CHI Archives | Alex Taylor

CHI 2021 conference papers

Alex Taylor — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 08:58:56 +0000

Two papers at the CHI conference this year.

Sara Heitlinger, Lara Houston, Alex Taylor, Ruth Catlow (2021) Algorithmic Food Justice: Co-Designing More-than-Human Blockchain Futures for the Food Commons, Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, pdf, doi:10.1145/3411764.3445655

Abstract
The relationships that constitute the global industrial food system tend towards two dominant values that are creating unsustainable social and environmental inequalities. The first is a human-centered perspective on food that privileges humans over all other species. The second is a view of food as a commodity to be traded for maximum economic value, rewarding a small number of shareholders. We present work that explores the unique algorithmic affordances of blockchain to create new types of value exchange and governance in the food system. We describe a project that used roleplay with urban agricultural communities to co-design blockchain-based food futures and explore the conditions for creating a thriving multispecies food commons. We discuss how the project helped rethink algorithmic food justice by reconfiguring more-than-human values and reconfiguring food as more-than-human commons. We also discuss some of the challenges and tensions arising from these explorations.

Algorithmic Food Justice, CHI 2021 (286 downloads)

Cecily Morrison, Edward Cutrell, Martin Grayson, Anja Thieme, Alex Taylor, Geert Roumen, Camilla Longden, Sebastian Tschiatschek, Rita Faia Marques, Abigail Sellen (2021) Social Sensemaking with AI: Designing an Open-Ended AI Experience with a Blind Child, Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, pdf, doi:10.1145/3411764.3445290

Abstract
AI technologies are often used to aid people in performing discrete tasks with well-defined goals (e.g., recognising faces in images). Emerging technologies that provide continuous, real-time information enable more open-ended AI experiences. In partnership with a blind child, we explore the challenges and opportunities of designing human-AI interaction for a system intended to support social sensemaking. Adopting a research-through-design perspective, we reflect upon working with the uncertain capabilities of AI systems in the design of this experience. We contribute: (i) a concrete example of an open-ended AI system that enabled a blind child to extend his own capabilities; (ii) an illustration of the delta between imagined and actual use, highlighting how capabilities derive from the human-AI interaction and not the AI system alone; and (iii) a discussion of design choices to craft an ongoing human-AI interaction that addresses the challenge of uncertain outputs of AI systems.

Social Sensemaking with AI, CHI 2021 (198 downloads)

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Conference papers

Alex Taylor — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 08:48:54 +0000

I’ve been slow to share papers here, so posting about two recently published papers. With both publications it was a absolute joy and privilege to work with my co-authors.

Cynthia L Bennett, Daniela K Rosner, Alex S Taylor (2020) The Care Work of Access, CHI ’20, p. 1–15, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/3313831.3376568

Abstract
Current approaches to AI and Assistive Technology (AT) often foreground task completion over other encounters such as expressions of care. Our paper challenges and complements such task-completion approaches by attending to the care work of access-the continual affective and emotional adjustments that people make by noticing and attending to one another. We explore how this work impacts encounters among people with and without vision impairments who complete tasks together. We find that bound up in attempts to get things done are concerns for one another and how well people are doing together. Reading this work through emerging disability studies and feminist STS scholarship, we account for two important forms of work that give rise to access: (1) mundane attunements and (2) non-innocent authorizations. Together these processes work as sensitizing concepts to help HCI scholars account for the ways that intelligent ATs both produce access while sometimes subverting people with disabilities.

The care work of access, CHI 2020 (571 downloads)

Jessica L Feuston, Alex S Taylor, Anne Marie Piper (2020) Conformity of Eating Disorders through Content Moderation, Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4(CSCW1), New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, pdf, doi:10.1145/3392845

Abstract
For individuals with mental illness, social media platforms are considered spaces for sharing and connection. However, not all expressions of mental illness are treated equally on these platforms. Different aggregates of human and technical control are used to report and ban content, accounts, and communities. Through two years of digital ethnography, including online observation and interviews, with people with eating disorders, we examine the experience of content moderation. We use a constructivist grounded theory approach to analysis that shows how practices of moderation across different platforms have particular consequences for members of marginalized groups, who are pressured to conform and compelled to resist. Above all, we argue that platform moderation is enmeshed with wider processes of conformity to specific versions of mental illness. Practices of moderation reassert certain bodies and experiences as ‘normal’ and valued, while rejecting others. At the same time, navigating and resisting these normative pressures further inscribes the marginal status of certain individuals. We discuss changes to the ways that platforms handle content related to eating disorders by drawing on the concept of multiplicity to inform design.

Conformity of eating disorders, CSCW 2020 (535 downloads)

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Papers presented at CHI ’18

Alex Taylor — Thu, 03 May 2018 10:41:31 +0000

Delighted to see the two great papers I contributed to being presented at CHI 2018 in Montreal.

