Tiffany Knearem
Tiffany has wide-ranging interests in the areas of human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence in design tooling, creativity support and community informatics. During her PhD, her primary focus was on understanding and enabling community innovation through information and communication technologies.
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Solidarity not Charity! Empowering Local Communities for Disaster Relief during COVID-19 through Grassroots Support
Jeongwon Jo
Oluwafunke Alliyu
John M. Carroll
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2024) (2024)
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The COVID-19 pandemic brought wide-ranging, unanticipated societal changes as communities rushed to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. In response, mutual aid groups bloomed online across the United States to fill in the gaps in social services and help local communities cope with infrastructural breakdowns. Unlike many previous disasters, the long-haul nature of COVID-19 necessitates sustained disaster relief efforts. In this paper, we conducted an interview study with online mutual aid group administrators to understand how groups facilitated disaster relief, and how disaster relief initiatives developed and maintained over the course of the first year of COVID-19. Our findings suggest that the groups were crucial sources of community-based support for immediate needs, innovated long-term solutions for chronic community issues and grew into a vehicle for justice-centered work. Our insights shed light on the strength of mutual aid as a community capacity that can support communities to collectively be more prepared for future long-haul disasters than they were with COVID-19.
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Exploring the future of design tooling: The role of artificial intelligence in tools for user experience professionals
Mohammed Kamal Khwaja
ACM CHI 2023 (2023)
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Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) has been introduced into a variety of consumer applications for creative work. Although AI-driven features in design tooling are nascent, there is growing interest in utilizing AI to support user experience (UX) workflows. In this case study, we surveyed industry UX professionals ("UXers") to understand how they perceive AI-driven assists in their tools, their concerns about accepting AI in design tools and which design-related workflows could be promising for future research. Our results suggest that UXers are overall positive about AI-driven features in design tools; looking to AI as a creative partner to iterate with and as an assistant with mundane tasks. We offer practical directions for the future of AI in UX tooling, but caution against developing tools that do not sufficiently address UXer's concerns around bias and trust.
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Relay: A collaborative UI model for design handoff
Kris Giesing
ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (2023)
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The design handoff process refers to the stage in the user interface (UI) design process where a designer gives their finished design to a developer for implementation. However, design decisions are lost when developers struggle to interpret and implement the designer’s original intent. To address this problem, we built a system called Relay that utilizes concrete UI models to capture design intent. To our knowledge, Relay is the first system described in the academic literature to take artifacts from an existing design tool and generate a UI model.
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