CSCW Research Research Articles

Family Resilience in Care Coordination Technologies: Designing for Families as Adaptive Systems

When a child is admitted to the hospital with a critical illness, their family must adapt and manage care and stress. CSCW researchers have shown the potential for collaborative technologies to support and augment care collaboration between patients and caregivers. However, as a field CSCW lacks a holistic, theory-driven understanding of how collaborative technologies might best augment and support the family caregiving circle as a socio-technical system. In this paper, we report findings from interviews with 14 parents of children with cancer admitted for extended hospitalizations. We use the resilience-based Family Adaptive Systems framework from family therapy as a lens to characterize their challenges and practices across four key subsystems: Emotion, Control, Meaning, and Maintenance. Then, we introduce a fifth system-the Information system-and draw on our empirical findings to suggest theory-driven opportunities for designing future collaborative technology to augment collaborative caregiving and enhance family resilience.

Whose Knowledge is Valued? Epistemic Injustice in CSCW Applications

Social computing scholars have long known that people do not interact with knowledge in straightforward ways, especially in digital environments. While policies around knowledge are essential for targeting misinformation, they are value-laden; in choosing how to present information, we undermine non-traditional, often non-Western, ways of knowing. Epistemic injustice is the systemic exclusion of certain people and methods from the knowledge canon. Epistemic injustice chips away at one's testimony and vocabulary until they are stripped of their due right to know and understand. In this paper, we articulate how epistemic injustice in sociotechnical applications leads to material harm. Inspired by a hybrid collaborative autoethnography of 14 CSCW practitioners, we present three cases of epistemic injustice in sociotechnical applications: online transgender healthcare, identity sensemaking on r/bisexual, and Indigenous ways of knowing on r/AskHistorians. We further explore signature tensions across our autoethnographic materials and relate them to previous CSCW research areas and personal non-technological experiences. We argue that epistemic injustice can serve as a unifying and intersectional lens for CSCW research by surfacing dimensions of epistemic community and power. Finally, we present a call to action of three changes the CSCW community should make to move toward its own goals of research justice. We call for CSCW researchers to center individual experiences, bolster communities, and remediate issues of epistemic power as a means towards epistemic justice. In sum, we recount, synthesize, and propose solutions for the various forms of epistemic injustice that CSCW sites of study---including CSCW itself---propagate.

"We're not all construction workers": Algorithmic Compression of Latinidad on TikTok

The Latinx diaspora in the United States is a rapidly growing and complex demographic who face intersectional harms and marginalizations in sociotechnical systems and are currently underserved in CSCW research. While the field understands that algorithms and digital content are experienced differently by marginalized populations, more investigation is needed about how Latinx people experience social media and, in particular, visual media. In this paper, we focus on how Latinx people experience the algorithmic system of the video-sharing platform TikTok. Through a bilingual interview and visual elicitation study of 19 Latinx TikTok users and 59 survey participants, we explore how Latinx individuals experience TikTok and its Latinx content. We find Latinx TikTok users actively use platform affordances to create positive and affirming identity content feeds, but these feeds are interrupted by negative content (i.e. violence, stereotypes, linguistic assumptions) due to platform affordances that have unique consequences for Latinx diaspora users. We discuss these implications on Latinx identity and representation, introduce the concept of algorithmic identity compression, where sociotechncial systems simplify, flatten, and conflate intersection identities, resulting in compression via the loss of critical cultural data deemed unnecessary by these systems and designers of them. This study explores how Latinx individuals are particularly vulnerable to this in sociotechnical systems, such as, but not limited to, TikTok.

"Let's embark on a joint health journey" - How Boundary Negotiating Artifacts Influence Patients' Psychological Ownership in Chronic Care

CSCW and HCI research has a standing discourse on boundary negotiating artifacts and psychological ownership. Both concepts are attributed the potential to address the spreading chronic disease pandemic and rising healthcare costs. While CSCW has attended only to boundary negotiating artifacts to study patient-provider collaboration, the psychological ownership discourse primarily focuses on the perception of ownership over digital objects. Despite studies in both discourses reporting promising results, the concepts have been studied separately. Accordingly, the ways boundary negotiating artifacts relate to psychological ownership in healthcare interactions remain unclear. In this research-through-design study, we evaluate the Digital Companion as a technology-based boundary negotiating artifact. Our field study with 27 patients shows how the Digital Companion fosters psychological ownership in weight management by bridging domains and closing the loop between patient self-management and medical support in consultations. By understanding how boundary negotiating artifacts foster psychological ownership, we gain deeper insights into how patients assume and share ownership of their therapy plans. Our analysis uncovers the emergence of perceived shared ownership as BNAs create concordance between patients and physicians.

