What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays an increasingly important role in improving HCI and user experience. Yet many challenges persist in designing and innovating valuable human-AI interactions. For example, AI systems can make unpredictable errors, and these errors damage UX and even lead to undesired societal impact. However, HCI routinely grapples with complex technologies and mitigates their unintended consequences. What makes AI different? What makes human-AI interaction appear particularly difficult to design? This paper investigates these questions. We synthesize prior research, our own design and research experience, and our observations when teaching human-AI interaction. We identify two sources of AI's distinctive design challenges: 1) uncertainty surrounding AI's capabilities, 2) AI's output complexity, spanning from simple to adaptive complex. We identify four levels of AI systems. On each level, designers encounter a different subset of the design challenges. We demonstrate how these findings reveal new insights for designers, researchers, and design tool makers in productively addressing the challenges of human-AI interaction going forward.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3313831.3376301

Re-examining Whether, Why, and How Human-AI Interaction Is Uniquely Difficult to Design

How did electricity enter everyday life in America? Using Muncie, Indiana -- the Lynds' now iconic Middletown -- as a touchstone, David Nye explores how electricity seeped into and redefined American culture. With an eye for telling details from archival sources and a broad understanding of cultural and social history, he creates a thought-provoking panorama of a technology fundamental to modern life. Emphasizing the experiences of ordinary men and women rather than the lives of inventors and entrepreneurs, Nye treats electrification as a set of technical possibilities that were selectively adopted to create the streetcar suburb, the amusement park, the \"Great White Way,\" the assembly line, the electrified home, and the industrialized farm. He shows how electricity touched every part of American life, how it became an extension of political ideologies, how it virtually created the image of the modern city, and how it even pervaded colloquial speech, confirming the values of high energy and speed that have become hallmarks of the twentieth century. He also pursues the social meaning of electrification as expressed in utopian ideas and exhibits at world's fairs, and explores the evocation of electrical landscapes in painting, literature, and photography. Electrifying America combines chronology and topicality to examine the major forms of light and power as they came into general use. It shows that in the city electrification promoted a more varied landscape and made possible new art forms and new consumption environments. In the factory, electricity permitted a complete redesign of the size and scale of operations, shifting power away from the shop floor to managers. Electrical appliances redefined domestic work and transformed the landscape of the home, while on the farm electricity laid the foundation for today's agribusiness.

Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940.@@@The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880- 1930.

Personal, portable, pedestrian: Mobile phones in Japanese life.

While self-usage has long been regarded as a questionable approach in human-computer interaction (HCI) research, recent projects have shown the successful use of autobiographical design as a method to investigate long-term and intimate relations between people and technologies in everyday life. In an effort to continue the development of methodological best practices, we need to acknowledge with more nuance the tensions that arise in use. In this paper, we articulate such tensions by examining two first-hand accounts of using autobiographical design and four autobiographical design projects of other HCI researchers. Our findings address: genuine needs, design participation, intimacy, reflexivity, and authorial voice. Our contribution is constituted of critical insights into the complexities of using autobiographical design and recommendations for researchers interested in using this method.

Revealing Tensions in Autobiographical Design in HCI

The management of bodily excretion is an everyday biological function necessary for our physiological and psychological well-being. In this paper, I investigate interaction design opportunities for and implications of leveraging intimate and somatic data to manage urination. This is done by detailing a design space that includes (1) a critique of market exemplars, (2) three conceptual design provocations, and (3) autobiographical data-gathering and labeling from excretion routines. To conclude, considerations within the labeling of somatic data, the actuating of bodily experiences, and the scaling of intimate interactions are contributed for designers who develop data-driven technology for intimate and somatic settings.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3322276.3322290

Do You Have to Pee?: A Design Space for Intimate and Somatic Data

Recent design research has shown an interest in diffraction and agential realism, which promise to offer generative alternatives when designing with data that resist treating data as objective or neutral. We explore engaging diffractively with ‘lived data’ to surface felt and prospective aspects of data as it is entangled in everyday lives of designers. This paper presents five biodata-based case studies demonstrating how design researchers can create knowledge about human bodies and behaviors via strategies that allow them to engage data diffractively. These studies suggest that designers can find insights for designing with data as it is lived by working with it in a slow, open-ended fashion that leaves room for messiness and time for discovering difference. Finally, we discuss the role of ambiguous, open-ended data interpretations to help surface different meanings and entanglements of data in everyday lives.

/pdf/diffraction-in-action-designerly-explorations-of-agential-1gxhvx6f.pdf

Diffraction-in-action: Designerly Explorations of Agential Realism Through Lived Data

This paper introduces the concept of leaky objects to describe this phenomenon in which shared objects unintentionally reveal implicit information about individual or collective users. This leaking of implicit information changes our individual interactions with objects to through objects, enabling expressive communication and ambiguous speculation. The aim of this paper is raise awareness of this phenomenon through an ongoing autobiographical design probe in which remote interpersonal communication through a connected object is being explored, and raise questions regarding the potential implications for designers.

/pdf/leaky-objects-implicit-information-unintentional-dibb95b1y1.pdf

Leaky Objects: Implicit Information, Unintentional Communication

We present a study of long-term outdoor activities, based on altogether 34 interviews with 19 participants. Our goal was not only to explore these enjoyable experiences, but more broadly to examine how technology use was recontextualized 'away' from the everyday. Outdoor activities are commonly presented as an escape from our technology-infused world. In contrast, our interviews reveal experiences that are heavily dependent on technology, both digital and not. However, digital technology - and in particular the mobile phone - is reconfigured when taken out of its ordinary, often urban and indoor, context. We first present a diversity of 'aways' during outdoor activities by depicting cherished freedoms and interpersonal preferences. We then describe how participants managed connection and disconnection while away and upon coming back. To conclude, we discuss how constructions of away can support more purposeful engagements with digital technology, and how pointed (dis)connection can be useful for technology design also in non-outdoor settings.

Away and (Dis)connection: Reconsidering the Use of Digital Technologies in Light of Long-term Outdoor Activities

This paper investigates humor as a resource and strategy for design with discourse as an intended outcome. While humor can incite empathy and understanding, it can also lead to alienation and disengagement. Through the detailing of the pre-narrative and narrative processes of a design fiction, we describe why and how elements of humor, in particular puns, parody, and pastiche, were employed. Following the presentation of the fiction and its use in the design of an exhibition of diegetic prototypes, the paper presents responses from participants and audience members to reflect upon how the humor was received. Following a discussion on these reflections, as the near-future scenario was written four years prior and is now situated within the present-day, it then concludes with a post-mortem reflection on the floating nature of humor.

/pdf/humor-in-design-fiction-to-suspend-disbelief-and-belief-1h7q2l97ug.pdf

Karey Helms

Papers

Do You Have to Pee?: A Design Space for Intimate and Somatic Data

Diffraction-in-action: Designerly Explorations of Agential Realism Through Lived Data

Leaky Objects: Implicit Information, Unintentional Communication

Away and (Dis)connection: Reconsidering the Use of Digital Technologies in Light of Long-term Outdoor Activities

Humor in design fiction to suspend disbelief and belief