Hi, I'm Dan Bennett, a
postdoc with Elisa Mekler currently at ITU in Copenhagen.
I did this work at Bristol and Aalto University.
So this is a systematic review looking at 30 years of research
in major HCI venues, including CHI.
We aim to understand How does HCI Understand Human Agency and Autonomy.
In brief, we found that there is currently a lack of clarity
and coordination around these concepts,
and our review suggests that this leaves important gaps in our understanding
and may limit HCI’s ability to address practical and ethical issues.
Responding to this, we articulated a set of distinctions which help clarify
the aspects of agency and autonomy, which are important in HCI research.
Through this, we aim to support better coordination around these
issues in future work.
Agency and autonomy are key concepts for HCI.
They are foundational, for example, and accounts of user experience
from Schneiderman's seven Golden Rules to value centered design.
They also play important roles in work on accessibility,
wellbeing, privacy and consent.
And it seems likely that these concepts will only become more important in future.
A recent high impact paper argue that the concept of agency
is central to understanding the integration
of technologies into human behavior and bodies.
Human agency and autonomy also seem to be critical issues
in understanding interaction with AI and persuasive technologies.
A problem here is that agency
and autonomy are also hugely complicated.
First, the words are difficult to disentangle from one another.
Etymologically autonomy relates to self-governance,
while agency relates to self causality and execution.
But in real world situations,
the distinction between performing and governing can often be hard to draw.
In practice, and even sometimes
in theoretical discourse, the terms are treated as near synonymous.
Second, agency and autonomy are hugely multifaceted and multi-scale phenomena.
Quite different accounts are found in different disciplines.
Even within psychological accounts, we find considerable diversity
focusing on different timescales of behavior, decision versus action,
and persistent versus episodic aspects of agency and autonomy.
This is arguably more problematic for HCI than in many other disciplines.
We do not have the luxury of focusing
only on isolated aspects of behavior in laboratories.
Interaction scenarios will inevitably involve
multiple aspects of agency and autonomy.
This raises the question of how these aspects interact and which are relevant.
So we were
interested in the question of how HCI addresses this.
So we analyzed 30 years of HCI papers
which addressed issues of agency and autonomy
to understand the different approaches to addressing these concepts
and the different roles, properties and values which are assigned to them.
We analyzed the corpus via inductive thematic analysis
and articulated four categories of distinction.
First, there was the distinction between issues of self
causality and identity.
Self causality, concern the user’s
causal involvement: acting and making decisions.
For example, much work focused on the experience of controlling systems,
deciding outcomes, or performing day to day activities for oneself.
Within this, we note a distinction between the focus
on direct self causality and decision making.
Turning to identity.
Many papers related agency to the use of self and values.
For example, work which drew on self-determination theory,
emphasized that where outcomes are congruent with users
values, this will be experienced as autonomous.
In other papers, agency and autonomy were identified
with the ability to be oneself or to be recognized as the person one is.
Our second distinction was between issues
of experience and materiality.
Many papers focused only on the user's subjective
experience of autonomy and agency, not on its material in action.
Other papers, meanwhile, took a more third person view,
focusing on the degree to which the users had control over a process, for example.
These factors could be detached from one another.
For example, in self-determination theory,
the congruence of the outcome is expected to support autonomy.
Whether or not the user has control over it
and work on electro muscle stimulation
showed that use a sense of causing an outcome could be increased or decreased
even in cases where the user was not actually in control.
Third, we paid attention to the timescales of agency and autonomy.
Some work focused on micro interactions of a few seconds or less, for example,
triggering a single outcome with a button push.
Other work focused on episodes of interaction up to an hour or more.
For example, playing a game or executing a task.
Finally, some work
focused on life situated activities spanning days and longer.
Our last distinction focused on the importance of independence.
Some accounts emphasize agency autonomy in terms
of acting as an individual without support or influence,
but in other cases, accounts of both agency and autonomy
emphasized their basic grounding in interdependence.
That is, the reliance on others and the way that social contexts
actively support individual autonomy.
Now, while we found that these distinctions marked
meaningful structure in the corpus, it was rare for authors
to explicitly articulate these or other relevant distinctions.
Few authors acknowledged the wider context of understandings of autonomy
or situated that work within it.
Strikingly, given this diversity of understandings,
only a minority of papers gave explicit working definition of agency or autonomy.
We felt that factors like this would limit the ability
for researchers to identify relevant prior work.
And in line with this, we found it was indeed rare for authors
to build on the work of previous research within HCI.
This leaves us with a wide range of different views of agency and autonomy
and little clarity about how they relate to one another.
And this makes it hard to know which aspects can be expected
to really matter in a given context and why.
So let's illustrate this.
When I push a button to cause an outcome.
How is this sense of agency meaningful in terms of user experience,
well-being, and other valued outcomes?
Moving back, how does this sense of agency relate
to my sense of control over the task as a whole via action and decision making?
Do these aspects influence one another, which matters most?
Zooming out further,
how do all of these things interact with more identity related aspects?
The degree to which the task and outcomes
are congruent with my values, for example.
moving back still further.
How does all of this interact with my wider sense of agency and autonomy?
My agency in my job, my leisure time, in my wider life?
We only found a handful of papers which began to address these issues
and we found many open questions.
Overall, we found a lack of clarity across the corpus.
Our results suggest that agency and autonomy current function
in HCI at least as vague, resonant umbrella concepts.
That's to say they gather together a wide range of different perspectives
on a family of phenomena which may or may not be related to one another.
We suggest that the
community can work to improve the situation by developing
and maintaining these concepts as affective boundary objects.
As we detail in the paper, boundary objects are flexible, yet robust concepts
that can help coordinate the perspectives and activities of different communities
in the absence of precise agreement on definitions.
We detailed two kinds of future work which can improve
coordination around issues of agency and autonomy.
First, we suggest detailed work to clarify particular understandings
of agency and autonomy relevant to particular communities.
We make concrete suggestions for empirical work, which can extend
work on the two most commonly used scientific frameworks in HCI.
Intentional binding and self-determination theory.
We also call for more longitudinal studies
to understand agency and autonomy beyond individual
episodes of interaction.
Now, second, we suggest that the community could focus more on integrative work,
coordinating and drawing connections across communities.
This includes work to understand how different
aspects of agency and autonomy relate to one another
and work to develop and refine conceptual schemes
and taxonomies.
Now, this is a short presentation on a complex paper,
and I've had to leave out a lot of detail, including discussion of ethical issues,
detail about boundary objects and detail of integrative work
to relate different understandings of agency and autonomy to one another.
Hopefully I can address some of this in the questions.
Thanks.