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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)

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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)

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)

The post CHI 2018 papers. appeared first on Alex Taylor.

A conversation with Alex and Daniela for the “What are you reading?” column in interactions magazine, Nov. 2017.
A.S.T.: Daniela and I wanted to try something a little different for this issue’s “What are you reading?”. We wanted to read something together that had a resonance between us, and that might give rise to a generative discussion. After a bit of deliberation, we settled on two books. The first is Anna Tsing’s “The Mushroom at the End of the World,” an extraordinary examination of one of the world’s most rarified mushrooms across capitalist supply chains and histories of multispecies cohabitation that explores the tensions between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival. The second book is Sarah Ahmed’s “Living a Feminist Life,” a feminist treatise that weaves together ideas from feminist of color scholarship with personal meditations on everyday feminist encounters.
Although quite different in scope, and although investigating topics conventionally outside HCI, both volumes explore feminist figurings of materialism that Daniela and I have been mulling on for quite some time. […]
Before getting into the readings, I feel it’s important to share that over the last eight years Daniela and I have grown together as scholars. Early on, we shared a keen interest in materialities as articulated by people like Tim Ingold and Bruno Latour. Over the years, this mutual interest has developed to centre far more on a feminist figuring of materialism and a particular concern for the entangled enactments of being and doing in the world, probably best exemplified in Donna Haraway’s figures of the cyborg, companion species and, most recently, the chthulucene. At the same time, Daniela has gone on to develop a mature reading of craft, hand-work and repair, and demonstrated the importance of these to HCI. And my own interests have threaded a variety of topics together, but been unified by a deep interest in the structural effects and affects of computation. Together, then, we hoped our convergences and divergences might make for something engaging, if unconventional for an interactions’ reader.
* * *
Having read these books what makes them valuable to be read together, and critically how do they come to be valuable together as feminist figurings of materiality?
D.K.R.: I’m in awe of these authors — the scope of their work, their ability to entwine a strong activist agenda with a crisp theoretical focus, and their skillful nurturing of a poetics of practice with powerful analytic potential. How to search for understanding while asserting difference? Thinking through mushrooms, I’ve learned, can help.
Before reading Tsing’s book, I never thought much about mushrooms as more than something delicious (or deadly!) to consume, and certainly not as an object for feminist world-making. But as with Ahmed’s focus on feminism, reading Tsing’s account of the matsutake mushroom is a deeply personal account of noticing —showing how the impulse to notice can take multiple forms. For Ahmed noticing is a political act, drawing forth and realizing exclusions and omissions. What is it that people learn not to notice? In learning and unlearning across difference Ahmed promises opportunities for listening, for noticing. Tsing works with a noticing of unpredictability, the dance of following tracks in the dark, of follow the mushrooms, of noticing what matters. Bodies, both living and dead, become tools for “show[ing] us how to look around rather than ahead.” (2015, 22) They enroll additional instruments for knowing; forms of political listening that, in Tsing’s words, “look for disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest” (ibid, 5).
Have these forms of noticing infected your work? What did you find?
A.S.T.: You capture a strong commonality between what have been for me two exhilarating and deeply moving texts. I felt the same way: noticing is thoroughly enlivened by both authors. I found their ideas turned and folded in together—involuted! (Hustak and Myers)—to offer up something more and at the same time pointing to a deeper, more critical attention to things.
I was delighted with Tsing’s insistence on following the stories, of choosing to turn away from the usual modes of scholarly accounting and, instead, stay with the noticed details of lines spun by mushrooms and people across time, and along global supply chains. Also, I was touched by Ahmed’s attention to revisiting her own profound encounters with violence, (un)happiness and self-discovery, and responding by daring to ‘get in the way’—like Wolf’s Mrs Dalloway, finding ways to stop and orient the body differently. Between them, such shifts in scale! But together they invite, as you say, a care for paying attention and asking, to use Ahmed’s words, “questions about how to live better” (2017, 12).
It’s with an emphasis on the latter that I want to respond to you, and that I mean to ask a follow on question. Certainly paying attention to the details has been central to my research in studying how lives entangle with technologies. This has always been the starting point for the ethnographic enterprise that channels my work. And yet, I’ve managed to bracket this kind of eye for detail from what I bring with it, what worlds I bring with such noticings. I agree with you, Ahmed and Tsing (along with other feminist writings) show how noticing has its politics, that by ‘merely’ noticing we are always already entangled in a cosmopolitics (Stengers) in which the personal and structural are strung together, and where injustices, inequities and violence are immanent. What Ahmed’s and Tsing’s noticings show for me, then, is a commitment to much more than the detailed accounts of the world. By paying attention to the troubled conditions we are implicated in, they are making the space to seek reparative methods and the possibilities for other more bearable worlds.
What I’m curious to hear is whether these ideas of what I am beginning to think of as ‘resistances and reparations’ resonate with you in reading the texts and, perhaps more importantly, if/how you see them coming through in the design research you do.
D.K.R.: I like thinking of these as reparative methods — and, in this sense, I see their methods as reflections of genealogy. The lineage of design we receive as HCI practitioners looks very different from the one I inherited as an undergraduate design student, which looks different from the one I now seek to recuperate in my recent work (exploring the practices of women who wove early forms of computing memory by hand). In this multiply produced trajectory, in seeking out varied pathways toward defining design, I see possibilities for reconfiguring what comprises design today. Design might not work toward progress or toward ruin but instead, after Tsing, it may help us think with “salvage rhythms.” It might help us notice the uneven, contingent, and collective work required for change. Ahmed writes of women’s studies departments:

