With or Without Permission: Site-Specific Augmented Reality for Social Justice

TL;DR

This paper outlines a half-day CHI 2024 workshop on site-specific augmented reality for social justice, focusing on artifacts used to speculate, design, and deliver AR experiences in place-based activism. It argues for a community-driven, interdisciplinary approach and the creation of an open artifact database to facilitate knowledge sharing while addressing ownership, accessibility, and sustainability concerns. The organizers bring expertise across HCI, AR, design justice, and community engagement, with planned outcomes including an annotated artifact collection and a public repository. The work aims to empower marginalized communities to leverage AR for spatial justice, while examining the ethical and logistical challenges of working with platforms, permissions, and cross-sector collaborations.

Abstract

Movements for social change are often tied to a particular locale. This makes Augmented Reality (AR), which changes how people perceive their surroundings, a promising technology for social justice. Site-specific AR empowers activists to re-tell the story of a place, with or without permission of its owner. It has been used, for example, to reveal hidden histories, re-imagine problematic monuments, and celebrate minority cultures. However, challenges remain concerning technological ownership and accessibility, scalability, sustainability, and navigating collaborations with marginalized communities and across disciplinary boundaries. This half-day workshop at CHI 2024 seeks to bring together an interdisciplinary group of activists, computer scientists, designers, media scholars, and more to identify opportunities and challenges across domains. To anchor the discussion, participants will each share one example of an artifact used in speculating, designing, and/or delivering site-specific AR experiences. This collection of artifacts will inaugurate an interactive database that can inspire a new wave of activists to leverage AR for social justice.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: An Example of a 'Final Artifact.' The Kinfolk App invites users to place digital monuments of people of color at specific locations. The project emerged from an artist and activist campaign to advocate for the removal of the statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle in New York City McWhirter2021-yj. Here, Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of a Haitian slave rebellion and revolutionary movement, is shown superimposed over that statue of Columbus, leveraging augmented reality to envision a more just future.
• Figure 2: An example of a ‘Speculative Artifact.' The Memory Layers application, a depiction of sensitive narratives, was developed in collaboration with the Museo de la Memoria, a human rights museum in Colombia cardenas2022_2. The research team and museum employees co-created sketches of three different modes of user interaction, focusing on adapting existing exhibitions and collections to an AR format. This exploration delved into a design space for AR applications, considering users, technology, and objectives.
• Figure 3: An Example of a ‘Process Artifact’