Josephine Hoy in block letters, orange and hot pink
Portrait of Joey, a person with dark shoulder-length curly hair and thick bangs, wearing a blue dress with a white collar. They are smiling and leaning/looking to the right.

Hi, I'm Josephine Hoy. I'm a graduate student in the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. I am very lucky to be able to work with mentors and collaborators across departments and institutions, but my primary home is the Tactile and Tactical (TAT) Design Laboratory.

My work as a researcher and designer is motivated by a desire to help imagine and engineer emancipatory sociotechnical systems—technologies designed and adopted with enthusiastic consent by the individuals and communities who will live with them, with consideration and regard for future generations, non-human life, and our world.

My approach to human-computer interaction (HCI) is also deeply informed by my experiences with theatre; I believe in the power of narrative, immediacy, presence, and embodied imagination to invite possibilities and priorities.


"We create truths by describing, or by re-describing, our beliefs and observations. Our task, and the task of every artist and scientist, is to re-describe our inherited assumptions and invented fictions in order to create new paradigms for the future." —Anne Bogart, A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre


Some of my other interests include: tending plants, Muppets, vintage computer architectures, hiking, bouldering, learning to speak Southern Lushootseed, cooking, niche online communities, improv comedy, the Sims, film, reading (especially speculative/science fiction and poetry), and watercolor painting.



Before I began my PhD studies, I spent many years working in a variety of design, operations, and product strategy roles in the tech industry. I'm always happy to provide networking connections or mentorship—especially for anyone who is underrepresented and under-supported in the technology sector. Similarly, I always welcome opportunities to learn! Whether you're interested in research, career development, or agitating for change within your organization, I'd love to chat. Please reach out to me via email if you have something to share with me or think I can be helpful!

Research

My primary focus is participatory design and civic technology infrastructuring, primarily to support practices of collective care and community-building.

I am committed to facilitating the design of tools and methods that make it easier for communities to exercise their own skills and agency in deciding their own technological fate. This begins with communities deciding how much—if any—technology is desirable to them and includes their ongoing ownership over design, maintenance, and "end-of-life" options.

Using the most common 1000 words in English:


I study how people use computers and look for ways we can work together to make and use computers (or do different things instead of making or using computers) that help us take care of each other and our world and become more free.


In Winter 2021, I will be hosting a Directed Research Group titled Community, Capacity, and Collective Care in Practice. We will be developing an open research archive and assembling a toolkit from our explorations.



My Master's capstone project* focused on designing and prototyping a networking toolkit to support community disaster resilience and facilitate mutual aid. Our toolkit specifies an open source, low-cost mesh network technology with software modules designed to support trustworthy, adaptable communication networks that extend the reach and accessibility of "low- or no-tech" artifacts and community solutions. I continue to explore how high- and low-tech tools can contribute to community autonomy, vitality, and organizing.

*A collaboration with three amazing members of my MS cohort at the University of Washington and funded in part by the HCDE Excellence Fund

Publications & Talks

I try to publish as open access whenever possible; if there is a paper you would like a copy of and you are unable to access it, please feel welcome to email me!


Decolonizing Risk Communication: Indigenous Responses to COVID-19 using Social Media. Nicole Kuhn, Shawon Sarkar, Lauren Alaine White, Josephine Hoy, Celena McCray, and Clarita Lefthand-Begay. Journal of Indigenous Social Development: Special Issue on Indigenous Communities and COVID-19: Impact and Implications. 2020. View publication.

"The Personal Is Political": Feminist Consciousness Raising as a Hackathon Outcome. Catherine D'Ignazio, Alexis Hope, Rebecca Michelson, Josephine Hoy, Jennifer Roberts, and Kate Krontiris. In Proceedings of the 2020 CSCW Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3415221

Troubled Worlds: A Course Syllabus about Information Work and the Anthropocene. Megan Finn, Daniela K. Rosner, Suzanne Black, Nathan Cunningham, Kristin N Dew, Josephine Hoy, Kevin McCraney, Colin Morgan. Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i1.137

Human-Computer Insurrection: Notes on an Anarchist HCI. Os Keyes, Josephine Hoy, and Margaret Drouhard. 2019. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 339, 13 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300569

Hackathons as Participatory Design: Iterating Feminist Utopias. Alexis Hope, Catherine D'Ignazio, Josephine Hoy, Rebecca Michelson, Jennifer Roberts, Kate Krontiris, and Ethan Zuckerman. 2019. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 61, 14 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300291 [CHI 2019 Best Paper Honorable Mention]



Non-Archival Publications

Resilience and the Rapid Shift to Remote Working at a University: Emerging Questions. Caitie Lustig, Ridley Jones, Josephine Hoy, Negin Alimohammadi, and Charlotte Lee. Symposium on the New Future of Work. Microsoft Research. 2020. View publication.



Talks & Workshops

Engaging Tribal Communities to Decolonize COVID-19 Risk Communication Using Social Media. Nicole Kuhn, Josephine Hoy, Shawon Sarkar, Celena McCray. National Tribal Health Conference 2020.

idk (a blog)

I have very sporadically (though with the best of intentions!) shared my thoughts and experiences as a PhD student at idk.