Entangled Amid Misaligned Seams: Limitations to Technology-Mediated Care for Repairing Infrastructural Breakdowns in a Youth Empowerment Program

The COVID-19 pandemic broke down the human infrastructure of many community-based programs, disrupting in-person care services for low-resourced families. Yet, minimal work has explored how actors repair these breakdowns and how other infrastructures may interfere with repairs in such contexts. Interviewing adolescents and adults affiliated with a youth empowerment program, we used the pandemic to examine how a human infrastructure that previously facilitated a sense of community broke down and how members attempted to repair this infrastructure. While organized activities, resources, and interpersonal interactions aligned to facilitate in-person care that established a sense of community, incorporating information and communication technologies to align a sociotechnical infrastructure during social restrictions could not overcome multiple constraints imposed by other infrastructures that limited this sense of community. We discuss limitations to care and aligning together multiple disjointed infrastructures, calling for CSCW researchers to critically consider asset-based design as a methodology that might help sustain a community's well-being.

(Dis)placed Contributions: Uncovering Hidden Hurdles to Collaborative Writing Involving Non-Native Speakers, Native Speakers, and AI-Powered Editing Tools

Content creation today often takes place via collaborative writing. A longstanding interest of CSCW research lies in understanding and promoting the coordination between co-writers. However, little attention has been paid to individuals who write in their non-native language and to co-writer groups involving them. We present a mixed-method study that fills the above gap. Our participants included 32 co-writer groups, each consisting of one native speaker (NS) of English and one non-native speaker (NNS) with limited proficiency. They performed collaborative writing adopting two different workflows: half of the groups began with NNSs taking the first editing turn and half had NNSs act after NSs. Our data revealed a 'late-mover disadvantage' exclusively experienced by NNSs: an NNS's ideational contributions to the joint document were suppressed when their editing turn was placed after an NS's turn, as opposed to ahead of it. Surprisingly, editing help provided by AI-powered tools did not exempt NNSs from being disadvantaged. Instead, it triggered NSs' overestimation of NNSs' English proficiency and agency displayed in the writing, introducing unintended tensions into the collaboration. These findings shed light on the fair assessment and effective promotion of a co-writer's contributions in language diverse settings. In particular, they underscore the necessity of disentangling contributions made to the ideational, expressional, and lexical aspects of the joint writing.

Mitigating Gender Stereotypes Toward AI Agents Through an eXplainable AI (XAI) Approach

People often apply gender stereotypes toward computerized agents. Rather than challenging these stereotypes, modern AI technologies controversially use them in creating AI agents that underline stereotypical gendered roles. This approach thus further reinforces the often male-dominated societal gender norms and disenfranchises women and gender non-binary individuals. While this issue has raised concerns in the HCI and CSCW communities, still little is known regarding how to mitigate the negative impacts of embedding gender stereotypes in AI agents. In this paper, we propose an eXplainable AI (XAI) approach to mitigating individuals' gender stereotypes toward AI agents. We conducted an online video vignette experiment with 350 participants randomly assigned to one of the eighteen conditions of a 3 (gender of the agent: woman, man, gender-neutral) x 3 (task gender: feminine, masculine, neutral) x 2 (presence or absence of AI explanation) between-subjects design. Our findings indeed suggest that XAI helped participants avoid applying gender stereotypes toward gendered AI agents, by increasing their understanding of how the agent came to its decision and decreasing their rating of the agent's humanlikeness. We contribute to CSCW research by providing a timely investigation into individuals' gender stereotypes toward the state-of-the-art AI agents and by advancing the empirical understanding of the cognitive processes and mechanisms underlying these gender stereotypes. We also demonstrate how eXplainable AI can effectively suppress the application of social characteristics (i.e., gender stereotypes) toward AI agents by disrupting the said cognitive processes. Insights from this study can inform how future AI technologies should be designed to create a progressive gender reality that will gradually reshape humans' experience and ingrained gender ideologies.

