Ann Light

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Verified

Ann verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at University of Sussex

This forum showcases emerging approaches, new ideas, and promising pathways that draw attention to the diverse, interdisciplinary, and impactful work of global scholars to advance dialogue in the field on how we can best contribute to climate action. --- Robert Soden, Vishal Sharma, Matthew Louis Mauriello, and Nicola J. Bidwell, Editors

In this paper, we report on a three-year endeavour that fostered 18 collaborations between academic and non-academic organizations to co-create responses to social (in)justice issues in digital societies. The projects and range of individuals and organisations connected to this programme offer a snapshot of the state of social justice thinking with...

More-than-human philosophical approaches, premised on relations that prioritise care, interdependence and flourishing, have become attractive to think with. Yet designers also seek to enact their convictions as method. As soon as theories of relationality are substantiated in concrete form, tensions accrue and issues of rep- resentation and partici...

This one day workshop will explore queering as a design technique for troubling data and AI systems, ranging from quotidian personal data to recent Generative AI tools. By surfacing numerous instances of queering data or AI, we will come together to develop an archive of techniques for queering or artful subversion. From this archive, participants...

Climate change, rapid urbanisation, pandemics, as well as innovations in technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) are all impacting urban space. One response to such changes has been to make cities ecologically sustainable and ‘smart’. From real-time bus information, autonomous electric vehicle...

Witnessing the speed of growth and reach in demand for service design (SD) confronts us to ask what neoliberal forces are behind this acceleration? Can services, systems and structures really improve at this velocity; what are we eroding and ignoring in turn? Pausing to ask about the direction and effect of change is critical to recognising SD’s im...

What happens when we try to enact theory in our practices of collaboration? The CreaTures project spent three years exploring the challenges of conceptualising and enacting entanglement in using creative practice to try and change worldviews towards understandings of interdependence. Acknowledging the backdrop to our work as pressing ecological bre...

Witnessing the speed of growth and reach in demand for service design (SD) confronts us to ask what neoliberal forces are behind this acceleration? Are services, systems and structures really improving at this velocity, and what are we eroding and ignoring in turn? Pausing to ask about the direction and effect of change is critical to recognising S...

This workshop advances a CSCW-perspective on how scale and place relate and how we might better understand what role scale plays in the design of tools and collaborative processes. This full-day workshop is designed for up to 20 participants, to be selected based on short position papers that relate to one or more of the workshop themes: (1) the po...

When times change rapidly, the transformations around us ask us to consider whether our practices of research and scholarship are keeping abreast. Multiple crises are bearing down on us and only a change in Global North lifestyles and values will begin to address the world's course towards major catastrophe. In this highly interactive panel, we unr...

“Sharing economy” and “collaborative economy” refer to a proliferation of initiatives, business models, digital platforms and forms of work that characterise contemporary life: from community-led initiatives and activist campaigns, to the impact of global sharing platforms in contexts such as network hospitality, transportation, etc. Sharing the co...

What makes the design of futures sufficiently transformative? Worldwide, people are aware of the need to change and keep changing to address eco-social challenges and their fallout in an age of crises and transitions in climate, biodiversity, and health. Calls for climate justice and the development of eco-social sensibilities speak to the need for...

While scalability and growth are key concerns for mainstream, venture-backed digital platforms, local and location-oriented collaborative economies are diverse in their approaches to evolving and achieving social change. Their aims and tactics differ when it comes to broadening their activities across contexts, spreading their concept, or seeking t...

Uncertainty is a prevalent characteristic of contemporary life and a central challenge of HCI. As humans, researchers, and designers we encounter uncertainty in a multitude of forms and a variety of settings. The growing attention to uncertainty in HCI is due to the ever increasing expansion of the field and questions and contexts to which we seek...

This article explores how co-design workshops might engage with the conditions that constrain our anticipation of more just futures. We discuss how practitioner commitments to feminisms might contribute to more critical exploration. Rather than exploring what practitioners should be doing in feminist futures-focused co-design, we seek a better unde...