“We have to shake the foundations”

“But when we shake the foundations, it is harder to stay up” (2017, 232). Does design call for the same willful commitment to keep going, “to keep coming up?” (ibid, 12).
Ahmed and Tsing don’t speak directly to design as a field or as a practice. But I wonder if you see in their critiques and potentials — from “decentering human hubris” to “diversity work” — an opening for elaborating a different kind of technology design? Tsing writes, “To listen politically is to detect the traces of not-yet-articulated common agendas” (2015, 254). As you do this listening, this reparation and resistance, what not-yet-articulated common agendas might you find?
A.S.T.: There’s so much to say in response to this, but in the interests of space (which we are running out of), let me limit my answer to one thing in particular, namely what I see to be our contemporaneous obsession with numbers, counting and simulacrums of the market place. To me, this unerring drift (that sometimes feels like a surge) towards measurement and the market rationalising of everything, has become such a big part of how we approach technology design. It operates as a rationalising force in so much work, to the point that we mask how—in the way Tsing shows so compellingly— labour and capital is strewn together through such a heterogeneity of flows, eddies, disturbances and even ruin. Indeed, the labours and products that many of us are involved in appear to be so bound up with this powerful logic, but there are still so few possibilities to question or resist it, to “shake the foundations” and “keep coming up”.
For me, Tsing and Ahmed show that we need, urgently, to find ways to act together, to make more possible with the possibilities you write of. Inspired by Ahmed’s language, in particular, I come away wanting to build an army in which each of us is not afraid of putting our bodies into it. All around us, there are ideologies, structures, methods, norms, practices, etc. that seek to smooth so much over and remove each of us from being counted, really counted, from being “alive with a world”. What we need are ways to keep pushing, resisting, and being sensational. We need to ensure our noticings are noticed.
D.K.R.: So maybe then, for HCI, this call to arms makes possible a renewed concern for the problem-solving heritage of the field. Across its methodological rubrics and case studies, HCI scholarship tends to frame design as a means of accomplishing ends, of seeking out too-easy resolutions rather than encouraging creative listening, in Tsing’s terms. These texts, by contrast, caution against such prefabrications and fatalisms. They show that what is at stake in making and inhabiting unpredictable encounters is our ability to recognize and become more accountable to those who lose out — to the things that lie outside our immediate view, to the bacteria that make the soil in which many designers mine, to the “users” haunted by our patriarchal legacies of innovation work. Tsing and Ahmed ask readers to struggle against — to take in and wrestle with our surrounding ecosystems. “We become a problem when we describe a problem,” writes Ahmed (2017, 87). For HCI, Tsing and Ahmed show that designers are not self-contained entities but designers-in-motion, continually working together across difference.