Social fidelity in cooperative virtual reality maritime training

ABSTRACT Each year maritime accidents occur at sea causing human casualties. Training facilities serve to reduce the risk of human error by allowing maritime teams to train safety procedures in cooperative real-size immersive simulators. However, they are expensive and only few maritime professionals have access to such simulators. Virtual Reality (VR) can provide a digital all-immersive learning environment at a reduced cost allowing for increased access. However, a key ingredient of what makes all-immersive physical simulators effective is that they allow for multiple participants to engage in cooperative social interaction. Social interaction which allows trainees to develop skills and competencies in navigating situational awareness essential for safety training. Social interaction requires social fidelity. Moving from physical simulators into digital simulators based upon VR technology thus challenges us as HCI researchers to figure out how to design social fidelity into immersive training simulators. We explore social fidelity theoretically and technically by combining core conceptual work from CSCW research to the design experimentation of social fidelity for maritime safety training. We argue that designing for social fidelity in VR simulators requires designers to contextualize the VR experience in location, artifacts, and actors structured through dependencies in work allowing trainees to perform situational awareness, coordination, and communication which are all features of social fidelity. Further, we identify the risk of breaking the social fidelity immersion related to the intent and social state of the participants entering the simulation. Finally, we suggest that future designs of social fidelity should consider not only trainees in the design, but also the social relations created by the instructors’ guidance as part of the social fidelity immersion.

What Research through Art can bring to CSCW: exploring ambiguous futures of work

Abstract As work is shifting and changing, we, CSCW researchers, must consider our role in creating work futures, and what experiences we want to produce through technology design. What qualities are important to consider about the human experience when designing work technologies for the future? Exploring the potentials of artistic practices for epistemological inquiry, we demonstrate Research through Art as a novel futuring approach for CSCW research, leveraging the power of artistic practice for exploring questions of human experience. We engaged with young artists who created art pieces that manifested their hopes, intuitions, and anxieties on the future of work. Our analytical inquiry of these artistic practices allowed us to explore what different futures might be imaginable and what might these futures feel like. We find that futuring entails engaging with ambiguities, which can be a productive resource for design. We identified the ambiguities of time, purpose, body, identity, and agency as foundational for the imaginaries produced by the artists. By intersecting the ambiguities, we can begin to systematically frame novel design questions for CSCW technologies of the future by conceptualizing these ambiguities as multifinalities – single points from which many possibilities emerge.

Knowledge Spillover: Between Serendipity and Strategic Planning - Lessons for Practice-oriented Interventions into Regional Innovation Systems

Previous CSCW research has paid increasing attention to regional innovation systems providing the context for CSCW research and design. In this paper we provide insights into attempts to intervene in such a regional innovation system via practice-oriented activities. Our findings describe experiences of co-creating knowledge around digitization of SMEs on a regional level, beyond individual company contexts. We reflect on the benefits and challenges such an approach affords and highlight the importance of interpersonal relationships and similarities between practices in different contexts to enable intended but also initially unexpected knowledge spillovers. Our findings highlight how a praxeological approach to CSCW can be influential in regional development programs, and open this field to CSCW research and design. We draw out lessons for similar interventions and outline fruitful avenues for future research.

Characterising CSCW Research on Human-Robot Collaboration

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is an increasingly prominent topic in CSCW. From telepresence systems through field robots for extreme missions to social robots in homes, HRC is becoming a recurring theme across a broad range of CSCW research. Based on the growing interest, we explore the coupling of the field of CSCW and research on robotics at this critical time. This paper presents a primary and secondary literature review of CSCW proceedings and venues for robotics research. We identified 29 CSCW papers that contribute to the body of HRC research and analyse the foundations on which these papers rely. Then, we identified 138 papers published in robotics outlets that either (1) cite one or more CSCW papers, or (2) use the term CSCW. We discuss how CSCW is currently contributing to HRC research through five research topics: Sociomateriality, teamwork, awareness, embodiment, and communication. The paper contributes by offering three key future pathways for expanding this area of research, outlining questions and gaps that have yet to be explored for (1) expanding the application domains and diversifying robot types for HRC, (2) methodological implications for HRC, and (3) learning from human collaboration.

Moving Towards Mobility Justice: Challenges and Considerations for Supporting Advocacy

In response to climate change and continued urbanization, urban transportation systems around the world are undergoing transitions to promote lower-emission vehicles, public transit, biking and walking. However, mobility is a complex issue that raises important questions of social justice as a result of its connections to numerous aspects of everyday life and the broader social and political contexts. Drawing on interviews with transportation advocates across Canada, we identify four ways in which the design and use of existing mobility tools and technologies perpetuate mobility injustices, and deepen the divide between urban planners and the public. Looking across these arguments, we note path-dependence in transportation knowledge infrastructures as a common barrier to mobility justice advocacy that can be difficult to recognize or overcome. Finally, we consider tactics that research in HCI and CSCW might pursue as part of efforts to unsettle path-dependence and reorient transportation planning towards mobility justice.

