Makerspaces are identified in HCI to have great potential in fostering diverse participation in technology and computing–considering making as a democratic form of innovation. However, growing research also indicates many current makerspaces fail to address non-white and non-cisheteronormative perspectives. Prior works suggest embodiment as a core but seldom understood consideration for intersectional inclusion. Current trends in technologies and computing also stifle such considerations through two phenomena: broader implications of “woman lite” thinking, and what this provocation defines as “techno-disembodiments.” To combat perpetuating these phenomena in makerspaces, we posit looking to bodily and sensory responses, or embodied reflections, from communities of Trans and Black, Indigenous and People of Color (TBIPOC). Further, we examine prior works in visual auto-ethnography and diary studies for approaches to inquire about embodied reflections. In considering embodied reflections of TBIPOC communities, researchers can gain insights on decentering cisheteronormative whiteness to afford broader inclusion in maker culture.

Technologies designed to support marginalized communities have often led to unintended harm. This frequently occurs when misaddressing or failing to understand communities’ experiences, needs, and desires. User-centered research often focus on needs versus desires (leveraging deficit versus assets-based approaches), which have been contested in HCI. To promote technology design that better balances the tensions between needs and desires, we contribute participatory zine-making as an effective approach for speculatively designing trans augmented reality (AR) technologies. We facilitated in-person and virtual workshops with trans participants (n=44) focused on designing AR technologies, observing participants’ zine-making processes and artifacts to gather visual ethnographic data alongside transcripts and facilitator field notes. In participants’ zines we identified ambivalence as critical in addressing trans people’s needs and desires, and participants conveyed this ambivalence through metaphor and anti-assimilationist aesthetics. Our participatory zine-making approach enabled us to uncover perspectives and design implications crucial to designing trans technologies.

This work provides a preliminary understanding of how transgender women and non-binary people of color experience violence and manage safety, and what opportunities exist for HCI to support the safety needs of this community. We conducted nine interviews to understand how participants practice safety and what role technology played, if any, in these experiences. Interviewees expressed physical and psychological safety concerns, and managed safety by informing friends of their location using digital technologies, making compromises, and avoiding law enforcement. We designed U-Signal, a wearable technology and accompanying smartphone application prototype to increase physical safety and decrease safety concerns, reduce violence, and help build community.

Women gig workers face unique challenges in on-demand platforms as gendered aspects of class, caste, and labor participation intersect with moments of control experienced on the job. Through in-depth interviews with 19 beauty workers on on-demand home service platforms, we explore how the platformization of informal beauty work in India has ruptured dominant socio-cultural structures of control that have traditionally shaped women’s mobility and access to work. This paper maps the ways in which women beauty gig workers experience and are impacted by algorithmic and bureaucratic management practices prevalent in the gig economy, in the context of home service platforms in Bangalore. We find that platform control impacts lives in myriad ways, beyond the conditions of work. Women workers negotiate their identities and sense of agency through the visibility afforded by platform control mechanisms. Yet, despite these subversions, being on a platform does not fundamentally change the socio-cultural logic that restricts women’s lives in India. These mechanisms work to entrench power asymmetries between customers and workers, as well as maintain them between the platform and the worker.