We are all cyborgs. No, not the "Terminator" Arnold Schwarzenegger kind; we are a different type of cyborg. We are living in a world where the technology we create is shaping who we are. When you think about it, the boundaries between you and your technologies are fuzzy at best.

Most of us rely heavily on our tech to get through the day. Smartphones wake us up in the morning with ringtones labeled oxygen, drip, and krypton. They let us swoon over perfectly plated food pictures posted by someone we will never meet, halfway around the world. They connect us to our friends through video chat, even if we're in the same room. We see the whole world through the high-megapixel lens of our smartphone. Whether your day is shaped by a potential tweet, an Instagram post, a Facebook message, or a Snap, you're experiencing life as a cyborg.

The cyborg future is a networked existence where you and your technology shape the world. Letting go of physical boundaries, where do you end and where does your smartphone begin? The closing distance between you and your phone is only the tip of a giant, cyborg iceberg (iceborg?). Think about it, if tech is literally shaping who we are and what the world is, it is an incredibly powerful tool that is being used to build our future.

If we're all cyborgs, living in a networked world co-constructed by our tech, we need technology that is designed by and for a wide variety of people. We need to know whom our tech is designed by and whom our tech is designed for.

This means we need to talk about human-computer interaction, or HCI for short. HCI is a field dedicated to interfaces between people—often referred to as "users"—and computing technologies. This is a pretty broad field. HCI experts and practitioners have backgrounds in design, computer science, psychology, media studies, and more. Likewise, HCI research covers a massive variety of research styles, topics, technologies, and users. Research covers topics like user experiences with different application interfaces, anonymity on social media sites, people's password-sharing practices [1], and interactions with artificially intelligent chatbots [2].

HCI is infatuated with the user. We are constantly talking about user experiences, user needs, user errors, user practices, and user preferences. But who is this illusive user? Is it you, me, Laverne Cox, Katya Zamolod-chikova, your weird relative, a tech bro, the Terminator?

When we're talking about the user we're talking about complex people with differences from one another. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say you and I have at least as many differences as we have similarities. Some of these differences relate to socially-situated identity factors, like race, gender, sexuality, and class. Other differences arise from things we do, love, care about, work on, and know. All these differences are instructive. They make the world interesting. Can you imagine how boring the world would be if everyone and everything were exactly the same?

Exposure to things that are different than we are allows us to grow, learn, and engage with the world in life-expanding ways. Given how important difference is, we need to know if we're taking these differences into account in our understanding of the user. When we are designing technology for a wide variety of users, we will be well on our way to building our better cyborg future.

So, whom are we designing for? In research published in 2017, Rebecca Grinter, W. Keith Edwards, and I investigated this question [3]. Unfortunately, what we found wasn't great. The bad news is, we don't do a very good job at thinking about a wide variety of identity factors like gender, race, and class when thinking about the user in HCI.

Although we may be cyborgs, gender, race, and class have immense influence on how we experience and act in this world. These important identity factors are a critical part of who the user is. That's why this research examined how these identity categories were talked about in HCI's premiere publication venue, the CHI conference. By gathering publications that talked about these categories, we can understand who we've been designing for and develop plans to better design technology for all the differences of human-cyborg users.

In order to fully understand who we've been designing for, we need to know what research says about users in all their complexity. Gender, race, and class are very broad umbrella categories, and don't tell us about specific terms we use to identify ourselves and express our differences. So we developed a detailed set of terms we use to describe our identity. This set of more than 50 identity keywords inclued transgender, boys, women, black, white, Native American, Asian, homeless, middle class, poverty, and Chicanx (including its lexical variants across the gender spectrum: Chicano, Chicana, Chicanx, etc.). With these words, we were able to find previous research in the ACM Digital Library (ACM DL) that would help us understand who we've been designing for.

At this point, you might be wondering, what did the research find? Well, after querying the ACM DL, we ended up with 140 publications that mentioned at least one of these identity terms. Here, publications refer to full papers, short-papers (notes), and experimental papers (alt.chi). Ultimately, not a lot of research talked about users with these common and important terms. To get a feel for the scale, at the time of this research, there were nearly 14,000 ACM SIGCHI publications. This means that CHI papers focused on these identity keywords represent only 1 percent of ACM SIGCHI publications, Although the 14,000 includes more than just CHI papers, the numbers are only slightly better if you include all the publications our searches gathered; there were a total of 309 hits, or 2.21 percent of all SIGCHI publications. Either way, that's a truly small number of publications. If it tells us anything, it's that research isn't talking about these socially situated identity attributes when talking about the user.