Empirically Understanding the Potential Impacts and Process of Social Influence in Human-AI Teams

In the coming years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be applied as a teammate that works alongside and collaborates with humans. Prior research in teaming and CSCW has shown that teammates have the ability to change the thoughts and behaviors of each other through simple interactions in a process known as social influence. However, to date, research has yet to identify the social influence that AI teammates could have in these human-AI teams, which has led to a limited understanding of how AI teammates will change the behaviors of their human teammates. To remedy this gap, we conduct a mixed-methods study (N=33) with young individuals to explore how humans could behaviorally adapt and perceive their behavioral adaptation due to interaction with an AI teammate. Qualitative results report that perceived three unique stages they had to experience for the social influence of their AI teammate to lead to adaptation (i.e., perceiving a sense of control, identifying a technological or performative justification, and gaining first-hand experience). Quantitative results validate and illustrate the results of this perceived process, as results show that participants adapted their behaviors to complement the behaviors of different types of AI teammates. This study contributes to the CSCW/HCI field by developing an initial understanding of AI teammates' social influence in human-AI teams, which will be a pivotal design and research consideration in future efforts.

Security Patchworking in Lebanon: Infrastructuring Across Failing Infrastructures

In this paper we bring to light the infrastructuring work carried out by people in Lebanon to establish and maintain everyday security in response to multiple simultaneously failing infrastructures. We do so through interviews with 13 participants from 12 digital and human rights organisations and two weeks of ethnographically informed fieldwork in Beirut, Lebanon, in July 2022. Through our analysis we develop the notion of security patchworking that makes visible the infrastructuring work necessitated to secure basic needs such as electricity provision, identity authentication and financial resources. Such practices are rooted in differing mechanisms of protection that often result in new forms of insecurity. We discuss the implications for CSCW and HCI researchers and point to security patchworking as a lens to be used when designing technologies to support infrastructuring, while advocating for collaborative work across CSCW and security research.

Concept of Operations as Epistemic Object: The Sociotechnical Design Roles of a Systems Engineering Document

When large, complex interorganizational collaborations create new systems, they must discover how the system should work and how it should integrate into the overall organizational milieu. These collaborations must also draw upon and accommodate a host of processes and resources. In this paper, we present results from a qualitative case study of a key policy and process document for a large design project for a civic traffic management system that must serve multiple organizations and government agencies. The document is one common to systems engineering, but less familiar to CSCW: the Concept of Operations (ConOps). We describe the sociotechnical design functions of the ConOps. We also analyze the document and its developmental process using Ewenstein and Whyte's concept of epistemic objects," which has been useful for CSCW and design research scholars to understand the roles artifacts play in the messy processes of design and cooperative work. We find that the ConOps exhibits many qualities of an epistemic object and supports the deeply integrated work of "designing" both the system and the interorganizational collaboration itself. We then explore avenues for future research in similarly complex infrastructural design settings.

Missed Opportunities for Human-Centered AI Research: Understanding Stakeholder Collaboration in Mental Health AI Research

In the mental health domain, patient engagement is key to designing human-centered technologies. CSCW and HCI researchers have delved into various facets of collaboration in AI research; however, previous research neglects the individuals who both produce the data and will be most impacted by the resulting technologies, such as patients. This study examines how interdisciplinary researchers and mental health patients who donate their data for AI research collaborate and how we can improve human-centeredness in mental health AI research. We interviewed patient participants, AI researchers, and clinical researchers in a federally funded mental health AI research project. We used the concept of boundary objects to understand stakeholder collaboration. Our findings reveal that the social media data provided by patient participants functioned as boundary objects that facilitated stakeholder collaboration. Although the collaboration appeared to be successful, we argue that building consensus, or understanding each other's perspectives, can improve the human-centeredness of mental health AI research. Based on the findings, we provide suggestions for human-centered mental health AI research, working with data donors as domain experts, making invisible work visible, and privacy implications.