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This is a brief comment on a meeting Barry Brown and I hosted at Microsoft Research Cambridge, titled .

“Interaction as a a promiscuous concept”: it’s Stuart Reeves’ phrasing that nicely captures the sentiment of our small meeting’s discussions. The collection of short talks and the emphasis given to talking (and not just lecturing), gave rise to a language of critical but positive reflection. Rather than deliberating on an ‘after’ or ‘post’ interaction turn or wave in HCI, interaction was seen to still offer a great deal. The consensus (led by positions from David Kirk, Abi Durrant , Bill Gaver and Stuart) was it provides us with a device or machinery in common, and, conceptually, there remains much to do with the word that keeps us open to new domains and indeed new (design) possibilities. Here, I’m reminded of Isabelle Stengers use of the phrase a “tool for thinking”. It certainly appears interaction (still) provides us with just such a tool.
And yet I felt there was a shared frustration — or at least a frustration in myself — of what limits come with using the word interaction. With it, I find it hard not to feel bound to mediation as a central matter of concern, and alongside that being drawn to a fixed ‘divide’ between humans and machines that must be bridged or somehow solved. For me, this brings to mind Karen Barad’s ’ in which she introduces “intra-action” to purposefully contrast it with the “the usual ‘interaction’, which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction”.

With interaction, it seems we also struggle to account for the worlds that are instantly and irrevocably entangled in our ‘interactions’ with machines, the scales of order (Eric Laurier) or scaling (Alex Wilkie) that always looms large. Among her reflections on the day, Kat Jungnickel reminded us of Leigh Star’s wonderful “Cultures of Computing” in which she writes evocatively:

“, typing this, my neck aches and I am curled in an uncomfortable position. I try to think about my fingertips and the chips inside this Macintosh as a seamless “web of computing,’ to use Kling and Scacchi’s classic phrase (1982). But chips make me think of the eyesight of women in Singapore and Korea, going blind during the process of crafting the fiddly little wires; of ‘clean rooms’ I have visited in Silicon Valley and the Netherlands, where people dressed like astronauts etch bits of silicon and fabricate complex Sandwiches of information and logic. I think of the silence of my European ancestors who wore Chinese embroidery, marveling at its intricate complexity, the near impossible stitches woven over a lifetime with the eyesight of another generation of Asian women. I think, I want my body to include these experiences. If we are to have ubiquitous, wireless computing in the future, perhaps it is time to have a less boring idea of the body right now—a body politic, not just the substrate for meetings or toys.”

So, yes, interaction analysis, such as that from Christian Licoppe, offers us some compelling tools for examining the unfolding detail of mundane activities, but how do we extend these analyses to account for a wider ethics (Yvonne Rogers), the “body right now”, and indeed our own productive roles in enacting these cuts (Kat)? How might we focus our attentions not on the agencies intrinsic in humans and things (before interaction, if there could be such a thing), but where and how agency is brought into being (Alex Wilkie and Mike Michael).
I ask, then, is this the point of inflection? As we turn our minds and bodies to very present technocultures that surround us, ones where things take on new agencies (David Martin), have the capacity to push back (Elisa Giaccardi ), and where data infrastructures and algorithms are pervasive (Airi Lampinen and Barry), these weaknesses become increasingly prescient. How are we to think with the “usual” interaction here? How does a preoccupation with a human-centred interaction with machines give us the capacity to see things and practices that stitch and weave across geographies and over lifetimes? Do our promiscuous interactions, if you will, leave us room for thinking and making around these sprawling, always provisional cosmopolitical land- and time-scapes?
Here, might we sketch out a way to move on in which the uses and design of technology become ways to extend our thinking about and with promiscuous interactions? These interactions—from small scale, one-to-one tinkerings, makings, and repairs, to movements and transformations at scale—aren’t so much things that follow knowing (or for that matter produce what we know); the divide here isn’t between knowing and interacting. Rather they are active processes through which we come to be in the world, not just in what we know, but how we organise ourselves, what we value and care for, etc. We might grapple with things, materially, at the one-to-one scale, but we are forever working with their extending web of entanglements (Abi Durrant). This, we might say, is to take interaction seriously, to understand it beyond the object of study and see it more as a productive reconfiguration of what for many of us have become the troubling disciplinary divisions between the social sciences, design and computing. What we have is an inventive orientation to interaction; whether it’s the detailed study of car drivers using Facebook (Christian Licoppe) or the economic and political assemblages emerging through widely distributed Uber and AirBnB use (Barry and Airi Lampinen), interaction gives us a way to cast things differently and get closer, so to speak, to the entanglements.

