Authors:
Tiffany Knearem
As I approach three years since transitioning from academia to industry research, I find myself reflecting on the lifelong curiosity that has led me down this winding yet fulfilling path. My journey began with a fascination for Japanese language and culture, which led me to pursue a dual bachelor's degree in East Asian languages and cultures and in psychology. This allowed me to live in Japan for years and travel extensively before starting my research career. My reading list is a mix of recent reads and longtime favorites that I continually return to, reflecting the diverse interests I've developed along the way.
Making the transition from academia to industry user research can be challenging. From collaborating with stakeholders who do not always share a researcher's perspective to working with data at scale, it's typical to encounter challenges that a Ph.D. program hasn't prepared you for. In my final internship, my intern host recommended Tomer Sharon's It's Our Research: Getting Stakeholder Buy-in for User Experience Research Projects. I continue to find it insightful for navigating the peculiarities of industry. Even though I'd worked in tech in Silicon Valley prior to graduate school, I was eager to deepen my understanding of how to advocate for user experience research so that my research insights could effectively integrate into product development. The book starts out with the humorous question, "If a study has run, with no one around to hear about it, did it still happen?" At that point, I realized this book wouldn't be just informative but also digestible and exciting. If you're curious about industry or want to improve your buy-in skill set, I highly recommend adding it to your shelf.
My career path has been anything but traditional, and I've been blessed with wonderful mentors who helped me understand the opportunities and challenges that I, as a woman in computing, have encountered. One salient example is learning how to talk about my talents and successes. Mentors come in many forms, and some are authors whom I'll likely never meet. One of them is Peggy Klaus, a communication coach who wrote Brag! The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It. She teaches readers to develop confident yet graceful brag bites—little snippets of information about achievements that draw people in and make them curious. It can be hard to keep your personal brand top of mind with those you want to influence. Brag! provides strategies that aren't sales-y and that work in the real world, where making and maintaining a good impression is paramount. This often comes down to having only a moment to pique the interest of a busy professional or person with influence. Bragging effectively is not a 30-second elevator pitch. Rather, it invites the listener to engage in a conversation—a process that can build strong allies over time. I've seen firsthand how Klaus's method has supported my confidence to speak about my achievements, and I often recommend this book to folks I mentor.
One of the first research papers that resonated with me was Jack Carroll and Mary Beth Rosson's "Wild at Home: The Neighborhood as a Living Laboratory for HCI." Carroll and Rosson present a theoretical lens on a series of related participatory design projects, utilizing the community as a "living laboratory" for HCI research. In 2017, as a new graduate student in Carroll's lab, I became interested in local communities. This stemmed from my realization of the significant impact one can have on a hyperlocal scale, working directly with people who both influence and are influenced by technology. For this reason alone, the paper was—and still is—an important read. In 2024, however, it resonates on a different level. With the shift toward embedding AI into daily life, it has become crucial to understand the people who are affected by these systems. Furthermore, this paper serves as a powerful reminder that technology's impact is not unidirectional; people also shape the evolution of these technologies. They are active agents of their own experience, "always learning and discovering opportunities, appropriating resources, and elaborating their concepts and practices … [N]ew technology necessarily disturbs the incumbent activity system, raising new possibilities and challenges." If we think about recent innovations in AI as a task-artifact cycle [1], we can center human experience as we iteratively design, deploy, and evaluate artifacts.
The final book that I recommend can help us make sense of our intertwined relationships—with technology, one another, and our natural world. In Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, Merlin Sheldrake shares the foundational role that fungi have played in life on Earth, illuminating the extent to which everything is connected. As the daughter of a landscape designer, I spent many years learning firsthand how to grow and nourish plants, with the understanding that they depend on one another to survive. The idea that all of nature is interconnected through a fungal network really struck me. It got me thinking that, since plants can sense and respond to the world around them, perhaps they are intentional collaborators, engaging in exchange and mutual support through an invisible network of fungal connectors. It's compelling that the patterns that have long helped humans survive may also be integral to nonhumans. The book is an engaging mix of personal experience and scientific assessment, teaching us along the way about our minds, our health, and our intelligence, and even alluding to how creative use of fungi may help us recover from disasters.
References
1. Carroll, J.M. and Rosson, M.B. Getting around the task-artifact cycle: How to make claims and design by scenario. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 10, 2 (1992), 181–212.
Author
Tiffany Knearem is a user experience researcher at Google. She has expertise in HCI, as well as wide-ranging interests in the areas of human-AI alignment, product design, and creativity support tooling and participatory design. She holds a Ph.D. in information sciences and technologies from Pennsylvania State University. [email protected]
Copyright 2025 held by owner/author
The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2025 ACM, Inc.
Post Comment
No Comments Found