Alt.CHI 2020: a reader’s guide

20 May 2020

ACM’s Computer Human Interaction conference (CHI) is big. It’s too big really. Too big, that is, to really engage with the glut of research accepted each year. But alt.CHI is small; just 24 papers of ten pages each. And despite its size each year it covers the spectrum of conceptual issues the field of HCI is currently dealing with.

Alt.CHI, in case you don’t know, is the experimental, reflexive and boundary-pushing track within the CHI. It hosts work that is either too experimental or too introspective for the main conference.

CHI was cancelled this year due to the unfolding pandemic, but while main track papers were allowed to submit video presentations to ACM and accepted into local conferences, Alt.CHI was properly cancelled. With no hope of seeing the presentations, I spent last week reading the 24 papers accepted into this year’s Alt.CHI proceedings and I’ve summarised them below for those who don’t have 3 days to spare.

The proceedings begin with an unexpected piece of good news; Jason T. Jacques’ “CHI 2020: Right Here, Right Now”¹ estimates the carbon footprint of the CHI conference over two decades. The paper establishes conference travel as far and away the biggest cause of carbon emissions. According to Jacques’ analysis, CHI 2020 was on track to have the largest carbon footprint in the conference’s history, amounting to approximately 5,600 tonnes of CO₂. This in large part due to Honolulu’s distance from CHI’s estimated “centre of population”. The cancellation of this year’s conference is of course unfortunate, but it offers a moment to consider the environmental cost of in person attendance and whether alternatives are possible. In 2019 CHI introduced a sustainability position to the committee, while this is admirable, it seems unlikely that we will make serious reductions in carbon footprint without addressing the demand for international travel. Meanwhile, according to Jacques, CHI has only demanded “with increasing vigour” that accepted authors attend the conference.¹ This is a difficult but necessary conversation we will need to have if CHI is to take its commitment to sustainability seriously.

Next up is a paper which embodies the ideals of Alt.CHI; John Desnoyers-Stewart’s “Engaging with a CHI Paper Through Embodied Action”². The paper raises issues around the primacy of text in academic knowledge production. If it is true that “we know more than we can tell”, how can we access that author’s tacit knowledge? The paper practices emodied action as a way of knowing in HCI. In the paper Desnoyers-Stewart attempts to make sense of another CHI paper “Design for Collaborative Survival”³ through a series of “Urban Forays” in search of fungi reclaiming urban environments. These active engagements in Liu et al.’s text are documented in a narrative style and though a number of technical artefacts were produced, the focus is always on the active exploration as the primary generator of knowledge. The irony of interpreting this work through its paper alone is not lost on me. Perhaps this is a case where in person conference attendance really would have made a difference.

Issues of representation are a major theme in this year’s proceedings. Contributions consider christian hegemony, (global) northern centrism and ageism in HCI. Marisol Wong-Villacres and co-authors’ “Reflections from the Classroom and Beyond” examines Global North-centrism/colonialism in the HCI education grounded in the lived experience of the authors.⁴ The paper reminds us that colonialism did not end with modernity. In HCI, despite some adoption of postcolonial and transnational theory, this work is still positioned “at the margins.” The paper reflects on the problem of translation; whereby translations “will never mean exactly what was meant by the authors” and advocate for a plurivocal interpretations. The authors draw on concepts from “Southern” theorists; Gloria Anzaldua’s mestiza consciousness and Walter Mignolo’s colonial difference to enrich the discourse which often exclusively operates with ideas drawn from western european thinkers.

Another underrecognised centrism in HCI work is that of Christianity. Religion is studied in HCI but rarely do we consider the religiousity of supposedly “secular” representations ubiquitous in technology. In “Envisioning Jewish HCI”, Jessica Hammer exposes Christian cultural hegemony in HCI.⁵ In an illustrative example, Hammer notes that the representation of the calendar in most software is that introduced by Pope Gregory and enforced by Christian rulers. I am reminded of mapping software like google maps and open street maps, which despite a wealth of possibilities, still use the Mercator map, a representation connected to histories of colonialism. Like the previous paper, Hammer shares concepts from Jewish thought; elu v’elu, tzedakah, the eishet chayil, and ma’alin bakodesh, which suggest new alternative approaches to research. Hammer asks what might HCI look like if we adopted these concepts?

