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As a research tradition, participatory design (PD) tends to focus on power dynamics where researchers hold greater power than participants. This paper uses design fiction to consider what this tendency overlooks by examining settings where participants may exist in multiple power relationships simultaneously implicated by the research, specifically focusing on the contexts of misinformation, disinformation, and online hate (M/D/OH). Drawing from existing literature in M/D/OH, we present a series of imaginary method abstracts that prompt questions for researchers to reflect on as they adapt PD techniques for new, different contexts. We highlight three value tensions—authenticity, reciprocity, and impact—integral to sustaining a concern for responsibility in PD scholarship. We end with reflections and potential considerations for responsibly applying PD and design fiction methods in M/D/OH settings. 

Given decades of Human computer interaction (HCI) research focused on scientific empiricism, it can be hard for the field to acknowledge that data analysis is both an emotional and speculative process. But what does it mean for this process of data analysis to embrace its situated and speculative nature? In this paper, we explore this possibility by building on decades of HCI mixed methods that root data analysis in design. Drawing on an autoethnographic design inquiry, we examine how data analysis can work as an implicating process, one that is not only critically grounded in a designer’s own situation but also offers modes of imagining the world otherwise. In this analysis, we find that autobiographical design can help HCI scholars to respond to current critiques of speculative design by grounding and rendering more personal certain kinds of speculation, opening a space for diverse voices to emerge. 

Despite the central role that stories play in social movement-building, they are difficult to sustainably document for many reasons. To explore this challenge, this paper describes the design of a community-based conversational storytelling agent (CSA) to document digital stories of housing insecurity. Building on insights from an ongoing grassroots project, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, we share how a study initially focused on CSA-support opened an investigation of the role that artificial intelligence may play in housing justice movements. Drawing from 17 interviews with narrators of housing insecurity experiences and collectors of such stories, we find that collectors perceive opportunities to expand means of documentation with multimedia and multi-language support. Meanwhile, some narrators perceive potential for a CSA to offer therapeutic storytelling experiences and document otherwise unrecorded stories. Yet, CSA encounters also surface perils of machine bias, as well as reduced possibilities of human connections and relations. 

While cross-disciplinary collaboration continues to be a cornerstone of inventive work in interactive design, the infrastructures of academia, as well as barriers to participation imposed by our professional organizations, make collaboration between particular groups difficult. In this workshop, we will focus specifically on how artist residencies are addressing (or not addressing) the challenges that artists, craftspeople, and/or independent designers face when collaborating with researchers affiliated with DIS. By focusing on the question “what is mutual benefit?”, this workshop seeks to combine the perspectives of artists and academic researchers who collaborate with artists (through residencies or other forms of sustained collaboration) to (1) reflect on benefits or deficiencies in what the residency research model is currently doing and (2) generate resources for our community to effectively structure and evaluate our methods of collaboration with artists. Our hope is to provide recognition of the research contributions of artists and pathways for equitable inclusion of artists as a first step towards broader infrastructural change. 

Over the past decade, the growth of voice assistants has presented new challenges within domestic life. Prior research has shown that such technologies affect users unevenly or fail to account for some relationships and domesticities entirely. Our work investigates the under-examined topic of queerness at home. Drawing on the experience of queer breakup, we describe a design inquiry and a first-person research approach exploring two concurrent relationships in separate households both using Alexa. We explore issues of temporality, glitch, and shared accountability. We also ask critical questions with audio experiments, including: How do voice assistants differentiate between queer voices? How should we converse with voice assistants about queerness? And are voice assistants “queer enough”? We contribute a discussion of difference, inclusion, and queer cultures of adversarial use to highlight the limitations of both everyday and professional language for describing and analyzing the particulars of queerness and interaction design.