Nusrat Jahan Mim
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
This paper critically examines the impacts of social media-based business on urban residential architecture in Dhaka, Bangladesh and joins the growing body of work in critical HCI. Based on a seven-month-long qualitative empirical study in Dhaka, this paper reports how Facebook commerce (F-commerce) drives many local women to actively engage in home-based businesses, which in turn, challenges the inherent spatial regulations of modern residential architecture. This paper also documents how F-commerce mediated transformations in residential spaces are promoting heterogeneous functions, re-surfacing traditional values, and altering orders and rationales that define modern housing. Drawing from a rich body of literature in urban housing architecture, critical theories around modernism, South-Asian feminism, and postcolonial computing, we explain how these spatial transformations and alterations are ``appropriating" architectural design vocabularies. Our findings further explain how negligence toward such emerging needs often marginalizes the women spatially and economically, who are involved in F-commerce. We conclude with design implications to architecture and HCI to address these issues, and connect our findings to the broader agendas of Postcolonial HCI around diversity, inclusion, and global development.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3502071
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2022.acm.org/)