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Auflistung nach Autor:in "Schneider, Hanna"

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  • Zeitschriftenartikel
    Designing for empowerment – An investigation and critical reflection
    (it - Information Technology: Vol. 61, No. 1, 2019) Schneider, Hanna
    Technology bears the potential to empower people – to help them tackle challenges they would otherwise give up on or not even try, to make experiences possible that they did not have access to before. One type of such technologies – the application area of the thesis presented here – is health and wellbeing technology (HWT), such as digital health records, physical activity trackers, or digital fitness coach applications. Researchers and companies alike often claim that HWTs empower people to live healthier and happier lives. However, there is reason to challenge and critically reflect on these claims and underlying assumptions as more and more researchers are finding that technologies described as empowering turn out to be “disempowering”. This critical reflection is the starting point of the thesis presented here: Can HWTs really empower people in their everyday lives? If so, how can we design for empowerment? In my cumulative dissertation, I combine studies on existing HWTs, such as patient-controlled electronic health records and personalized mobile fitness coaches with the development of novel prototypes such as transparent digital fitness coaches that communicate their rationale to the user. By reflecting on these case studies, I come to revisit the sometimes washed-out meaning of “empowerment” in “empowering technologies”; I introduce a framework to establish conceptual clarity; and I suggest three principles to design for empowerment based on my own work and the Capability Approach by Sen and Nussbaum that aim to inform and inspire research on HWTs and beyond.
  • Dissertation
    Designing for empowerment: an exploration and critical reflection
    (2018) Schneider, Hanna
    Technology bears the potential to empower people - to help them tackle challenges they would otherwise give up on or not even try, to make experiences possible they did not have access to before. One type of such technologies - the application area of this thesis - is health and wellbeing technology (HWT), such as digital health records, physical activity trackers, or digital fitness coach applications. HWTs often claim to empower people to live healthier and happier lives. However, there is reason to challenge and critically reflect on these claims and underlying assumptions as more and more researchers are finding that technologies aiming or claiming to be empowering often turn out to be disempowering. This critical reflection is the starting point of this thesis: Can HWTs really empower people in their everyday lives? If so, how should we go about designing them to foster empowerment and avoid disempowerment? To this aim, this thesis makes three main contributions: First, it presents a framework of empowering technologies that aims to introduce conceptual and terminological clarity of empowerment in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). As a literature review conducted for this thesis reveals, the understandings of empowerment in HCI diverge substantially, rendering the term a subsumption of diverse research endeavors. The presented framework is informed by the results of the literature review as well as prior work on empowerment in social sciences, psychology, and philosophy. It aims to help other researchers to analyze conceptual differences between their own work and others’ and to position their research projects. In the same way, this thesis uses the proposed framework to analyze and reflect on the conducted case studies. Second, this thesis explores how HWT can empower people in a number of studies. Technologies that are investigated in these studies are divided into three interaction paradigms (derived from Beaudouin-Lafon’s interaction paradigms): Technologies that follow the computer-as-tool paradigm include patient-controlled electronic health records, and physical activity trackers; technologies in the computer-as-partner paradigm include personalized digital fitness coaches; and technologies in the computer-as-intelligent-tool paradigm includes transparently designed digital coaching technology. For each of these paradigms, I discuss benefits and shortcomings, as well as recommendations for future work. Third, I explore methods for designing and evaluating empowering technology. Therefore, I analyze and discuss methods that have been used in the different case studies to inform the design of empowering technologies such as interviews, observations, personality tests, experience sampling, or the Theory of Planned Behavior. Further, I present the design and evaluation of two tools that aimed to help researchers and designers evaluate empowering technologies by eliciting rich, contextualized feedback from users and fostering an empathic relationship between users and designers. I hope that my framework, design explorations, and evaluation tools will serve research on empowering technologies in HCI to develop a more grounded understanding, a clear research agenda, and inspire the development of a new class of empowering HWTs.