Umeå universitets logga

In this paper we present our work on the design and evaluation of a web-based digital archive. The aim of this research project was to explore ways of enabling easy access to materials about their cultural heritage for indigenous people. In this project we worked in close collaboration with the Sami people across brainstorming sessions, design workshops, prototype development, and user tests. During this process we became aware of two intertwined sensitivities, i.e. a cultural sensitivity and a design sensitivity - and we refer to this as a “double sensitivity”. The data recorded from the interviews and the participants' interaction with the prototype were analyzed using thematic analysis as the methodological approach. Our results pointed at five main code clusters including: tonality of the design, usability, sociability, ethical considerations and technical errors. In this paper we discuss these findings, and we suggest that our results, and the proposed notion of “double sensitivity” contributes important research on human computer interaction (HCI) design for indigenous people.

There is a growing strand of research on social justice in HCI. While many contemporary HCI studies are being conducted and analyzed in a social justice context, still few studies examine how this plays out among older adults and their use of technology. In this paper, three streams of HCI and HCI-connected research are mapped out describing personal characteristics, economic benefits, and age-related vulnerability at the forefront of older adults’ technology use. Through an empirical study and a social justice-oriented perspective, I establish how HCI research on older adults’ technology use fails to include important societal factors and misses out on valuable insights such as how societal structures can affect senior’s life and technology use. Contributions posit three opportunities into how a social justice-oriented perspective can benefit research regarding older adults’ technology use in HCI.

As technology and social media develop and expand, technology-facilitated sex trafficking becomes increasingly difficult to take action against and prevent. Technology-facilitated sex trafficking implies the use of digital tools such as social media platforms to coordinate trafficking and (mis)lead persons into sexual exploitation, e.g., commercial sex. To address and prevent sex trafficking as it expands through technology, legal frameworks can both help and interfere with the work provided by aid organizations and authorities. We present an expert interview study with six professionals from authorities, women shelters and NGO organizations working alongside the Swedish (governance) Model. Our findings show that digital technology is useful yet heavily challenging for anti-trafficking organizations and authorities in their fight against sex trafficking, exploitation, and digital child abuse. More resources and tools are needed to mitigate the (mis)use of technology and prevent abuse. To do this, we discuss the need to recontextualize efforts against trafficking within the structural conditions and legal model of Swedish society that facilitate exploitation. Furthermore, we propose a series of risk-mitigating approaches which centers four questions for the HCI community working towards anti-trafficking efforts.

The expanding interest in justice-oriented HCI focusing on critical perspectives, structural oppression, and marginalization—often referred to as social justice—is reflected in a growing number of publications over the past few years. Through the continuous growth of social justice in HCI, we argue that now is a good time to provide an overview of the ongoing and current streams of social justice research. We introduce social justice as it has grown in HCI during the last 15 years followed by the most commonly framed theoretical tenets. Secondly, we construct a corpus of 60 HCI articles building on social justice as the main concept. Through our corpus we summarize and present 4 currently ongoing streams of research to further a cohesive, yet fluid understanding of how social justice is shaped and understood within HCI. Describing these interconnected streams also gives us the possibility to frame and describe the current development and move forward as a research community. Based on our study and discussions, we suggest 6 considerations for HCI researchers seeking to work with social justice as a concept, and we emphasize the need for long-term engagement in justiceoriented research to foreground and enable societal change and social good. Through this study, we contribute to the ongoing growth of social justice research in HCI by providing an overview of current streams and ways forward.

We tell a story of a woman getting ready to go for a walk, using a plethora of personal safety technologies designed and reported on by HCI researchers to ensure her own safety against public gendered violence (GV). To reflect on this approach, we elicit the Four Domains of Power, highlighting HCI’s over-engagement with interpersonal safety technologies when seeking to intervene in GV.In later parts of the paper, we discuss two main contributions for HCI: (1) The Complexities of Designing for GV as an Interpersonal Problem and (2) Complexities of Designing for Normative Understandings of GV to highlight the potential harm in employing interpersonal technological solutions to socio-political issues. Coming back to the four domains of power, we ultimately argue that HCI-researchers and designers can use the framework to analyse their technological interventions to address GV in more nuanced ways so as to not re-produce shortsighted, solutionist, or victim-blaming technologies.