July - August 2021 | ACM Interactions

VOLUME XXVIII.4 July - August 2021

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WELCOME
- The labor of tech
  
  Daniela Rosner, Alex Taylor, Mikael Wiberg
  
  Visit a work site today and it's hard not to find emerging technology. Networked cameras that monitor the activities of domestic care workers. Apps that trace the movement of ride-sharing workers and mobile shoppers. Smart soap dispensers that tally how often hospital employees wash their hands. From warehouses to…
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What are you reading?
- What are you reading? Grant Jun Otsuki
  
  Grant Otsuki
  
  This past year I've spent a lot of time working online, as many people have. Slack and TikTok, Zoom and FaceTime, Moodles and Blackboards—all were a part of life before. But they've become inescapable, even down here in the relative calm of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Politics, economics, and culture, not…
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Blog@IX
- The labor behind the tools: Using design thinking methods to examine content moderation software
  
  Caroline Sinders, Sana Ahmad
  
  Content moderation is widely known to be hidden from the public view, often leaving the discourse bereft of operational knowledge about social media platforms. Media and scholarly articles have shed light on the asymmetrical processes of creating content policies for social media and their resulting impact on the rights…
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Exhibit X
- Dream: Mixed Reality Technologies for Live Performance
  
  Lara Houston, Marshmallow Laser Feast
  
  When the Covid-19 pandemic closed London's theaters, digital studio Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) was already working on Dream, a mixed-reality live performance intended to bring together live and online audiences. Co-developed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Manchester International Festival, and the Philharmonia Orchestra, Dream's focus on the integration…
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Columns
- Bridging knowledge and labor
  
  Jonathan Bean
  
  Enzo, an experienced machinist quoted in a report prepared by the Forrester consulting firm, felt out of place when he joined a new shop at age 56. He knew that he had changed over time, "but the machines had changed a lot more. They had gotten very high tech.…
- Aesthetic flattening
  
  Jaz Choi, Cade Diehm
  
  One year into the Covid-19 pandemic, an impatient public—lit up by the blue glow of screens—preps itself for a collective amnesia. Many of us started 2020 nervously counting infection curves and rising death rates. Now, after a year of ghoulish statistics dictating what should be considered essential—or grievable—we wait…
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Making/breaking
- Speculatively sewing historic clothing patents
  
  Kat Jungnickel
  
  For nearly a decade, I've been interested in historic clothing inventions and how "making things to make sense of things" [1] using visual and inventive methods might help me get closer (and in)to research in new ways. In my research and teaching at Goldsmiths I've explored ideas around gender,…
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Forums
- How does AI challenge design practice?
  
  Thomas Olsson, Kaisa Väänänen
  
  Machine learning-based systems have become the bread and butter of our digital lives. Today's users interact with, or are influenced by, applications of natural language processing and computer vision, recommender systems, and many other forms of so-called narrow AI. In the ongoing commodification of AI, the role of design…
- ‘Everything in the forest Is the forest’: A decade of the sustainability in (inter)action forum
  
  Roy Bendor, Lisa Nathan, Matthew Mauriello, Oliver Bates
  
  The Sustainability in (Inter)Action forum first appeared in Interactions in 2011 (May–June, Vol. 18.3). It sought to create a space for highlighting innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, welcoming a diversity of approaches to the topic across human-computer interaction (HCI) communities. Whether…
- A conversation with Kamela Heyward-Rotimi: Part 1
  
  Sareeta Amrute, Kamela Heyward-Rotimi
  
  Kamela Heyward-Rotimi is a practicing anthropologist whose work reflects her commitment to actualizing theory into practice. Executive director and founder of the international Knowledge Exchange Research Group (KERG), she holds affiliations with the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Obafemi…
- Discovering intersectionality part 2: Reclaiming our time
  
  Jakita Thomas, Neha Kumar, Alexandra To, Quincy Brown, Yolanda Rankin
  
  In the previous issue of ACM Interactions, I engaged four thought leaders in the field of HCI—Quincy Brown, Neha Kumar, Jakita Thomas, and Alexandra To—in an intimate conversation about how they first discovered intersectionality. In this issue, we continue the second part of the conversation. Here, each scholar talks…
- Seeing like a dataset from the Global South
  
  Nithya Sambasivan
  
  Data is the fundamental technical infrastructure for inferential technologies. The Global South contributes an outsize user and labor base in producing the data that powers AI models. Yet most AI creators have failed to understand how the social, political, ecological, and infrastructural nuances of these contexts can affect data,…
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Features
- Interrupting invisibility in a global world
  
