November - December 2021 | ACM Interactions

VOLUME XXVIII.6 November - December 2021

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WELCOME
- (Un)making democracy
  
  J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Sucheta Ghoshal, Daniela Rosner, Alex Taylor, Mikael Wiberg
  
  This issue is a call for a careful consideration of the relationship between democracy and design. Rather than treat democracy as a universal good or moral value, what would it mean to examine it as integral to the complex ideological work of policymaking, practical reform, and dreams deferred? The…
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Blog@IX
- Black literary technoculture and afrofuturist rupture
  
  Kristen Reynolds
  
  As an epigraph to her incomplete book [1], Parable of the Trickster, Octavia Butler writes, "[T]here's nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns." I take this to be her call for opening ourselves up to those other worlds that are already here, yet we have been…
- Open civic engagement in a panopticon state
  
  Subhashish Panigrahi
  
  On August 18, 2021, the Pegasus Project, a coalition of 17 organizations, started to unveil the extent of a highly sophisticated, unlawful surveillance operation of more than 50,000 individuals in 40 different countries by authoritarian regimes, potentially by using the Pegasus spyware developed by NSO Group, a private Israeli…
- The platform as the city
  
  Mac Arboleda, Palak Dudani, Sayash Kapoor, Lorna Xu
  
  Digital platforms obfuscate the power arrangements that undergird them in part by mimicking aspects of real life in their user interface. A Web page for answering questions becomes a "forum," a group on Facebook becomes a "community," all to make interaction with digital platforms seem frictionless. Carceral logics for…
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Exhibit X
- Yo-yo machines: Self-build peripheral awareness communication devices
  
  Interaction Research Studio
  
  Yo-Yo Machines are playful communication devices designed to help people feel socially connected while physically separated. Our response to a U.K. call for projects using previous research to create an impact during the pandemic, YoYo Machines make a long line of work on peripheral and emotional awareness available to…
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Columns
- Democracy and data fatalism
  
  Jonathan Bean
  
  In The Green New Deal, Jeremy Rifkin describes a vision of the future that is dependent on distributed computing. As Rifkin sees it, energy generation and storage, financial transactions, and the operation of autonomous transportation will be dependent on microprocessors embedded in just about every aspect of our built…
- What does it mean to do things together? Design’s conflicting relationships with democracy
  
  Jaz Choi, Andrea Cabrera
  
  We are exhausted. The topic resonates with us. We work well together. We genuinely care about each other. Yet, entering the second half of 2021 in two opposite seasons, we still find ourselves unable to write this column with the kind of dynamism we anticipated. The Covid pandemic covered…
- The institutional capture of abolitionist dissent: Ending genres of police science
  
  Mon Mohapatra, Rachel Kuo
  
  Data-driven technology usage abounds in policing and incarceration: biometric surveillance, facial recognition software, ShotSpotter, license plate readers, cell tower simulators ("Stingrays"), drones, metadatabases, and myriad predictive technologies. Ongoing protests against police violence and mass incarceration have created an urgent push to challenge and dismantle policing, including the carceral tools…
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Forums
- A conversation with Kamela Heyward-Rotimi: Part 2
  
  Sareeta Amrute, Kamela Heyward-Rotimi
  
  In the July—August issue, Kamela Heyward-Rotimi introduced us to the complications surrounding the Yahoo-Yahoo or 419 scams in Nigeria. In this second installment of the two-part interview, Heyward-Rotimi turns to the efforts big companies go to surveil these scams. Through her account, we'll hear how the treatment of the…
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Space
- Mapmaking for memory’s sake: The Tigray genocide
  
  Salem Tewelde
  
  [T]o acknowledge our dreams is to sometimes acknowledge the distance between those dreams and our present situation. Acknowledged, our dreams can shape the realities of our future, if we arm them with the hard work and scrutiny of now. — Audre Lorde Ancient Debre Damo monastery building Tigray, Ethiopia.…
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Features
- Grieving in the face of fascism
  
  J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Sucheta Ghoshal
  
  The Otherwise School is a collaboration between J. Khadijah Abdurahaman's initiative We Be Imagining and Sucheta Ghoshal's research collective Inquilab at the University of Washington. The program for summer 2021 was funded by the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington. The project's goal is…
- Online experiments and participation within Chile’s extraordinary constitutional process
  
