Dissertation Defense - Daisy Yoo
You are cordially invited to join us for the Dissertation Defense of Daisy Yoo, to be held on Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2018, beginning at 9 a.m. in Bloedel Hall Room 070. Below, you will find the dissertation title, abstract and the Supervisory Committee.
Title: Designing with (Political) Complexity: Understanding Stakeholders, Emotions, and Technology in the Case of Medical Aid-in-Dying
Abstract:
The notion of human factors in human-computer interaction (HCI) has been shifting over time. Traditionally, HCI focused on the experience of individual users (e.g., ergonomics, cognitive science), which was extended to a group or community (e.g., groupware), and to a larger society (e.g., social computing). As interactive technologies continue to become pervasive, new opportunities arise for such technologies to be leveraged by wider publics to emerge, communicate, and engage in social change. In the past several years, HCI and design researchers have begun to explore issues that arise from working with publics in highly political contexts. Yet, such design research is still in its nascent stage; (sociopolitical) publics are relatively underexplored stakeholders in the field of HCI. Relatively little is known about who publics are and how to design technology vis-à-vis long-term social change. Open questions abound: How do stakeholders experience and engage with sociopolitical issues, in particular, highly sensitive and controversial issues? How can we design systems to support political dialogue and social change as they unfold over very long periods of time? What design methods can we use? What frameworks would be helpful? And what systems could be build?
My dissertation will define publics as distinct from “the public,” highlighting its indefinite and pluralistic qualities. Publics are an intriguing but rather amorphous and elusive concept, presenting new challenges to traditional methods of user studies aimed at more targeted and defined sets of stakeholders. To ground my work, I will conduct my investigations around the case of end-of-life medical decision-making law, policy and practice. Specifically, I focus on the contemporary debates over the legalization of medical aid-in-dying in the United States. My work has produced new design methods and toolkits—Stakeholder Tokens, Emotion Elicitation—for understanding diverse stakeholders, for addressing stakeholders' emotions and sensibilities around specific sociopolitical issues, and for getting designers to engage in longer-term design thinking. In reflection, I speculate on how designers can more effectively shape the sociopolitical fabric through the systems we design.
Supervisory Committee:
- Batya Friedman, Chair
- Catharine Starbird, GSR
- David Hendry, Member
- David McDonald, Member
- John Zimmerman, Member