As exploration of living media, biology, and biotechnology advances HCI, researchers call attention to implications for ethics. We respond with a qualitative study of audience engagement with multimedia bioart installation. Bioart comprises a transdisciplinary practice that brings diverse perspectives in art, science, and technology into dialogue and engages audiences. Understanding a bioart exemplar, Raaz, as disrupting habitual modes of being, we investigate audience experiences in three contexts, elaborating transdisciplinary community engagement that takes seriously living media and biotechnology and informs HCI broadly through vital authenticity, performative reflection, empowered critique, distributed expertise, and revealed dynamics. We discuss how transdisciplinary community engagement functions as a mode of inquiry and design that supports inclusive liminal experiences.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642339
Short-format videos have exploded on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Despite this, the research community lacks large-scale empirical studies into how people engage with short-format videos and the role of recommendation systems that offer endless streams of such content. In this work, we analyze user engagement on TikTok using data we collect via a data donation system that allows TikTok users to donate their data. We recruited 347 TikTok users and collected 9.2M TikTok video recommendations they received. By analyzing user engagement, we find that the average daily usage time increases over the users' lifetime while the user attention remains stable at around 45%. We also find that users like more videos uploaded by people they follow than those recommended by people they do not follow. Our study offers valuable insights into how users engage with short-format videos on TikTok and lessons learned from designing a data donation system.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642433
Social media feeds are deeply personal spaces that reflect individual values and preferences. However, top-down, platform-wide content algorithms can reduce users' sense of agency and fail to account for nuanced experiences and values. Drawing on the paradigm of interactive machine teaching (IMT), an interaction framework for non-expert algorithmic adaptation, we map out a design space for \textit{teachable social media feed experiences} to empower agential, personalized feed curation. To do so, we conducted a think-aloud study (N=24) featuring four social media platforms---Instagram, Mastodon, TikTok, and Twitter---to understand key signals users leveraged to determine the value of a post in their feed. We synthesized users' signals into taxonomies that, when combined with user interviews, inform five design principles that extend IMT into the social media setting. We finally embodied our principles into three feed designs that we present as sensitizing concepts for teachable feed experiences moving forward.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642120
Online communities offer their members various benefits, such as information access, social and emotional support, and entertainment. Despite the important role that founders play in shaping communities, prior research has focused primarily on what drives users to participate and contribute; the motivations and goals of founders remain underexplored. To uncover how and why online communities get started, we present findings from a survey of 951 recent founders of Reddit communities. We find that topical interest is the most common motivation for community creation, followed by motivations to exchange information, connect with others, and self-promote. Founders have heterogeneous goals for their nascent communities, but they tend to privilege community quality and engagement over sheer growth. Differences in founders' early attitudes towards their communities help predict not only the community-building actions that they pursue, but also the ability of their communities to attract visitors, contributors, and subscribers over the first 28 days. We end with a discussion of the implications for researchers, designers, and founders of online communities.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642269
This three-phase study explores the experiential background of contributors to platforms that provide crowdsourced location-related information. Initially, we utilized interviews to understand users' expectations for location-related information and the contributors’ experiential background they believe would enhance this information's utility. We then deployed a survey to identify the top eight sought-after location-information types and their perceived characteristics. Then the concluding online scenario-based study provided quantitative evidence about the interrelationships of eight types of location-related information, ten crucial quality attributes, and aspects of the contributors' experiential background believed to enhance the utility of the descriptions they provide. Notably, although certain experiential background aspects were deemed universally advantageous across all information types, unique connections were identified among specific information types and distinct experiential background aspects seen as augmenting the contributor's descriptions' utility. These insights underline the importance of location-based crowdsourcing platforms incorporating contributors’ experiential background when assigning tasks.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642520