Postcolonial theory is again invoked by Aloha Hufana Ambe and co-authors’ in “An Oldy’s Lament”.⁶ The paper engages with older people’s perspectives of technology which are rarely considered in the design of new technology. The authors conducted a series of co-design workshops with older creative writers, one of whom, 86 year old Julie Butler, wrote the poem “An Oldy’s Lament”. The paper is structured around Butler’s poem and offers a postcolonial reading of the work. The postcolonial lens offers a useful language to describe how technology colonises and ‘others’ older people. The paper then presents Butler’s poem as a form of resistance. I liked this paper but I was disappointed that Butler was not included as an author.

In another paper on poetry is Mark Amerika and co-authors’ “Fatal Error”.⁷ The work engages with questions of artificial creativity and its philosophical consequences for authorship. Fatal Error features an AI spoken word poet complete with a 3D avatar resembling the first author, and trained on their body of poetic work. According to the authors, as the AI doppelganger learns it will also be capable of creative “autonomy”, the project in turn transforms Amerika’s personal artistic development. In this sense creativity is reframed as “psychic automatism” and the AI is afforded the status of a collaborator in the creative process.

So far the papers I’ve described have made clear research contributions to HCI, some might even be acceptable in the main CHI conference track. But Alt.CHI also regularly hosts work so wild that it has “serious” researchers raising eyebrows. In “What’s Your Problem with the Dog Internet?” Ben Kirman and co-authors reflect on ten years of absurdist research, and make the case for its value as a critical approach in HCI.⁸ The paper consolidates ideas from a set of projects based around “the dog internet”; a technology “like the human internet, but for dogs”. The authors relate “the absurd” to movements in HCI around troublemaking; notably Dunne and Raby’s “critical design” and Donna Haraway’s call to stay “with the trouble”. In the context of HCI’s increasingly commercial research agenda and the expecations of employers and colleagues, absurdism is difficult to justify especially when, from the outside it might appear to be nothing but increasingly elaborate “in-jokes”. And yet absurdism as the authors show can be “profoundly, accidentally, productive”, revealing aspects of our culture and technology which are taken for granted and which could be otherwise.

Similar methods are used to great effect in the Christine Geeng’s (and anonymous co-author’s) spectacular paper “EGregor”.⁹ The paper explores issues of trust and privacy with regard to smart personal assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Google Home. Geeng examines the vocal and behavioural affectations which lead us to place trust in these systems, in spite of their creepy, data-extractive behaviours. The paper imagines a smart personal assistant, eGregor, a hiveminded being whose sublime and repulsive physical appearance offers a corrective to parasocial design principles which suggest a trustworthy companion. “eGregor presents itself not as a human individual, but as a vast and unknowable alien collective. This persona is meant to encourage a healthy mental model of the assistant…elements borrowed from … cosmic horror help to establish eGregor’s alien indifference to the user.” Although Geeng does not use the term “design fiction” this paper intersects with the design fiction methodology that is becoming increasingly common in Alt.CHI (and even CHI proper).

One paper which does invoke “design fiction” directly is “Children of 2077”, by Oğuz’Oz Buruk and co-authors. The paper is an ambitious work, constituting an entire (fictional) proceedings in its own right.¹⁰ The paper is a collection of thirteen abstracts which imagine Transhuman futures for children’s technologies. This stucture proves incredibly rich offering a plurality of possible futures and provocative ideas. The condensed form of the abstract leaves plenty of room for imagination on the part of the reader; Mattia Thibault’s contribution, for example, imagines the children of “sunken nations (such as Maldives and Tuvalu)” and promises to survey the new uses of public spaces made by “amphibian youth”. The paper’s findings must be imagined by the reader, nonetheless this and other abstracts in “Children of 2077” should cause us to question whether we can design our way out of the world we are creating.

Haider Akmal and Paul Coulton’s “The Divination of Things by Things” is another design fiction in this years proceedings.¹¹ The authors imagine a mobile application, Madame Bitsy’s Fantastic Future Forecasting and Fortune Telling Emporium for the Internet of Living Things, which serves to illuminate the experiences of IoT objects. The paper imagines an “Object-Oriented Fortune Telling” performed by an app in the style of a tarot reader. The visual design of this project is outstanding and the screenshots throughout serve to bring the fiction to life. So does the fact that this paper only announces itself as a “design fiction” in the conclusion, even the abstract gives no suggestion of fictionality. Design fiction is one of the author keywords on the paper but I must have missed that section as I read the paper. I must admit that I was utterly taken in by the paper and felt a little dissappointed to discover it is fictional. I know I am not alone in this because I saw during alt.CHI’s public review process that others had similar reservations.

