Song signing videos have grown in numbers on YouTube, with much of the content created by amateur non-d/Deaf signers. However, the Deaf community has voiced concerns over misrepresentation and cultural appropriation in these performances. We explore self-disclosure as a way for performers to clarify their motivations and foster greater acceptance among viewers. We interviewed 11 song signers and surveyed 50 viewers to understand important elements that should be included in self-disclosure statements (SDS). A follow-up study with 24 d/Deaf participants assessed the impact of SDS, finding that they generally led to a more positive reception. Participants rated song signing style, relationship to the Deaf community, and sign language as the most important elements to include in SDS. We discuss actionable recommendations for culturally responsive self-disclosures by setting personal boundaries, constructing structured narratives, and presenting SDS without distracting from the performance.
Computer vision systems are increasingly used by blind individuals to navigate their lives, helping, for example, locate objects such as doors or chairs. Yet these recognition systems do not work for many personal objects a blind user might want to find, such as keys or a special notebook. In response, efforts created personalized recognition systems, where individuals train their phones to identify and locate things, like a coffee mug or white cane, using example images/videos. However, these tools are trained on data from high-resource contexts, not necessarily reflecting India’s material culture. This paper discusses the contribution of the ORBIT-India dataset, which extends these tools to the Indian context, home of the world’s largest blind population. The ORBIT-India dataset comprises 105,243 images from 587 videos, representing 76 unique objects. We use this experience to examine dataset collection practices translated from high- to low-resource settings, providing recommendations to support cross-geography dataset collection.
Inclusion is important for meeting effectiveness, which is in turn central to organizational functioning. One way of improving inclusion in meetings is through feedback, but social dynamics make giving feedback difficult. We propose that AI agents can facilitate feedback exchange by being psychologically safer recipients, and we test this through a meeting system with an AI agent feedback mediator. When delivering feedback, the agent uses the Induced Hypocrisy Procedure, a social psychological technique that prompts behavior change by highlighting value-behavior inconsistencies. In a within-subjects lab study ($n=28$), the agent made speaking times more balanced and improved meeting quality. However, a field study at a small consulting firm ($n=10$) revealed organizational barriers that led to its use for personal reflection rather than feedback exchange. We contribute a novel sociotechnical system for feedback exchange in groups, and empirical findings demonstrating the importance of considering organizational barriers in designing AI tools for organizations.
While recent usable privacy and security (UPS) research has made progress in moving beyond “the average user,” a systematic account of how UPS researchers navigate diversity and inclusion in their work remains lacking. Through 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews with experienced researchers, we examine how and why they recruit diverse, underserved populations in their work, as well as the challenges they face in doing so, including conceptual difficulties in defining who is underserved, limited access to target populations, and inflexible peer review and publishing norms. Participants also reflected on their own positionality when planning and conducting studies, often expressing uncertainty about how to account for and articulate their positionality. We identify strategies researchers use to overcome challenges and highlight areas where collective action from the research community and institutions is needed to foster greater inclusion in UPS research practices.
Vehicle dwelling has increased significantly in recent years. While HCI research has explored vehicle dwelling through the lens of digital nomadism and vanlife, it has largely overlooked the complexities of vehicle dwelling as a form of housing insecurity, as well as the unique constraints of living in smaller vehicles. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of posts and comments from an online community, we examine car dwellers' infrastructuring work to manage daily life under social, spatial, and infrastructural constraints. We further explore the motivations and identity negotiations of car dwellers, whose experiences fall between homelessness and nomadism, and highlight how developing infrastructural competence can shape identity. We discuss implications for future HCI research on mobility and dwelling under conditions of uneven access to infrastructure and provide design recommendations for technologies that better account for car dwellers' diverse needs, circumstances, and identities.
Sociocultural engineering research is being systematically attacked under the current US government, pressuring researchers to eliminate cultural inquiry from our work. These attacks present an existential crisis for HCI because technological innovation and understanding cultural impact are fundamentally intertwined. Marginalized HCI practitioners are at particular risk from these policies. Compliance with authoritarian demands is untenable. We need strategic, principled ways of resisting. We propose the augmented undercommons, a framework grounded in Harney and Moten’s undercommons that supports liberatory, culturally grounded technology development parallel and in opposition to ethically compromised institutions. We outline five guiding principles, demonstrate their use in HCI through three case studies, and reflect further on one principle's dimensions in practice. The augmented undercommons builds upon past knowledge from oppressed scholars to offer one possible survival strategy for our current moment, while critically reflecting on the HCI community’s current and future responsibilities.