I’ve come to feel like human-centered design (HCD) and the overarching project of HCI has reached a state of abject failure. Maybe it’s been there for a while, but I think the field’s inability to rise forcefully to the ascent of large language models and the pervasive use of chatbots as panaceas to every conceivable problem is uncharitably illustrative of its current state.

I think we’re about to enter a stage of sharing the web with lots of non-human agents that are very different to our current bots – they have a lot more data on how behave like realistic humans and are rapidly going to get more and more capable.Soon we won’t be able to tell the difference between generative agents and real humans on the web.Sharing the web with agents isn’t inherently bad and could have good use cases such as automated moderators and search assistants, but it’s going to get complicated.

This seems a beautiful way to take advantage of the qualities of the different approaches.

As this quote implies, formalisms are often difficult for people to use because they need to takemany extra steps (and make additional decisions) to specify anything.

The authors propose, based on these experiences, that the cause ofa number of unexpected difficulties in human-computer interaction lies in users’ unwillingness orinability to make structure, content, or procedures explicit

a new interface for the internet.

It begins by investing in people

going back to find something they found before

goals of artificial intelligence include learning, reasoning, and perception

augmentation means

HCI has traditionally been built on a procedural foundation. HCI, from its very beginning, took on the trap­pings of the traditional computational model and set out its account of the world in terms of plans, procedures, tasks, and goals. In contrast, the model of HCI I set out here is one that places interaction at the center of the picture. By this I mean that it considers interaction not only as what is being done, but also as how it is being done. Interaction is the means by which work is accomplished, dynamically and in context.

lnteractional approaches conceptual­ize computation as the interplay between different components, rather than the fixed and prespecified paths that a single, monolithic computa­tional engine might follow. These models of computation have more in common with ecosystems than with the vast mechanisms we used to imagine. They emphasize diversity and specialization rather than unity and generality.

Embodied Interaction is interaction with computer systems that occupy our world, a world of physical and social reality, and that exploit this fact in how they interact with us

These two trends-the massive increase in computational power and the expanding context in which we put that power to use-both suggest that we need new ways of interacting with computers, ways that are bet­ter tuned to our needs and abilities. Over the last few years, research into Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has begun to explore ways to con­trol and interact with a new breed of computer systems. Prototype sys­tems have been developed; new forms of interaction explored; new research groups established; new designs developed and tested.

Stepping back, one can broadly distinguish among two gen-eral ways that feminism contributes to interaction design: Critique-based and generative. •Critique-based contributions rely on the use of feminist approaches to analyze designs and design processes in order to expose their unintended consequences. Such contributions indirectly benefit interaction design by raising our sensibilities surrounding issues of concern. •Generative contributions involve the use of feminist ap-proaches explicitly in decision-making and design proc-ess to generate new design insights and influence the de-sign process tangibly. Such contributions leverage femi-nism to understand design contexts (e.g., “the home” or the “workplace”), to help identify needs and require-ments, discover opportunities for design, offer leads to-ward solutions to design problems, and suggest evalua-tion criteria for working prototypes, etc.

The quality of self-disclosure refers to the extent to which the software renders visible the ways in which it effects us as subjects. Self-disclosure calls users’ awareness to what the software is trying to make of them, and it both intro-duces a critical distance between users and interactions, and also creates opportunities for users to define themselves for software.

he next stage of this agenda, that is, development on the quality of embodi-ment, needs to push embodiment in the direction of gender commonalties and differences, gender identity, human sexuality, pleasure and desire, and emotion.

Extending this notion of material ecology, the quality of ecology in feminist interaction design integrates an aware-ness of design artifacts’ effects in their broadest contexts and awareness of the widest range of stakeholders through-out design reasoning, decision-making, and evaluation. It invites interaction designers to attend to the ways that de-sign artifacts in-the-world reflexively design us [79], as well as how design artifacts affect all stakeholders.

Material ecology theory emphasizes the extent to which an artifact participates in a system of artifacts [73, 52]. This structural approach considers ways that relationships among artifacts determine their meaning in the system or ecology.