  Noopur Raval
  
  With the rise of the on-demand platform economy, the term invisible labor has steadily gained purchase in multiple disciplines. Encompassing everything from task work or digital piecework to gig work such as Ubering and food delivery, "invisible work" has proven to be an important conceptual lens to understand the…
- Platform workers as infrastructures of global technologies
  
  Rida Qadri
  
  Mobility platforms entered Jakarta at a moment when algorithmic matching was heralded as a revolution for how we moved in the city. Digital platforms would free residents from the inefficiencies and frictions of the city and free the city from the chaos of the informal motorbike taxis that dominated…
- The collateral damage of digitalization during Covid
  
  Linnea Öhlund
  
  The intention of digitalizing in a society may be to contribute to the greater good; collateral damage, however, is bound to occur as integration proceeds without fully considering those negatively affected. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the adaptation and digitalization of technologies in society. In Sweden, many people turned…
- Companion toys for children: Using drawings to probe happiness
  
  Rojin Vishkaie
  
  In this article, we contribute to child-computer interaction (CCI) as an evolving area of research and design. Our goal is to explore early elementary school students' (K–1) happiness in a learning environment. We collected drawings by children to learn about their perceptions of happiness in the classroom and to…
- Mind the gap: How good are we at keeping our distance?
  
  Ava Elizabeth Scott, Thomas Reitmaier, Matt Jones, Yvonne Rogers
  
  During the Covid-19 pandemic, many countries instigated regulations to encourage us all to physically keep 2 meters apart when we encountered people outside our households or support bubbles, a practice commonly referred to as social distancing by (inter) governmental organizations such as the WHO, the NHS, and the CDC.…
- Visualizing Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics
  
  Tim Schütz
  
  Formosa Plastics Group (FPG) is one of the largest petrochemical conglomerates in the world, with facilities in Taiwan, China, Vietnam, and the United States. Formosa has a damning record of explosions, routine pollution, and "mafia-like" behavior with environmental activists and other critics [1]. In this article, I reflect on…
- What does AI mean for smallholder farmers? A proposal for farmer-centered AI research
  
  Courtney Heldreth, Diana Akrong, Jess Holbrook, Norman Makoto Su
  
  Smallholder farmers make up 95 percent of the world's farmers and produce 45 percent of the world's food, 70 percent of which comes from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia [1]. Yet these farmers face challenges including low yields, poverty, food insecurity, climate change, and limited access to…
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Dialogues
- Tech labor
  
  Seyram Avle, Sarah Fox
  
  Recent big tech flexes tell a story of an industry with increasing hubris and reach, largely acting with impunity. Whistleblower claims against Google representatives for their baseless firing of tech ethicist Timnit Gebru have led to little in the way of recourse or remedy, following a pattern of discriminatory…
- Interrupting invisibility in a global world
  
  Noopur Raval
  
  With the rise of the on-demand platform economy, the term invisible labor has steadily gained purchase in multiple disciplines. Encompassing everything from task work or digital piecework to gig work such as Ubering and food delivery, "invisible work" has proven to be an important conceptual lens to understand the…
- Platform workers as infrastructures of global technologies
  
  Rida Qadri
  
  Mobility platforms entered Jakarta at a moment when algorithmic matching was heralded as a revolution for how we moved in the city. Digital platforms would free residents from the inefficiencies and frictions of the city and free the city from the chaos of the informal motorbike taxis that dominated…
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Calendar
- Calendar
  
  INTR Staff
  
  July CUI '21: Conversational User Interfaces Conference (virtual) Conference Dates: July 27–29, 2021 https://conversationaluserinterfaces.org/2021 August INTERACT '21: 18th IFIP TC.13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (Bari, Italy) Conference Dates: August 30-September 3, 2021 https://interact2021.org September Audio Mostly 2021 (Trento, Italy) Conference Dates: September 1–3, 2021 https://audiomostly.com MuC…
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Exit
- Just and equitable data labeling: Toward a responsible AI supply chain
  
  Ananya Parekh, Sarayu Natarajan
  
  Contributors: Ananya Broker Parekh, Sarayu Natarajan Curator/Editor: Nia Easley https://www.aapti.in/blog/just-and-equitable-data-labelling Commissioned by Aapti Institute for a research report on equitable artificial-intelligence supply chains, this illustration depicts the process of data labeling, or annotation, labor often carried out by workers in the Global South. Through this image, we hope to…
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