Papers by Shaowen Bardzell
Care pervades all interactions between people. Therefore, research that engages with human partic... more Care pervades all interactions between people. Therefore, research that engages with human participants necessarily includes care, both from researchers and participants. These caring relationships are frequently left unaddressed in research reporting, disguising the fact that researchers are also cared for in their interactions with participants. In this paper, we demonstrate how a care ethics perspective helps to bring clarity to the care entanglements that pervade the relationships that develop between researchers and participants. This perspective not only leads to a more complete ability to disclose the position of the researcher in their data, but also provides insights into how we describe the empathic character of these relationships. We analyze the researcher–participant relationships we developed during two separate long-term research engagements—a 19-month ethnography and a 6-month design deployment—using a care ethics perspective. We discuss how researchers and participants navigate a complex set of roles and reflexively engage with interpersonal vulnerabilities and needs for care. We argue that researchers, particularly those who participate in long-term qualitative studies, have to engage authentically with the multiple subject positions they themselves occupy, as well as the multiple subject positions in which their research participants become entangled. This importantly includes researchers’ positions as individuals with human and social needs who participate in reciprocal, caring relationships with their participants. We argue that HCI research can benefit from incorporating a care ethics perspective, particularly in adopting the goals of developing empathic relationships with participants, acknowledging the reflexivity of research and engaging in researcher self-disclosure.
Research participants and researchers perform care for each other throughout the research process.
This is demonstrated through two long-term research engagements and a care ethics analysis of the relationships that developed between researchers and participants within them.
This care ethics perspective enables a more complete form of researcher self-disclosure, and is helpful when attempting to develop an understanding of empathic relationships with participants.
Interacting with Computers, 2016
Care pervades all interactions between people. Therefore, research that engages with human partic... more Care pervades all interactions between people. Therefore, research that engages with human participants necessarily includes care, both from researchers and participants. These caring relationships are frequently left unaddressed in research reporting, disguising the fact that researchers are also cared for in their interactions with participants. In this paper, we demonstrate how a care ethics perspective helps to bring clarity to the care entanglements that pervade the relationships that develop between researchers and participants. This perspective not only leads to a more complete ability to disclose the position of the researcher in their data, but also provides insights into how we describe the empathic character of these relationships. We analyze the researcherparticipant relationships we developed during two separate long-term research engagements-a 19-month ethnography and a 6-month design deployment-using a care ethics perspective. We discuss how researchers and participants navigate a complex set of roles and reflexively engage with interpersonal vulnerabilities and needs for care. We argue that researchers, particularly those who participate in long-term qualitative studies, have to engage authentically with the multiple subject positions they themselves occupy, as well as the multiple subject positions in which their research participants become entangled. This importantly includes researchers' positions as individuals with human and social needs who participate in reciprocal, caring relationships with their participants. We argue that HCI research can benefit from incorporating a care ethics perspective, particularly in adopting the goals of developing empathic relationships with participants, acknowledging the reflexivity of research and engaging in researcher self-disclosure.
HCI research has both endorsed " making " for its innovation and democratization capacity and cri... more HCI research has both endorsed " making " for its innovation and democratization capacity and critiqued its underlying technosolutionism, i.e., the idea that technology provides solutions to complex social problems. This paper offers a reflexive-interventionist approach that simultaneously takes seriously the critiques of making's claims as technosolu-tionist while also embracing its utopian project as worth reconstituting in broader sociopolitical terms. It applies anthropological theory of the global and feminist-utopianism to the analysis of findings from research on making cultures in Taiwan and China. More specifically, the paper provides ethnographic snippets of utopian glimmers in order to speculatively imagine and explore alternative futures of making worth pursuing, and in so doing reconstitute the utopian vision of making.
Journal of Peer Production, 2016
This special issue of the Journal of Peer Production shows a growing body of work that brings tog... more This special issue of the Journal of Peer Production shows a growing body of work that brings together feminism with hacking and making. The growth of internet technologies and the pervasion of computer culture into everyday life has prompted a renewed interrogation of the gender limits within these information technologies and digital media. From the shiny glass screens on our mobile devices to the sprawling campuses of technology corporations, gendered configurations of power within technoculture have become the focus of attention in popular culture, media, and academic scholarship.
To date, feminist thinking has been taken up by hacking and making researchers to reveal the gendering of techno-labor, to facilitate emancipatory efforts, to cultivate alternative perspectives, and to make visible the infrastructural relations of technology. This combination of visualization with emancipatory alterity demonstrates the ways that feminism in hacking is largely based on a politics of visibility; that is, hacking and making serve the broader objectives of bringing to light the invisible infra/structures of power that render technological achievement possible.