Award winning paper talk about chatbots and race. — RW pic.twitter.com/C4rClKRzf1

— ACM CHI Conference (@sig_chi) April 24, 2018

Ari Schlesinger, Kenton O’Hara and Alex Taylor (2018) Lets Talk about Race: Identity, Chatbots, and AI. In Proceedings CHI ’18. ACM Press.

pdf (1282 downloads)

Anja @anja_thieme doing a fab job presenting all the months of time and thought we’ve put into an expansive idea of capability #chi2018 @MSFTResearch @MSFTResearchCam pic.twitter.com/fZ5SdpGFh5

— Alex Taylor (@alxndrt) April 24, 2018

Anja Thieme, Cynthia L. Bennett, Cecily Morrison, Edward Cutrell and Alex Taylor (2018) “I can do everything but see!” – How People with Vision Impairments Negotiate their Abilities in Social Contexts. In Proceedings CHI ’18. ACM Press.

pdf (879 downloads)

Abstract — Why is it so hard for chatbots to talk about race? This work explores how the biased contents of databases, the syntactic focus of natural language processing, and the opaque nature of deep learning algorithms cause chatbots difficulty in handling race-talk. In each of these areas, the tensions between race and chatbots create new opportunities for people and machines. By making the abstract and disparate qualities of this problem space tangible, we can develop chatbots that are more capable of handling race-talk in its many forms. Our goal is to provide the HCI community with ways to begin addressing the question, how can chatbots handle race-talk in new and improved ways?

Abstract — This research takes an orientation to visual impairment (VI) that does not regard it as fixed or determined alone in or through the body. Instead, we consider (dis)ability as produced through interactions with the environment and configured by the people and technology within it. Specifically, we explore how abilities become negotiated through video ethnography with six VI athletes and spectators during the Rio 2016 Paralympics. We use generated in-depth examples to identify how technology can be a meaningful part of ability negotiations, emphasizing how these embed into the social interactions and lives of people with VI. In contrast to treating technology as a solution to a ‘sensory deficit’, we understand it to support the triangulation process of sense-making through provision of appropriate additional information. Further, we suggest that technology should not try and replace human assistance, but instead enable people with VI to better identify and interact with other people in-situ.

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CHI 2018 papers.

Alex Taylor — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 21:56:52 +0000

pdf (879 downloads)

Ari Schlesinger, Kenton O’Hara and Alex Taylor (2018) Lets Talk about Race: Identity, Chatbots, and AI. In Proceedings CHI ’18. ACM Press.

pdf (1282 downloads)

Very happy to have contributed to two papers being presented at the upcoming CHI conference this year. One reports on work with the blind and vision impaired a few of us have been involved in different ways (see here). Broadly, we’ve used the piece to reflect on the relations between vision impairment and artificial intelligence, and set out directions for a possible design space.

The second paper picks up on a new theme for me, but one closely related to past reflections and design work around machine intelligence. With the fantastic Ari Schlesinger (GA Tech) leading the research, we examine the challenges faced in handling race talk (and racism) in human-bot interactions. Taking both Tai AI and the blacklist as starting points, we take seriously the computational underpinnings of chat bots and conversational agents, to underscore the role they have in sustaining troubling racial categories and the conditions they make possible for more just and equitable ways forward.

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Re-making places

Alex Taylor — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 07:39:00 +0000

At the CHI conference this year, Clara Crivellaro presented this paper on our amazing work at a regeneration site on the outskirts of London. The work touches on many issues that are important to me, from grassroots participation and housing to inventive methods and technoscience’s productive possibilities.

Re-Making Places:

HCI, ‘Community Building’ and Change

Clara Crivellaro, Alex Taylor, Vasilis Vlachokyriakos, Rob Comber, Bettina Nissen, Peter Wright

Abstract
We present insights from an extended engagement and design intervention at an urban regeneration site in SE London. We describe the process of designing a walking trail and system for recording and playing back place-specific stories for those living and working on the housing estate, and show how this is set within a wider context of urban renewal, social/affordable housing and “community building”. Like prior work, the research reveals the frictions that arise in participatory engagements with heterogeneous actors. Here we illustrate how material interventions can rearrange existing spatial configurations, making productive the plurality of accounts intrinsic in community life. Through this, we provide an orientation to HCI and design interventions that are concerned with civic engagement and participation in processes of making places.

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Published “After Interaction”

Alex Taylor — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 13:58:03 +0000

Just had a short piece, After Interaction, published in Interactions magazine.

… I want to argue that as a concept, interaction hinges on an outmoded notion of technology in use. I’ll argue that technology use is, in fact, already and always has been about a lot more than human-machine interactions (at least in how interaction is regularly imagined in HCI and IxD). I want to suggest that what we have been doing by both investigating and designing technology is participating in and to some extent configuring dense, interconnected relationships of humans and non-humans. That is, we have been assembling and reassembling human-machine hybrids, often in great numbers. And rather than working at a neatly defined interface, we have knitted together and entangled ourselves in these interwoven networks of relations, and go on doing so…

Read the full piece here.

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on “Leakiness and creepiness in app space”

Alex Taylor — Mon, 30 Jun 2014 09:00:05 +0000

I recently had an email exchange with Irina Shklovski in which she kindly sent me the paper she presented at the CHI conference this year. It’s a great paper, with some carefully thought through insights into the data we produce and (often inadvertently) share when using smart phones.