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The article is a hard hitting critique of Apple’s current design philosophy. More than this, though, the two long time interaction design gurus set out a clear project for design, one that they see Apple having been instrumental in but now deviating from. Their general argument is, on the face of it, pretty convincing. Yet digging a little deeper it’s one that I have problems with. This post is really an effort to sort things out in my own mind.
I think, outwardly, at least, Norman and Tog have a point about Apple doing a disservice to design. Certainly, in their marketing and stores, they are putting a lot of emphasis on visual aesthetic and physical form. As Norman and Tog say, this conveys a message that the business of design (and how it is being widely promoted by Apple) is all about making things pretty. I am fairly confident though that Apple’s designers would make a strong case for putting meticulous effort into interaction cues, and visual (and tactile) feedback—that is, in thinking carefully about the ensemble of product/interaction design. I’ve read interviews with Apple’s designers saying just this and heard Ive talking about the painstaking efforts to convey interactional qualities through animation, touch, tactility, etc. Whether they’ve made good choices or not is, I’d say, another matter.
Again, I also recognise that Norman and Tog have some very clear and convincing arguments for the kind of interaction design they proselytise. I worry though that they are part of the old guard that sees some of the original ‘solutions’ to the problems they themselves created/defined as the best ones (for example, what they see to be ).

If we were to take this reference—indeed reverence—to Apple’s past design at face value, we would be led to imagine that none of us had problems with using earlier versions of Mac OS. Well, of course we did. I never really got on with Apple’s original bitmap Chicago font, the open/save dialogues were notoriously confusing, and we’re still left with the legacy of a very awkward solution for ejecting media.


More importantly, there is a sense of the authors misjudging the changing ways we have come to think about computing and use computers. In fact, I think many people don’t think they’re using computers anymore—at least in how we understood them in the 80s/90s as productivity machines. Our phones and tablets are much more entertainment devices (devices of consumption), not so far from a gaming experience in which many will know things like discoverability, feedback, mapping, and the ability to undo are just not cast in the same mould. Of course, the kinds of design criteria Norman and Tog talk about are important and I, for one, sorely miss them when I try to use Word, Excel, etc. on a iPad. But in the world of iOS, where the forms of use are so very different, I think the issues manifest themselves differently and demand a different kind of attention (one that Norman and Tog choose not to see or perhaps not to understand).
What particularly interests me about this is that I think we need to recognise that what good usability is and, to some extent, what good design is are things we in a sense ‘manufacture’ through the technologies we produce and design. Tog and Norman understand good design guidelines as static, something somehow unchanging, irrespective of everything else that is changing. By talking about “basic psychological principles” they indicate an obduracy to what good design might be, but fail to recognise that this is deeply bound to the continuously changing material practices we are enabling through ‘computing’. They write: “principles reflect the needs, desires, and abilities of human beings, not the machines they use.”
The trouble is our needs, desires and abilities are inexorably entangled with matter, matter like machines. The qualities of being human can’t in some way exist outside of these entanglements. Of course, there is much to be gained by looking back to designers like Dieter Rams, but I think what we’re doing when we do this historicising is reworking old concepts into contemporary moments, undertaking a translation work to make these meaningful for the assemblies of things and people we are dealing with today. So, to me, the guidelines Norman and Tog speak of make most sense for the machines that they played a role in engineering and building. A principle of consistency has a very particular meaning for the early Mac OS that, I feel, doesn’t translate in any straightforward way to contemporary operating systems and ecologies of apps, etc. What Tog and Norman miss, I think, is that we are always giving shape to new and different possibilities of good design through the things we create. As computing has diverged from the Macintosh (and PC), we have created logics and rationales that present fundamentally different kinds of interaction where it doesn’t always make sense to rigidly apply past principles.
Even though Tog and Norman plead for us not to, yes, let’s take the popularity of the iPad amongst—for lack of a better category description—retirees (or ‘grandparents’ if you like). I know I’m not alone in being struck by how people from my parents’ generation can get so intimately attached to their iPads. I think we have to ask what’s going on here and not brush aside what is visibly a genuine intimacy by simply criticising some specific user interface features based on the design of “traditional computers”. And this is meant as more than the hackneyed “could my mother use it” kind of point. Really, what’s going on here? Of course, there are probably plenty of reasons for the iPad’s appeal (and I don’t mean to overlook a lot of the really difficult and frustrating aspects of using them), but I think we’re witnessing a different set of expectations around computing and the relationships we form with machines. This seems to be something Norman and Tog don’t want to acknowledge (despite Norman’s efforts to understand ). 
As I see it, the iOS aims to reveal (and make discoverable) a different set of qualities that appeal in different sorts of ways and that fit within a logic of portable and touch enabled devices in the way the Mac OS doesn’t (and shouldn’t). In the original design of the Mac, choices also needed to made about what was immediately discoverable and what would be buried under the menu architecture and in obscure dialogues (remember the Chooser?), and this presented a particular kind of logic-of-use. With the iOS, I think (intentionally or not) a different kind of experience is surfaced by the decisions to reveal and hide interactional capabilities, and the logic-of-use here is fundamentally different; I feel like the iPad, etc. is much more about the feel for content (and to some extent, creation). So perhaps it’s this that makes the devices so appealing and that many of us, including my parents, get so attached to.


