marginalised community of women who are living in crisis situations. The kit contains a video camera, disposable camera and a set of task cards to prompt them to capture certain experiences. We applied this method with 13 participants from a community care centre and found the self-reported experiences to reveal both useful and insightful perspectives around the lives of women in crisis situations. Through this methodology the women shared different aspects of their lives, challenged stereotypes, and were empowered to share their stories and experiences. This methodology is useful in sensitive settings as it includes participants in the design process, and supports their privacy by enabling agency. It also allows for digital inclusion in terms of interacting with and using the camera technology

Women in crisis situations: Empowering and supporting women through ICTs

Women are more likely to experience poverty than their male counter-parts, through negative life events that can potentially place women in a crisis situation. Past studies highlight that there is a need for a better understanding of the tools that could both support and empower women in crisis situations. We respond to this with a study that illustrates how we may be able to generate ideas for designing technologies that are both empowering and supportive. In collaboration with a non-profit community care center in Australia, we undertook a qualitative study of thirteen women in crisis situations to better understand the issues they faced. We took an in-situ approach, where we provided video and disposable cameras to these participants letting them record their experiences. Through an analysis of their videos and photos followed by semi-structured interviews, we show that while each participant had different life experiences that initially appear unrelated, there are three common challenges they face. These are: their living conditions, social isolation and stigma. As our findings are from an exclusively female perspective, through this research we contribute to the HCI literature on understanding the specific issues faced by women in crisis situations and aim to inform designs for technology that can support and empower women in challenging circumstances

Understanding the use of a bug tracking system in a global software development setup

Bug fixing is a highly cooperative work activity where developers, testers, product managers and other stake-holders collaborate using a bug tracking system. In the context of Global Software Development (GSD), where software development is distributed across different geographical locations, we focus on understanding the role of bug trackers in supporting software bug fixing activities. We carried out a small-scale ethnographic fieldwork in a software product team distributed between Finland and India at a multinational engineering company. Using semi-structured interviews and in-situ observations of 16 bug cases, we show that the bug tracker 1) supported information needs of different stake holder, 2) established common-ground, and 3) reinforced issues related to ownership, performance and power. Consequently, we provide implications for design around these findings

Facilitating digital participation through design projects with economically-marginalized communities

This position paper presents our experiences of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) projects with economically-marginalised participants to demonstrate the role design research and artefacts can play in fostering digital skills for low-income people and their communities. We present two case studies with low-income participants of different demographics: one with women in crisis situations at a community care centre, and another with volunteers at e-waste recycling workshop. We illuminate the ways in which design activities such as self-reported experiences through video documentaries, and repurposing second-hand digital products, can facilitate digital and community participation for low-income people both in their homes, and in the broader community. In our discussion we reflect on the intersections of the two case studies: developing digital skills and enabling community participation through these digital skills, as well as the opportunities this has provided for participant engagement in the research process

The Making of Women: Creating Trajectories for Women's Participation in Makerspaces

This paper investigates how making activities and participation in makerspaces supports the wellbeing and empowerment of women, particularly in making domains that are typically male-dominated. We spent six months undertaking participant observations in a women-only makerspace that runs workshops aimed at teaching women skills in using power tools and woodwork. We conducted contextual interviews with 12 workshop attendees as well as with the makerspace founder and lead instructor. Through the lens of feminist HCI and legitimate peripheral participation, we present trajectories of participation within a women-only makerspace - from beginning as a peripheral participant to becoming a competent and confident maker. We found that through structured workshops in a women-only space that actively teach making skills, the women-only makerspace works to transform the current makerspace landscape so more women can engage with these spaces and participate within them. We contribute three core qualities to foster participation: women-only but without a 'feminist' label, configuring a formal and collaborative learning environment, and reification through artefacts. Collectively these work towards new configurations of makerspaces for women that enable their participation within them, and we detail how such configurations work to create trajectories for women's participation

Exploring motivations of young adults to participate in physical activities

This paper investigates the motivations of young adults aged 18 to 24 years to participate in physical activities and how technology might best support this motivation. Motivational factors were studied through contextual interviews, an adapted cultural probe activity and a survey with a group of young adults currently active in sports. From our preliminary findings we determine that staying healthy, achieving specific goals and socialising represent key motivational factors for young adults to be active in sports, but also, that exercise is not considered a high priority in their daily lives. A link between the motivation of achieving specific goals and a technology to measure and track activities was established. The study concludes with three implications for the design of technology to motivate young adults to participate in sports

Key Issues for Realizing Open Ecoacoustic Monitoring in Australia

Many organizations are attempting to scale ecoacoustic monitoring for conservation but are hampered at the stages of data management and analysis. We reviewed current ecoacoustic hardware, software, and standards, and conducted workshops with 23 participants across 10 organizations in Australia to learn about their current practices, and to identify key trends and challenges in their use of ecoacoustics data. We found no existing metadata schemas that contain enough ecoacoustics terms for current practice, and no standard approaches to annotation. There was a strong need for free acoustics data storage, discoverable learning resources, and interoperability with other ecological modeling tools. In parallel, there were tensions regarding intellectual property management, and siloed approaches to studying species within organizations across different regions and between organizations doing similar work. This research contributes directly to the development of an open ecoacoustics platform to enable the sharing of data, analyses, and tools for environmental conservation