The quality of advocacy engages with this dilemma seri-ously. On the one hand, feminist interaction design should seek to bring about political emancipation and not just keep up with it. At the same time, it should also force designers to question their own position to assert what an “improved society” is and how to achieve it. Participatory approaches just described are a natural ally to this quality, because they distribute the authority and responsibility for such decisions across a polyvocal dialogue among stakeholders.

participatory approach is compatible with empathic user research [81] that avoids the scientific distance that cuts the bonds of humanity between researcher and subject, pre-empting a major resource for design (empathy, love, care).

The quality of participation refers to valuing par-ticipatory processes that lead to the creation and evaluation of design prototypes.

Pluralist designs are likely to be more human-centered than universalizing designs simply because “human” is too rich, too diverse, and too complex a category to bear a universal solution. Pluralist design en-courages an alternative sensibility to design, foregrounding questions of cultural difference, encouraging a constructive engagement with diversity, and embracing the margins both to be more inclusive and to benefit from the marginal as resources for design solutions.

A key feminist strategy is to denaturalize normative conven-tions, both exposing their constructedness as human dis-courses situated in socio-political institutions and exploring alternative approaches. A related strategy is to investigate and even nurture the marginal, for here alternatives to nor-malizing discourses are often most visible. The quality of pluralism refers to design artifacts that resist any single, totalizing, or universal point of view.

The qualities I propose as a starting point are as follows: pluralism, participation, ad-vocacy, ecology, embodiment, and self-disclosure.

In sum, I see the contribution of feminist theories and methods to HCI in the following ways: •Theory: Feminism can critique core operational concepts, assumptions, and epistemologies of HCI, and at the same time, open up opportunities for the future •Methodology: Interaction designers and researchers can incorporate feminism in user research, iterative design, and evaluation methodologies to broaden their repertoire for different contexts and situations •User Research: The notion of “the user” can be updated to reflect gender in a way that noticeably and directly af-fects design •Evaluation: Feminism can help make visible ways that designs configure users as gendered/social subjects—and what implications these configurations bear for future design work

HCI continues to expand beyond the preoccupations with how efficiently a system performs and is becoming increas-ingly concerned with culture [8, 9, 5], society [11], and interested in the experiential qualities of computing [59].

Science and technology studies (STS) investigate how so-cial, political, and cultural values and assumptions affect technological advancement and scientific research; it also investigates the converse, that is, the influences science and technology have on society.

Academically, feminism is often seen as a domain of critical theory that examines “the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social, and psychological oppres-sion of women.” [72]. Feminism integrates a collection of theories, analytical and interpretative methodologies, ethi-cal values, and political positions, which have evolved over the past two centuries.

Specifically, I am concerned with the design and evaluation of interactive systems that are imbued with sensitivity to the central commitments of feminism—agency, fulfillment, identity and the self, equity, empowerment, diversity, and social justice. I also seek to improve understanding of how gender identities and relations shape both the use of interac-tive technologies and their design. Additionally, feminist HCI entails critical perspectives that could help reveal un-spoken values within HCI’s dominant research and design paradigms and underpin the development of new ap-proaches, methods and design variations.

Our under-standing of the gap is driven by technological exploration through artifact cre-ation and deployment, but HCI and CSCW systems need to have at their corea fundamental understanding of how people really work and live in groups, or-ganizations, communities, and other forms of collective life. Otherwise, wewill produce unusable systems, badly mechanizing and distorting collabora-tion and other social activity.

The gap is also CSCW’s unique contribution. CSCW exists intellectually atthe boundary and interaction of technology and social settings. Its unique intel-lectual importance is at the confluence of technology and the social, and its

Nonetheless, it has been argued here that theunique problem of CSCW is the social–technical gap. There is a fundamentalmismatch between what is required socially and what we can do technically.Human activity is highly nuanced and contextualized. However, we lack thetechnical mechanisms to fully support the social world uncovered by the socialfindings of CSCW. This social–technical gap is unlikely to go away, although itcertainly can be better understood and perhaps approached.

Nonetheless, several guiding questions are required based on thesocial–technical gap and its role in any CSCW science of the artificial:• When can a computational system successfully ignore the need fornuance and context?• When can a computational system augment human activity withcomputer technologies suitably to make up for the loss in nuance andcontext, as argued in the approximation section earlier?• Can these benefits be systematized so that we know when we are add-ing benefit rather than creating loss?• What types of future research will solve some of the gaps betweentechnical capabilities and what people expect in their full range of so-cial and collaborative activities?

