Course info

Course goal

  • Identify some basic terms in political science and see how they correspond to digital products.
  • Understand the diversity of research taking place in HCI.
  • Examine different configurations of technology and society and see what purposes technology serves within the society.

Assessment of the course

We agree the assessment criteria

Course syllabus

Lecture 1: Introductions

Additional readings

  • Bødker, Susanne. 2006. “When Second Wave HCI Meets Third Wave Challenges.” In Proceedings of the 4th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Changing Roles, 14–18. https://doi.org/10.1.1.96.3754.
  • Oulasvirta, A., & Hornbæk, K. (2016). HCI Research as Problem-Solving. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’16, 4956–4967. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858283
  • Grudin, J. (1994). Groupware and Social Dynamics: Eight Challenges for Developers. Communications of the ACM, 37(1), 92–105. https://doi.org/10.1145/175222.175230
  • Soden, R., Ribes, D., Avle, S., & Sutherland, W. (2021). Time for Historicism in CSCW: An Invitation. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479603

Lecture 2: Background

Democracy Choose 1.

  • Held, David: Models of Democracy. Introduction
  • Dahlberg, L. (2011). Re-constructing Digital Democracy: An Outline of Four “Positions.” New Media & Society, 13(6), 855–872. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810389569

Values in design Choose 1.

  • Winner, Langdon. 1985. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” In The Social Shaping of Technology, edited by Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, 26–38. Buckingham: Open University Press. (if interested, you might read also this)
  • Nissenbaum, Helen. 2005. “Values in Technical Design.” In Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, edited by Carl Mitcham, lxvi–lxx. New York: MacMillan.

Addition readings

  • Birhane, A., Kalluri, P., Card, D., Agnew, W., Dotan, R., & Bao, M. (2022). The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research. 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 22, 173–184. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533083

Lecture 3: Governments, Representations and Citizens

Read three.

  • McDonald, Samantha, and Melissa Mazmanian. 2019. “Information Materialities of Citizen Communication in the U.S. Congress.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3 (CSCW). https://doi.org/10.1145/3359149.
  • Hemphill, Libby, and Andrew J. Roback. 2014. “Tweet Acts: How Constituents Lobby Congress via Twitter.” In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW ’14, 1200–1210. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531735.
  • Liste, Lucía, and Knut H Sørensen. 2015. “Consumer, Client or Citizen? How Norwegian Local Governments Domesticate Website Technology and Configure Their Users.” Information, Communication & Society 18 (7): 733–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.993678.
  • Nelimarkka, M., Laaksonen, S., Tuokko, M., & Valkonen, T. (2020). Platformed Interactions: How Social Media Platforms Relate to Candidate–Constituent Interaction During Finnish 2015 Election Campaigning. Social Media + Society, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120903856
  • Stromer-Galley, J. (2000). On-line interaction and why candidates avoid it. Journal of Communication, 50(4), 111–132. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2000.tb02865.x

Lecture 4: Publics and social movements

Read three.

  • Disalvo, Carl. 2009. “Design and the Construction of Publics.” Design Issues, 48–63. https://doi.org/10.1162/desi.2009.25.1.48.
  • Asad, Mariam, and Christopher a. Le Dantec. 2015. “Illegitimate Civic Participation.” Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW ’15, 1694–1703. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675156.
  • Erete, Sheena L. 2015. “Engaging Around Neighborhood Issues.” In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW ’15, 1590–1601. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675182.
  • Wright, S. (2012). From third place to third space: Everyday political talk in non-political online spaces. Javnost -- the Public, 19(3), 5–20. Retrieved from https://lra.le.ac.uk/handle/2381/27607

Lecture 5: Democratic Innovations and Participation

Read three.

  • Nelimarkka, Matti. 2019. “A Review of Research on Participation in Democratic Decision-Making Presented at SIGCHI Conferences. Toward an Improved Trading Zone Between Political Science and HCI.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3 (CSCW): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359241.
  • Chadwick, Andrew, and Christopher May. 2003. “Interaction between States and Citizens in the Age of the Internet: ‘E-Government’ in the United States, Britain, and the European Union.” Governance 16 (2): 271–300. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0491.00216
  • Wright, S. (2012). Assessing (e-)Democratic Innovations. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 9(4), 453–470. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2012.712820
  • Bardzell, J., Freeman, G., & Chen, P. (2020). Join . Love : A Sociotechnical Genealogy of the Legalization of Same-Sex Marriage. 1–13.
  • Palacin, V., McDonald, S., Aragón, P., & Nelimarkka, M. (2024). Configurations of Digital Participatory Budgeting. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 31(2). https://doi.org/10.1145/3635144

Additional readings

  • Zhang, A. X., Hugh, G., & Bernstein, M. S. (2020). PolicyKit: Building Governance in Online Communities. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 365–378. https://doi.org/10.1145/3379337.3415858
  • Jia, C., Lam, M. S., Mai, M. C., Hancock, J. T., & Bernstein, M. S. (2024). Embedding Democratic Values into Social Media AIs via Societal Objective Functions. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(CSCW1). https://doi.org/10.1145/3641002

Lecture 6: Critical accounts

Read one paper from Cluster A, one from Cluster B and one from either A or B (total: 3 articles).

Cluster A:

  • Spiel, K. (2021). ”Why are they all obsessed with Gender?” — (Non)binary Navigations through Technological Infrastructures. Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021, 478–494. https://doi.org/10.1145/3461778.3462033
  • Bardzell, S., & Bardzell, J. (2011, May). Towards a feminist HCI methodology: social science, feminism, and HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 675-684).
  • Dosono, B., & Semaan, B. (2019, May). Moderation practices as emotional labor in sustaining online communities: The case of AAPI identity work on Reddit. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13).

Cluster B:

  • Keyes, Os, Josephine Hoy, and Margaret Drouhard. 2019. “Human-Computer Insurrection.” Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’19, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300569.
  • Matamoros-Fernández, A. (2017). Platformed racism: the mediation and circulation of an Australian race-based controversy on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Information, Communication & Society, 20(6), 930–946. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1293130
  • Keyes, O., Hutson, J., & Durbin, M. (2019). A Mulching Proposal, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3310433
  • Fox, S. E., Sobel, K., & Rosner, D. K. (2019, May). Managerial Visions: stories of upgrading and maintaining the public restroom with IoT. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-15).
  • Haapoja, J., Laaksonen, S. M., & Lampinen, A. (2020). Gaming Algorithmic Hate-Speech Detection: Stakes, Parties, and Moves. Social Media and Society, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120924778