arXiv subjects

Nava Haghighi

Publications and source records attributed to Nava Haghighi.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Negotiating Ontological Boundaries in User-Authored Personal Sensing Systems

Designed artifacts are ontological, shaping, and at times limiting, what becomes possible or imaginable. One path toward mitigating such foreclosures is giving people power over how systems are designed and built. Despite decades of scholarship around systems that enable such authorship, these systems are often evaluated on whether or not they are usable, useful, or technically feasible, leaving questions of ontological boundary negotiation, unexamined. We design two open-ended probes that utilize a Wizard of Oz technique to enable the experience of training a personalized machine learning system on phenomena people define themselves. In a week-long exploratory study, participants use one of two probes in the course of their everyday lives. We identify four sites where ontological boundaries were negotiated; the boundaries of a phenomena, the subject as part of relations, what is signal and what is noise, and the objectivity of data. We offer starting points for supporting boundary negotiation through design and discuss open-ended probes as a method for ontological design.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Ontologies in Design: How Imagining a Tree Reveals Possibilites and Assumptions in Large Language Models

Amid the recent uptake of Generative AI, sociotechnical scholars and critics have traced a multitude of resulting harms, with analyses largely focused on values and axiology (e.g., bias). While value-based analyses are crucial, we argue that ontologies -- concerning what we allow ourselves to think or talk about -- is a vital but under-recognized dimension in analyzing these systems. Proposing a need for a practice-based engagement with ontologies, we offer four orientations for considering ontologies in design: pluralism, groundedness, liveliness, and enactment. We share examples of potentialities that are opened up through these orientations across the entire LLM development pipeline by conducting two ontological analyses: examining the responses of four LLM-based chatbots in a prompting exercise, and analyzing the architecture of an LLM-based agent simulation. We conclude by sharing opportunities and limitations of working with ontologies in the design and development of sociotechnical systems.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

The Effectiveness of Haptic Properties Under Cognitive Load: An Exploratory Study

With the rise of wearables, haptic interfaces are increasingly favored to communicate information in an ambient manner. Despite this expectation, existing guidelines are developed in studies where the participant's focus is entirely on the haptic task. In this work, we systematically study the cognitive load imposed by properties of a haptic signal. Participants wear a haptic device on their forearm, and are asked to perform a 1-back task. Each experimental condition isolates an individual property of the haptic signal (e.g., amplitude, waveform, rhythm) and participants are asked to identify the gradient of the data. We evaluate each condition across 16 participants, measuring participants' response times, error rates, and qualitative and quantitative surveys (e.g., NASA TLX). Our results indicate that gender and language differences may impact preference for some properties, that participants prefer properties that can be rapidly identified, and that amplitude imposes the lowest cognitive load.

cs.HC↗