While scalability and growth are key concerns for mainstream, venture-backed digital platforms, local and location-oriented collaborative economies are diverse in their approaches to evolving and achieving social change. Their aims and tactics differ when it comes to broadening their activities across contexts, spreading their concept, or seeking t...

How do people become conversant with futures-in-the-making? This paper explores speculative design from the position that futures have agency in the present and therefore forms of speculation – as well as futures - need to be inclusive. Regarding this as a democratic right throws attention on engagement processes, noting that speculation is often c...

The dramatic acceleration of digital technologies and their integration into physical products is transforming everyday objects. Our domestic appliances, furniture, clothing, are growing in intelligence. Smart objects are increasingly capable of interacting with humans in a purposeful manner with intentionality. This collection of essays, descripti...

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we use...

How do the social dynamics within interdisciplinary research teams shape sustainability research? This paper presents a case study of interdisciplinary research projects at the University of Sussex, as part of a programme aimed at encouraging collaborative work to address intersections between the Sustainability Development Goals. Using data gather...

Recent work on sharing and cooperativism has helped widen our understanding of the emerging systems for exchanges, interactions, and relationships beyond mainstream economic models, in particular through studying local cooperatives and their sharing practices across various domains. These efforts also indicate that design has the potential to shape...

This one-day workshop invites discussion on the various socio-technical processes and dynamics that characterize scale and scaling in local, community-sited initiatives. Seeking to move beyond a view of scale as mere growth in numbers and a matter of technology-mediated replication, the workshop aims at developing a nuanced vocabulary to talk about...

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we use...

Climate change is an increasingly urgent, complex problem, with consequences threatening human and non-human lives across the globe. Legislative and citizen-driven responses are valuable but insufficient, and their practical feasibility is unclear. Emerging design research suggests embracing imaginative, creative approaches to support engagement wi...

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) mark the first time a global body has attempted to manage the planet’s future in its entirety, linking together urgent, over- lapping and contradictory existential threats. If we treat the world as an interlinked system, it becomes clear that all answers to how we live are provisional and evolving. We n...

Crowdfunding offers a different approach to social innovation undertakings at a time of rapidly shrinking state support. Social innovation involves new social practices that aim to better meet the social needs and shape collective futures. The innovation here hinges on the way in which crowdfunding platforms can change the way that society works as...

Research in diverse areas such as climate change, happiness and wellbeing emphasizes the need for transformative change, stressing the importance of rethinking established values, goals and paradigms prevailing among civil servants, policy- and decision makers. In this paper, we discuss a role that design can play in this, especially how processes...

How do we ready ourselves to intervene responsively in the contingent situations that arise in co-designing to make change? How do we attune to group dynamics and respond ethically to unpredictable developments when working with ‘community’? This paper challenges co-design conventions that focus too tightly on formal process by addressing what happ...

In this paper, five authors account for the rethinking of a conference as a series of postcards, letters, rules and silent moments so that traditional hierarchies of knowledge could be overturned or, at least, sidelined. We recount how the place we convened was enlisted as an actor and the dramas and devices we applied to encounter it. We use this...

If municipalities were the caring platforms of the 19-20th century sharing economy, how does care manifest in civic structures of the current period? We consider how platforms – from the local initiatives of communities transforming neighbourhoods, to the city, in the form of the local authority – are involved, trusted and/or relied on the design o...

In this paper, five authors account for the rethinking of a conference as a series of postcards, letters, rules and silent moments so that traditional hierarchies of knowledge could be overturned or, at least, sidelined. We recount how the place we convened was enlisted as an actor and the dramas and devices we applied to encounter it. We use this...

We are living in a time of ecological and humanitarian crisis that requires imminent action from the joint fields of HCI and interaction design. In a very palpable way, we seem to be moving towards the "end of the world" (certainly, as we have known it). This workshop addresses three concrete end-of-world challenges - the end of nature, end of cult...

