Our projects generally belong to one of three research areas:
- Studying the Work Required to Address Ethical Issues within Organizational Contexts
- Creating Alternate Ethics Infrastructures and Levers
- Studying User Resistance, Non-Use, and Alternative Use Practices
If you’re interested in working with us and learning more about these project areas, check out the Guide to Working in the Creating Ethics Infrastructures Lab!
1. Studying the work required to address ethical issues within organizational contexts
These projects study how technology professionals–such as user experience (UX) professionals, product managers, or artificial intelligence (AI) practitioners–attend to values and ethical issues as a part of their professional work. Often this work is attuned to issues of social power: who does what type of work to address ethical issues; whose work and knowledge is seen as legitimate or appropriate; what types of structures help or hinder these efforts?
Recent Publications
- Seeing Like a Toolkit: How Toolkits Envision the Work of AI Ethics. (2023). Richmond Y. Wong, Michael Madaio, Nick Merrill. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. 7, CSCW1
- Tactics of Soft Resistance in User Experience Professionals’ Values Work. (2021). Richmond Y. Wong. Proceedings of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction, 5 (CSCW2)
2. Creating Alternate Ethics Infrastructures and Levers
These projects explore how we can exert pressure or enact change toward ethical goals in ways that go beyond directly making changes in technical design. Other social, cultural, legal, and economic practices may be of use. Much of our focus is on law and policy, but other practices may be of use as well such as: corporate disclosures, standards and risk management frameworks, media campaigns, in-person and online community practices, or collective action. These infrastructures can serve as (what Katie Shilton terms) “values levers,” or mechanisms that help make social values visible and open to action.
Recent Publications
- Ethics Pathways: A Design Activity for Reflecting on Ethics Engagement in HCI Research. (2024). Inha Cha, Ajit G. Pillai, Richmond Y. Wong. In Proceedings of the ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’24).
- The Future of HCI-Policy Collaboration. (2024). Qian Yang, Richmond Y. Wong, Steven J. Jackson, Sabine Junginger, Margaret Hagan, Thomas Krendl Gilbert, John Zimmerman.
In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24) - Privacy Legislation as Business Risks: How GDPR and CCPA are Represented in Technology Companies’ Investment Risk Disclosures. (2023). Richmond Y. Wong, Andrew Chong, R. Cooper Aspegren. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. 7, CSCW1
3. Studying User Resistance, Non-Use, and Alternative Use Practices
Technologies are not always used in the ways that their designers intend, particularly when the social values associated with the technology do not match the social values that users and communities want to promote. These projects explore how and why people choose to use technologies in alternate ways (particularly through refusal, non-use, or alternative forms of use), and the conditions that allow or inhibit them from doing so. We also imagine alternate possibilities for design.
Recent Publications
- Broadening Privacy and Surveillance: Eliciting Interconnected Values with a Scenarios Workbook on Smart Home Cameras. (2023). Richmond Y. Wong, Jason Caleb Valdez, Ashten Alexander, Ariel Chiang, Olivia Quesada, and James Pierce. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’23)
- Co-design Partners as Transformative Learners: Imagining Ideal Technology for Schools by Centering Speculative Relationships. (2024). Michael Alan Chang, Richmond Y. Wong, Thomas Breideband, Thomas M. Philip, Ashieda McKoy, Arturo Cortez, Sidney K. D’Mello. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24)