User Agency Research Articles

Conferencing together in social virtual reality: Bringing agency back into affordances-based approaches in communication scholarship

Technological advancements allow embodied and synchronous communication via social virtual reality (VR), where multiple users interact as avatars in a shared virtual space. However, the affordances of social VR and how users interact with them have been underexplored. We expand the discourse on media affordances by emphasizing user agency in strategic media choices for overcoming constraints in physical and virtual worlds. We qualitatively investigated user experiences of a social VR platform. Findings from semi-structured interviews (N = 28) revealed that media selection is determined through a dynamic relationship between platforms designed to encourage action possibilities and users strategically leveraging media affordances to overcome situational constraints of their physical environment.

“I Want to Send a Message to My Friend”: Exploring the Shift of Agency to Older Adults in HRI

Communication among some older adults is affected by cognitive and mobility impairments. This increases isolation, particularly for those residing in care homes, and leads to accelerated cognitive decline. Previous research has leveraged assistive robots to promote recreational routines and communication among older adults, with the robot leading the interaction. However, older adults could have more agency in the interaction, as robots could extend elders’ intentions and needs. Therefore, we explored an approach whereby the robot’s agency is shifted to the older adults who lead the interaction by commanding a robot’s actions using interactive physical blocks (tangible blocks). We conducted sessions with 22 care home dwellers where they could exchange messages and objects using the robot. Based on older adults’ observed behaviors during the sessions and perspectives gathered from interviews with geriatric professionals, we reflect on the opportunities and challenges for increased user agency and the asymmetries that emerged from differing abilities and personality traits. Our qualitative results highlight the potential of robotic approaches to extend the agency and communication of older adults, anchored on human values, such as the exchange of affection, collaboration, and competition.

Understanding Practices around Computational News Discovery Tools in the Domain of Science Journalism

Science and technology journalists today face challenges in finding newsworthy leads due to increased workloads, reduced resources, and expanding scientific publishing ecosystems. Given this context, we explore computational methods to aid these journalists' news discovery in terms of their agency and time-efficiency. We prototyped three computational information subsidies into an interactive tool that we used as a probe to better understand how such a tool may offer utility or more broadly shape the practices of professional science journalists. Our findings highlight central considerations around science journalists' user agency, contexts of use, and professional responsibility that such tools can influence and could account for in design. Based on this, we suggest design opportunities for enhancing and extending user agency over the longer-term; incorporating contextual, personal and collaborative notions of newsworthiness; and leveraging flexible interfaces and generative models. Overall, our findings contribute a richer view of the sociotechnical system around computational news discovery tools, and suggest ways to improve such tools to better support the practices of science journalists.

Seamful XAI: Operationalizing Seamful Design in Explainable AI

Mistakes in AI systems are inevitable, arising from both technical limitations and sociotechnical gaps. While black-boxing AI systems can make the user experience seamless, hiding the seams risks disempowering users to mitigate fallouts from AI mistakes. Instead of hiding these AI imperfections, can we leverage them to help the user? While Explainable AI (XAI) has predominantly tackled algorithmic opaqueness, we propose that seamful design can foster AI explainability by revealing and leveraging sociotechnical and infrastructural mismatches. We introduce the concept of Seamful XAI by (1) conceptually transferring "seams" to the AI context and (2) developing a design process that helps stakeholders anticipate and design with seams. We explore this process with 43 AI practitioners and real end-users, using a scenario-based co-design activity informed by real-world use cases. We found that the Seamful XAI design process helped users foresee AI harms, identify underlying reasons (seams), locate them in the AI's lifecycle, learn how to leverage seamful information to improve XAI and user agency. We share empirical insights, implications, and reflections on how this process can help practitioners anticipate and craft seams in AI, how seamfulness can improve explainability, empower end-users, and facilitate Responsible AI.

