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Unprecedented maker efforts arose in response to COVID-19 medical supply gaps worldwide. Makers in the U.S., participated in peer-production activities to manufacture personal protective equipment (PPE). Whereas, medical makers, who innovate exclusively for points of care, pivoted towards safer, reliable PPE. What were their efforts to pivot medical maker infrastructure towards reliable production of safe equipment at higher volumes? We interviewed 13 medical makers as links between institutions, maker communities, and wider regional industry networks. These medical makers organized stopgap manufacturing in institutional spaces to resolve acute shortages (March–May) and chronic shortages (May–July). They act as intermediaries in efforts to prototype and produce devices under regulatory, material, and human constraints of a pandemic. We re-frame their making efforts as repair work to offer an alternate critical view of optimism around making for crisis. We contribute an understanding of these efforts to inform infrastructure design for making with purpose and safety leading to opportunities for community production of safe devices at scale.

Medical making intersects opposing value systems of a medical “do no harm” ethos and makers’ drive to innovate. Since March 2020, online maker communities have formed to design, manufacture, and distribute personal protective equipment (PPE) and other medical devices needed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. We present a participant observation study of 14 maker communities, which have developed differing driving principles for efforts with varied access to interdisciplinary expertise on online platforms that mutually shape collective action. Over time, these communities unintentionally align towards action-oriented or regulated practices because they often lack higher level insight and agency in choosing communication platforms. In response, we recommend: regulatory bodies to build coalitions with makers, online platforms to give communities more control over the presentation of information, and repositories to balance needs to distribute information while limiting the spread of misinformation.

Accessibility research sits at the junction of several disciplines, drawing influence from HCI, disability studies, psychology, education, and more. To characterize the influences and extensions of accessibility research, we undertake a study of citation trends for accessibility and related HCI communities. We assess the diversity of venues and fields of study represented among the referenced and citing papers of 836 accessibility research papers from ASSETS and CHI, finding that though publications in computer science dominate these citation relationships, the relative proportion of citations from papers on psychology and medicine has grown over time. Though ASSETS is a more niche venue than CHI in terms of citational diversity, both conferences display standard levels of diversity among their incoming and outgoing citations when analyzed in the context of 53K papers from 13 accessibility and HCI conference venues., 11 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, 2 appendices; CHI LBW 2021; accessible PDF available at https://makeabilitylab.cs.washington.edu/

Accessibility research has grown substantially in the past few decades, yet there has been no literature review of the field. To understand current and historical trends, we created and analyzed a dataset of accessibility papers appearing at CHI and ASSETS since ASSETS' founding in 1994. We qualitatively coded areas of focus and methodological decisions for the past 10 years (2010-2019, N=506 papers), and analyzed paper counts and keywords over the full 26 years (N=836 papers). Our findings highlight areas that have received disproportionate attention and those that are underserved--for example, over 43% of papers in the past 10 years are on accessibility for blind and low vision people. We also capture common study characteristics, such as the roles of disabled and nondisabled participants as well as sample sizes (e.g., a median of 13 for participant groups with disabilities and older adults). We close by critically reflecting on gaps in the literature and offering guidance for future work in the field.

Spreadsheet systems are used for storing and analyzing data across domains by programmers and non-programmers alike.While spreadsheet systems have continued to support increasingly large datasets, they are prone to hanging and freezing while performing computations even on much smaller ones. We present a benchmarking study that evaluates and compares the performance of three popular systems, Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc, and Google Sheets, on a range of canonical spreadsheet computation operations. We find that spreadsheet systems lack interactivity for several operations, on datasets well below their advertised scalability limits. We further evaluate whether spreadsheet systems adopt database optimization techniques such as indexing, intelligent data layout, and incremental and shared computation,to efficiently execute computation operations. We outline several ways future spreadsheet systems can be redesigned to offer interactive response times on large datasets.

We introduce HomeSound, an in-home sound awareness system for Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) users. Similar to the Echo Show or Nest Hub, HomeSound consists of a microphone and display, and uses multiple devices installed in each home. We iteratively developed two prototypes, both of which sense and visualize sound information in real-time. Prototype 1 provided a floorplan view of sound occurrences with waveform histories depicting loudness and pitch. A three-week deployment in four DHH homes showed an increase in participants' home- and self-awareness but also uncovered challenges due to lack of line of sight and sound classification. For Prototype 2, we added automatic sound classification and smartwatch support for wearable alerts. A second field deployment in four homes showed further increases in awareness but misclassifications and constant watch vibrations were not well received. We discuss findings related to awareness, privacy, and display placement and implications for future home sound awareness technology.

Spreadsheet systems enable users to store and analyze data in an intuitive and flexible interface. Yet the scale of data being analyzed often leads to spreadsheets hanging and freezing on small changes. We propose a new asynchronous formula computation framework: instead of freezing the interface we return control to users quickly to ensure interactivity, while computing the formulae in the background. To ensure consistency, we indicate formulae being computed in the background via visual cues on the spreadsheet. Our asynchronous computation framework introduces two novel challenges: (a) How do we identify dependencies for a given change in a bounded time? (b) How do we schedule computation to maximize the number of spreadsheet cells available to the user over time? We bound the dependency identification time by compressing the formula dependency graph lossily, a problem we show to be NP-Hard. A compressed dependency table enables us to quickly identify the spreadsheet cells that need recomputation and indicate them as such to users. Finding an optimal computation schedule to maximize cell availability is also NP-Hard, and even merely obtaining a schedule can be expensive-we propose an on-the-fly scheduling technique to address this. We have incorporated asynchronous computation in DataSpread, a scalable spreadsheet system targeted at operating on arbitrarily large datasets on a spreadsheet frontend.

Spreadsheet tools are ubiquitous for interactive adhoc data management and analysis. With increasing dataset sizes, spreadsheet tools fall short—they freeze during heavy computation within the sheet (interactivity); they are hard to navigate when datasets go beyond a certain size (navigability); they only support cell-at-a-time computation, severely limiting analysis capabilities (expressiveness). We have been developing DATASPREAD to holistically unify databases and spreadsheets to leverage the benefits of both, with a spreadsheet-like front-end and a database-like backend. We demonstrate three key features of DATASPREAD to address the aforementioned spreadsheet scalability challenges in interactivity, navigability, and expressiveness1. Our demonstration will let attendees perform typical analysis tasks on Microsoft Excel and DATASPREAD side-by-side, providing a clear understanding of the improvements offered by DATASPREAD over traditional spreadsheet tools.

In traditional usability studies, researchers talk to users of tools to understand their needs and challenges. Insights gained via such interviews offer context, detail, and background. Due to costs in time and money, we are beginning to see a new form of tool interrogation that prioritizes scale, cost, and breadth by utilizing existing data from online forums. In this case study, we set out to apply this method of using online forum data to a specific issue---challenges that users face with Excel spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are a versatile and powerful processing tool if used properly. However, with versatility and power come errors, from both users and the software, which make using spreadsheets less effective. By scraping posts from the website Reddit, we collected a dataset of questions and complaints about Excel. Specifically, we explored and characterized the issues users were facing with spreadsheet software in general, and in particular, as resulting from a large amount of data in their spreadsheets. We discuss the implications of our findings on the design of next-generation spreadsheet software.