Exploring COVID-19 App Ecologies: An Introduction to Multi-Situated App Studies
Apps have been promoted as a means for intervening in and managing the COVID-19 pandemic around the world. While critical attention has primarily focussed on privacy issues with digital contact tracing, many other types of apps are available that aim to address the crisis in different ways, from quarantine enforcement and symptom reporting to community support and information dissemination. Platform owners claim to be carefully regulating the release of such software, however, there is a need for a comprehensive critical understanding of these various apps, including how they relate to each other and the potential socio-technical issues they raise.
As an introduction to methods for studying the design of apps, this workshop will delve into emerging COVID-19 app ecologies. Apps may appear as discrete digital icons on our device screens, but actually exist as multidimensional, highly complex assemblages that raise significant methodological challenges to research. In this session, we will consider how the design apps, including elements of interaction and user interface design, are entangled with the composition of platforms and control of data-intensive infrastructures. Drawing from an ongoing research into COVID-19 apps, we will introduce participants to a series of approaches for investigating these entanglements that we describe as ‘multi-situated app studies. (Dieter et al., 2019).
10:00 - 12:00 | Talk: Exploring COVID-19 App Ecologies
Michael Dieter (University of Warwick), Anne Helmond (University of Amsterdam), Nate Tkacz (University of Warwick)
13:00 - 15:00 | Workshop: Multi-situated app studies
Michael Dieter (University of Warwick), Anne Helmond (University of Amsterdam), Nate Tkacz (University of Warwick), Fernando van der Vlist (Utrecht University), Esther Weltevrede (University of Amsterdam), Jason Chao (University of Siegen)
Post COVID empirical methods
The theme of this day is research on and after the COVID-19 crisis, in particular with a focus on the methods. We are asking a handful of inspiring international researchers to contribute to thinking about how HCI’s empirical research will change with and after the pandemic. We recognise that of course there are here and now changes in what we can do and how, but we think this is also a chance to do more long term changes in how we conduct empirical research.
14:00 - 14:50 | Talk: Information Comorbidities in US Pandemic Risk Communication
Leysia Palen, UC Boulder
Albrecht Schmidt (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich), David Randall (Uni. Siegen), Annette Markham (AU and RMIT School of Media and Communication), Jacob Wobbrock (University of Washington), Carla Griggio (AU)
