Double Binds and Double Blinds: Evaluation Tactics in Critically Oriented HCI

Critically oriented researchers within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have fruitfully intersected design and critical analysis to engage users and designers in reflection on underlying values, assumptions and dominant practices in technology. To successfully integrate this work within the HCI community, critically oriented researchers have tactically engaged with dominant practices within HCI in the design and evaluation of their work. This paper draws attention to the ways that tactical engagement with aspects of HCI evaluation methodology shapes and bears consequences for critically oriented research. We reflect on three of our own experiences evaluating critically oriented designs and trace challenges that we faced to the ways that sensibilities about generalizable knowledge are manifested in HCI evaluation methodology. Drawing from our own experiences, as well as other influential critically oriented design projects in HCI, we articulate some of the trade-offs involved in consciously adopting or not adopting certain normative aspects of HCI evaluation. We argue that some forms of this engagement can hamstring researchers from pursuing their intended research goals and have consequences beyond specific research projects to affect the normative discourse in the field as a whole

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

Demography, foreclosure, and crime:: Assessing spatial heterogeneity in contemporary models of neighborhood crime rates

BACKGROUND The present research evaluates the possibility of spatial heterogeneity in the effects on neighborhood crime rates of both traditional demographic indicators - immigrant concentration, racial composition, socioeconomic disadvantage, and residential instability - and a contemporary aspect of housing transition - foreclosure - that has garnered significant attention in recent scholarship. OBJECTIVE This research advances previous research by explicitly assessing the merits of the typical "global" or "one size fits all" approach that has been applied in most neighborhood studies of demographic context and neighborhood crime rates by juxtaposing it against an alternative strategy - geographically weighted regression (GWR) - that highlights the potentially significant "local" variability in model parameters. We assess the local variation of these relationships for census tracts within the city of Chicago. METHODS This paper utilizes GWR to test for spatial heterogeneity in the effects of demographic context and other predictors on neighborhood crime rates. We map local parameter estimates and t-values generated from the GWR models to highlight some of the patterns of demographic context observed in our analysis. CONCLUSIONS GWR results indicate significant variation across Chicago census tracts in the estimates of logged percent black, immigrant concentration, and foreclosure for both robbery and burglary rates. The observed effects of socioeconomic disadvantage on robbery rates and residential stability on burglary rates also are found to vary across local neighborhood clusters in Chicago. Visual inspection of these effects illuminates the importance of supplementing current approaches by "thinking locally" when developing theoretical explanations and empirical models of how demographic context shapes crime rates

Assessing the Relevance of Anomie Theory for Explaining Spatial Variation in Lethal Criminal Violence: An Aggregate-Level Analysis of Homicide within the United States

One of the most influential statements in the anomie theory tradition has been Merton’s argument that the volume of instrumental property crime should be higher where there is a greater imbalance between the degree of commitment to monetary success goals and the degree of commitment to legitimate means of pursing such goals. Contemporary anomie theories stimulated by Merton’s perspective, most notably Messner and Rosenfeld’s institutional anomie theory, have expanded the scope conditions by emphasizing lethal criminal violence as an outcome to which anomie theory is highly relevant, and virtually all contemporary empirical studies have focused on applying the perspective to explaining spatial variation in homicide rates. In the present paper, we argue that current explications of Merton’s theory and IAT have not adequately conveyed the relevance of the core features of the anomie perspective to lethal violence. We propose an expanded anomie model in which an unbalanced pecuniary value system – the core causal variable in Merton’s theory and IAT – translates into higher levels of homicide primarily in indirect ways by increasing levels of firearm prevalence, drug market activity, and property crime, and by enhancing the degree to which these factors stimulate lethal outcomes. Using aggregate-level data collected during the mid-to-late 1970s for a sample of relatively large social aggregates within the U.S., we find a significant effect on homicide rates of an interaction term reflecting high levels of commitment to monetary success goals and low levels of commitment to legitimate means. Virtually all of this effect is accounted for by higher levels of property crime and drug market activity that occur in areas with an unbalanced pecuniary value system. Our analysis also reveals that property crime is more apt to lead to homicide under conditions of high levels of structural disadvantage. These and other findings underscore the potential value of elaborating the anomie perspective to explicitly account for lethal violence

Recidivism in the Republic of Ireland.

As prison populations increase, the need for successful reintegration of ex-prisoners becomes more pressing. The challenge of what has become known as `re-entry' has stimulated an extensive body of research, much of it concentrated in a small number of jurisdictions and concerned with levels and predictors of recidivism. The limited geographic breadth of the research effort has hindered our capacity to consider theoretically relevant questions, such as whether particular societal conditions thought to be conducive to successful prisoner reintegration (e.g. high levels of social capital and informal social control) in fact translate into lower levels of recidivism. In this article we expand the reach of existing research by exploring levels and patterns of recidivism in uncharted territory—the Republic of Ireland—and by drawing out the implications of the patterns observed there for comparative analysis

When the implication is not to design (technology)

As HCI is applied in increasingly diverse contexts, it is im-portant to consider situations in which computational or in-formation technologies may be less appropriate. This pa-per presents a series of questions that can help researchers, designers, and practitioners articulate a technology’s appro-priateness or inappropriateness. Use of these questions is demonstrated via examples from the literature. The paper concludes with specific arguments for improving the conduct of HCI. This paper provides a means for understanding and articulating the limits of HCI technologies, an important but heretofore under-explored contribution to the field