The recognition that technology is not neutral has deep roots in science and technology studies. Langdon Winner’s foundational work "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" [@winner85] established that technological artifacts embody politics by requiring or promoting certain social orders. Winner’s analysis of Robert Moses’ bridges in Long Island, which excluded public transportation and therefore access to lower-income communities, is a clear demonstration of how design can perpetuate social inequalities.
Building on this foundation, HCI work has increasingly acknowledged that technology design and research are based on embedded values and are not neutral processes [@Nissenbaum2005]. Following this development our workshop frames political research in HCI at the level of ideologies. Recent years have shown us the revitalization of political ideologies in policy-making, academic research and public debate. On the level of international relations, Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been described as an unapologetic example of imperialism, and the geopolitical conflict between the United States and China is prominently framed as a conflict of ideologies in the public discourse. On a national level, the reversals of protections for women, transgender persons, and other disadvantaged groups in the US and other developed countries have drastically limited their freedoms and livelihoods, fueled by partisan framings of “woke” or “gender” ideology. At the same time, the entanglement between the tech industry and politics have become front stage through, for example, Elon Musk’s direct involvement in the US government.
Ideologies can be understood as foundational belief systems that shape how groups perceive and interact with the world. Ideologies inform more specific group attitudes and have the capacity to shape how individual members of the group interpret events, construct opinions, and engage in social practices and discourse. Ideologies are not just isolated belief systems but through the processes of group identification and differentiation they section society. HCI has engaged with ideologies by criticizing hegemonic perspectives, which are shared by a large fraction of society and therefore create widely accepted norms, like capitalism, individualism or modernism. Differing ideological stances are also reflected in methodological tensions: for example, feminist methodology refutes the belief in objective truth in science and postulates a science influenced by social values. This creates a tension with the influences of the natural sciences in computer science and consequently, HCI. In design, ideologies are present in the differing wordviews of stakeholders.
Ideologies can be understood as foundational belief systems that shape how groups perceive and interact with the world. Ideologies inform more specific group attitudes and have the capacity to shape how individual members of the group interpret events, construct opinions, and engage in social practices and discourse [@vandijkPoliticsIdeologyDiscourse2006; @Detienne2019]. Ideologies are not just isolated belief systems but through the processes of group identification and differentiation they section society. In this understanding ideologies are not solely an object of criticism, but rather the object of study and observation.
Building on the aforementioned starting point of ideologies as a object of study and observation, we organize a workshop to
disambiguate the term ideology,
identify areas of ideology in and around HCI, and
develop new ways of working with ideology
To work toward these aims, our collaborative endeavor will initiate discussion on:
How do ideologies manifest across HCI topics, such as design principles, user engagement, data ethics, privacy, inclusion, or access?
Why should we care about ideology in HCI? What is ideology not appropriate for in HCI?
How do ideologies affect core assumptions, research questions, and methods in HCI?
What are the ideological dilemmas of HCI?
How can our field’s unique methods inform ideology research and produce knowledge beyond our field?
How do we leverage theoretical concepts and/or frameworks from political science, critical theory, and other social sciences to inform HCI research?
What methods or frameworks can help to study and explicate the covert ideological influences in HCI research? Pragmatically, how does attending to ideology help HCI researchers and practitioners do their work better?
Identifying and curating various ideological forces, tensions, and dilemmas in HCI and ways to operationalize and study them will foster productive discussion for the evolution of the field and make our political work more transparent. By placing HCI’s works in to the larger landscape of political forces, we should increase its impact on fields beyond technology design, like policy and the social sciences.
We invite up to 20 scholars at any career stage to submit a 2–3 page position paper (ACM single-column or DIS2026 pictorial format) engaging with any of the following:
Non-verbal or pictorial contributions are welcome, as the submissions will serve as material for the workshop activities. Papers will be reviewed for relevance, originality, and potential to advance the conversation. Selection will balance diversity in background, seniority, geography, and perspective, if oversubscribed. Selected contributions will be published on arXiv with author consent. One author per submission is required to attend, but we will accommodate remote participation in specific cases.
Submissions should be sent to X on dd.mm.yyyy at the latest.
ACM single column templates can be found from here:
DIS 2026 Pictorial formats are available here:
The workshop organizers bring together interdisciplinary perspectives from their diverse backgrounds in HCI, design, political science, social psychology and social science. This will pave the way for including various perspectives for injecting the HCI community with new ways of working with and on ideologies.
Felix Anand Epp is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Design at Aalto University and the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki. Using design practice and in-situ research, he investigates how interactive technologies and sociotechnical imaginaries shape social life. He is coordinating this workshop relying on his extensive experience in organizing and facilitating participatory workshops and will facilitate parts of the workshop activities.
Matti Nelimarkka is a university lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki and an affiliated researcher at Aalto University’s Department of Computer Science. His work has focused on the intersection of politics and technology, both examining the construction of technology and the use of technology for political communication. He has extensive experience in CHI and CSCW on publishing and reviewing papers related to politics. For the workshop, he advises on political science perspective, manages the web page and serves as a senior editor on the planned special issue.
Jesse Haapoja is a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University’s Department of Computer Sciences and a visiting researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki. His work has focused on social studies of algorithmic systems, with a recent interest in moral discourse and its relationship with ideologies on social media platforms and their users. Jesse serves as the technical program chair, managing the review of submissions and advising from a social psychology perspective.
Pedro Ferreira is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. His work focuses on examining the discourses surrounding the design and deployment of technologies in different contexts, specifically the ways they construct users, tasks and goals, often in tension with stated intentions. Drawing from a background in design research, running a wide range of workshops across different countries and contexts, Pedro will take main responsibility for facilitating the workshop activities.
Os Keyes is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Their work frequently explores the political and ideological underpinnings of computing technologies, with a focus on questions of gender, disability and race. In the workshop, Os will organize and manage the remote participation and advise on critical perspectives from his background in law and studies on gender.
Shaowen Bardzell is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. A common thread throughout her work is the exploration of the contributions of feminism, design, and social science to support the role of technology in social change. She provides advocacy for social change during the planning and execution of the workshop, facilitates some of the activities and serves as senior editor for the planned special issue.
Together our team represents different sections of the HCI community and our shared experience in facilitating group work, will guarantee productive discussion on a delicate and polarizing topic as ideologies.