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Community of practice (CoP) is a primary framework in social computing research that addresses learning and organizing specific practices in online communities. However, the classic CoP theory does not provide a detailed account for how practices change or evolve. Against the backdrop of a rapidly changing occupational landscape, it is crucial to understand how people participate in online communities focused on practices that have a volatile nature, as well as how social computing tools can best support them. In this article, we examine user experience (UX) design as a volatile practice that has no coherent body of knowledge and lacks a concrete path for newcomers to become a UX professional. Our study site is the “/r/userexperience” subreddit, an online UX community where practitioners socialize and learn. Using a mixed-methods approach, we identified five distinct social roles in relation to knowledge production and dissemination in the online community of volatile practice. We demonstrate that knowledge production is highly distributed, involving the participation and sensemaking of community members of varied levels of experience. We discuss how online platforms support online community of volatile practice and how our findings contribute to the CoP literature.

Design culture is increasingly present within organizations, especially with the rise of UX as a profession. Yet there are often disconnects between the development of a design philosophy and its translation in practice. Students preparing for UX careers are positioned in a liminal space between their educational experience and future practice, and are actively working to build a bridge between their developing philosophy of design and the translation of that philosophy when faced with the complexity of design practice. In this study, we interviewed ten students and practitioners educated within design-oriented HCI programs, focusing on their design philosophy and evaluating how their philosophical beliefs were shaped in practice. Building on prior work on flows of competence, we thematically analyzed these interviews, identifying the philosophical beliefs of these designers and their trajectories of development, adoption, or suppression in industry. We identify opportunities for enhancements to UX educational practices and future research on design complexity in industry contexts.

New parents often experience significant stress as they take on new roles and responsibilities. Stress management and mental wellbeing are two areas in which personal informatics (PI) research has gained attention, and there is an opportunity to investigate how parenting stress can be mitigated through PI practices. In this paper, we present the results of a co-designed technology probe study through which we deployed individualized self-trackers with new parents. We investigate the stress management topics new parents are interested in tracking and how — and with what goals---they engage in self-directed PI practices. Our findings indicate that PI practices can potentially enable parents to: re-discover positive aspects of their everyday lives; identify better-suited stress management strategies; and facilitate spousal communication about shared responsibilities. We discuss how self-tracking experiences for the mental wellness of parents can be better designed.

In this paper, we describe our efforts to appropriate an autono-preneurial agent---in this case, the Amazon Locust\footnoteThe Amazon Locust is a fictional autonomous lawn mowing robot that we imagine to be widely available through Amazon by 2035. ---through the development of an API that enables equitable and socially aware entrepreneurial decision making on the part of the Locust. We present a new API and our intended vision for this system, along with our proposed deployment plan for implementing appropriated Locusts in Midwestern USA suburban communities. These appropriated Locusts will allow community provisioning decision-making that moves beyond consideration of profitability to also include decisions based on equity, equality, community, and interpersonal relationships. We discuss the broader implications of this work and point toward future areas of inquiry.

With the Syrian crisis entering its 8th year, refugees have become the focus of research across multiple disciplines, including design and HCI research. While some researchers have reflected upon designing with refugees, these accounts have been limited to conducting design workshops in formal spaces. Through reflecting on our experiences of conducting design research in informal refugee settlements in Lebanon we unpack lessons learnt, design practices and research approaches that facilitate design engagements with refugees. We highlight the value in participants configuring the design space, using a dialogical approach as well as creating a safe space for both participants and the researcher. We also reflect on the roles that researchers may take on when conducting similar research. By doing so we contribute specific design practices that may be transferrable to other similar contexts.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together CSCW audiences who engage in studies and interventions related to care work. Our aims are to understand how care has been conceptualized in the extant CSCW community, identify core issues and concerns, and formalize how CSCW concepts could be used as a lens to inquire into this domain. We will explore the following themes: the invisibility of care work; the evolution of care labor; how care can often be sentimentalized, formalized, or infantilizing; and how we can attend to-and design for-the multiple experiences of care. Participants of this workshop will be invited to participate in future journal special issues and external grant writing activities.

Recent HCI scholarship has begun to incorporate the concept of care as an alternative design lens, moving beyond health care or social care to consider care as a fundamental relational quality of life. This one-day workshop brings together researchers to find a shared understanding of the ways in which interpersonal care and interdependence could be supported through technology design in community contexts. The goal is to raise issues and increase sensitivity towards care, with the ultimate aim of impacting design practices-including how one might design community interactions with and for care. Participants will learn together how such a focus could impact their own research, while mapping and articulating how research and design in HCI-related fields can and does integrate care into sociotechnical systems more broadly.

Interest in critical scholarship that engages with the complexity of user experience (UX) practice is rapidly expanding, yet the vocabulary for describing and assessing criticality in practice is currently lacking. In this paper, we outline and explore the limits of a specific ethical phenomenon known as "dark patterns," where user value is supplanted in favor of shareholder value. We assembled a corpus of examples of practitioner-identified dark patterns and performed a content analysis to determine the ethical concerns contained in these examples. This analysis revealed a wide range of ethical issues raised by practitioners that were frequently conflated under the umbrella term of dark patterns, while also underscoring a shared concern that UX designers could easily become complicit in manipulative or unreasonably persuasive practices. We conclude with implications for the education and practice of UX designers, and a proposal for broadening research on the ethics of user experience.

