alt.britchi: Designing Otherwise: Power, Values and Consequences
Date: Tuesday 3 Nov 2026
Time: 12:00–12:30
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| Time | Presentation | Abstract | Authors | Contribution type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12:00-12:10 | Safety by Design Will Not Save Us: Why Financial Technologies Always Side with Economic Abuse Perpetrators | “Safety by design” has become a familiar mantra within design, policy and information security circles. We take issue with this approach to design, an ahistorical and solutionist interpretation of technology-facilitated abuse that asks practitioners to anticipate how their systems might be misused, and to adjust their design to foreclose those possibilities. We argue that the features enabling technology-facilitated abuse are deeply embedded in the foundational principles under which digital technologies are conceived, and that addressing such harms instead requires systemic change. Taking fintech-facilitated economic abuse as our case study, we demonstrate that “safety by design” is powerless against the harmful potential of digital systems, and that promoting it is not merely ineffective but actively counterproductive. | Barros Pena, Wiper | alt.britchi |
| 12:10-12:20 | Values Before Variables: Why HCI Should Design “Boring” Digital Health Infrastructure | Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in digital health frequently focuses on designing decision aids and interfaces to solve complex frictions. Yet, in paediatric type 1 diabetes, deploying a beautifully designed Shared Decision Making (SDM) tool into rigid, linear clinical pathways leads to an illusion of choice. Our objective is to provoke the HCI community to look beyond the user interface and engage with the messy, “boring” hidden work of clinical service design by establishing a continuous, values-based SDM architecture. Co-design with 90 young people, their families and healthcare team took place within a hectic clinical environment, blending methodologies in response to resources and needs. A “Dual-Loop” architecture replaced a conventional pathway: an initial cycle ensuring values precede choice, followed by ongoing optimisation accommodating shifting clinical and personal realities. The dual-loop changed behaviours: 38% of families reconsidered their initial technology choice, shifting away from assumption-based decisions to those matching their values. HCI must stop treating clinical workflows as unchangeable or out of scope. Rigid clinical norms and activities can be separated and rebuilt as adaptable systems that survive the messy realities of young lives. The Dual-Loop generates space for effective communication and sustainable technology adoption, transferable to other self-managed chronic conditions. | Guy, Summerton, Williams, Boulos, Marshall, O'Kane | alt.britchi |
| 12:20-12:30 | On Hitting the Button | a one-page piece of prose expresses the defeated and disembodied experience of humans using GenAI casually while knowing or suspecting some of the resulting harms. It is written with a cadence to invoke a sense of direct causation from single user action to single outcome, but this is partly for effect to illustrate participating in a network of harms. In a closing line, the author suggests to the reader that even in such hopelessness, we still have choices. The abstract and keywords are placed afterward to protect the “show, don’t tell” rule of fiction writing. This piece was submitted to BritChi’s alt.britchi track, a creative call on the topic of what HCI (human-computer interaction) can’t do. | Gruben | alt.britchi |