The “sharing economy” has promised more sustainable use of the world’s finite resources, exploiting latency and promoting renting rather than ownership through digital networks. But do the digital brokers that use networks at global scale offer the same care for the planet as more traditional forms of sharing? We contrast the sustainability of mana...

In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. --- Roy Bendor, Editor

If social, economic and environmental sustainability are linked, then support for the increasing number of non-profit groups and member-owned organizations offering what Trebor Scholz has called "platform cooperativism" [17] has never been more important. Together, these organizations not only tackle issues their members identify in the world of wo...

The increasing corpus on queer research within HCI, which started by focusing on sites such as location-based dating apps, has begun to expand to other topics such as identity formation, mental health and physical well-being. This Special Interest Group (SIG) aims to create a space for discussion, connection and camaraderie for researchers working...

The aim of this one-day workshop is to provide a forum for HCI researchers to discuss a wide range of issues at the intersection of philosophy and HCI. The participants will reflect on how philosophy influenced the development of HCI in the past, how philosophical insights are being utilized in current HCI research, and how philosophy can help HCI...

To stay within the planetary boundaries, we have to take responsibility, and this includes designers. This requires new perspectives on design. In this work, we focus on a co-design project with indigenous communities. Within such communities, indigenous knowledge is central. Indigenous knowledge acknowledges that the world is alive and that we, as...

This document is intended to inform those involved in policy making, practice and re-search who are interested in how to encourage a shift to a more sustainable society. We demonstrate the quick wins and long-term value of employing, supporting and enabling creative practice that is collaborative and outward-oriented, inspires reflec-tion and devel...

Design has become a global activity dominated by one set of cultural interests to produce a consistency of practice. This essay uses an experience of design for social innovation in northern Finland, inspired by land and place, to speculate upon the dimensions across which plurality in designing could be embraced in an increasingly globalized world...

Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole. --- Christopher A. Le Dantec, Editor

To stay within the planetary boundaries, we have to take responsibility, and this includes designers. This requires new perspectives on design. In this work, we focus on a co-design project with indigenous communities. Within such communities, indigenous knowledge is central. Indigenous knowledge acknowledges that the world is alive and that we, as...

Tricky Things responds to the burgeoning of scholarly interest in the cultural meanings of objects, by addressing the moral complexity of certain designed objects and systems. The volume brings together leading international designers, scholars and critics to explore some of the ways in which the practice of design and its outcomes can have a dark...

This workshop addresses the changing nature of work and the important role of exchange platforms as both intermediaries and managers. It aims to bring together interdisciplinary and critical scholars working on the power dynamics of digitally mediated labor. By doing so, the workshop provides a forum for discussing current and future research oppor...

Haraway (2015, p. 160) suggests, “One way to live and die well as mortal critters in the Chthulucene is to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and recomposition, which must include mourning irreversible losses.” Losses constitute themselves in time and s...

How do we ready ourselves to intervene responsively in the contingent situations that arise in co-designing to make change? How do we attune to group dynamics and respond ethically to unpredictable developments when working with 'community'? Participatory Design (PD) can contribute to social transitions, yet its focus is often tightly tuned to tech...

The turn to participation in smart cities was intended to increase the involvement of diverse, often marginalised, citizens in the design and use of networked sensing technologies. However, ideals of activism, citizen engagement and democratisation through the co-design of networked technologies and services have been largely based on an understand...

We propose a collective participatory speculative urban walk exploring "more-than-human" perspectives for smart cities. The walk will be a curated selection of outcomes from a PDC workshop interrogating how "more-than-human" approaches and their resultant ethical, legal, and methodological concerns can shape participatory design practices toward co...

As participants in participatory process, PD academics report on the practices and outcomes of their work and thereby shape what is known of individual projects and the wider field of participatory design. At present, there is a dominant form for this reporting, led by academic publishing models. Yet, the politics of describing others has received...

