Feminism and HCI: Intersections and Opportunities

Speaker
Shaowen Bardzell
Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction Design, School of Informatics and Computing, University of Indiana

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Video
Video link

Description

As both an academic tradition and a form of activism, feminism may seem worlds apart from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). However, feminist social science has more in common with HCI’s user- and value-centered design processes than is often recognized. The commonalties go beyond considerations of gender in diverse human domains, e.g., gender and computing. Indeed, both feminism and HCI share a commitment to understanding people on their own terms, intervening to improve everyday people’s quality of life, a foregrounding of ethical considerations within scientific activities, and the deployment of reflective methods to account for how researchers produce knowledge, who benefits from it, and who pays for it (and in what ways). Yet researchers in HCI have only very recently begun to draw on feminist theory and methodology. I argue that HCI researchers and practitioners have much to gain from a more committed engagement with feminism.

In this presentation, I will summarize some of my research contributions toward feminist HCI, which I define as the reflective integration of feminist theories and methodologies as resources for interaction design research and practice. These projects take on theoretical topics (e.g., efforts to theorize “the marginal user” in more productive way for interaction design research), methodological topics (e.g., critical design probes), and domain-related topics (e.g., technology and human sexuality) that could benefit from a feminist HCI perspective. I hope to show that feminism need not sit on the sidelines, criticizing technologies after the fact, but rather can be productively leveraged throughout HCI processes to help us accomplish our goals.

Speaker's Bio

Shaowen Bardzell is an assistant professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. She is also an affiliated faculty of the Kinsey Institute in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Dr. Bardzell’s research centers on the theme of socio-cultural computing, with an emphasis on emotional, intimate, and embodied computing experiences. She leverages her background in the humanities to study computing in use. This includes investigating (1) how cultural theory can be developed and used in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) to enhance our understanding of people’s subjective and social responses to experiences with technology, and (2) making cultural theory accessible to interaction design practitioners to inform and innovate design practices.

Dr. Bardzell’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation; Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, Taiwan; Northumbria University, UK; and One to One Interactive. She co-directs the Cultural Research in Technology (CRIT) Group at Indiana University and is a member of the Editorial Board of Interacting with Computers (Elsevier).

Speaker's Website
http://www.soic.indiana.edu/people/profiles/bardzell-shaowen.shtml

Host
Jodi Forlizzi