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.
This paper provides insight into the use of data tools in the American labor movement by analyzing the practices of staff employed by unions to organize alongside union members. We interviewed 23 field-level staff organizers about how they use data tools to evaluate membership. We find that organizers work around and outside of these tools to develop access to data for union members and calibrate data representations to meet local needs. Organizers mediate between local and central versions of the data, and draw on their contextual knowledge to challenge campaign strategy. We argue that networked data tools can compound field organizers' lack of discretion, making it more difficult for unions to assess and act on the will of union membership. We show how the use of networked data tools can lead to less accurate data, and discuss how bottom-up approaches to data gathering can support more accurate membership assessments.
The human-computer interaction community has made some efforts toward racial diversity, but the outcomes remain meager. We introduce critical race theory and adapt it for HCI to lay a theoretical basis for race-conscious efforts, both in research and within our community. Building on the theory's original tenets, we argue that racism is pervasive in everyday socio-technical systems; that the HCI community is prone to "interest convergence", where concessions to inclusion require benefits to those in power; and that the neoliberal underpinnings of the technology industry itself propagate racism. Critical race theory uses storytelling as a means to upend deep-seated assumptions, and we relate several personal stories to highlight ongoing problems of race in HCI. The implications: all HCI research must be attuned to issues of race; participation of underrepresented minorities must be sought in all of our activities; and as a community, we cannot become comfortable while racial disparities exist.
The term "digital divide" indexes a body of research at the intersection of digital technology and social equity, including research on inequality that criticizes and recapitulates the original concept. Based on a qualitative study at a community literacy center serving resettled refugees and immigrants, we show that the digital divide framework rests on a distributive logic, one that implies that distributing access to digital technology constitutes a form of social equity. Because this framework only considers valorized goods, skills, and uses, research has frequently ignored the startup, maintenance, and affective costs we found accompanied digital access for our participants. To account for these costs, we propose a theoretical adjustment to the digital divide framework, one where design is an act of configuring both costs and benefits together. We argue that considering such costs enables HCI researchers to engage more effectively with host communities in the non-innocent work of confronting inequity.
Interactive computing systems increasingly allow for experimental evaluations of fundamental issues in law, government, and society. In this paper, we describe a participatory simulation of the Accountable Capitalism Act, a bill proposed in 2018 by US Senator Elizabeth Warren. We present findings from an empirical study conducted using this system, relating to the impact of 1) interactive visualization and 2) the Accountable Capitalism Act legal framework on the behavior of participants acting as corporate directors. From this study, we draw lessons about research possibilities at the juncture of HCI and legal and policy studies. This study contributes an analysis and evaluation of a design probe used to investigate potential impacts of the Accountable Capitalism Act, experimental evidence from a study conducted using the design probe, and guidance for future participatory simulations that seek to inform the design of social institutions.