Commons emerge and are reclaimed through collective, shared, and self-organized practices known as commoning. Despite their historical embeddedness in South Asian communities, commoning practices have succumbed to enclosure and destruction due to region-wide privatization and development schemes implemented over the past century. Certain HCI and ICTD research has critiqued such schemes for undermining community autonomy and well-being. To advance the development of alternative models, we conducted a literature review of HCI research involving the commons, considering both natural and digital resources, in South Asia. Additionally, we examine the social practices, rules, and institutional arrangements described in the corpus through the lens of Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for commons governance. Based on our findings, we formulate a commoning framework by synthesizing three areas of HCI research — infrastructuring, participatory design, and assets-based design — proposing it as an alternative to neoliberal development paradigms for future HCI research.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642547
We explore the potential of generative AI text-to-image models to help designers efficiently craft unique, representative, and demographically diverse anthropographics that visualize data about people. Currently, creating data-driven iconic images to represent individuals in a dataset often requires considerable design effort. Generative text-to-image models can streamline the process of creating these images, but risk perpetuating designer biases in addition to stereotypes latent in the models. In response, we outline a conceptual workflow for crafting anthropographic assets for visualizations, highlighting possible sources of risk and bias as well as opportunities for reflection and refinement by a human designer. Using an implementation of this workflow with Stable Diffusion and Google Colab, we illustrate a variety of new anthropographic designs that showcase the visual expressiveness and scalability of these generative approaches. Based on our experiments, we also identify challenges and research opportunities for new AI-enabled anthropographic visualization tools.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641957
This study elucidates the challenges faced by married migrant women (MMW) in South China in relation to design. Through 2-year ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with 15 participants, I aim to understand the context and intricacies of their systemic marital problems that form the backdrop against which mobile technology design could occur. I discuss how they tactically appropriate cellphones to negotiate love, sex, and marriage while remaining stuck in gendered patterns of technological use. The marital issues raised by the participants concerning the place of technology could provide HCI researchers with valuable guidance. “Design with” implies avoiding an elite perspective, eschewing a top-down approach, and steering clear of a condescending attitude in technical design. Designers should act as collaborators, assisting MMW in uncovering and nurturing their values, collective traits, and life experiences, which could ultimately nourish the future development of MMW and the migrant community. Potential considerations include a better understanding of national history and local ecosystems, recognizing MMW’s agency and initiative in technology design and decision-making, valuing and learning from their “alternative” experiences of using technologies, and design beyond individual users for a more equal and safer environment.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641990
Despite a long tradition of ‘non-expert’ participation in ecoacoustics research, asymmetrical distribution of resources and engagement between the Global North and Global South continue, extending to ecoacoustic sensing and design. Whilst there exists a growing body of work in Participatory Design (PD) addressing the technical and social challenges of ecoacoustic research, we find that popular PD methods inadequately address design justice and decolonising agendas. Through participatory ecoacoustic sensing and design engagements with a forest community in Ghana, we highlight the tensions that emerge when employing visual and written modes of PD in a context where an oral approach to creativity and communication is more appropriate. We present Justice-oriented Design Listening, an acoustically-mediated approach to PD, described through three modes: polyphony, pace and transformation. This work contributes to calls for design justice by developing a methodological approach that facilitates pluralistic participation in design when developing conservation technologies in non-Western contexts.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3643044
The importance of history as an HCI method has been gaining increasing attention in HCI literature. However, the mainstream historical sources (books, documentaries, etc.) and methods often risk (re)producing western colonial biases potentially providing a narrow one-sided perspective on history and detaching “sanitized facts” from people’s emotional accounts. While oral history and similar alternative methods are often used as a countermeasure, their applicability has remained underexplored in HCI, especially in a sensitive context, such as migration. We build on the rich body of social science work on collective memory to introduce a complementary way of navigating the past of the migrant families, and also reveal the corresponding challenges to advance this literature. Our interview study with 17 migrant families highlights how the politics of remembrance, family dynamics, and postmemory shape the past stories of migrant families. We discuss how these findings inform the HCI literature on migration, design, and postcolonial computing.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642496
This mixed method study situated in Ontario, Canada, investigates how migrant farmworkers' experiences with agricultural technologies (agtech) affect their attitudes, conditions, and expectations of work, and how workers envision technologies serving as supportive interventions. Through a survey and interviews, we identify that surveillance and tracking agtech (chequeadoras) affect workers, imparting negative health and safety consequences. Workers' interactions with chequeadoras reveal three major impacts: performance expectations engender stress, surveillance causes fears of disciplinary action, and performance tracking heightens competition. These impacts demonstrate how chequeadoras erode workers' capacity to build sociality and solidarity. In response to these impacts and to support workers' desired workplace changes, which aim for safer environments with technical skill development opportunities, we examine tactics from HCI, critical design, and migrant justice movements. Our findings lead us to contemplate what qualifies as agtech and how we may support marginalised workers with divergent opinions regarding workplace technologies, and desired collective change.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642263
Maldaimonic game experiences occur when people engage in personally fulfilling play through egocentric, destructive, and/or exploitative acts. Initial qualitative work verified this orientation and experiential construct for English-speaking Westerners. In this comparative mixed methods study, we explored whether and how maldaimonic game experiences and orientations play out in Japan, an Eastern gaming capital that may have cultural values incongruous with the Western philosophical basis underlying maldaimonia. We present findings anchored to the initial frameworks on maldaimonia in game experiences that show little divergence between the Japanese and US cohorts. We also extend the qualitative findings with quantitative measures on affect, player experience, and the related constructs of hedonia and eudaimonia. We confirm this novel construct for Japan and set the stage for scale development.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642273
This paper reexamines appropriation in human-computer interaction (HCI), which refers to the unexpected alterations made to artifacts by users. We analyze when earlier informal practices of exchanging airtime for cash became enclosed into proprietary mobile money platforms, and show that this enclosure has a longer history in global telecommunications. Building on interviews with 19 experts in computing, policy, and media, we challenge teleological narratives of the inevitability of mobile money often overlooked in computing and global development. We develop an ‘appropriation matrix’ introducing a dialectic of re- and reverse- appropriation animated by three elements—users, artifacts, and imaginaries—that unexpectedly switch between production and consumption, complicating invention and innovation in formal and informal economies. This matrix may help HCI and development better understand how different values, visions, and practices might have led (or could still lead) to different designs of products like mobile money.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642590
Online Knowledge Repositories (OKRs) like Wikipedia offer communities a way to share and preserve information about themselves and their ways of living. However, for communities with low-resourced languages---including most African communities---the quality and volume of content available are often inadequate. One reason for this lack of adequate content could be that many OKRs embody Western ways of knowledge preservation and sharing, requiring many low-resourced language communities to adapt to new interactions. To understand the challenges faced by low-resourced language contributors on the popular OKR Wikipedia, we conducted (1) a thematic analysis of Wikipedia forum discussions and (2) a contextual inquiry study with 14 novice contributors. We focused on three Ethiopian languages: Afan Oromo, Amharic, and Tigrinya. Our analysis revealed several recurring themes; for example, contributors struggle to find resources to corroborate their articles in low-resourced languages, and language technology support, like translation systems and spellcheck, result in several errors that waste contributors' time. We hope our study will support designers in making online knowledge repositories accessible to low-resourced language speakers.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642605