HCI

Designing for Upstream Work: Learnings from Co-Design for Preventative Solutions with Urban Fire Departments

Public health and social welfare fields increasingly recognize the need for preventative interventions that address root causes rather than respond to emergent problems – yet face significant challenges in designing tools and demonstrating success for such initiatives. We characterize these important, but difficult to develop and scale solutions using Dan Heath’s term “upstream work”. We then explore design solutions to support upstream work through a multi-phase co-design process to assist fire departments developing alternate EMS response programs to reduce 911 call volume.

Care Workers' Risk Work: How Nannies Manage Invisible Threats in Employers' Homes

Extending prior HCI and CSCW research on invisible challenges that domestic care workers face, we examine how childcare workers, particularly nannies, experience and manage workplace risks. Drawing on interviews with 21 full-time nannies, we identified three interrelated risks—physical, emotional, and financial—arising from structural and relational constraints in employers’ homes. Through the lens of risk work, we show how these multi-dimensional constraints create tensions that hinder nannies' direct risk mitigation strategies.

Mapping Risk Work and Designing Technologies to Support it in CSCW Research

This workshop brings together CSCW scholars of various domains, such as medicine and healthcare, disaster planning, and public safety, to consider different dimensions of risk work and their implications on computing. Risk work encompasses the practices through which workers assess, manage, and mitigate potential harms in situations framed by uncertainty. In the face of a pervasive rhetoric of crisis, risk work is expanding and evolving as workers and laypeople are increasingly charged with preventing, predicting, and communicating risks.

Understanding Information Managers: A Thematic Analysis of Information Challenges of Disability Service Providers

This paper details an investigation into the information management challenges encountered by disability service providers. Prior research has mainly focused on understanding the information management challenges related to user records or internal organizational systems. However, this study posits that the information access patterns of disability services users are significantly influenced by their interactions with service providers’ information management practices in localized settings.

New Kids on the Block? Exploring Onboarding Strategies of Prospective Professionals in Cybersecurity

This paper explores how prospective professionals, including those outside of educational institutions, approach entering the cybersecurity field. Through qualitative interviews with individuals planning a cybersecurity career, we explore diverse challenges they face during their journey to enter the profession. Our preliminary analysis suggests their challenges may include a lack of awareness of occupational culture, insufficient domain-specific language, visibility into the practitioner community, and differences in expectations between new and practicing professionals.

Data Discretion: Screen-Level Bureaucrats and Municipal Decision-Making

Public servants tasked with implementing rules or policies on the street-level often make discretionary decisions based on local context. Lipsky has labeled them street-level bureaucrats. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as most face-to-face interactions facilitated by local government moved online, many street-level decisions were moved to screens, representing the actions of who Bouvins and Zouridis refer to as screen-level bureaucrats. Discretionary decision-making among public servants continued, but much of it centered on the collection, analysis, and use of data.

Exploring Domestic Workers’ Risk Work During the COVID-19 Pandemic

While many occupations turned to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic work by definition requires workers to enter other people’s households, and they often work in close proximity to their employers. With domestic workers proactively handling COVID19 risks as part of their already precarious jobs, there is a need for a conceptual understanding of risk management to aid this occupational group during a public health crisis.

Visualizing Local Information Inequality in South Korea: An AI-Based Approach Using Public Library Data

The goal of the project is to understand information inequality across geographical regions in South Korea and visualize them using an AI-backed visualization tool. Our plan, spanning three years, revolves around the development of an intuitive platform for the purpose of visualizing these disparities. During the first year, we aim to construct comprehensive metrics for assessing the level of informational inequality, based on the theory of local information landscapes (LIL theory).

Understanding the Present and Designing the Future of Risk Prediction IT in Fire Departments

This research will develop and design new data-driven risk prediction principles and management (DDRPM) tools that anticipate and manage a variety of community risks, which fire departments are increasingly required to respond to, including medical, fire, and safety emergencies. Today, much of their work focuses on community risk reduction (CRR), a paradigm that seeks to mitigate risks before they lead to emergencies in the first place. The CRR paradigm will leverage new data-driven risk prediction and management (DDRPM) tools to predict and respond to a variety of community risks.

Exploring How Convergence Methods Foster Shared Accountability to Reveal, Map, and Mitigate the Sources and Dynamics of Bias across Social Service Provisioning Systems

Social services, traditionally, have been organized around their missions, such as education or safety or health. A newer approach, called "wrap-around services" or "systems of care," organizes services around individuals and their specific context and needs. These systems face many challenges when applied in real-world settings. Application processes often focus more on the potential of technologies and less on the realities, histories, and needs of communities. The proposed research addresses this gap by evaluating the implementation of a system of care in a real-world setting.

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