The final first-order approximation is the creation of technical architecturesthat do not invoke the social–technical gap; these architectures neither requireaction nor delegate it. Instead, these architectures provide supportive oraugmentative facilities, such as advice, to users.

Another approximation incorporates new computational mechanisms tosubstitute adequately for social mechanisms or to provide for new social issues(Hollan & Stornetta, 1992).

First-order approximations, to adopt a metaphor from fluid dynamics, aretractable solutions that partially solve specific problems with knowntrade-offs.

Similarly, an educational perspective would argue that programmers andusers should understand the fundamental nature of the social requirements.

CSCW’s science, however, must centralize the necessary gap between whatwe would prefer to construct and what we can construct. To do this as a practi-cal program of action requires several steps—palliatives to ameliorate the cur-rent social conditions, first-order approximations to explore the design space,and fundamental lines of inquiry to create the science. These steps should de-velop into a new science of the artificial. In any case, the steps are necessary tomove forward intellectually within CSCW, given the nature of the social–tech-nical gap.

Ideological initiatives include those that prioritize the needs of the peopleusing the systems.

Simon’s (1969/1981) book does not address the inevitable gaps betweenthe desired outcome and the means of producing that outcome for anylarge-scale design process, but CSCW researchers see these gaps as unavoid-able. The social–technical gap should not have been ignored by Simon.Yet, CSCW is exactly the type of science Simon envisioned, and CSCW couldserve as a reconstruction and renewal of Simon’s viewpoint, suitably revised. Asmuch as was AI, CSCW is inherently a science of the artificial,

At a simple level,CSCW’s intellectual context is framed by social constructionism andethnomethodology (e.g., Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Garfinkel, 1967), systemstheories (e.g., Hutchins, 1995a), and many large-scale system experiences (e.g.,American urban renewal, nuclear power, and Vietnam). All of these pointed tothe complexities underlying any social activity, even those felt to be straightfor-ward.

Yet,The Sciences of the Artificialbecame an an-them call for artificial intelligence and computer science. In the book he ar-gued for a path between the idea for a new science (such as economics orartificial intelligence) and the construction of that new science (perhaps withsome backtracking in the creation process). This argument was both charac-teristically logical and psychologically appealing for the time.

The HCI and CSCW research communitiesneed to ask what one might do to ameliorate the effects of the gap and to fur-ther understand the gap. I believe an answer—and a future HCI challenge—is toreconceptualize CSCW as a science of the artificial. This echoes Simon (1981)but properly updates his work for CSCW’s time and intellectual task.2

As Heilbroner (1994) and other researchers have argued, technological tra-jectories are responsive to social direction. I make the case that they may alsobe responsive to intellectual direction.1Indeed, a central premise of HCI isthat we should not force users to adapt.

The coevolutionary form of this argument is that we adapt resources in theenvironment to our needs. If the resources are capable of only partial satisfac-tion, then we slowly create new technical resources to better fit the need.

A second argument against the significance of the gap is historically based.There are several variants: that we should adapt ourselves to the technology orthat we will coevolve with the technology.

A logically similar argument is that the problem is with the entire vonNeumann machine as classically developed, and new architectures will ame-liorate the gap. As Hutchins (1995a) and others (Clark, 1997) noted, the stan-dard model of the computer over the last 30 years was disembodied, separatedfrom the physical world by ill-defined (if defined) input and output devices.

First, it could be that CSCW researchers merely have not found the properkey to solve this social–technical gap, and that such a solution, using existingtechnologies, will shortly exist.

Theproblem, then, was centered by social scientists in the process of design. Cer-tainly, many studies in CSCW, HCI, information technology, and informa-tion science at least indirectly have emphasized a dichotomy betweendesigners, programmers, and implementers on one hand and the social ana-lyst on the other.

In particular, concurrency control problems arise when the software, data,and interface are distributed over several computers. Time delays when ex-changing potentially conflicting actions are especially worrisome. ... Ifconcurrency control is not established, people may invoke conflicting ac-tions. As a result, the group may become confused because displays are incon-sistent, and the groupware document corrupted due to events being handledout of order. (p. 207)

Moreover,one of the CSCW findings was that such categorization (and especially howcategories are collapsed into meta-categories) is inherently political. The pre-ferred categories and categorization will differ from individual to individual.