Building Knowledge: Constructing Technoscientific Infrastructures

Through an ethnographic analysis of the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC) at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and drawing on a Science and Technology Studies (STS) inspired theoretical framework, this article explores architectural space as configured by sociotechnical infrastructures. In the context of the GEIC, by paying attention to the flows of University-employed engineers, prototyped technologies, gas pipes, cables and ventilation, the article illuminates how new spatial configurations emerge through the practices and processes of which the building becomes a part. Such an analysis, it will argue, allows attention to move away from a sole focus on visions of architects and clients or even the agency of users to modify their environment. Instead, the work proposes a fruitful area for future study, paying attention to the connections, components and flows which are modularly plugged into the building and the legacies of “knowledge” which they leave behind.

Navigating the stacks virtually: Integrating virtual reality into writing resource instruction

Virtual reality (VR) presents a significant opportunity to expand remote access to educational materials and writing skills development for students not able or unwilling to participate in person. However, to ensure that VR-based learning is inclusive, research designs must incorporate user experience feedback. This study examines community college students’ feedback on a virtual library tour (VRT) for an Introduction to Writing course. Because building library skills is a key objective of this course, decreasing barriers to student library access is critical. Findings from the study indicate (1) most participants had a positive response and experienced a heightened sense of control (over 70%), though nearly half (48.1%) felt that the virtual experience did not fully replicate the real-life experience, (2) participants valued the structured guidance of the tour but recommended more flexibility and user agency within the VR environment, and (3) noted technical problems related to motion sickness, sound levels, and visual clarity. The study presents specific suggestions for enhancements and underscores the importance of utilizing design research to improve user experiences with VR. Directions for future research are also discussed.

The Varieties of Agency in Human–Smart Device Relationships: The Four Agency Profiles

This paper investigates how users of smart devices attribute agency both to themselves and to their devices. Statistical analyses, tag cloud analysis, and sentiment analysis were applied on survey data collected from 587 participants. As a result of a preliminary factorial analysis, two independent constructs of agency emerged: (i) user agency and (ii) device agency. These two constructs received further support from a sentiment analysis and a tag cloud analysis conducted on the written responses provided in a survey. We also studied how user agency and device agency relate to various background variables, such as the user’s professional knowledge of smart devices. We present a new preliminary model, where the two agency constructs are used to conceptualize agency in human–smart device relationships in a matrix composed of a controller, collaborator, detached, and victim. Our model with the constructs of user agency and device agency fosters a richer understanding of the users’ experiences in their interactions with devices. The results could facilitate designing interfaces that better take into account the users’ views of their own capabilities as well as the capacities of their devices; the findings can assist in tackling challenges such as the feeling of lacking agency experienced by technologically savvy users.

Inequalities in privacy cynicism: An intersectional analysis of agency constraints

A growing body of research highlights a trend toward widespread attitudes of privacy cynicism, apathy and resignation among Internet users. In this work, we extend these discussions by concentrating on the concept of user agency. Specifically, we examine how five types of structural constraints—interpersonal, cultural, technological, economic and political—restrict user agency and contribute to the prevalence of privacy cynicism as a common response. Drawing on critical data studies and adopting an intersectional lens, we demonstrate how these constraints disproportionately impact various social groups unequally, leading to a disparate distribution of agency and privacy cynicism. Furthermore, we contend that the sense of powerlessness engendered by excessive constraints on user agency can, in turn, exacerbate user vulnerability to such constraints, potentially initiating a vicious cycle of disempowerment. The article enriches the field of privacy research by linking the traditionally individual-focused and psychological dimensions of privacy with critical surveillance studies and by proposing potential interventions to mitigate privacy cynicism.

Privacy threats of behaviour identity detection in VR

This study explores the potential privacy risks associated with the use of behavioural data as an identification mechanism in immersive VR applications. With the advent of modern VR technology, tracking sensors are now able to provide a highly immersive experience with a high level of user agency, significantly increasing both the amount and richness of behavioural data being collected and recorded. However, there has been little research into the privacy risks of such approaches. In this work, we investigate the capability of machine learning algorithms to identify VR users across multiple sessions and activities, as well as their effectiveness when users deliberately change their behaviour to evade detection. We also examine how the physical characteristics of users impact the accuracy of these algorithms. Our results show that once a user is tracked in VR, they can be identified with 83% accuracy across multiple sessions of the same activity and with 80% accuracy when performing a different task. Even when users attempt to deliberately obfuscate their behaviour, they can still be recognised with 78% accuracy. These findings highlight the need for more robust technical measures to safeguard the behavioural privacy of VR users.