As we rely upon increasingly complex sociotechnical systems to support ourselves and, by extension, the structures of society, it becomes yet more important to consider how ethics and values intertwine in design activity. Numerous methods that address issues related to ethics and value- centeredness in design activity exist, but it is unclear what...

Recent HCI scholarship has begun to incorporate the concept of care as an alternative design lens, moving beyond health care or social care to consider care as a fundamental relational quality of life. This one-day workshop brings together researchers to find a shared understanding of the ways in which interpersonal care and interdependence could b...

Written for the AHRC to review how creative practice has led to culture change. A shorter and more incisive version can be found at: bit.ly/CPT2S.

Achieving a cultural shift towards sustainability will involve a diversity of approaches at different scales. What we propose here is not a uniform landscape replicating similar practice, but work that encourages creativity and positive responses to change, that recognises the value of process in itself for transformation and that finds new ways of...

In this late breaking work, we present preliminary results from a portion of an auto-ethnography in which an HCI scholar drove for both Uber and Lyft over the course of 4 months, recording his thoughts about the driving experience as well as his experiences with-and emails from-both platforms. The first phase of results we present here are based on...

Debates regarding the nature and role of HCI research and practice have intensified in recent years, given the ever increasingly intertwined relations between humans and technologies. The framework of Human-Engaged Computing (HEC) was proposed and developed over a series of scholarly workshops to complement mainstream HCI models by leveraging syner...

Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole. --- Christopher A. Le Dantec, Editor

What should be our orientation to the socio-technical as climate predictions worsen; ecological crises and wars escalate mass migration and refugee numbers; right-wing populism sweeps through politics; automation threatens workers' jobs and austerity policies destabilize society? What is to be done when it is not " business as usual " and even brok...

Digital platforms, often labeled as part of the "sharing economy", are becoming increasingly relevant to both the daily lives of private individuals and to researchers. As these tools are transforming various communities (of interest, place, practice and circumstance) to establish new forms of connection, welfare, labour and service, there emerge f...

While social isolation in an ageing population is a concern in many locations, it is greater in towns where divisive local geography and declining investment conspire against meeting places and mutual awareness. This research into the design of location-based tools to support sociality asks whether embedded digital tools that make neighbourhood act...

RESUMO Em outubro de 2915, organizamos uma oficina para 80 pesquisadores e praticantes envolvidos em makerspaces na Europa. Nosso objetivo era explorar como os makerspaces podem fomentar desenvolvimento sustentável. Este artigo relata a discussão na oficina e idéias sobre este tópico, ilustrando o interesse no potencial deliberativo deste tipo de "...

We contemplate paths between form and formlessness as a middle way between digital technology for mindfulness, and mindfulness without digital technology, thereby inviting alternative departure points with interactive systems. In doing so, we step into a contested yet potentially fertile arena to challenge the handling, analysis and reporting of th...

Drawing from a wide range of examples and perspectives, this book explores how participatory design can contribute to the development, implementation, and sustainability of learning innovations.

Crowdfunding enables groups to self-fund the changes they want to make in the world. In other words, digital financial platforms are proving capable of supporting new relations between groups of people as well as offering new ways to organize money. Taking an HCI lens, we look at how some crowdfunding platform owners are approaching social innovati...

What should designers do with their design skills and orientation to the future as right-wing populism sweeps through politics; climate predictions worsen; mass migration (within/across countries) escalates refugee numbers; new classes of automation threaten workers' jobs and austerity policies destabilize society? What is to be done when it isn't...

When we say ‘what is the legacy of a project’, the response necessarily implies a values judgement, but such values are often implicit. In this work, we explore ways of conceptualizing and evaluating legacies of community-university collaborations by starting from values: specifically the human values of those individuals and organisations involved...

Introduction University–community collaborations are often complex, fraught, emotional affairs. Participants devote a lot of time, energy and emotion to bridging differences, improvising solutions, and making things work. This can be difficult and sometimes frustrating, but can also have a transformative legacy for the participants and the wider co...