Current Projects

Designing Citizenship in Transnational India

My dissertation addressed the relationship between design and society through ethnography of the social world of a Delhi design studio. Entitled Designing Citizenship in Transnational India, the dissertation research involved one year of immersive fieldwork in India, in both English and Hindi. Supported by a Fulbright scholarship and an NSF Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems grant, I conducted daily fieldwork at the studio, and at satellite sites such as design conferences, restaurants, hackerspaces, and homes.

The dissertation showed that the studio's specific practices enacted changing forms of middle-class Indian citizenship. To understand the role of design practice as a force for social change in India, we must consider India's histories of engineering, class relations, and market transition. The dissertation focuses on the forms of difference and citizenship articulated through the work of the studio. The high-tech work practices at the studio produce not only designed objects, but ethical claims about post-liberalization Indian progress and selfhoods. The dissertation also offers an account of how design practices are shaped by broader cultural, social, and political processes, and shape those processes in turn.

• K. Philip, L. Irani, and P. Dourish. 2012. Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey. Science, Technology, and Human Values, 27(1), 3-29.
• L. Irani, P. Dourish, and M. Mazmanian. 2010. Shopping for Sharpies in Seattle: Mundane Infrastructures of Transnational Design. Proceedings of ICIC 2010, Aug 19-20, 2010. Copenhagen, Denmark. (39% acceptance rate - awarded best paper)
• L. Irani, J. Vertesi, P. Dourish, K. Philip and B. Grinter. 2010. Postcolonial Computing: A Lens on Design and Development. Proceedings of CHI 2010, Apr. 10-15, 2010. Atlanta, GA. (22% acceptance rate)
• L. Irani and P. Dourish. 2009. Postcolonial Interculturality in Late Breaking Papers: International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration, Feb. 20-21, 2009. Stanford, CA.

Turkopticon: Engaged Design in Global Sociotechnical Systems

With Six Silberman, the Turkopticon moderators, and Turkers who contribute reviews

Since 2008, we have designed and maintained Turkopticon, a tool and web service that enables Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) workers to share job information with one another and hold employers accountable for fair treatment. Turkopticon is a browser extension that inserts reviews of employers into AMT’s task marketplace interface. Thousands of workers a month use the system.

AMT is a system that allows programmers to solicit large numbers of workers to do small bits of computational labor, such as transcription, image labeling, or survey participation. These bits of labor can be integrated directly into computational systems, layering human computation into existing and emerging information technologies. Human computation represents a growing area of both academic research and industrial development.

Our work examines what happens when people are organized as smooth computational infrastructure, integrated directly into algorithms. As a source of ethical insight into AMT, we began by surveying workers, asking them to draft a what they would like as a worker's bill of rights. Though workers' responses diverged wildly, many agreed on one problem: they had little recourse when employers withheld pay. We responded to these findings by designing Turkopticon.

• Turkopticon
• Slideshare: "Agency and Exploitation in Mechanical Turk" - Talk given Nov. 13, 2009 at Internet as Playground and Factory at The New School, NY)
• J. Ross, L. Irani, M.S. Silberman, A. Zaldivar, B. Tomlinson. 2010. Who are the Crowdworkers? Shifting Demographics in Mechanical Turk. in Extended Abstracts of CHI 2010 (alt.chi), Apr. 10-15, 2010. Atlanta, GA.
• Essay on my concerns about crowdsourcing

Through this work, I question how we might talk about the politics of technologies that have diverse meanings in diverse cultural contexts. Turkopticon is also a study in designing as a relationship, rather than a process leading to an artifact.

Past research

Collective privacy strategies in and around virtual worlds

As web applications collect increasing amounts of people's personal and collaborative content, we need to understand people's online collective information practices. These practices enact privacy, trust, intimacy, and sharing.

I have completed a study of online activist groups that use a combination of virtual environments, social networking services, email, and blogs to stay connected. By studying individuals who have a heightened need for intimacy, coordination, and information sharing, I highlighted tensions, needs, and strategies that may also exist more subtly in wider populations.

Work from this project has been published at CSCW: Situated Practices of Looking: Visual Practice in an Online World. I collaborated with Gillian Hayes and Paul Dourish.

A Different Voice: Women in Computer Science at Stanford University

I spent a year and a half designing and conducting a longintudinal mixed-methods study of students in Stanford's introductory computer science sequence. By following a cohort of 30 students with quarterly interviews, we found aspects of course experience that affected confidence, motivation, and interest in the major. Through surveys of a broader population and analysis of course performance by gender, we set qualitative findings against measures of confidence and motivation in the broader course population.

The research was awarded Stanford's Firestone Medal for Undergraduate Research (top 10% of theses).

• Thesis - A Different Voice: Women Exploring Stanford Computer Science (pdf)
• ACM SIGCSE: Understanding gender and confidence in CS course culture

Past design work

This is only a sample of projects I worked on while at Google. I am only providing publicly available screenshots here.