Radical Left Culture and Heritage, the Politics of Preservation and Memorialisation, and the Promise of the Metaverse

Radical left culture and heritage—understood as incarnations of leftist artefacts and praxis both past and present—have taken risks in challenging hegemonic machinations often when it is unpopular to do so. To the ire of hegemons, leftist projects across the globe have marshalled places, spaces, and technologies into sites of empowerment and struggle utilising ‘small’ and ‘big’ acts of resistance and critical interventions to champion social justice—sometimes successfully, and at other times, less so. However, the preservation of projects’ artefacts, praxis, and memory work has been anything but straightforward, owing primarily to institutional politics and infrastructural and resourcing issues. Taking The Freedom Archives (FA) as a case study, this article explores how FA is preserving the distinctive political education programme that underpinned the iconic liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau that kickstarted the seismic, global decolonisation project in the late 1950s. The article argues that FA could substantially enhance the preservation and memorialisation of that programme in the Metaverse—if this materialises as a fully open, interoperable, and highly immersive space (1) unfettered by hegemonic regulation, and (2) characterised by ‘strategic witnessing’, ‘radical recordkeeping’, and user agency. In doing so, FA would serve as an exemplar for leftist projects globally.

Socio‐technical issues in the platform‐mediated gig economy: A systematic literature review: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

AbstractThe gig economy and gig work have grown quickly in recent years and have drawn much attention from researchers in different fields. Because the platform mediated gig economy is a relatively new phenomenon, studies have produced a range of interesting findings; of interest here are the socio‐technical issues that this work has surfaced. This systematic literature review (SLR) provides a snapshot of a range of socio‐technical issues raised in the last 12 years of literature focused on the platform mediated gig economy. Based on a sample of 515 papers gathered from nine databases in multiple disciplines, 132 were coded that specifically studied the gig economy, gig work, and gig workers. Three main socio‐technical themes were identified: (1) the digital workplace, which includes information infrastructure and digital labor that are related to the nature of gig work and the user agency; (2) algorithmic management, which includes platform governance, performance management, information asymmetry, power asymmetry, and system manipulation, relying on a diverse set of technological tools including algorithms and big data analytics; (3) ethical design, as a relevant value set that gig workers expect from the platform, which includes trust, fairness, equality, privacy, and transparency. A social informatics perspective is used to rethink the relationship between gig workers and platforms, extract the socio‐technical issues noted in prior research, and discuss the underexplored aspects of the platform mediated gig economy. The results draw attention to understudied yet critically important socio‐technical issues in the gig economy that suggest short‐ and long‐term opportunities for future research directions.

D-Tour: Semi-Automatic Generation of Interactive Guided Tours for Visualization Dashboard Onboarding.

Onboarding a user to a visualization dashboard entails explaining its various components, including the chart types used, the data loaded, and the interactions available. Authoring such an onboarding experience is time-consuming and requires significant knowledge and little guidance on how best to complete this task. Depending on their levels of expertise, end users being onboarded to a new dashboard can be either confused and overwhelmed or disinterested and disengaged. We propose interactive dashboard tours (D-Tours) as semi-automated onboarding experiences that preserve the agency of users with various levels of expertise to keep them interested and engaged. Our interactive tours concept draws from open-world game design to give the user freedom in choosing their path through onboarding. We have implemented the concept in a tool called D-TOUR PROTOTYPE, which allows authors to craft custom interactive dashboard tours from scratch or using automatic templates. Automatically generated tours can still be customized to use different media (e.g., video, audio, and highlighting) or new narratives to produce an onboarding experience tailored to an individual user. We demonstrate the usefulness of interactive dashboard tours through use cases and expert interviews. Our evaluation shows that authors found the automation in the D-Tour Prototype helpful and time-saving, and users found the created tours engaging and intuitive. This paper and all supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/6fbjp/.

