I looked at a lot of efforts to create innovation hubs where you put lots of people together and it’s supposed to be vibrant and exciting. I learned a word a couple of years ago, 蚊子館. A lot of them are set up, but then nobody actually shows up.

That makes sense. Could I ask a question?

Deep hanging out.

Could you talk a little bit about the digital ecology that these are all part of? I think you already started to do that. You were saying, with Slack, it might feel like it’s a room, but actually, it’s more of an agora. You’re trying to link it through Logbot ...

Sorry, I’m just trying to take notes. This is going to sleep every 30 seconds, so it’s great.

And Logbot. I actually don’t understand what that is, but maybe you could tell us quickly what Logbot is. [laughs]

Some of what we’ve seen, and that’s what I’d like to talk about, is with join.gov or -- I don’t how to say it. Is it polis?

We have overwhelming elections that say that people want more Democrats, and still, you have a Republican...One of the things that excited me about Taiwan and some of your work and some of what I want to see is I feel like you’re creating new ways for people to be ...

We live in a very liberal area, but we have always had conservative representation, and it will never change because it’s crafted in order to make sure that our voices is not heard. As an American, I personally have felt there’s nothing I can do. Trump loses the vote, and ...

We live in a district that has been crafted in order to make sure that our vote doesn’t matter. They make very funny-shaped districts, and then they get all the liberal populations, and they break them up and spread them out, so they have the least impact.

One of the things we wanted to start with and I have to say -- I’m going to share my positionality -- one of the things as an American that I feel, that really inspires me about what I’ve seen in Taiwan, is I feel very hopeless. I feel like ...

We have, I think, a two-part agenda. One is we want to ask a bunch of questions about your perspectives and your experiences. Mostly this is to create a basis of shared understanding. The second part’s a little bit more intellectual. We want to share a little bit some of ...

That’s basically the introduction.

Yeah.

One thing that I feel as a researcher is any time somebody’s really touched in their soul, whether or not you can explain or defend it, it’s important, so you should try to pursue and understand it. A lot of the work that we’ve done since then has been in ...

...not necessarily as a research colleague, that that had a huge impact on her. She started talking about Taiwan a lot more and in different ways and asking deep questions of herself and her own identity that I hadn’t heard prior to that. I think that was really a turning ...

I can say, as her husband...

One of the threads that we encountered here -- I’ll get back to that -- we started to hear a lot about the pursuit of democracy in Taiwan and the role of technology and technology tools for that. Of course, the Sunflower Movement was very impactful on her in particular.

We want to show where this is coming from, what some of the issues are, and the ways in which we’ve tried to blend things that we care about, like gender, Taiwan, criticality, with things that our government’s willing to pay us to do, [laughs] innovation, democratization of technology, start-ups, ...

There’s another word in there, but I can’t remember what it is, National Craft, something, Research Institute in Caotun. We interviewed several master crafters. This is back in 2011, I think.

We’re looking at leadership in a more predominantly female, but also still large network, distributed, keeping it in a curated content setting. Because of the Taiwan angle, we started to look at craft. We went to Caotun and the National Craft...

It’s a predominantly female site. A lot of people are showing leadership.

...by men. It was mostly college-aged guys. Gender was an important topic to us, so then we started to look at etsy.com. Do you know the site Etsy? It’s a craft website in the US.

One of the things that we were looking at then was World of Warcraft animations. Then, we realized that was also very much driven...

Part of this was arising out of the early days of YouTube, Second Life, and some of these things where there’s a lot of excitement about participant-generated or community-generated content and that kind of thing. That was the start of that grant.

It was on creativity support. That’s one of the big topics in our field, how might technologies support people being creative. Initially, one of the things that we were looking at was network-enabled creativity.

Yeah. I’m going to come backwards, then I’ll come back to that, just to get everything on the record. The research that we started, the initial grant, was before this current one. When was that, 2009 or 2010?

Yeah, cultural heritage. One of the things we’ve seen we’ll come back to later is it seems like a lot of people are talking about Taiwan identity, both as a people, as a country, or even those that sit in Taipei.

Of course, to a certain extent, that’s true. We want that to happen, and we support that. We’ve also discovered there’s a lot of people who are pursuing making, DIY, or other kinds of technological projects for reasons that they’re passionate about, but may not have to do with the ...

Yeah.

There’s a whole story there in a narrative that’s been spread around the world.

There’s often a subtext, which is, "Why are people really doing this" and, "What are people’s real values," and, "What is the really interesting stuff that’s happening?" It’s skipping ahead a little bit, but one of the things that we discovered in this research was that there were, of course, ...

That’s the official story anyway that we used to get grant funding.

That’s right. Maybe 5 or 10 years after you went to the US, you started to miss Taiwan.

The other thing very much coming from Shaowen is a commitment to Taiwan, because Shaowen is originally from Taiwan. You can...

Position, and that kind of thing. Exactly. There are two things that have driven this research. One has been a commitment to gender and gender issues. Shaowen, in particular, is very well-known for her work on feminism and feminist HCI.

One of our commitments from being from comparative literature is actually telling what our commitments are, actually saying what we believe.

We both have our PhDs in comparative literature. It’s a little bit of a transition from comparative literature into computing, but that’s what happened. Most of our research, we have a critical or humanistic take on HCI.

I think we both typically identify as design researchers. We are maybe a little bit less on the technical side and more on the "having a good idea" side. That’s at least how we think about it. I think it’s relevant -- this will come up -- that both of ...

Let me at least start with some research. For the benefit of the transcript, we are Shaowen Bardzell and Jeffrey Bardzell. We’re both professors at Indiana University in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. We’re both researchers in human-computer interaction, or HCI, and design. That’s the quick introduction.

Excellent, yes. Basically, we know how it’s going to start with the interview and where it’s going to end, but what’s in the middle is up to us.

Usually, to start with the interview, we introduce ourselves and the research project.