Hi, folks! While I continue to cherish the baby bubble and becoming a full professor, here comes a letter to celebrate some of the amazing people I get to work with:

#1 Last Friday, Kristina Popova defended her PhD thesis Ethical Reasoning in Tech Work: From Individual Responsibility to Collective Action. Call me biased, but this research makes original and important contributions to the literature on ethics-in-practice (and beyond). Congratulations once more, Dr. Popova, and thank you to opponent Katie Shilton and the grading committee for scaffolding an excellent discussion!

#2 When Things Don’t Go As Planned with Digital Contraception, led by Cristina Bosco, is the latest piece of our research into digital contraception: “We present a qualitative interview study that examines what happens when things do not go as planned with digital contraception. Through an analysis of 27 interviews with ongoing users of digital contraception at the time of the study, we convey participants’ accounts of their experiences regarding unplanned pregnancies or use of emergency contraception to avoid an unplanned pregnancy. Our analysis considers participants’ sense-making processes, and notably how they attended to questions of risk and responsibility. Finally, we depict how these participants came to continue using digital contraception after these experiences. Our study connects to ongoing conversations on technological failures in personal informatics and safety-critical systems. We emphasise that failure and success should not be used as a binary classification of long-term users’ relationships with self-tracking technology, which are intimate and critical. Rather, the sustained relation with an intimate technology is composed by several ‘failures’ which are interpreted, acted upon, and, ultimately, overcome.”

#3 Ecological Systems Theory for Studying and Designing Menstrual Technologies, led by Anupriya Tuli, explores what it means to take an ecological approach in studying and designing menstrual technologies. We translated and adapted Ecological Systems Theory (EST) for menstrual wellbeing and packaged the outcome in the form of a socio-ecological Canvas, accompanied by written examples and a set of prompts to facilitate engagement.

#4 In Misalignments between Privacy Claims and Privacy Policies in Smart Sex Toys, led by Xiaofei Sun, we present a content analysis of the privacy policy documentation and product descriptions from 146 smart sex toys across fourteen brands. The paper underscores the need for HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners to address the structural inefficiency of policy compliance, the need to elevate privacy as an essential feature in products that collect and store sensitive and intimate data, and the stakes of privacy in the context of digital intimacy.

-A