Abstract:HCI is focused on improving the interactions we have with technology and innovating new types of interactions, as well as expanding the types of people for whom those interactions are designed. Central to these efforts is the simultaneously empowering and contested construct of the "user." This paper examines what the construct of the user highlights, as well as what it conceals. We introduce postuserism, a perspective that simultaneously acknowledges the limits of, and proposes alternatives to, the central co… Show more
“…They use, reflect, and understand-as well as design, make, and produce-both with professional skill and responsibility, and with experience as a user. In line with work on post-userism [5], the multiplicity of relations and subject positions that our participants took did not always clearly fit the categories of "user" and "designer." Being able to interpret the workbooks from multiple subjectivities aligns with the values in design goal of understanding a design from multiple stakeholders' perspectives.…”
Although "privacy by design" (PBD)-embedding privacy protections into products during design, rather than retroactively-uses the term "design" to recognize how technical design choices implement and settle policy, design approaches and methodologies are largely absent from PBD conversations. Critical, speculative, and value-centered design approaches can be used to elicit reflections on relevant social values early in product development, and are a natural fit for PBD and necessary to achieve PBD's goal. Bringing these together, we present a case study using a design workbook of speculative design fictions as a values elicitation tool. Originally used as a reflective tool among a research group, we transformed the workbook into artifacts to share as values elicitation tools in interviews with graduate students training as future technology professionals. We discuss how these design artifacts surface contextual, socially-oriented understandings of privacy, and their potential utility in relationship to other values levers.
“…They use, reflect, and understand-as well as design, make, and produce-both with professional skill and responsibility, and with experience as a user. In line with work on post-userism [5], the multiplicity of relations and subject positions that our participants took did not always clearly fit the categories of "user" and "designer." Being able to interpret the workbooks from multiple subjectivities aligns with the values in design goal of understanding a design from multiple stakeholders' perspectives.…”
Although "privacy by design" (PBD)-embedding privacy protections into products during design, rather than retroactively-uses the term "design" to recognize how technical design choices implement and settle policy, design approaches and methodologies are largely absent from PBD conversations. Critical, speculative, and value-centered design approaches can be used to elicit reflections on relevant social values early in product development, and are a natural fit for PBD and necessary to achieve PBD's goal. Bringing these together, we present a case study using a design workbook of speculative design fictions as a values elicitation tool. Originally used as a reflective tool among a research group, we transformed the workbook into artifacts to share as values elicitation tools in interviews with graduate students training as future technology professionals. We discuss how these design artifacts surface contextual, socially-oriented understandings of privacy, and their potential utility in relationship to other values levers.
“…Baumer et al (2015) emphasize that non-use is a choice that is worth studying, and people often have good reasons for choosing to not participate or use technology. Baumer and Brubaker (2017) argue that the metaphor of a technology "user" is not an appropriate metaphor, because there are a wide variety of patterns of interactions with technology that are not captured by the "user" metaphor. For example, some people use technology indirectly through others (e.g.…”
Online communities, socio-technical systems where people interact with others, depend on new members coming to the community. While the majority of research in online communities relation to the recruitment of new members has focused on new members’ socialization and retention, little work has focused on how potential new members who are not yet a member of the community make the decision on whether they are willing to join in the online community. To understand this initial decision process, we investigated how potential new members build mental models of the online community from their first experience within the community, and how this process impacts the decision to continue participating in the community. We interviewed 31 potential new members of the online communities, Quora and Reddit, to better understand how they evaluate a new community. We found that the process of understanding a community involves orienting toward multiple different aspects of the community, including the content available on the community, the people who are already part of the community, and the technology interface and mechanisms that control the community. Participants who focused on consuming and enjoying content were much more likely to express an interest in future participation in these communities than participants who just evaluated the community, looking at the people in the community or the technology of the community. This extends previous considerations for recruiting new members in online communities. We conclude by discussing how our findings can have broad implications in developing successful online communities and suggesting future research efforts that could help understand potential new members.
“…In discussing Post Userism, Baumer and Brubaker (2017) carefully consider the user construct as it manifests in design research. They note how, within the broadening scope of design research, notions of 'user' can result in reductive representations when confounded by increasingly blurred boundaries between human and computer, and casts significant doubt on what the 'centre' of design research should be.…”
Section: Taking a Non-anthropocentric Turnmentioning
This paper responds to contemporary design contexts that frequently contain complex interdependencies of human and non-human actants. To adequately represent these perspectives requires a shift towards More-Than Human Centred Design. The Internet of Things is one context that demonstrates this need. The 'things' within such networks transcend their physical forms and extend to include algorithms, humans, data, business models, etc., and each imports independent-but-interdependent motivations and perspectives. Therefore, we use the Internet of Things to clarify our proposition and to convey our three contributions. First, we review the expanding corpus of contemporary Human-Computer Interaction research that seeks to expand the notion of Human Centred Design by moving beyond the dominant anthropocentric perspective. Second, we introduce a novel design metaphor, 'constellations', which allows both the interdependencies and independent perspectives to be considered. Third, we provide an account of a speculative design to demonstrate how it may be put into practice.
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