Shifting Design and Development
Featured Designing a Gender-inclusive Ride-Hailing Sector: Foregrounding Marginalized Women Drivers And Women-focused Initiatives View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pallavi Bansal, Payal Arora
The rapid rise of the ride-hailing sector with increased digital connectivity coupled with low barriers to entry for workers, flexibility of timings and the promise of inclusivity are opening new avenues for women to participate in the Indian platform economy. However, women continue to be underrepresented as transport providers as much of the debate in the ride-hailing sector centers around women as transport users, and not as transport workers. In this paper, we critically explore the strategies to enhance the participation of women drivers in the ride-hailing sector by conducting 11 in-depth qualitative interviews with the stakeholders such as women taxi drivers, platform providers, NGOs, and policy and research support groups in India. The interviews are supported by carrying out a document analysis of over 50 documents related to the government policies, platform companies, organizations and the policies and references mentioned by the participants. This study builds on the Feminist HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) theory that propose technologies should integrate feminist values such as agency, fulfillment, identity, equity, empowerment, and social justice in the design (Bardzell, 2010). It helps in bringing forth the otherwise neglected sector and advocates for redesigning the ride-hailing platforms in alignment with the marginalized actors.
What Were They Thinking; What Are We Doing?: Convenience and Its Discontents
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marina deBellagente La Palma
I look at the past and present of our use of and our relationship with technology drawing from my own experience in Silicon Valley for 18 years, as well as several written sources. focusing on three aspects of human behavior and perception that shape our current relation to that technology: Habit, Convenience, and Cognitive Overload. Habit as a basic human practice that can have problematic aspects; Convenience as a complex modern conundrum; cognitive overload as a pervasive and detrimental condition. The three are implicated in our current near enslavement in the devices and frustrations of the very technology that was to have set us free. It encompasses everything from the well-documented loss in many young people of the ability to read maps or navigate spaces and landscape without GPS or some other aid, to the loss of the ability to spell one’s own language or read cursive handwriting. Some early developers and designers believed that the personal computer, the internet, and the mobile phone would infinitely improve our lives. But it has been a very uneven and asymmetrical “improvement”, weaponized and monetized by the forces of militarism, commerce and, sometimes, of sheer propaganda. (To name three massively consequential examples: the international rush into an ill-conceived War on Terror, the 2016 presidential election in the USA, and the Brexit referendum in the UK.) I call for a more reflective and skeptical approach to the adoption of new technologies based on ecological, personal, and economic-political considerations.
Analyzing Consumer Preferences for Diabetes Information on a Question-and-Answer Community: An Application of a Large Language Model
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Beom Bae, Sang Won Bae
Diabetes is one of the most common illnesses in the U.S. and causes serious damage to daily life. Patients and their significant others are exposed to a variety of messages encouraging healthy behaviors. However, it is unclear as to what specific messages are most effective in discussing the issue. The study is designed to gain insights into consumer preferences for information about diabetes by analyzing content on the online question and answer platform, Quora. It investigates these preferences through the perspective of persuasive communication emphasizing Aristotle’s Rhetoric including ethos (source credibility), pathos (emotional appeal), and logos (logical reasoning). The approach includes a comparative analysis of the most popular answers with answers with fewer upvotes on the same questions so as to examine how the two different kinds of answers differ in applying rhetorical principles. A total of 200 pairs of the most upvoted and less upvoted answers will be collected. Utilizing a fine-tuned large language model (LLM), ChatGPT, this study will highlight the distinguishing features of the most upvoted answers compared to the less popular ones. This comparison will elucidate which persuasive elements align with consumer preferences regarding diabetes information. This research contributes to the field of health information by identifying the types of messages that resonate with consumers, thereby potentially increasing the likelihood of their acceptance and application of health information. Moreover, it demonstrates the practicality of employing an LLM for the content analysis of health information, particularly in uncovering latent content, which extends AI-driven text analysis.
