CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar   (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)

Fridays 11:30am-12:30pm PT · Gates B3 · Open to the public
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Tawanna Dillahunt
University of Michigan
Community-Engaged Approaches to Rethinking Safety Infrastructures: Cases of Speculative Design and Photovoice
February 16, 2024

Human Computer Interaction is increasingly engaged with the social-cultural context that people live in everyday. The city, in all its grit and glory, provides a complex and rich context in which to understand the challenges technologies face when they are adopted by people in the real world. In this presentation, I discuss three on-going research initiatives from my group at Cornell Tech in New York City which grapple with interaction in the urban context: Trashbots in the City, Urban Fingerprinting, and Communal eXtended Reality. These projects highlight different aspects of urban interaction--culture, scale, engagement--which demand new approaches from researchers and practitioners in HCI. In this talk, I will also champion the perspectives that HCI brings to the already crowded urban landscape.

Tawanna Dillahunt is a 2023-2024 MIT MLK Fellow in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and an associate professor at the University of Michigans School of Information. She holds a courtesy appointment with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. She leads the Social Innovations Group SIG, an interdisciplinary group of individuals whose vision is to design, build, and enhance technologies to solve real-world problems affecting marginalized groups and individuals primarily in the US. Her current projects aim to address unemployment, environmental sustainability, and technical literacy by fostering social and socio-technical capital within these communities. At MIT, she is working to explore and raise the visibility of alternative economic futures for Black and Brown Detroiters.

Tawanna is a 2022-2023 William Bentinck-Smith Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, an ACM Distinguished Member, and an inaugural Skip Ellis Early Career Award recipient.