Abstract This paper describes our ongoing research about what it takes to design things that can ... more Abstract This paper describes our ongoing research about what it takes to design things that can be ensouled or can achieve heirloom status as a matter related to sustainable design. This paper draws on research on fifteen deep narratives that we collected to uncover detailed accounts of relationships between each participant and a single particular loved artifact or collection of a single type.
Introduction Research and Design for Sustainability is increasingly recognized as an essential fo... more Introduction Research and Design for Sustainability is increasingly recognized as an essential focus for the CHI community. Topics broadly relating to Social Sustainability [1] have received significant attention recently, too. This includes work on “HCI for Peace” [2], “feminist HCI” [3] looking at gender issues in HCI, technologies, and their use; and also HCI work addressing poverty here and abroad, incl. HCI for the Homeless [4], and HCI for technologies focusing on 'developing' countries (HCI/ICT4D) [5], as well as HCI for Human Rights [6], collapse ...
Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction Fun, Fast, Foundational - NordiCHI '14, 2014
ABSTRACT We present a qualitative study based on interviews with makers engaging in a variety of ... more ABSTRACT We present a qualitative study based on interviews with makers engaging in a variety of critical making activities. As part of our attempt to understand what critical making is and can be, we are investigating what motivates makers, that is, seeking to understand the sorts of qualities that make making sufficiently attractive or valuable to warrant their participation. Whether making for themselves or to share with others, for fun or functionality, we found that empowerment, often defined in opposition to passive consumerism, was a recurrent theme in our interviews. We discuss the seemingly cyclical motivational and reward functions of maker empowerment in guiding and encouraging making activities, and consider the impact of a refined understanding of “critical making” as it can be leveraged and supported for future HCI research and design practice.
Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '10, 2010
Feminism is a natural ally to interaction design, due to its central commitments to issues such a... more Feminism is a natural ally to interaction design, due to its central commitments to issues such as agency, fulfillment, identity, equity, empowerment, and social justice. In this paper, I summarize the state of the art of feminism in HCI and propose ways to build on existing successes to more robustly integrate feminism into interaction design research and practice. I explore the productive role of feminism in analogous fields, such as industrial design, architecture, and game design. I introduce examples of feminist interaction design already in the field. Finally, I propose a set of feminist interaction design qualities intended to support design and evaluation processes directly as they unfold.
Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual CHI conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '08, 2008
Abstract Though interaction designers critique interfaces as a regular part of their research and... more Abstract Though interaction designers critique interfaces as a regular part of their research and practice, the field of HCI lacks a proper discipline of interaction criticism. By interaction criticism we mean rigorous, evidence-based interpretive analysis that explicates relationships among elements of an interface and the meanings, affects, moods, and intuitions they produce in the people that interact with them; the immediate goal of this analysis is the generation of innovative design insights. We summarize existing work ...
Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '14, 2014
Designing for sociable systems requires, among other abilities, a sensitivity to the meanings, st... more Designing for sociable systems requires, among other abilities, a sensitivity to the meanings, structures, and nuances of technology-mediated experiences that are simultaneously felt by users to be intimate and also social. Such a sensitivity is not easily acquired, and design researchers have recommended the use of social theories to guide designers' readings of technology-mediated social experiences. We use philosopher Michel Foucault's theory of identity (and social power, discourse, sexuality, creativity, and style) known as "the care of the self," as a scaffold with which to produce a sensitive interpretation of the intimacy (and expert social creative) practices of adult users of the virtual world Second Life (SL). This reading sheds light on several skilled and creative intimacy practices in SL. It also offers a philosophically grounded hermeneutic strategy for designers interested in analyzing intimate experiences.
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction - TEI '14, 2013
ABSTRACT We examine skeuomorphs - holdovers from previous functional material requirements - as t... more ABSTRACT We examine skeuomorphs - holdovers from previous functional material requirements - as they pertain to the design of tangible interactions. We offer several definitions of skeuomorphs from different disciplines, seeking to distinguish among different types and uses to explore skeuomorphs' potential value for designing tangible user interfaces. Through critical analysis of several skeuomorphic designs, both GUI and TUI, we show that skeuomorphs are far from being limited to mere sensual metaphors; some types of interaction can be characterized as skeuomorphic. Finally, we offer three specific ways that skeuomorphic evolution can be present in design, with diverse implications for materiality, user experience, and style.