Irina Shklovski, Scott D. Mainwaring, Halla Hrund Skúladóttir, and Höskuldur Borgthorsson. 2014. Leakiness and creepiness in app space: perceptions of privacy and mobile app use. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2347–2356.

The paper got me thinking about some broader (and long-standing) issues I’ve been working through myself related to the researcher’s agential (and often inadvertent) role in empirical research. What follows are some slightly amended comments I’ve shared with Irina.

Something that strikes me is that the paper presents a set of examples (dare I say data) about how people make sense of worlds from, if you will, outside of them. I wonder to what extent this is different to how we actually use our mobile devices (how we enact these worlds)? So to what extent are the reflections on talk about privacy, creepiness, leekages, helplessness, etc. insights into how we rationalise what we do as opposed to insights into what we do? I’m not saying this (I hope) to make that well-worn argument about people not doing what they say we do. Nor do I say it to lessen the value of the interviews and survey results presented. I think it’s important though to draw attention to the kind of materials being examined and what can be sensibly said about them.
Here’s one take on the paper, just to try to illustrate this point a bit. The theorising from Altman and Nissenbaum suggest the presumption of some discrete (and somewhat stable) ideas of interior, exterior, private, public, space, etc. etc. Yes, there may be a fluidity to how things move between these categories (and they may change over time), but nevertheless, the implication is there are for all intents and purposes a set of stable, applicable categories. My suggestion isn’t that this is a strong claim, but it does feel like it’s more or less the working assumption in the paper.
In being careful about the kinds of empirical materials being used, I think there’s a different way to think about this. I wonder whether performativity might be a useful concept to work with? Might we say that these things the researchers and the informants collectively spoke about, e.g. selves, data, devices, third parties, privacy etc. are being drawn together to enact just these categories? What we might be seeing here is not an indication of how data falls into (or threads across) these categories, but how we enact them when we talk about our mobile devices and how we make sense of data in those self same terms. (This is one of the ideas I take from Nelson Goodman’s “Ways of Worldmaking” (1978). I love his remark: “The uniformity of nature we marvel at or the unreliability we protest belongs to a world of our own making.” p.10).
Take this statement, for example:

“This is completely ridiculous, I would not invite people into my closet, this is way out of line. No I don’t find it appropriate to give up personal information in exchange for this game and that they don’t need more approval than they apparently do.”

What are the circumstances (discursive and material) that would allow a conversation to unfold in this way and for things like smart phones to be talked about like closets? Moreover, how is it that data on these devices should be understood as personal and in some fashion belonging to the person speaking? I don’t see any of these things to be given. Rather, I want to ask in what way the assemblage of interview, people, devices, data, etc. allow for this kind of talk and enactment of categories like personal, information, right vs. wrong, etc. (I take this argument directly from Helen Verran’s wonderful book, “Science and an African Logic”.
This might seem like an unnecessary theorising, but I think it comes back to the question of the kind of empirical materials presented in the paper and what can be said about them. From the results, I don’t know whether one can really say people have stable ideas of values tied to what’s personal and what’s creepy when it comes to infringements on the personal. I do think what can be usefully asked is ‘How is it that this assemblage of actors/agents allows us to talk about things like private, public, creepiness, leekages, helplessness, etc.?’
Where this becomes concrete, I think, is when we then ask how might things be different? So in what other ways might we talk about these things and what are the possibilities of using matter (or design) to intervene? For instance, how might the data being collected be refigured (discursively and materially) as not personal? What would it take in the design of these systems (and their interfaces) for people to talk about the data being collected as not about them in any intimate way, but about some ‘impersonal’ aggregation of data from a network of nodes? For me this offers the beginnings for thinking differently about data and what it might enable.

Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of worldmaking. Hackett Publishing.

Verran, H. (2001). Science and an African logic. University of Chicago Press.

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Short note on ‘Objects, Infrastructure and Vocation’

Alex Taylor — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 08:53:08 +0000

Infrastructure and Vocation: Field, Calling and Computation in Ecology
A brilliant CHI paper by Steven Jackson and Sarah Barbrow. How many papers presented at CHI cite St. Augustine of Hippo and, to boot, succeed in drawing out relevant reflections on scientific modelling tools in ecology. Seeing ecology through the lens of both infrastructure and the ‘vocational calling’ provides a productive view onto what ecologists do and how their practices are changing. Jackson and Barbrow illustrate this nicely by writing of the changing notion of ‘the field’ for ecologists. I see a strong parallel here between ecology and biology. Biology is a field very much in transition and the changes have much to do with the material encounters in biological work — with for example the changing nature of biologists’ work at ‘the bench’ and with experimental apparatus. The turn to machines, computation and algorithms is not only reshaping the practices but also refiguring what biologists know and how they see their phenomena (something we also tried to get across in At the interface of biology and computation at CHI). A similar conclusion is being drawn out in this papers as it captures the entangled relations between the tools, practices and ways of knowing in ecology.

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