Things get a bit more encouraging when we look at how these identity terms are talked about over time. Historically, the presence of these keywords is heavily skewed toward the recent past; most of the publications are from the 2000s, with two during the 1980s (1.43 percent), two during the 1990s (1.43 percent), 33 during the 2000s (23.57 percent), and 103 during 2010–2016 (73.57 percent). Even if there isn't as much research that is explicit about who the user is, there is a lot more now than there was even only 10 years ago.

Although this is only a small percentage of CHI publications, by investigating what is included in them and what is missing, we can learn how the user is described and figure out how to do better for building the cyborg future we deserve. On further analysis of the final 140 publications, we found that the focus on the umbrella categories—gender, race, and class—was not evenly distributed. Additionally, prior research looked at some identities more than others. Though there is some overlap, the numbers reveal that 70 percent of publications focused on gender, 12.12 percent on race, and 30 percent on class. The focus on identity was unbalanced.

It's disheartening that certain identity attributes were the focus of so few publications; however, it is also encouraging that these percentages don't add up to 100 percent. Identity is not an exclusive category. When thinking about users, HCI can and should also consider gender, race, and class at the same time. This is critical because identity is complicated; people do not experience just one identity attribute at a time. Put another way, your race, gender, and class co-exist at all times and these intersections impact your experiences of the world. A person is not black on Mondays and a woman on Fridays, nor are they white on Mondays and a man on Fridays. This brings us to an important topic, intersectionality.

Intersectionality is a flexible framework for analyzing identity attributes like gender, race, and class. It allows us to investigate how identity attributes impact one another, a person's surroundings, and larger social systems.

The term intersectionality was coined in 1989 by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw [4]. But so far, this description is pretty abstract. What does it mean in a more concrete way? In Crenshaw's article, she wrote about a 1976 lawsuit against the company General Motors (GM), DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, where five black women sued GM for discriminatory practices. GM fired all its black women employees hired after 1970 in a seniority-based layoff scheme; it's important to note they didn't even hire black women before 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act. Now, dismissing all black women employed at one company within a single year would appear to be discriminatory right off the bat, but the court didn't see it that way. Here's what happened, women are a protected group under employment law and black people are a protected group under employment law; however, these laws made no stipulation for people who are both black and women at the same time. As a result, the court explained that because GM still had (white) women employees, it wasn't violating anti-discrimination statues protecting women. The court also dismissed their claims for race discrimination, suggesting the women join a different lawsuit against GM based on race discrimination. But, the plaintiffs, the black women suing, countered that their case was specifically a problem of gender and race-based discrimination, which would be misrepresented in joining a race-based case. Nevertheless, the court doubled-down and completely dismissed the case. The court concluded the government was not intending for a special category of black women to be protected under the law since there was no employment law addressing these intersections of identity. The experience of black women, who experience racism and sexism in combination, was erased.

There are clear, concrete, discriminatory consequences when we fail to consider identity overlaps. Crenshaw argued if we want to build a better future for everyone, we must focus our attention on those who are marginalized in intersectional ways. If we can address the needs and struggles of the individuals, we will have made strides forward for everyone. This is absolutely true when working toward building the cyborg future we all deserve.

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When we understand how identity-based discrimination is designed into our technologies, we are able to address our shortcomings and develop new paths.

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Building a better future for HCI requires us to do more when it comes to the identity of the user. By centering people with intersectional, marginalized identities, we can break away from discriminatory practices that render large portions of the population invisible.

Intersectionality is an essential framework for any work that interfaces with human identity. For this research, it's important to ask how the publications we collected stack up. How many focus on more than one identity category within a single publication? In total, 24 papers focused on more than one umbrella identity category. While encouraging, at the end of the day, most of the corpus didn't fare this well. In order to build better technology, better human-cyborg computer interactions, we all need to think about how intersectional identities affect our work.

Another identity-related shortcoming we uncovered was how papers about gender often collapsed identity differences in ways that make the experiences of some users invisible. It is great that research considered gender, but gender was often a shorthand for women, which is only one of many gender identities. Further, with intersectionality as a guiding framework, it becomes clear that women as a category cannot adequately address the experience of the many differences that exist within this identity-construct. HCI should thus consider the wide spectrum of gender identities that exist, not just narrow representations of women.

Taking intersectionality seriously gives us an opportunity to improve development at the intersection of humans and computing. To build the cyborg future we need, we need to be clearer about the identities of the user.

