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1. Analyzing Value Discovery in Design Decisions Through Ethicography

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300307  

   Chivukula, Shruthi Sai; Gray, Colin M.; Brier, Jason A. (May 2019, Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '19)

   HCI scholarship is increasingly concerned with the ethical impact of socio-technical systems. Current theoretically driven approaches that engage with ethics generally prescribe only abstract approaches by which designers might consider values in the design process. However, there is little guidance on methods that promote value discovery, which might lead to more specific examples of relevant values in specific design contexts. In this paper, we elaborate a method for value discovery, identifying how values impact the designer's decision making. We demonstrate the use of this method, called Ethicography, in describing value discovery and use throughout the design process. We present analysis of design activity by user experience (UX) design students in two lab protocol conditions, describing specific human values that designers considered for each task, and visualizing the interplay of these values. We identify opportunities for further research, using the Ethicograph method to illustrate value discovery and translation into design solutions. 

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2. MobiSweep: Exploring Spatial Design Ideation Using a Smartphone as a Hand-held Reference Plane

   https://doi.org/10.1145/2839462.2839490  

   Vinayak, Devarajan Ramanujan (February 2016, TEI '16 Proceedings of the TEI '16: Tenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction)

   In this paper, we explore quick 3D shape composition during early-phase spatial design ideation. Our approach is to re-purpose a smartphone as a hand-held reference plane for creating, modifying, and manipulating 3D sweep surfaces. We implemented MobiSweep, a prototype application to explore a new design space of constrained spatial interactions that combine direct orientation control with indirect position control via well-established multi-touch gestures. MobiSweep leverages kinesthetically aware interactions for the creation of a sweep surface without explicit position tracking. The design concepts generated by users, in conjunction with their feedback, demonstrate the potential of such interactions in enabling spatial ideation. 

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3. What Kind of Work Do "Asshole Designers" Create? Describing Properties of Ethical Concern on Reddit

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395486  

   Gray, Colin M.; Chivukula, Shruthi Sai; Lee, Ahreum (July 2020, DIS '20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM on Designing Interactive Systems Conference)

   Design practitioners are increasingly engaged in describing ethical complexity in their everyday work, exemplified by concepts such as "dark patterns" and "dark UX." In parallel, researchers have shown how interactions and discourses in online communities allow access to the various dimensions of design complexity in practice. In this paper, we conducted a content analysis of the subreddit "/r/assholedesign," identifying how users on Reddit engage in conversation about ethical concerns. We identify what types of artifacts are shared, and the salient ethical concerns that community members link with "asshole" behaviors. Based on our analysis, we propose properties that describe "asshole designers," both distinct and in relation to dark patterns, and point towards an anthropomorphization of ethics that foregrounds the inscription of designer's values into designed outcomes. We conclude with opportunities for further engagement with ethical complexity in online and offline contexts, stimulating ethics-focused conversations among social media users and design practitioners. 

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4. Cultural Context in Engineering Design: Exploring the Influence of Communication on Design Practices

   https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4068593  

   Marshall, Avery; Fu, Katherine (December 2025, Journal of Mechanical Design)

   Just as engineering designs can be uniquely created for different cultures around the world, engineers come from all over and view design through their own cultural lenses. Culture can impact how designers perceive themselves, their self-efficacy, and the way they interpret the design task at hand. Studies have shown that cultural values and behavior (i.e., cultural context) impact communication patterns, as well as learning strategies (Newman et al., 2017, “Psychological Safety: A Systematic Review of the Literature,” Hum. Resour. Manage. Rev., 27(3), pp. 521–535. 10.1016/j.hrmr.2017.01.001; Hirsch et al., 2001, “Engineering Design and Communication: The Case for Interdisciplinary Collaboration,” Int. J. Eng. Educ., 17(4/5), pp. 343–348). Halls' information processing continuum illuminates how some cultures communicate explicitly through written and spoken words (low context), while others communicate with a common awareness of nonverbal cues (high context) (Handford et al., 2019, “Which ‘Culture’? A Critical Analysis of Intercultural Communication in Engineering Education,” J. Eng. Educ., 108(2), pp. 161–177. 10.1002/jee.20254). Designers from low-context cultures are more comfortable in a low-context learning environment (e.g., with explicitly written instructions), whereas those from high-context cultures benefit more from face-to-face interactions (Goel and Pirolli, 1992, “The Structure of Design Problem Spaces,” Cogn. Sci., 16(3), pp. 395–429. 10.1207/s15516709cog1603_3). These communication differences impact cross-cultural collaboration within global companies and virtual teams. This study examined whether communicating a design task in a more engaging manner would impact solution quality and self-efficacy, particularly in light of the designer's culture and/or familiarity with the design problem. Engineering undergraduate students and professionals were recruited from each of 10 countries, including the United States, to complete a design task and respond to self-perception questions. Participants were presented with the design problem in one of two modes: written (low context) or video (high context). Results showed that delivery modality and cultural context did impact design solution quality and self-efficacy; however, differences were found between professionals and students. 

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5. Physical Visualization Design: Decoupling Interface and System Design

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3725334  

   Chen, Yiru; Li, Xupeng; Tao, Jeffrey; Ramjit, Lana; Mitra, Subrata; Ghaderi, Javad; Netravali, Ravi; Parameswaran, Aditya; Rubenstein, Dan; Wu, Eugene (June 2025, Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data)

   Interactive visualization interfaces enable users to efficiently explore, analyze, and make sense of their datasets. However, as data grows in size, it becomes increasingly challenging to build data interfaces that meet the interface designer's desired latency expectations and resource constraints. Cloud DBMSs, while optimized for scalability, often fail to meet latency expectations, necessitating complex, bespoke query execution and optimization techniques for data interfaces. This involves manually navigating a huge optimization space that is sensitive to interface design and resource constraints, such as client vs server data and compute placement, choosing which computations are done offline vs online, and selecting from a large library of visualization-optimized data structures. This paper advocates for a Physical Visualization Design (PVD) tool that decouples interface design from system design to provide design independence. Given an interfaces underlying data flow, interactions with latency expectations, and resource constraints, PVD checks if the interface is feasible and, if so, proposes and instantiates a middleware architecture spanning the client, server, and cloud DBMS that meets the expectations. To this end, this paper presents Jade, the first prototype PVD tool that enables design independence. Jade proposes an intermediate representation called Diffplans to represent the data flows, develops cost estimation models that trade off between latency guarantees and plan feasibility, and implements an optimization framework to search for the middleware architecture that meets the guarantees. We evaluate Jade on six representative data interfaces as compared to Mosaic and Azure SQL database. We find Jade supports a wider range of interfaces, makes better use of available resources, and can meet a wider range of data, latency, and resource conditions. 

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