Finally, I should say that I am a long time Mac user but I feel wedded to Macs (and the Apple ‘ecosystem’), for now at least, because that’s what I’ve bought into and am used to using. I’m really not sure whether Apple’s interaction design is especially better than anyone else’s and I think there are lots of things that confuse and frustrate me about their various operating systems. This post isn’t one defending Apple’s design, but more a response to what I see as Don Norman’s and Bruce Tognazzini’s views on design.

The post On “How Apple is Giving Design a Bad Name” appeared first on Alex Taylor.

First, let me respond to your criticisms regarding the interminglings of humans and nonhumans. As I understand it, you are opposed to the idea of a kind of symmetry between the two. I concede, symmetry here raises problems, as does the implication that people and things populate the same single category. With these problems, I realise I need to make my position clearer.
Finding my inspiration in (post) ANT, feminist technoscience and, as Mol now likes to call it, a , you are right to point out that I see the human-nonhuman binary as a  peculiar one. However, I see the symmetry trick to be far from, well, a trick. On the contrary, to me it feels a much more genuine and responsive starting point. Let’s consider the category problem. For starters, when would you and I imagine ourselves to share a category? Well, one rather macabre place might be on the pathologist’s bench. Another might be as one of the many millions of commuters passing through London. In both, we are — in different senses — human bodies. We can, though, imagine just as many situations in which we would be lumped into different categories – ethnicity, geography, intellectual auspices, and so on. Likewise, we could repeat this exercise with things: tables and chairs are items of furniture, but at the same time they of course can be categorised, differently, in that they reference particular styles/periods, or are made of distinct materials. Indeed, this category making could, dare we imagine it, lump things and people together: door-men and self-closing door hinges keep cold weather out, police and road humps slow traffic, etc. So the symmetry here is not one that presupposes categorical sameness, or indeed any essential categories — be they the body or mind, or people vs. things.
My obvious point here (and I apologise for belabouring it) is that categories, , are enacted. Chuck Goodwin provides us with such delightful examples of this. I particularly like his description of . So why then would we presuppose that one very particular category distinction – that between humans and nonhumans — should prevail above all others? Surely, we would want to be open minded about the ways categories are done and not to approach any phenomena insisting that one binary must be enforced?
Let me, then, take up another of your related objections and through this return to my piece in interactions and my modestly pieced together point on relationality. You ask whether it is helpful to attribute agency and normative qualities to things – productive in the short term, you suggest, yet eventually leading us into a quagmire of nonsense and confusion. Can I ask you this: in what way is human agency independent of *things*? I find it hard to think of a context in which agency resides entirely in/with humans. A more honest perspective, as I see it, is to see this more like a spectrum in which agency surfaces somewhere amongst a relational configuration of actors/agents. I slow the car down because I am moving in a car, and together we (me and the car) are obliged to respond to the material arrangement of the road, the road furniture (as it is called), and the road hump. True, remove the human and the intention to slow down is gone, but so too when the car or hump are gone. The intention is in the mixture of humans and non-humans. And your power station gives us another helpful example. Why would we want to imagine that a morality and set of accompanying activities (like investing in nuclear energy) are in someway separate to the things themselves? Without nuclear power stations, and all that ’stuff’ that goes into them, where would we find the morality. Of course, we would not. Agencies and normativities arise out of relational entanglements. 
Alas, I must agree with you though. These are longstanding arguments, and I’m confident I won’t be the one who satisfactorily answers your objections. Yet I hope to have shown that the proposal is not to simply shift agential capacities from one side of the human-nonhuman binary to the other. Nor is it to blindly lump humans and nonhumans into the same category. I draw on a project that contests any such binaries or essentialist categories, and instead invites a serious examination of how worlds of humans and things are enacted.
It’s this point on relationality that brings us back to the heart of the matter, a rethinking of interactions. As a matter of fact, I’m not all that concerned with the word, as it is generally used, and I, like you, greatly admire sociologists such as Goodwin who show the interactional accomplishments that constitute ordinary scientific business. My concern is with an interaction that narrows its sights on the neatly demarcated interactions humans have with machines, and presupposes that we might easily separate and forget about the relational entanglements that run alongside and interweave with these. What Goodwin so expertly illustrates is how the assembled arrangements of human bodies (plus their talk) and things, occasion ‘worlds’ of materially configured knowing and logic. The rationale and product in science is enacted through the incessant categorising and ordering (i.e. bringing into relation) of people and things. In effect, Goodwin shows us worlds in the making — ‘world making’. As he writes:

Rather than sustaining an opposition between the “mental” and the “material” such activity systems seamlessly link phenomena such as the embodied actions of participants, physical tools, language use, work relevant writing practices, etc. into the patterns of coordinated action that make up the lifeworld of a workgroup.()

So through their linking activities his archaeologists are bringing a very particular kind of ‘lifeworld’ or world into play, one enacted and sustained through materially bound activities that keep certain relations stable and others mutable. If you are advocating this kind of attention to interaction then I am all for it. 
My basic premise in the Interactions article builds on precisely this shift from a empirical project that relies on ready-made categories and relations, to one that is genuinely about how the relations are enacted and what the enactments mean for the worlds we live in. I argue this matters for technology because in designing and building technical systems we are affording (and indeed ) certain ways of knowing and doing. We are implicated in that world making that Goodwin observes, but in our case we are giving real shape to the instruments and processes that might bring things, practices, knowings, normativities, etc. into being. We are designing vast arrays of Munsell chart-like systems and the processes that give them authority to claim things about and enforce certain orders in the world.
Finally, it’s this recognition of our inevitable participation in performing worlds, even when we valiantly try to resist a priori categories, that I claim we must show a . The narrow concern for how technical things support or mediate an exceptional human endeavour elides the shear diversity of and possibility for different and new figurings — it is to start too late, it . An openness to the unfolding relations — not just a fixation on a few but in all their varieties — invites us to be far more careful about the worlds we live in; we see that we have some part to play (even though it will always be ) and have a great deal at stake in how we want to live, and how we might make things better.

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<snip>… 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…</snip>

Read the full piece here.

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We present findings from a year-long engagement with a street and its community. The work explores how the production and use of data is bound up with place, both in terms of physical and social geography. We detail three strands of the project. First, we consider how residents have sought to curate existing data about the street in the form of an archive with physical and digital components. Second, we report endeavours to capture data about the street’s environment, especially of vehicle traffic. Third, we draw on the possibilities afforded by technologies for polling opinion. We reflect on how these engagements have: materialised distinctive relations between the community and their data; surfaced flows and contours of data, and spatial, temporal and social boundaries; and enacted a multiplicity of ‘small worlds’. We consider how such a conceptualisation of data-in-place is relevant to the design of technology.

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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.

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