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I use design and empiric methods to explore how computing technologies might address social inequality. In research, I study, design, and prototype human-centered technologies for intervening in large systemic social issues, like social and economic inequalities (e.g., hunger; wage violations). My work contributes to the fields of human-computer interaction, ubiquitous and social computing, and design. The goal of such work is to understand the limitations and strengths of applying design methods to contemporary social issues. Such work produces analytic, theoretic, and pragmatic contributions within HCI to deepen the field’s understanding of how information and communication technologies may foster and inhibit social change. Given these interests and commitments, I explore themes of power, empowerment, politics, ethics, values, advocacy, and social justice within the context of the design and use of sociotechnical systems.
I am interested in teaching topics about Human-Computer Interaction, Design Theory, Ethics, Values in Design, and Sociotechnical Systems.
Here are my most recent publications since 2025:
Cindy Kaiying Lin, Lynn Dombrowski, and Shaowen Bardzell. 2025. Whose, Which, and What Crisis? A Critical Analysis of Crisis in Computing Supply Chains. In Proceedings of the sixth decennial Aarhus conference: Computing X Crisis (AAR '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 56–70. https://doi.org/10.1145/3744169.3744179
Gabriella Thompson, Lynn Dombrowski, and Angela D. R. Smith. 2025. Embracing Social Justice within a Computing Curriculum to Foster Social Change. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 586, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713125