The Care Work of Access

Abstract

Current approaches to AI and Assistive Technology (AT) often foreground task completion over other encounters such as expressions of care. Our paper challenges and complements such task-completion approaches by attending to the care work of access-the continual affective and emotional adjustments that people make by noticing and attending to one another. We explore how this work impacts encounters among people with and without vision impairments who complete tasks together. We find that bound up in attempts to get things done are concerns for one another and how well people are doing together. Reading this work through emerging disability studies and feminist STS scholarship, we account for two important forms of work that give rise to access: (1) mundane attunements and (2) noninnocent authorizations. Together these processes work as sensitizing concepts to help HCI scholars account for the ways that intelligent ATs both produce access while sometimes subverting people with disabilities.

Social Sensemaking with AI: Designing an Open-ended AI Experience with a Blind Child

“…To extend human capabilities, then, is to consider how design might aid such mutual productions of meaning and action, and do so in ways that are accessible to diverse users. A further point to consider is how such meanings and actions play into long established norms, and in some cases reproduce ableist norms that sanction the objectification and discrimination against people with disabilities [6]. In the work we present, for example, further research is needed to examine how mutual attention might be signified not just through bodily orientations that arguably align with sighted norms, but also in more diverse ways that expand the repertoire for interaction.…”

Sonic Technologies of a Queer Breakup

“…Throughout this study, we paid attention to consent, anonymity, and an ethic of care [10,59] as main guidelines for ethical considerations. Before starting the study, Kinnee talked with both Warlock and Michael to explain their goal of examining questions of voice assistants and queerness, and perhaps interrogate how IoT devices have baked in assumptions about the home, households, and relationships.…”

Troubling Care: Four Orientations for Wickedness in Design

“…In contrast, a tension might also include celebrating well-meaning care labor that should be expected, which can anglify care givers and in turn devalue the needs of care recipients. In HCI, this tension can be seen in research on how the prioritization of task completion in AI and Assistive Technology subverts people with disabilities, and might instead place greater emphasis on interdependent caring relations [11].…”

“…Disturbing such assumptions aims toward more critical practices that make accountable romantic techno-science projects, that despite good intentions, often either do not address or normalize painful relations and structures of care. Such entanglements have been increasingly recognized by HCI research that locates power and access within politics of care [11,23,37], and foregrounds unease as a potential byproduct within the emotional labor of research [6,66]. Taken together, these growing bodies of work highlight potential negative consequences of care across diverse domains.…”