Because some of the idealization must be ignored to pro-vide a working solution, this trade-off provides much of the tension in anygiven implementation between “technically working” and “organizationallyworkable” systems. CSCW as a field is notable for its attention and concern tomanaging this tension.

Incentives are critical.

People not only adapt to their systems, they adapt their systems to theirneeds

There appears to be a critical mass problem for CSCW systems

The norms for using a CSCW system are often actively negotiatedamong users.

Visibility of communication exchanges and of information enableslearning and greater efficiencies

eople prefer to know who else is present in a shared space, and they usethis awareness to guide their work

Exceptions are normal in work processes.

Members of organizations sometimes have differing (and multiple)goals, and conflict may be as important as cooperation in obtaining is-sue resolutions (Kling, 1991). Groups and organizations may not haveshared goals, knowledge, meanings, and histories (Heath & Luff,1996; Star & Ruhleder, 1994).

One finding of CSCW is that it is sometimes easier and better toaugment technical mechanisms with social mechanisms to control,regulate, or encourage behavior (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991)

because people of-ten lack shared histories and meanings (especially when they are indiffering groups or organizations), information must berecontextualized to reuse experience or knowledge. Systems often as-sume a shared understanding of information.

Yet, systems often have considerable difficulty han-dling this detail and flexibility.

Social activity is fluid and nuanced, and this makes systems techni-cally difficult to construct properly and often awkward to use.

March and Simon’s (1958; Simon, 1957) limited rational actormodel underlies CSCW

I also arguelater that the challenge of the social–technical gap creates an opportunity to re-focus CSCW as a Simonian science of the artificial (where a science of the arti-ficial is suitably revised from Simon’s strictly empiricist grounds).

In summary, they argue that human activity is highly flexible,nuanced, and contextualized and that computational entities such as informa-tion sharing, roles, and social norms need to be similarly flexible, nuanced, andcontextualized.

Thesocial–technical gapis the divide between what we know we must support sociallyand what we can support technically. Exploring, understanding, and hopefullyameliorating this social–technical gap is the central challenge for CSCW as afield and one of the central problems for human–computer interaction.

Engelbart embedded a set of organizing principles in his lab, which he termed "bootstrapping strategy".

In contrast, activities of invention almost always progress towards the creation of new or better things but not necessarily through refi nement. Normally we invent by combining a set of things we already understand how to create into larger, more complex, or more capable things that did not previously exist.

Activities of discovery can have a variety of aims, including generating rich, empirically based descriptions, and creating new theoretical understandings

Another way of understanding technical HCI research is by contrasting it with other types of technical work that is not research. For our purposes, research can be seen as having the creation of reusable knowledge at its core. More specifi cally technical HCI research emphasizes knowledge about how to create something (invention) but also knowledge that might be reused to assist in the creation of a whole class of similar things or even multiple types of different things.

In an interdisciplinary setting such as HCI, we often shift between disciplines that have stable and functional but potentially con-tradictory world views. In doing so, we are confronted with the need to select and use (or at least appreciate, understand, and evaluate) a wide range of methods and with them a wide range of expectations and values.

Technical HCI focuses on the technology and improvement aspects of this task—it seeks to use technology to solve human problems and improve the world. To accom-plish this, the fundamental activity of technical HCI is one of invention —we seek to use technology to expand what can be done or to fi nd how best to do things that can already be done.

Leaming viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral par­ticipation. By this we mean to draw attention to the point that learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcom­ers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community.

There are central issues that are only touched upon in this monograph, and that need to be given more attention. The concept of "community of practice" is left largely as an intuitive notion, which serves a purpose here but which requires a more rigorous treatment. In particular, unequal relations of power must be included more systematically in our analysis. Hegemony over resources for learning and alienation from full participation are inherent in the shaping of the legitimacy and peripherality of participation in its historical realizations. It would be useful to understand better how these relations generate characteristically intersti­tial communities of practice and truncate possibilities for iden­tities of mastery.

In this sense, peripherality, when it is enabled, suggests an opening, a way of gaining access to sources for understanding through growing involve­ment. The ambiguity inherent in peripheral participation must t�en _be connected to issues of legitimacy, of the social orga­mzat10n of and control over resources, if it is to gain its full analytical potential.

Furthermore, legitimate peripherality is a complex notion, imRlicated in social structures involving rel�tions _of pow�r •.