“The Divination of Things by Things” is not the only surprise design fiction in this year’s proceedings. Franziska Pilling and co-authors’ “The Process of Gaining an AI Legibility Mark” imagines an iconography for Artificial Intelligence legibility akin to a laundry labelling scheme.¹² Contemporary AI systems are hopelessly illegible. While some progress has been made in explaining these systems, this has barely kept pace with the increasing size and complexity of the systems. What’s more, we are installing these systems in public places and public institutions as well as countless commercial projects. This design fiction imagines a widely adopted system of iconongraphy, controlled by an international body which certifies AI systems and services by the level of legibility and provides recognisable labels to indicate the level of certification to subjects/consumers. While this paper, like the last, only announced itself as a design fiction in the conclusion, I clued on much earlier, perhaps because I had been fooled once. I am not opposed to this practice as such; it has the fascinating effect of causing me to read the design fiction with greater focus, commiting to memory ideas and references to follow up after reading. Conversely, this changes the way I read non-fictional papers, leaving me unsure anytime I read something that seems too wild to be true.

Such was the case with Mirela Alistar and Margherita Pevere’s paper “Semina Aeternitatis”.¹³ The project was so fascinating and beyond the usual work of CHI that I could barely believe it. Midway through the paper I had to stop to run a keyword search for “fiction”. When no match was found I read the rest in awe. The paper describes a biotechnology project to splice an elderly woman’s memory (recounted as text and converted into DNA code) into bacteria. The bacteria produced a biofilm which was then exhibited, giving a material, tangible, olfactory experience to the memory. This creative application of biotechnology, fairly uncommon in HCI, offers new ways for humans to interact with data. While this embodiment of data has issues of legibility; e.g. does the encoded memory really change the look, feel or smell of the biofilm? It also raises questions around communication and permanence; embedded in a living organism, the data/memory can self-replicate, mutate or even transfer to another organism.

Changing pace now, in “Suffering-Centered Design”,¹⁴ Bill Tomlinson asks what principles guide our design choices in HCI. As many of the papers in Alt.CHI reflect, there are many unexamined consequences in the design of technology. We as humans “are skilled at closing their minds to the suffering of others” and, as Tomlinson argues, information technology is a powerful enabler of this tendency. The paper explores the potential for a suffering-centrered design, which foregrounds the suffering of others rather than helping us ignore it. Rising to global challenges, of poverty and climate change will require us to face uncomfortable truths about our world. Tomlinson shows how HCI can play a part in rising to this challenge.

One paper which does promote an empathic response is Miriam Sturdee and co-authors’ “Seven Year Glitch”.¹⁵ The abstract sets the tone for the paper; “I(am)MEI: 013709002488246. … I was not built to last. This is my story.” The paper recounts the life of an ailing smartphone as it breaks down over a several years. The story is expressed through a series of journal entries written from the perspective of the phone, and illustrated with a set of increasingly corrupted photos. The authors celebrate the beauty of these glitches while reflecting on the tradgedy of the short lives of our electronic devices. In the sorrowful conclusion to the paper, the protagonist describes a data transfer it knows to be a sign of the end.

Another paper which addresses the short lives of electronic devices is my own contribution to this year’s proceedings; “Eating Computers Considered Harmful”.¹⁶ The paper, co-authored with Ben Swift and Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, examines the damage to health and environment caused by global e-waste. Electronic devices constitue the most toxic stream of waste we produce. This toxic cocktail of substances inevitably make their way back into the soil, water and air where they are consumed by organisms (including humans). Even “recycling” practices only extract small amounts of valuable materials and burn or dispose of the rest. The initial idea for this paper was to work out how much of a computer I could eat without severly endangering myself. The answer I discovered is 0%; even the plastic in a computer is more toxic than regular plastic! And yet we are already eating our computers through offgassing, leeching and bioaccumulation. These bodily interactions with technology are generally ignored by HCI, but why? Ranting aside, this paper imagines a world where you have to eat your old computer or smart phone before you can upgrade and offers a diet plan that will have you eating your way to that new iPhone in no time!

