Reworking the Gaps between Design and Ethnography

Khovanskaya, Vera; Sengers, Phoebe; Mazmanian, Melissa; Darrah, Charles N.

doi:10.1145/3025453.3026051

Cited by 37 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…The gap between trust in conventional design versus co-design is wide in this study context as it is in other contexts (Forlano and Mathew 2014;Nelson-Barber and Johnson 2016;Khovanskaya et al 2017). Evidence also supports the idea that communities do not believe that infrastructure controlled by outside sources and not informed by the community can succeed (Boyd 2011;Martín 2014;Dyck et al 2015;Black and McBean 2017).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 64%

Co-design of water services and infrastructure for Indigenous Canada: A scoping review

Bradford

Vogel

McPhedran

et al. 2018

FACETS

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There is movement in engineering fields and in Indigenous communities for enhancement of local participation in the design of community infrastructure. Inclusion of community priorities and unique cultural, spiritual, and traditional values harmonize the appearance, location, and functionality of developments with the social and cultural context in which they are built and contribute to holistic wellness. However, co-design processes that align community values and the technical needs of water facilities are difficult to find. A scoping review was conducted to explore the state of knowledge on co-design of water infrastructure in Indigenous Canada to build a knowledge base from which practices and processes could emerge. The scoping results revealed that articles and reports emerged only in recent years, contained case studies and meta-reviews with primary (qualitative) data, and involved community members in various capacities. Overall, 13 articles were reviewed that contributed to understanding co-design for water infrastructure in Indigenous Canada. Barriers to co-design included funding models for Indigenous community infrastructure, difficulties in engineers and designers understanding Indigenous worldviews and paradigms, and a lack of cooperation among stakeholders that contribute to ongoing design failures. A working definition of co-design for Indigenous water infrastructure is presented.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 64%

Co-design of water services and infrastructure for Indigenous Canada: A scoping review

Bradford

Vogel

McPhedran

et al. 2018

FACETS

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“…Dislodging the sediment of the present is a significant challenge but also presents an opportunity for reconfiguring our tools. The past is multiply concretized in the present day, in forms of speech, habits of interaction, technical artifacts, and expectations of other people and technologies-a situation ripe for methodological innovation, where we might re-deploy familiar techniques like ethnography and design thinking in novel tandem arrangements with historical inquiry [4]. Engaging with history will go hand in hand with continued work to reach out to new disciplinary and methodological spaces-in particular, to zones of research and praxis in which scholars and activists have been formulating modes of resistance and tactics for challenging the status quo.…”

Section: Commitment To Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing against the status quo

et al. 2018

Self Cite

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Innovation. Transformation. Disruption. These buzzwords suggest that the impacts of new technologies are all somehow revolutionary. Yet despite micro-disruptions to specific practices, new computing tools often fall short, reinforcing the status quo in new material forms. A smartphone appeals with the promise of working from the beach instead of the office; a worker breaks free from the office jail, only to be enrolled in expectations to be ever more available, on the clock even when supposedly on vacation at the beach. The oppression of the office has not been disrupted; instead, its reach has only expanded.The re-entrenchment of the status quo often entails the simultaneous reinforcement of inequity. Uber and Lyft transform the taxi industry. The consumer experience is more blissful than ever: A GPS-based app puts a car at your beck and call; no need to walk to a commercial corridor to hail a cab; no miscommunicated street crossings. Liberated from exclusionary licensing systems, anyone can be an independent digital entrepreneur driving on their own schedule. Uber even offers a subprime leasing program for drivers without good credit; payments are auto-deducted from a driver's paycheck; lessees lose the freedom to work on competing platforms or pursue other jobs; drivers sleep in their vehicles, work 12-plus-hour shifts, and default on their payments.Within the HCI community, there is growing interest in leveraging design as an agent of change in large-scale social challenges like sustainability, labor politics, and sexism. Yet the methodological repertoire we know is ill suited to the task. Practicing a traditional user-centered design process-one widely adopted in industry and taught in universities-would have us researching existing practices and needs in order to design technologies that might comfortably fit into existing routines. If we truly want to innovate, transform, and disrupt, we need new ways of working.In this article, we report on a set of conversations that grew out of a workshop held at DIS 2016 [1]. We explore how we might innovate in both method and outcome to design interactive systems that are responsive to current and future societal challenges. In contrast to user-centered design, we look for ways to design against the status quo, working to thwart the routines, habits, and norms of a social life that is inequitable and unsustainable.

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“…We may also look to build upon speculative or design fiction research more generally [e.g. 9, 23] and further bridge the temporal gap between design and ethnography [35], to develop methodologies which merge speculative designs with longer term participatory studies-aiming to probe and evaluate how users' acceptance of speculative digital wellbeing designs may change over time. How that may happen is beyond the scope of this paper, but I call for the digital wellbeing community to engage in speculative work to help think more deeply about unforeseen impacts of our tools.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When the Good Turns Ugly: Speculating Next Steps for Digital Wellbeing Tools

Widdicks

2020

Proceedings of the 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Shaping Experiences, Shaping Society

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Concerns surrounding technology use in society has led to the HCI community creating tools for 'digital wellbeing'. These aim to improve users' relationships with technology, but these positively motivated tools may initiate further negative impacts for users e.g. on their privacy or autonomy. Using Pierce's speculative design concepts of 'foot-in-the-door' technologies and focusing on three common digital wellbeing features (time limits and prompts, social 'do not disturb' modes, app and service blocking), I highlight how these tools are a small step away from being used to manipulate users which could enact slow shifts in users accepting such manipulation. Through this and the discussion, I accentuate that positively motivated designs may not explicitly lead to positive interactions by default. I hope this paper will facilitate speculative design and discussion in the digital wellbeing community, to ensure that our designs continue to mitigate negative impacts from technology now and in the future.

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Reworking the Gaps between Design and Ethnography

Cited by 37 publications

References 47 publications

Co-design of water services and infrastructure for Indigenous Canada: A scoping review

Co-design of water services and infrastructure for Indigenous Canada: A scoping review

Designing against the status quo

When the Good Turns Ugly: Speculating Next Steps for Digital Wellbeing Tools

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