But we intend for the concept to be taken as a whole. Each of its aspects is indispensable in defining the others and cannot be considered in isolation. Its constituents contribute inseparable aspects whose combinations create a landscape _ shapes, degrees, textures -of community membership.

In our view, earning is not merely situated in practice -as if it were some independently reifiable process that just happened to be located somewhere; learning is ao integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world.

The no­tion of situated learning now appears to be a transitory con-cept, a bridge, between a view according to w�ich cognit'.ve processes (and thus learning) are primary and a v�ew according to which social practice is the primary, generative p�eno�e­non and learning is one of its characteristics.

The gen­erality of any form of knowledge always lies i� the powe� to renegotiate the meaning of the past and future m constructing the meaning of present circumstances.

Second, this conception of situated learning clearly was more �nc�m�assi�� in i�tent than �onventional notions of '' learning in suu or learnmg by domg" for which it was used as a rough equivalent.

"Legitimate peripheral participation" provides a way to speak about the relations between newcom­ers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts, and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns the process by which newcomers become part of a community of practice. A person's intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of be­coming a full participant in a sociocultural practice. This so­cial process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills.

In particular, the fact that most users are only now beginning to experience the ubicomp vision and integrate this new, unique class of technology into their work practices suggests that another change in focus may be on the horizon: “[T]he shift from user-centered design to context-based design corresponds with recent developments in pervasive, ubiquitous computing networks and in the appliances that connect with them, which are radically changing our relationships with personal computing devices” (Gay & Hembrooke, 2003)

Over the last decade, the focus of the HCI community began to shift away from the quantitative evaluation of user interfaces based on cognitive models and towards more ecologically informed techniques, including contextual and participatory design (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1998; Kyng, 1994). This “user-centered design” movement foregrounded the social context of technology use and incorporated user feedback and participation throughout the design process.

Historically, HCI adopted and adapted knowledge, processes and techniques from artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive science, and cognitive psychology in service of understanding and modeling user behavior, and applied those findings to the creation of new interfaces and technologies through design practice. As a result of this lineage, many of the theories and techniques used in HCI to model users have exhibited a markedly cognitive, “agents as information processors” flavor. As a result, much of the research literature on user modeling in HCI has been based on the Model Human Processor (Card, Moran & Newell, 1983), which has its roots in the physical symbol system hypothesis.

Research in HCI has illustrated how this notion of immedi-acy is upheld through the social conventions associated with technologies, as well as through their design. For ex-ample, Harper et al. [16] have described the lived experi-ence (or durée, following Bergson [6]) of Facebook as be-ing located firmly in the now, and have noted that this ne-cessitates a particular approach to the performance of iden-tity on the site by its users. They observe that interactions privilege the present and underpin an impression of events unfolding as they happen (even if this is not the case in terms of spatial time, or Bergson’s temps). Because of this, the performance of identity is one of the moment: users reported feeling it inappropriate to post old content, and were similarly aggrieved when others uploaded photos that surfaced ‘out of time’.

Research by narrative theorist Ruth Page [35] (a co-author on the above paper) considers fur-ther how Facebook users learn to interpret social media posts when reading the newsfeed. While the series of snip-pets of ‘breaking news’ posted by a variety of members of one’s social network do not offer a typical narrative, readers nevertheless draw their own story-like experience, using their knowledge of those posting content to build a backsto-ry, whilst imagining what may happen next.

This leads us to argue that ‘redesigning’ the experience of time as me-diated by technologies necessitates a broader way of deal-ing with the rhythms and routines that frame their use. We consider what role technology might play in this, through shaping temporal infrastructures and shifting reified tem-poral patterns. We conclude by noting the considerable challenges that this entails, especially in view of recent ac-counts that position time as collective and entangled.

The motivation in writing this paper is to examine some of these ideas about time and technology. The notion that digi-tal technologies in themselves have a temporal quality that is problematic is questionable.

For instance, a set of stairs does not just afford climbing, but based on the angle of construction, may facilitate an easy climb, pose challenges to climbing, or be unclimbable entirely

I am a PhD candidate in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) group of Computer Science Department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I work in the CASCAD Lab, advised by Prof.Wai-Tat Fu. I also work closely with Prof. Bruce Schatz . My research interests broadly lie in the fields of human computer interaction (HCI), social computing, health informatics and cognitive science. Please see bio and projects for more details.