Negotiating Ontological Boundaries in User-Authored Personal Sensing Systems

Researchers Nava Haghighi, Danielle Olson, Halden Lin, Erdrin Azemi, Gierad Laput, Kayur Patel and James Landay designed two open-ended probes that use a Wizard of Oz technique to enable the experience of training a personalized machine learning system on phenomena people define themselves.

In a week-long exploratory study, participants used one of the two probes in the course of their everyday lives. The work identifies four sites where ontological boundaries were negotiated: the boundaries of a phenomenon, the subject as part of relations, what is signal and what is noise, and the objectivity of data.

The authors note that designed artifacts are ontological, shaping and at times limiting what becomes possible or imaginable, and that one path toward mitigating such foreclosures is giving people power over how systems are designed and built. Despite decades of scholarship around systems that enable such authorship, the paper states these systems are often evaluated on whether they are usable, useful, or technically feasible, leaving questions of ontological boundary negotiation unexamined.

The paper offers starting points for supporting boundary negotiation through design and discusses open-ended probes as a method for ontological design. Affiliation notes list Haghighi and Landay with Stanford University, while the work of Olson, Lin and Patel was done while at Apple.