Games can be powerful vehicles for gender identity exploration and self-reflection but are often subject to designers' biases including gender representation, limiting such opportunities. Using a game jam as a research-through-design method, alongside qualitative interviews with the creators, this paper explores how the process of creating games and the games themselves can facilitate exploration of and reflection on gender identity. We highlight aspects of identity people want to explore; how different game elements can support processes of exploring these, and what aspects are missing in games. Further, the process of creating and playing helped participants reflect on and reframe their understanding of gender regardless of their identity/experience. Finally, we reflect on the process of designing an inclusive jam around the topic of gender identity, which can be sensitive and divisive. Our work results in implications for the design of games and other potential tools for gender exploration.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580646
Play-to-Earn (P2E) crypto-games recently emerged as a gig opportunity despite the absence of regulations. As these platforms continue to grow, there is a need to understand the interactions involved to protect vulnerable stakeholders. This paper describes how an unintended social dynamic became a strategy guiding players to navigate an unregulated space. First, we inquired through surveys ($N=69$) and interviews ($N=9$) to understand stakeholder motivations and practices in this space. Second, we analyzed data and then conceptualized eight themes (e.g., Management, Social, Gaming). Then, we uncovered four types of relationships (e.g., Manager-Scholar, Manager-Investor-Scholar, Coach-Mentee, Scholar-Turned-Manager) that shaped the behaviours of the different users on the platform. Lastly, we present design implications and recommendations to guide the design of P2E crypto games and the gig-focused communities that thrive around them. Our results contribute to ongoing discussions in designing digital gig economies and crypto-based games.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580713
Given the high attentional demand in aircraft cockpits, tactons can be used to deliver information without overloading the visual and auditory channels. However, aircraft are subject to turbulence that interfere with vibrotactile feedback. To investigate the impact of turbulence on tacton identification, 18 participants tried to identify 9 tactons with varying intensity and rhythm, while experiencing uncomfortable and very uncomfortable levels of mechanical vibration defined in ISO 2631-1. The results show that the effectiveness of tactile communication decreases with the rhythm identification performance as the level of turbulence increases. In our study, an RMS acceleration delta of 0.70~Grms between two consecutive tactons guaranteed near zero confusion. Based on their experience performing the study, participants built tactons that included 4 pulses, lasted for at least 350~ms and vibrated at no less than 1.25~Grms to be comfortably perceived. Our results will support practitioners for designing tactons that can be more resilient to turbulence.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580951
Safety has been used to justify the expansion of today's large-scale surveillance infrastructures in American cities. Our work offers empirical and theoretical groundings on why and how the safety-surveillance conflation that reproduces harm toward communities of color must be denaturalized. In a photovoice study conducted in collaboration with a Detroit community organization and a university team, we invited eleven Black mid-aged and senior Detroiters to use photography to capture their lived experiences of navigating personal and community safety. Their photographic narratives unveil acts of "everyday noticing" in negotiating and maintaining their intricate and interdependent relations with human, non-human animals, plants, spaces, and material things, through which a multiplicity of meaning and senses of safety are produced and achieved. Everyday noticing, as simultaneously a survival skill and a more-than-human care act, is situated in residents' lived materialities, while also serving as a site for critiquing the reductive and exclusionary vision embedded in large-scale surveillance infrastructures. By proposing an epistemological shift from surveillance-as-safety to safety-through-noticing, we invite future HCI work to attend to the fluid and relational forms of safety that emerge from local entanglement and sensibilities.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581474
Digital fabrication in industrial contexts involves standardized procedures that prioritize precision and repeatability. However, fabrication machines are now available for practitioners who focus instead on experimentation. In this paper, we reframe hobbyist CNC milling as writing literate programs which interleave documentation, interactive graphics, and source code for machine control. To test this approach, we present Imprimer, a machine infrastructure for a CNC mill and an associated library for a computational notebook. Imprimer lets makers learn experimentally, prototype new interactions for making, and understand physical processes by writing and debugging code. We demonstrate three experimental milling workflows as computational notebooks, conduct a user study with practitioners with a range of backgrounds, and discuss literate programming as a future vision for digital fabrication altogether.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581334