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This work forms a part of a series of "on the ground" studies dealing with (post-)conflict situations, focusing on the iterative, participatory design of a tool, Cyberactivist, for protection for activists and the empirical research that led to it. Work on the development of privacy and security tools has not always recognized the fragile nature of the political processes in emerging democracies, frequent naivety about threat, nor the "occasioned" responses of activists because activism can be a "one time" endeavor, prompted by specific events. Researching political activism in Republika Srpska, we identified issues relating to the use of ICT and social media, leading to the redesign of our prototype which now raises awareness of privacy and security and supports activists by challenging ignorance, lowering exposure, and enabling remediation. We addressed "usable security" challenges to ensure simplicity of the tool and engaged with HCI researchers focused on international activism to assess the global applicability of the technical design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human–computer interaction (HCI) scholars and others have advocated treating design as inevitably implicating political and ethical sensitivities. A subset of those considerations has been the attempt to deal with the often conflicting interests of stakeholders through 'value sensitivity'. Drawing on value-sensitive design (VSD) as an inspiration, we emphasize the necessary way in which the evolving contextuality of the values in question shaped our research collaborations. This paper presents a retrospective analysis of two case studies from long-term user-centered design projects in fields with explicit ambitions for value-driven HCI research and concerned with emancipation and empowerment. The first, a 3-year project, entailed an explicit commitment to feminist policy initiatives with female participants that aimed at fostering values of gender equality. The second, a 4-year project, dealt with HCI research with and for older adults, where a multimodal mobility platform for ridesharing and public transportation was developed. We show how we translated general commitment into pragmatic, co-design research goals and infrastructures. The long-term ambition of our endeavors and integration of a broad stakeholder base were vital to support this. We additionally provide insights into how our approach offered safe spaces for trustful collaboration and flexibility when adapting methods to specific contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile devices have conquered nearly all parts of the daily life. These devices support their owners in specific situations, both at work and in leisure contexts, and therefore make it increasingly difficult to keep work and private life separated. Examining the practices around the use of mobile technology has become a topic of some interest as issues around 'work-life balance' emerge. Although the field of HCI provides different approaches for capturing people's activities in situ, we will show that an additional value can be obtained from a consideration of the 'situated' view of contextuality, one which incorporates concerns of privacy and which identifies the reasons people might have for long-term user participation in this kind of study. Despite the undoubted sophistication of existing platforms, the issue of how to provide for dynamic adjustment to meet emerging research questions over time remains challenging. In this paper, we examine how one might approach the design of an observation environment that includes methods for understanding the way of how users reason about research, based upon the context they find themselves in. We have developed a research framework called 'PartS,' which captures in situ information about the individual as well as his/her (work/personal) context and offers functionality for collaborative discussions about the information collected. Based on its evaluation, we outline six lessons that need to be considered when designing a study for capturing the subjective context and related activities from an individual user's as well as a researcher's perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]