Data Science Principles for Interpretable and Explainable AI

Society’s capacity for algorithmic problem-solving has never been greater. Artificial Intelligence is now applied across more domains than ever, a consequence of powerful abstractions, abundant data, and accessible software. As capabilities have expanded, so have risks, with models often deployed without fully understanding their potential impacts. Interpretable and interactive machine learning aims to make complex models more transparent and controllable, enhancing user agency. This review synthesizes key principles from the growing literature in this field. We first introduce precise vocabulary for discussing interpretability, like the distinction between glass box and explainable models. We then explore connections to classical statistical and design principles, like parsimony and the gulfs of interaction. Basic explainability techniques – including learned embeddings, integrated gradients, and concept bottlenecks – are illustrated with a simple case study. We also review criteria for objectively evaluating interpretability approaches. Throughout, we underscore the importance of considering audience goals when designing interactive data-driven systems. Finally, we outline open challenges and discuss the potential role of data science in addressing them. Code to reproduce all examples can be found at https://go.wisc.edu/3k1ewe.

THE VALUE AFFORDANCES OF SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT FEATURES

Like, Comment, and Share are ubiquitous features and central elements of engagement on social media platforms. Yet the values promoted by such features remain an open question. We propose the concept of value affordances, defined as the set of ethical, aesthetic, and relational principles that emerge from the interaction between different stakeholders and technological infrastructures. We develop a novel method for studying value affordances through focus groups to explore the engagement features of Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Across platforms, our participants agreed that engagement features promote expression, care, and community, aligning with how companies promote their platforms. They also agreed that engagement features hinder privacy, mindfulness, peace, and safety, echoing public concerns about the harmful consequences of social media. Their accounts typically downplayed the role of technology, instead emphasizing user agency and responsibility. We discuss how users navigate tradeoffs in the value affordances of social media through creative strategies to negotiate, downplay, or even resolve these tensions. These include using features antagonistically, avoiding using specific features, or using features in more limited contexts like groups or direct messages. Users also negotiate value tradeoffs through how they assign responsibility for promoting or hindering particular values. While our participants consistently emphasized the agency of users, they differentiated responsibility into categories of "us" and "them," identifying with positive actions that promote values and blaming others for negative actions that hinder values.

A Generative Design Exploration Methodology for Integration of Structural, Environmental, and User Agencies in an Early Design Stage

This article presents a generative design exploration methodology utilized to assist designers in problem structuring and decision-making in a multi-disciplinary setting. This novel design exploration methodology is based on the hybridization of a genetic algorithm (GA) and the Theory of Innovative Problem Solving (TRIZ). This methodology allows investigation of unexpected solutions, application of innovative ideas for resolving contradictory design objectives, and continuous interaction between designers and the search engine. In this study, the design case of a mid-rise apartment complex is used to examine the capacity of the proposed multi-agent design exploration method. Accordingly, both quality and numeric performance-based values of the design alternatives, including the visual appearance of the complex and apartments’ shadows over one another, structural and energy efficiency, and life-cycle impact of the building’s structural system, are investigated to demonstrate the usability and benefits of the developed method.

From context adaptation to context restoration: strategies, motivations, and decision rules of managing context collapse on WeChat

Abstract Context collapse occurs on social media platforms when different groups are mixed into one audience. To advance the understanding of the extensive and complex coping strategies people use to address context collapse, this study makes a conceptual distinction between passively adapting by sharing context-free, general information (context adaptation) and rebuilding contexts to satisfy the diverse needs of impression management (context restoration). This study in-depth interviewed 51 WeChat users (30 working professionals and 21 college students) in urban China. The results identified strategies for context restoration through reconstructing contextual boundaries on psychological, relational, spatial, and temporal dimensions. These findings highlight individual (effort minimization, self-consciousness, and privacy concerns) and audience factors (the heterogeneity and activeness of the audience) in determining the adoption of specific strategies. This study emphasizes the subjectivity and agency of users in relation to the social media ecosystem and develops a theoretical spectrum systematically situating users’ coping behaviors for mitigating context collapse.