This includes working with people whose identities have not been given enough space in HCI. Our research uncovered multiple identity areas that produced no matches in the SIGCHI database at all. People whose identity and experiences are informed by being genderqueer, gender fluid, queer, Asian American, Chicanx and Latinx (and all lexical variations), First Nations, Alaskan Native, Pacific Islander, and lower class are users, but these identity keywords resulted in no matches in the SIGCHI database. Moreover, intersectional HCI requires us to acknowledge who is given space in our research and who has been left out. Knowing where we have fallen short as a field helps us pinpoint specific areas to build on for improving HCI. Further, it helps us target focus areas for making a better cyborg future a reality.

Through this research, we were able to uncover critical insights into identity work at CHI, but it also uncovered critical questions for the community at large: How is it possible that so few papers matched our search criteria? Given the nearly 14,000 publications we are pulling from, and HCI's foundational reliance on the user, it is truly remarkable that so few publications feature keywords from common demographic identity categories. If not with these common terms, how is the identity of the user represented?

While there is a lot more work to do in building a cyborg future that prioritizes the identity diversity of users, it is clear HCI is striving toward this future. Each year, more work is centered on computing technology created by and with people from many different, intersectional identity backgrounds. While only a beginning, the 24 papers with an intersectional focus covered in our research are a good start. Many of these publications were in-depth, qualitative studies into a particular intersectional identity, like young black men or homeless mothers. However, there were also a few papers that investigated multiple identity categories quantitatively, though in these publications identity categories were still investigated separately and then explained sequentially—data on gendered presented first, then data on race, then data on class. With this research at the roots, we can continue to build and strengthen how identity is handled in HCI.

There is more to intersectional HCI than considering identity intersections of users; this is just a first step. We need qualitative and quantitative work to be invested in intersectionality. We also need to be critical about the categories we are already using. As we covered earlier, many papers that talked about gender did so by using binary, cisgender categories (cisgender meaning people whose gender identity is aligned with the gender identity they were assigned at birth). Only a few papers mentioned trans identities. These publications were focused exclusively on trans communities [5]. In other papers, however, a side effect of this simplified representation of gender is the erasure of trans identities. This erasure contributes to widespread discrimination against transgender and gender non-conforming folk, which puts their lives and wellbeing at continued risk. Intersectional HCI can help us do better in building the human-computer interactions we all deserve.

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Identity is not an exclusive category. When thinking about users, HCI can and should also consider gender, race, and class at the same time.

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The words we use to talk about our users matter. Words are the main medium we use to communicate our work. The words we choose can continue to support structural, identity-based discrimination, or they can draw attention to the intricacies, experiences, and needs of users as complex human-cyborgs.

When it comes to the cyborg future we all deserve, we are clearly on the right path. The CHI community is thinking more about the user's identity than ever before. And, researchers are increasingly communicating that identity is something we need to address if we are going to understand and design for a world with ever-blurring boundaries between people and technology. When we understand how identity-based discrimination is designed into our technologies, we are able to address our shortcomings and develop new paths. We are able to design differently.

To create the better cyborg future Donna Haraway formulates in her "Cyborg Manifesto," we all need to play an active role in developing the technology that is shaping our world [6]. It's not about one totalizing user. It's about embracing difference and diversity. It's about embracing a multiplicity of users. We need to step up and take ownership of our responsibility for the entangled relationships between our social worlds and our technical ones. With intersectionality as a framework, we can build the better computer interactions of the cyborg future we all deserve.

  References

[1] Singh, S., Cabraal, A., Demosthenous, C., Astbrink, G., and Furlong, M. Password Sharing: Implications for Security Design Based on Social Practice. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, 2007, 895–904. http://doi.org/10.1145/1240624.1240759

[2] Luger, E. and Sellen, A. Like Having a Really Bad PA: The Gulf between User Expectation and Experience of Conversational Agents. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [CHI '16]. ACM, New York, 2016, 5286–5297. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858288

[3] Schlesinger, A., Edwards, W. K., and Grinter, R. E. Intersectional HCI: Engaging Identity through Gender, Race, and Class. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [CHI '17]. ACM, New York, 2017, 5412–5427. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025766

[4] Crenshaw, K. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, 139–167.

[5] Haimson, O. L., Brubaker, J. R., Dombrowski, L., and Hayes, G. R. Digital footprints and changing networks during online identity transitions. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, 2016, 2895–2907. http://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858136

[6] Haraway, D. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, New York, 1991, 149–181.

  Author

Ari Schlesinger is a full-time cyborg and a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing at Georgia Tech. Schlesingers research is focused on identity and infrastructure, looking into how we can develop technology that builds just values into multiple layers of a computational artifact. Find out more at www.AriSchlesinger.com

 

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