The next couple of papers are close to my heart because they continue to consider themes addressed by myself and Ben Swift in my first Alt.CHI.¹⁷ William Seymour and Max Van Kleek invoke notions from Shintoism to make sense of the apparent character in Smart Personal Assistants in “Does Siri have a Soul?”¹⁸. Clearly this paper addresses similar themes to “EGregor”, though the characterisation of these objects as “Kami” is far more positive. When you buy a smart personal assistant, the authors claim, “what you are really buying is the voice or the presence that inhabits the plastic and silicon”. The paper imagines voice assistants which can bring benefits but can also make life tough if they are not treated with respect. “The Wild Soul” imagined by the authors is a capricious voice assistant who intentionally misunderstands your requests. Gifts and offerings should be brought to the assistant so as to maintain the harmonious soul’s presence. Most voice assistants are placated with an offering of personal data. The paper draws attention to the parasocial aspects of Smart Personal Assistants; how does their behaviour inculcate trust, might it be exploited to sell more products or extract more data? This is another fine example of the methodological value of design fiction.

Another paper drawing on spiritualism to examine techonology is Andrew McNutt and co-authors’ “Divining Insights”.¹⁹ Drawing on the interaction modes and visual form of Tarot, the authors present the automatic data analysis tool Sortilège. The authors consider the opacity of statistical modelling and machine learning in the context of automated visual analyitics. These systems promise to reveal what is important or interesting in a dataset, generating so called “insights”. Like the systems they leverage, these automated methods are brittle and biased, and offer only answers without explanations. Sortilège offers a genuinely useful data analytics tool which uses the interaction modes of cartomancy to provoke thought. Unlike other automated “insight” generators, Sortilège does not present itself as authoritative or objective, instead, as in Tarot, it is the role of the user to interpret the cards in light of their question. The set of cards includes various graphs of the data along with “Major Arcana” which include iconography designed to foster introspection.

Galen Harrison’s commentary on “Divining Insights” is also worth a read as it critiques the growing body of work in Alt.CHI which adopts spirituality to examine technology. Harrison points out that these existing works invoke spirituality “as a means to a scientific end” and proposes that future work should engage with occult or mystical practices on their own terms. Of all the papers in this years Alt.CHI, perhaps only Sharifa Sultana and co-authors’ “Parareligious-HCI” meets this goal.²⁰ The paper reflects on a 3-year long ethnographic study on wellbeing practices in rural Bangladesh. The authors examine what they term “parareligious” practices such as witchcraft which are discarded by religions and modern medicine/science, but which nonetheless are culturally embedded in wellbeing practices. These practices have been mostly ignored by HCI. The authors argue that these practices constitue Indigenous knowledges and “alternative rationality” of rural populations. The paper concludes with a discussion of ways in which HCI might design for parareligion by replicatiing analogies, metaphors and methods of the populations.

Privacy and data ethics are common themes at CHI and Alt.CHI. One contribution to this converation this year is Simy Kaur Gahoonia and co-authors’ “Upon Not Opening The Black Box”.²¹ The paper use “dramaturgical” methods to explore these ideas, which is to say, they engage with the questions through the medium of a play. The dramatis personae, presumably modelled after members of their lab, are the lab director, lab manager, various lab members, a data inspector, an arrogant data consultant. The play explores conflicting ethical considerations in the use of data and the paper has the tone of a socratic dialogue, with the (wise old?) lab director gently leading the discussion, however, unlike a soctratic dialogue no conclusion is reached. Instead the paper suggests that data use/consent cannot be decided a priori even in the context of regulation such as the GDPR.

Another paper which models positive discourse in HCI is “No Hidden Catch, No Strings Attached”.²² In the paper Jasmin Niess and Paweł Wozniak propose a twelve-step programme to achieve inter/cross-disciplinary discourse. The value of interdisciplinarity is well acknowledged in HCI, but interdisciplinary communication is easier said than done. The paper addresses significant cultural issues in HCI which make cross-disciplinary conversation difficult. They suggest that we book too much time (there’s never enough), find the right people (diversity is key), forget about publication (for a moment), assume you know nothing (be open-minded), assume you know everything (no bad ideas), and bring pens and paper, amongst other valuable suggestions. These constitute a recipe for healthy discourse.