Recommendations for promoting user agency in the design of speech neuroprostheses.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) that directly decode speech from brain activity aim to restore communication in people with paralysis who cannot speak. Despite recent advances, neural inference of speech remains imperfect, limiting the ability for speech BCIs to enable experiences such as fluent conversation that promote agency - that is, the ability for users to author and transmit messages enacting their intentions. Here, we make recommendations for promoting agency based on existing and emerging strategies in neural engineering. The focus is on achieving fast, accurate, and reliable performance while ensuring volitional control over when a decoder is engaged, what exactly is decoded, and how messages are expressed. Additionally, alongside neuroscientific progress within controlled experimental settings, we argue that a parallel line of research must consider how to translate experimental successes into real-world environments. While such research will ultimately require input from prospective users, here we identify and describe design choices inspired by human-factors work conducted in existing fields of assistive technology, which address practical issues likely to emerge in future real-world speech BCI applications.

Geofence Warrants, Geospatial Innovation, and Implications for Data Privacy

ABSTRACTGeospatial technologies collect, analyze, and produce information about earth, humans, and objects through a convergence of geographic information systems, remote sensors, and global positioning systems. A microanalysis of Google's U.S. Patent 9,420,426 Inferring a current location based on a user location history (Duleba et al., 2016) reveals how geospatial innovation employs artificial intelligence (AI) to train computer‐vision models, infer, and impute geospatial data. The technical disclosures in patents offer a view within black‐boxed digital technologies to examine potential privacy implications of datafied citizens in a networked society. In patented geospatial innovation, user agency is subverted through AI and anonymous knowledge production.Presently, the Fourth Amendment does not adequately protect citizens in a networked society. Data privacy legal cases are interpreted through a lens of inescapability (Tokson, 2020), which assumes perpetual agency to consent to sharing data. In short, agency‐centered privacy models are insufficient where AI can anonymously produce knowledge about an individual. Privacy implications are exemplified in geofence warrants—an investigative technique that searches location history to identify suspects in a geofenced region in the absence of evidence. This analysis demonstrates that digital privacy rights must expand to datafication models (Mai, 2016) centered on knowledge production.

상호작용성과 서사적 몰입의 동시적 획득구조 연구

This study examines the factors that make Netflix's interactive movie “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch” an interactive storytelling content that can achieve both interactivity and narrative immersion. The existing interactive storytelling content mainly takes the form of a multivariable plot, which gives the user freedom of choice, but is limited in providing the full dramatic experience of an epic story that moves toward one ending by the laws of probability and inevitability. However, “Bandersnatch” breaks the convention that multivariable plots are boring and repetitive through the mechanism of limited choices and returning to plot points, and provides a new interactive storytelling experience. It also allows the user to exist inside and outside the character at the same time through a compressed story summary and the semanticization of repeated choices. At this time, the user agency experienced a kind of failure, but it served to attract users to expand the story world by themselves by experiencing more possibilities. Through this study, we have revealed the differentiating significance of <Bandersnatch> that distinguishes it from existing interactive storytelling contents.

Toward Green Metaverse Networking: Technologies, Advancements, and Future Directions

As the Metaverse is iteratively being defined, its potential to unleash the next wave of digital disruption and create real-life value becomes increasingly clear. With distinctive features of immersive experience, simultaneous interactivity, and user agency, the Metaverse has the capability to transform all walks of life. However, the enabling technologies of the Metaverse, i.e., digital twin, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and extended reality, are known to be energy-hungry, therefore raising concerns about the sustainability of its large-scale deployment and development. This article proposes Green Metaverse Networking for the first time to optimize energy efficiencies of all network components for Metaverse sustainable development. We first analyze energy consumption, efficiency, and sustainability of energy-intensive technologies in the Metaverse. Next, focusing on computation and networking, we present major advancements related to energy efficiency and their integration into the Metaverse. A case study of energy conservation by incorporating semantic communication and stochastic resource allocation in the Metaverse is presented. Finally, we outline the critical challenges of Metaverse sustainable development, thereby indicating potential directions of future research towards the green Metaverse.