For decades, HCI scholars have studied technological systems and their relationship to particular contexts and user groups. Increasingly, this scholarship is dependent not only on localized contexts, but also the relationship of local contexts to the global stage, drawing on approaches such as ICT4D and cross-cultural design. In this paper, we examine authors' descriptions of study contexts, particularly country information, in paper titles and texts in the CHI Proceedings from 2013 to 2017. We found strikingly different patterns of titling between studies of Western and non-Western countries, including whether and how country names are mentioned in titles, and the precision when describing study contexts. Drawing on critical theories, we analyze how the politics of titling at CHI functions to build categories of "normal" and "exotic." We explicate the problems that the current ways of representation bring to knowledge production at CHI, and necessary paths to move forward.

In this alt.chi paper, we reflect on #CHIversity a grassroots campaign highlighting feminist issues related to diversity and inclusion at CHI2017, and in HCI more widely. #CHIversity was operationalised through a number of activities including: collaborative cross-stitch and 'zine' making events; the development of a 'Feminist CHI Programme'; and the use of a Twitter hashtag #CHIversity. These events granted insight into how diversity discourses are approached within the CHI community. From these recognitions we provide examples of how diversity and inclusion can be promoted at future SIGCHI events. These include fostering connections between attendees, discussing 'polarizing' research in a conservative political climate, and encouraging contributions to the growing body of HCI literature addressing feminisms and related subjects. Finally, we suggest how these approaches and benefits can translate to HCI events extending beyond CHI, where exclusion may routinely go undetected.

In this late breaking work, we present preliminary results from a portion of an auto-ethnography in which an HCI scholar drove for both Uber and Lyft over the course of 4 months, recording his thoughts about the driving experience as well as his experiences with-and emails from-both platforms. The first phase of results we present here are based on several text analyses of the collected emails, as well as a preliminary examination of field notes in relation to these emails. We found that while Uber and Lyft participate in the gig economy in almost identical ways, the difference in tone apparent through each platform's messaging could lead to conflicting experiences for drivers. We identify implications for the potential future analyses of our autoethnographic data in relation to this psycholinguistic analysis.

Increasingly, HCI researchers are recognizing the challenges and opportunities of designing with and for people living with dementia. Recent critiques have highlighted the limited ways people with dementia are engaged in the research and design process. The second CHI HCIxDementia workshop will focus on engagement with and by people living with dementia. Through interactions with local community organizations and people living with dementia, workshop attendees will explore design possibilities. Building on open questions from the CHI 2017 workshop, this workshop will address how HCI researchers can support people living with dementia in engaging as leaders and with research, industry, and the community.

One of the many challenges of becoming a parent is the shift in one's social life. As HCI researchers have begun to investigate the intersection of sociotechnical system design and parenthood, they have also sought to understand how parents' social lives can be best supported. We build on these strands of research through a qualitative study with new parents regarding the role of digital technologies in their social lives as they transition to parenthood. We demonstrate how sociotechnical systems are entangled in the ways new parents manage their relationships, build (or resist building) new friendships and ad hoc support systems, and navigate the vulnerabilities of parenthood. We discuss how systems designed for new parents can better support the vulnerabilities they internalize, the diverse friendships they desire, and the logistical challenges they experience. We conclude with recommendations for future design and research in this area.

Hacking and making practices, participants, spaces, and communities have been of increasing interest to a range of fields that study the interactions between people and computing technologies. As these practices and community models are adopted into a variety of contexts, the need for a deeper understanding of the norms and values entangled in the hacker and maker movement has become clearer. In this study, I identify and analyze prominent topics discussed by hackerspace members and organizers on a popular hackerspace email list from 2008 to 2015. Through a thematic analysis, I identify common tropes-conversational shortcuts that refer to community narratives-that surface during these discussions. I then evaluate how these tropes, such as "every space is different," "be excellent to each other," and "hackers are critical thinkers," are used to reinforce dominant hacker culture values. I conclude with implications for research on, and adoption of, hackerspace community models.

With an increasing amount of work within HCI targeting people who have dementia, it is important to understand the ways that various factors influence the technology that is designed for people with dementia, and the way individuals adopt and use (or don't use) this technology. A nuanced understanding of this is especially important given the ethical and logistical issues of designing for and with a population that still faces significant marginalization, and who (along with family, carers, and clinicians) are managing a condition as complex as dementia. This two-day workshop aims to bring together HCI researchers and members from the dementia care community, to explore three subthemes of cross-cultural and local experiences of dementia, creativity and dementia, and personhood & citizenship in dementia.

A critical tradition has taken hold in HCI, yet research methods needed to meaningfully engage with critical questions in the qualitative tradition are nascent. In this paper, we explore one critical qualitative research approach that allows researchers to probe deeply into the relationships between communicative acts and social structures. Meaning reconstruction methods are described and illustrated using examples from HCI research, demonstrating how social norms can be traced as they are claimed and reproduced. We conclude with implications for strengthening rigorous critical inquiry in HCI research, including the use of extant critical research methods to document transparency and thick description.