Cyborg Imaginaries is a speculative design futures project. Participants shared their lived experiences with accessing, maintaining, and modifying the adaptive and assistive technologies (AT) they need to live their lives. These testimonies are complemented with interviews of AT policy makers, developers, and distributors. By investigating the space of AT through these three lenses of life, policy, and distribution, it becomes possible to understand how the current system is meant to function, how it really functions, and how that function directly impacts people’s lives. Five participants were selected for co-design sessions where we explored their dream sociotechnical future through individually tailored activities based on their prior interviews. The co-design session data is being used to develop multiple design artifacts for display in an exhibit expressing a future sociotechnical landscape of assistive technology unbounded by current societal norms, policy, and infrastructure barriers. I will be exploring opportunities to present these artifacts in various public venues as a public interest campaign to galvanize attention to the inequities in AT service provision and inspire local organizing efforts for change. In addition to this ongoing exhibit design project, the data collected is being analyzed and prepped for publication in multiple venues related to assistive technology, public policy, and research reform.
Team Members
Rua, Chorong, Monaami, Atharva, Laila
Associated Funding
Social Science Research Council Inaugural Just Tech Fellowship (2022-2024), $200,000
Calls for Participation
inactive
Associated Publications
- Williams, R. M. (n. d.). Cyborg realities / Cyborg imaginaries / Cyborg revolutions /. Shift Space. https://www.shiftspace.pub/writing/cyborg-realities-cyborg-imaginaries-cyborg-revolutions
- Jackson, L., Haagaard, A., & Williams, R. M. (2022, April 9). Disability Dongle. CASTAC Platypus Blog. https://blog.castac.org/2022/04/disability-dongle/
- Disability Dongles are contemporary fairy tales that appeal to the abled imagination by presenting a heroic designer-protagonist whose prototype provides a techno-utopian (re)solution to the design problem. Disability Dongle rhetoric instills in students the value of a quick fix over structural change, thus preventing them from seeking out, participating in, and contributing to existing inquiry. By labeling these material-discursive phenomena—the designed artifacts and the discourse through which their meaning is constituted—we work to shift the focus from their misguided concern about our bodies to their under-analyzed intentions and ambitions.
- Jackson, L., & Williams, R. M. (2024, April 4). The Wheelchair to Warfare Pipeline: How Disabled People Get Exploited to Build the Technology of War. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/179391/wheelchair-warfare-pipeline-disability-technology
- The cutting-edge products that Big Tech and the Pentagon are developing could be rebuilding an untold number of lives. Instead, they’re being sent to the battlefield to ruin more.
- Svyantek, M., & Williams, R. M. (2022). From Telecommute to Telecommunity: How Disabled Onto-Epistemologies Inform Post-Pandemic Professional Practices. In Chaos and Organizations: The Coronavirus and Lessons for Orgazational Theory. Information Age Publishing.
- Williams, R. M., Boyd, L., & Gilbert, J. E. (2023). Counterventions: A reparative reflection on interventionist HCI. Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581480
- Research in HCI applied to clinical interventions relies on normative assumptions about which bodies and minds are healthy, valuable, and desirable. To disrupt this normalizing drive in HCI, we define a “counterventional approach” to intervention technology design informed by critical scholarship and community perspectives. This approach is meant to unsettle normative assumptions of intervention as urgent, necessary, and curative. We begin with a historical overview of intervention in HCI and its critics. Then, through reparative readings of past HCI projects in autism intervention, we illustrate the emergent principles of a counterventional approach and how it may manifest research outcomes that are fundamentally divergent from dominant approaches. We then explicate characteristics of “counterventions” – projects that aim to contest dominant sociotechnical paradigms through privileging community and participants in research inquiry, interaction design, and analysis of outcomes. These divergent research imaginaries have transformative implications for how interventionist HCI might be conducted in future.
- Williams, R. M., & Gilbert, J. E. (2019). Cyborg Perspectives on Computing Research Reform. Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI EA ’19, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3310421
- Recent exposures of extant and potentially discriminatory impacts of technological advancement have prompted members of the computing research field to reflect on their duty to actively predict and mitigate negative consequences of their work. In 2018, Hecht et al. proposed changes to the peer-review process attending to the computing research community’s responsibility for impacts on society. In requiring researchers and reviewers to expressly consider the positive and negative consequences of each study, the hope is that our community can earnestly shape more ethical innovation and inquiry. We question whether most researchers have sufficient historical context and awareness of activist movements to recognize crucial impacts to marginalized populations. Drawing from the work of feminist theorists and critical disability scholars, we present case studies in leveraging “situated knowledges” in the analysis of research ethics.
- Williams, R. M., & Park, C. (2023). Cyborg Assemblages: How autistic adults construct sociotechnical networks to support cognitive function. Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581556
- Autism has become a popular context for accessible technology researchers, yet a majority of HCI projects for autism and ADHD do not engage in participatory methods or otherwise involve disabled stakeholders in the project and research design. Prior inquiry has identified executive function as a common difficulty for which technologies may provide novel benefits. In this study, we explore how autistic adults currently use technologies, broadly defined, to augment executive function and support themselves in day-to-day tasks. We collect qualitative data from narratives elicited during informal asynchronous interviews to conduct a digital ethnomethodology. Following from principles of Design Justice, crip technoscience, and cyborg assemblage theory, we investigate how autistic adults articulate their own sociotechnical environments into technologically mediated assemblages of executive function and interpersonal webs of care. These patterns of sociotechnical formation inform future work in research and design for tools that can mediate executive function for all users.
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