  Gloria Baigorrotegui, Matías Valderrama, Patricia Peña
  
  We write this article coming from a troubled and uncertain situation. The Chilean democracy has not been sensitive or responsive to the people's demands for greater equality and dignity. The so-called Penguin Revolution in 2006, the student mobilizations of 2011, the feminist protests of May 2018, and the demonstrations…
- Lateral violences: Speculating exit strategies within movements (a concept note)
  
  Rachel Kuo, Mon Mohapatra, Rigoberto Guzmán
  
  Abolitionist design (AD) seeks to identify the ways violence permeates laterally across collaborative formations who are trying to dismantle oppressive systems. We have seen different networks collapse because of unresolved internal conflict. As organizers and designers concerned with building and maintaining networks, we asked how we can transmute energy…
- The steep cost of capture
  
  Meredith Whittaker
  
  This is a perilous moment. Private computational systems marketed as artificial intelligence (AI) are threading through our public life and institutions, concentrating industrial power, compounding marginalization, and quietly shaping access to resources and information. In considering how to tackle this onslaught of industrial AI, we must first recognize that…
- A study of ballot anomaly detection with a transparent voting machine
  
  Juan Gilbert, Isabel Laurenceau, Jean Louis
  
  Many components contribute to a safe and secure election, but several experts agree that the most important one is to include risk-limiting audits on voter-verified paper ballots. Ballot-marking devices (BMDs) allow voters to select candidates on a machine and print a physical ballot summary that can be tallied and…
- Social media platforms are failed cities
  
  André Ourednik, Jakub Mlynář, Nico Mutzner, Hamed Alavi
  
  As the astronaut Dave Bowman, armed with a screwdriver, disconnects the murderous computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the machine complains, "My mind is going; I can feel it; please stop, Dave." Similarly, advocates for the alt-right Twitter clone Parler kept on pleading that "we're a town square,…
- Human-AI interaction: Intermittent, continuous, and proactive
  
  Niels van Berkel, Mikael Skov, Jesper Kjeldskov
  
  With the rise in artificial intelligence (AI)—driven interactive systems, both academics and practitioners within human-computer interaction (HCI) have a growing focus on human-AI interaction. This has resulted in, for example, system-design guidelines and reflections on the differences and challenges when designing for AI-driven interaction as opposed to more-traditional applications…
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Dialogues
- Grieving in the face of fascism
  
  J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Sucheta Ghoshal
  
  The Otherwise School is a collaboration between J. Khadijah Abdurahaman's initiative We Be Imagining and Sucheta Ghoshal's research collective Inquilab at the University of Washington. The program for summer 2021 was funded by the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington. The project's goal is…
- Online experiments and participation within Chile’s extraordinary constitutional process
  
  Gloria Baigorrotegui, Matías Valderrama, Patricia Peña
  
  We write this article coming from a troubled and uncertain situation. The Chilean democracy has not been sensitive or responsive to the people's demands for greater equality and dignity. The so-called Penguin Revolution in 2006, the student mobilizations of 2011, the feminist protests of May 2018, and the demonstrations…
- Lateral violences: Speculating exit strategies within movements (a concept note)
  
  Rachel Kuo, Mon Mohapatra, Rigoberto Guzmán
  
  Abolitionist design (AD) seeks to identify the ways violence permeates laterally across collaborative formations who are trying to dismantle oppressive systems. We have seen different networks collapse because of unresolved internal conflict. As organizers and designers concerned with building and maintaining networks, we asked how we can transmute energy…
- The steep cost of capture
  
  Meredith Whittaker
  
  This is a perilous moment. Private computational systems marketed as artificial intelligence (AI) are threading through our public life and institutions, concentrating industrial power, compounding marginalization, and quietly shaping access to resources and information. In considering how to tackle this onslaught of industrial AI, we must first recognize that…
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Calendar
- Calendar
  
  INTR Staff
  
  November CHIuXiD '21: 7th International HCI and UX Conference in Indonesia (virtual) November 3, 2021 https://chiuxid.org/ IoT '21: 11th International Conference on the Internet of Things (St. Gallen, Switzerland and virtual) November 8–12, 2021 https://iot-conference.org/iot2021 SUI '21: ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (virtual) November 9–10, 2021 https://sui.acm.org/2021/ ISS…
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Exit
- Resistance is tactile
  
  Annie Leue
  
  Contributor: Annie Leue Curator/Editor: Nia Easley Resistance is Tactile was a personal response to the tragedy that occurred in Las Vegas in October 2017. On February 21, 2018, I mailed nearly 5,000 moist towelettes to the top 20 congressional recipients of NRA campaign contributions as an act of artistic…
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