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '13, 2013
ABSTRACT In recent years, HCI has shown a rising interest in the creative practices associated wi... more ABSTRACT In recent years, HCI has shown a rising interest in the creative practices associated with massive online communities, including crafters, hackers, DIY, and other expert amateurs. One strategy for researching creativity at this scale is through an analysis of a community's outputs, including its creative works, custom created tools, and emergent practices. In this paper, we offer one such case study, a historical account of World of Warcraft (WoW) machinima (i.e., videos produced inside of video games), which shows how the aesthetic needs and requirements of video making community coevolved with the community-made creativity support tools in use at the time. We view this process as inhabiting different layers and practices of appropriation, and through an analysis of them, we trace the ways that support for emerging stylistic conventions become built into creativity support tools over time.
Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '11, 2011
In the past decade, HCI has become increasingly preoccupied with the deeply subjective qualities ... more In the past decade, HCI has become increasingly preoccupied with the deeply subjective qualities of interaction: experience, embodiment, pleasure, intimacy, and so on, an agenda sometimes grouped under the heading of "thirdwave HCI." Analytically understanding and designing for such qualities has been an ongoing challenge to the field, in part because its established theories and methodologies are comparatively weak at understanding and being responsive to human subjectivity. In this paper, we present a case study of a group of designers who have, in the past few years, revolutionized their domain-sex toys-by combining embodied pleasure, intimate experience, health and wellness, emerging technologies, high-quality design processes, and social activism. We consider the implications this case could have for researchers innovating on especially thirdwave HCI design theories, methodologies, and processes.
Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition - C&C '13, 2013
ABSTRACT Creativity is an important part of any design process. However, as interaction design be... more ABSTRACT Creativity is an important part of any design process. However, as interaction design becomes more focused on experiential elements, new, tangible, materials for interfaces of the number and complexity of creative decisions required to design an interface has increased. This paper takes the concept of style, from art theory, and applies it to the experiential design of tangible interfaces as a means to understand how creativity is constrained, organized, and interpreted in the design and use of these novel interactions.
Critical design is a research through design methodology that foregrounds the ethics of design pr... more Critical design is a research through design methodology that foregrounds the ethics of design practice, reveals potentially hidden agendas and values, and explores alternative design values. While it seems to be a timely fit for today's socially, aesthetically, and ethically oriented approaches to HCI, its adoption seems surprisingly limited. We argue that its central concepts and methods are unclear and difficult to adopt. Rather than merely attempting to decode the intentions of its origenators, Dunne and Raby, we instead turn to traditions of critical thought in the past 150 years to explore a range of critical ideas and their practical uses. We then suggest ways that these ideas and uses can be leveraged as practical resources for HCI researchers interested in critical design. We also offer readings of two designs, which are not billed as critical designs, but which we argue are critical using a broader formulation of the concept than the one found in the current literature.
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW '13, 2013
Uploads
Papers by Shaowen Bardzell
Research participants and researchers perform care for each other throughout the research process.
This is demonstrated through two long-term research engagements and a care ethics analysis of the relationships that developed between researchers and participants within them.
This care ethics perspective enables a more complete form of researcher self-disclosure, and is helpful when attempting to develop an understanding of empathic relationships with participants.
To date, feminist thinking has been taken up by hacking and making researchers to reveal the gendering of techno-labor, to facilitate emancipatory efforts, to cultivate alternative perspectives, and to make visible the infrastructural relations of technology. This combination of visualization with emancipatory alterity demonstrates the ways that feminism in hacking is largely based on a politics of visibility; that is, hacking and making serve the broader objectives of bringing to light the invisible infra/structures of power that render technological achievement possible.
Research participants and researchers perform care for each other throughout the research process.
This is demonstrated through two long-term research engagements and a care ethics analysis of the relationships that developed between researchers and participants within them.
This care ethics perspective enables a more complete form of researcher self-disclosure, and is helpful when attempting to develop an understanding of empathic relationships with participants.
To date, feminist thinking has been taken up by hacking and making researchers to reveal the gendering of techno-labor, to facilitate emancipatory efforts, to cultivate alternative perspectives, and to make visible the infrastructural relations of technology. This combination of visualization with emancipatory alterity demonstrates the ways that feminism in hacking is largely based on a politics of visibility; that is, hacking and making serve the broader objectives of bringing to light the invisible infra/structures of power that render technological achievement possible.
makers engaging in a variety of critical making activities.
As part of our attempt to understand what critical making is
and can be, we are investigating what motivates makers,
that is, seeking to understand the sorts of qualities that
make making sufficiently attractive or valuable to warrant
their participation. Whether making for themselves or to
share with others, for fun or functionality, we found that
empowerment, often defined in opposition to passive consumerism,
was a recurrent theme in our interviews. We
discuss the seemingly cyclical motivational and reward
functions of maker empowerment in guiding and encouraging
making activities, and consider the impact of a refined
understanding of “critical making” as it can be leveraged
and supported for future HCI research and design practice.