Towards a Feminist HCI Methodology: Social Science, Feminism, and HCI

With substantial efforts in ubiquitous computing, ICT4D, and sustainable interaction design, among others, HCI is increasingly engaging with matters of social change that go beyond the immediate qualities of interaction. In doing so, HCI takes on scientific and moral concerns. This paper explores the potential for feminist social science to contribute to and potentially benefit from HCI's rising interest in social change. It describes how feminist contributions to debates in the philosophy of science have helped clarify relationships among objectivity, values, data collection and interpretation, and social consequences. Feminists have proposed and implemented strategies to pursue scientific and moral agendas together and with equal rigor. In this paper, we assess the epistemologies, methodologies, and methods of feminist social science relative to prior and ongoing research efforts in HCI. We conclude by proposing an outline of a feminist HCI methodology.