Unfulfilled Promises of Child Safety and Privacy: Portrayals and Use of Children in Smart Home Marketing

Smart home technologies are making their way into families. Parents' and children's shared use of smart home technologies has received growing attention in CSCW and related research communities. Families and children are also frequently featured as target audiences in smart home product marketing. However, there is limited knowledge of how exactly children and family interactions are portrayed in smart home product marketing, and to what extent those portrayals align with the actual consideration of children and families in product features and resources for child safety and privacy. We conducted a content analysis of product websites and online resources of 102 smart home products, as these materials constitute a main marketing channel and information source about products for consumers. We found that despite featuring children in smart home marketing, most analyzed product websites did not mention child safety features and lacked sufficient information on how children's data is collected and used. Specifically, our findings highlight misalignments in three aspects: (1) children are depicted as users of smart home products but there are insufficient child-friendly product features; (2) harmonious child-product co-presence is portrayed but potential child safety issues are neglected; and (3) children are shown as the subject of monitoring and datafication but there is limited information on child data collection and use. We discuss how parent-child relationships and parenting may be negatively impacted by such marketing depictions, and we provide design and policy recommendations for better incorporating child safety and privacy considerations into smart home products.

'Not Just a Computer Screen:' Distributed Attunement in Virtual School Environments

Many digital platforms pit consumers or customers and service workers against one another or render human work invisible, concealing human labor for profit and the charismatic allure of automation. When schooling is digitized, what transformations occur to the relationships between teachers, parents, and students, and with what consequences? In pre-pandemic virtual and hybrid schooling, I find that teachers developed alternative strategies to practice caring responsiveness in online environments of low visibility through a process I call "distributed attunement.'' These strategies entailed building holistic relationships, collaborating with student families and fellow teachers, and interpreting student experiences using a combination of platform data and social information. Rather than giving in to digitization as a vehicle for removing or obscuring care work, this study illustrates that teachers centered relationships as core to the virtual schooling experience. The distributed attunement teachers in virtual schools created indicates the impossibility of separating technical and affective labor in a pedagogical context and provide promising sites to develop supports for high-quality online education. Further, teachers' navigation of limited visibility suggests tactics for CSCW researchers concerned with documenting invisible labor in the development of digital systems. Nevertheless, these strategies can be appropriated or undermined by employers in ways that threaten to diminish their efficacy, requiring ongoing advocacy to push for flourishing online schooling options.

Neurodiversity and the Accessible University: Exploring Organizational Barriers, Access Labor and Opportunities for Change

The access needs of neurodivergent individuals in organizational settings are many and varied - and so are their everyday contributions to the creation of collective access. In this study, we contribute to the growing body of CSCW research on accessibility and investigate the invisible access labor of neurodivergent students in three computer science institutions. We use an exploratory, multi-stakeholder approach, combining semi-structured interviews (n=26) and document analysis. We adopted a broad definition of neurodiversity: our study included individuals with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, cyclothymia and individuals with neurological conditions that developed as a result of illness, trauma or injury. Our findings show that neurodivergent students face a number of structural and attitudinal barriers to access in the educational environment and within the disability support system. We identified barriers in three main areas: (i) assistive technology access barriers, (ii) cognitive and physical access barriers, and (iii) social access barriers. We examined how stigma, individualized understandings of disability and intersectional disadvantage shape organizational practices and explored how students are creatively improving collective access through micro-interventions, although these efforts are largely invisible. We then draw on our findings to identify opportunities for change. We propose access grafting as a bottom-up approach to rethinking and reorienting organizational strategies to improve equitable access.?

What is a File on a Phone? Personal Information Management Practices Amongst WhatsApp Users

The file, as a means of sharing structured information across time and place, has spanned centuries of ICTs. Despite much CSCW research on file management practices in organizational desktop computing settings, little research has examined how files are managed and shared using mobile devices. Our research asks, how do mobile phones and mobile applications impact the personal information management (PIM) practices involving files for young adults? In this interview and task observation study, we examined the file management practices of mobile phone users (N=25), both Android and iOS owners who use the superapp WhatsApp. Superapps like WeChat and WhatsApp are increasingly characterized as technology of life for the majority world, particularly among mobile-first users. We find that many grammars of action related to managing digital files in personal computing and email contexts persist, but participants' sharing practices are influenced by media ideologies of friends, family, colleagues; and that their file management practices are shaped by the affordances of WhatsApp, as well as mobile operating systems and device hardware constraints. These results will be useful to researchers examining collective PIM practices; mobile communication practices between users and businesses via messaging apps; and theories of personal information practices related to the sharing and storage of digital files among mobile-first cohorts who increasingly share and access information via platforms and mobile applications.