Another paper addressing research culture is Jessica Hammer’s second contribution to this years proceedings as first author. In “Lab Counterculture”²³ Hammer and co-authors approach lab culture as a design problem. They identify “dark patterns” which structure the university and propose designs which correct these. Amongst the issues they identify are dynamics we will all no doubt be aware of; “quantitative outcomes, perfectionism, competition, time scarcity, power dynamics, bias towards maintaining the status quo, and financial stress”. These disproportionately affect students and faculty from underrepresented minorites. The authors suggest correctives they have applied in their own lab(s) such as celebrating effort rather than outcomes, elevating community over individuality, prioritising time together etc. and explain the effects these active choices had on their lab culture. The paper is a must read for anyone in the position to affect change in a research group or lab.

Similarly, in “I am just terrified of my future”²⁴, authored by a group of disabled scholars who list the first author as “Anon Ymous” describe the epistemic violence enacted upon disabled people in HCI. They identify the pervasive dehumanisation of disabled persons in existing HCI work on disability. The paper aims to take ownership of HCI’s disability narrative. The paper identifies entrenched culture of ableism which seeps into academia and into HCI despite its narrative of “doing good”. There are many important contributions in this paper, but I want to highlight one in particular by Judith Good which identifies the conflict between HCI’s engrained culture of “finding a solution to a problem” and how this leads HCI disability researchers to persistently tout the “problem” of, for example, ADHD and never acknowledge the strengths of neurodiversity or any other disability.

The papers we have covered so far have primarily addressed the research component of the university’s mission, and a few have even addressed teaching. Pietro Crovari and co-authors’ “Crime Story as a Tool for Scientific and Technological Outreach”²⁵ however, considers the so-called “third mission” of the university; public outreach. The paper describes “Death on the Nile”, an interactive, public exhibition which in the form of a whodunnit style crime-solving game. The stated aim of the project is to teach participants about a range of interactive technologies (from conversational agents to smart objects to smart spaces). The authors draw on concepts from “non-formal education” and “serious games” to frame the work. This paper has the dubious honour of being the only Alt.CHI paper in this year’s proceedings to include a user study. From this the authors “deduce” in the discussion, that their experience is inclusive, engaging and stimulating. I don’t want to criticise this paper too harshly, it looks to be a very creative and engaging interactive experience, but the methods used and the positivist language in the findings felt like something which is more aligned with CHI’s main track.

The proceedings end where they began; with sustainability. In “Low Power Web”, Max Willis and co-authors examine the carbon footprint of the web so well hidden behind the tech industry’s green image.²⁶ Global data centres now consume more energy than the UK and account for at least 2% of the worlds electricity demand. This is a sobering reminder to those celebrating the emissions saved from CHI’s cancellation. Moreover, as conference participants flock to the ACM website to read papers (like I just did) or to stream video presentations in lieu of the conference, we are reminded that every byte has an energy cost. The paper acknowledges the challenges in measuring the energy cost of data, but cites a number of estimates including a shocking comparison (to me anyway) that you can run a fridge for several hours on the energy required to stream 100 minutes of video online. The paper then turns to a “media forensic analysis” of the ACM website, the landing page of which “makes over 100 server requests and loads up to 12 MB of data. Having worked as a web developer myself, I can attest to the fact that bytes are rarely conserved anymore now that internet speeds in many parts of the world have removed concerns for wait times. And yet when we consider the carbon cost, saving bytes is still worth while, especially if you control a site with high traffic. The paper includes many ideas for how to do this as well as suggestions for ways to power a website renewably. This paper inspired me to finally delete google analytics from this site (you’re welcome, I wasn’t checking it anyway), and to reduce image sizes. I’m also looking into the possibility of solar powering another site I maintain, as the authors encouragingly state; “it’s not rocket science - all that is needed is some motivation, time, and an investment in human energy”. Whether bookending Alt.CHI with sustainability papers was a conscious choice on the part of the organisers, it serves as a reminder that tech is not the ethereal, platonic world we often mistake it to be; this is a reckoning HCI is yet to face up to.

Notes

ACM Digital Library