Long COVID is a post-viral illness where symptoms are still experienced more than three months after an infection of COVID 19. In line with a recent shift within HCI and research on self-tracking towards first-person methodologies, I present the results of an 18-month long autoethnographic study of using a Fitbit fitness tracker whilst having long COVID. In contrast to its designed intentions, I misused my Fitbit to do less in order to pace and manage my illness. My autoethnography illustrates three modes of using fitness tracking technologies to do less and points to the new design space of technologies for reducing, rather than increasing, activity in order to manage chronic illnesses where over-exertion would lead to a worsening of symptoms. I propose that these “pacing technologies” should acknowledge the interoceptive and fluctuating nature of the user’s body and support user’s decision-making when managing long-term illness and maintaining quality of life.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581505
Menstruation and fertility tracking applications are of increasing concern in HCI research, as their use becomes more widespread. Methods are needed to understand how such applications become entangled in everyday practices. While these apps promise increased self-knowledge of reproductive potential by collecting intimate data about reproductive bodies, they also restrict the knowledge produced about users’ bodies and embed normative understandings of reproduction and gender. In this paper, we scrutinize the normativities of reproductive bodies by deploying the “walkthrough method” to uncover sociotechnical entanglements of the menstruation and fertility apps Clue, Tilly, and Drip. We discuss how the walkthrough method contributes to HCI’s methodological repertoire for studying intimate bodily tracking apps and unpacking their normativities. We offer suggestions for using this method to critically analyze existing apps and extend approaches to design with and for a plurality of in/fertile bodies.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581450
Social injustices are commonly discussed on social media, presenting opportunities for youth to engage with this content and develop into engaged citizens. While much has been written about youths' online activism, less is known about how engaging with sociopolitical content may build their capacity for activist work. We explore the extent to which youths' engagement with sociopolitical content on various social media platforms is associated with critical consciousness---an awareness of inequities, the motivation to address them, and action that combats injustice. To investigate this relationship, we conducted a survey with 339 high school-aged youths. While sociopolitical engagement on some platforms was positively associated with youths' critical consciousness measures, sociopolitical engagement on other platforms was negatively associated. Qualitative post-hoc analysis was used to suggest reasons for possible differences. In light of our findings, we discuss the relationship between online sociopolitical engagement and critical consciousness and suggest directions for future work.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580823
Despite the proliferation of research on how people engage with and experience algorithmic systems, the materiality and physicality of these experiences are often overlooked. We tend to forget about bodies. The Embodying the Algorithm1 project worked with artists to explore the experience of translating algorithmically produced performance instructions through human bodies. As performers interpreted the rules of engagement produced by GPT-3, they struggled with the lack of consideration the rules showed for the limits of the human body. Performers made sense of their experience through personification, reflexivity, and interpretation, which gave rise to three modes of relating with the algorithm – agonistic, perfunctory, and agreeable. We demonstrate that collaboration with algorithmic systems is ultimately impossible as people can only relate to algorithmic systems (a one-way relation) due to the material limitations of algorithmic systems for reciprocity, understanding, and consideration for the human body.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580885
Research in HCI applied to clinical interventions relies on normative assumptions about which bodies and minds are healthy, valuable, and desirable. To disrupt this normalizing drive in HCI, we define a “counterventional approach” to intervention technology design informed by critical scholarship and community perspectives. This approach is meant to unsettle normative assumptions of intervention as urgent, necessary, and curative. We begin with a historical overview of intervention in HCI and its critics. Then, through reparative readings of past HCI projects in autism intervention, we illustrate the emergent principles of a counterventional approach and how it may manifest research outcomes that are fundamentally divergent from dominant approaches. We then explicate characteristics of “counterventions” – projects that aim to contest dominant sociotechnical paradigms through privileging community and participants in research inquiry, interaction design, and analysis of outcomes. These divergent research imaginaries have transformative implications for how interventionist HCI might be conducted in future.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581480
This paper presents a generative approach to interdisciplinary collaboration based on generic epistemology. Informed by the work of philosopher Anne-Françoise Schmid, we introduce the concept of the integrative object as a means to reorient interdisciplinary collaboration toward the requirements of the object of research itself, rather than via the requirements of particular disciplinary languages, methods, or operative logics. We show how such an approach is useful for research into sociotechnical phenomena that exceed the boundaries of discrete disciplines and their convergence. We introduce digital well-being as a case study, drawing on the authors' own interdisciplinary collaborative experiences in this area as its empirical matter. From this, and in order to aid future research into similarly complex sociotechnical objects, we then provide practical tools to help those in the HCI community prepare and conduct interdisciplinary research in a similarly generative, non-dogmatic, and non-hierarchical manner.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580717