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+# Hana's Blog Post #1
+
+I've picked the paper 'Designing Trans Technology: Defining Challenges and Envisioning Community-Centered Solutions' for my paper motivation critique. 
+
+*Citation: Oliver L. Haimson, Dykee Gorrell, Denny L. Starks, and Zu Weinger. 2020. Designing Trans Technology: Defining Challenges and Envisioning Community-   Centered Solutions. In ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.* 
+
+I picked this paper for a few reasons:
+  1. It directly relates to an upcoming project I have regarding trans and/or non-binary developers in open source software.
+  2. I'm very familiar with Prof. Oliver Haimson's work and have always found their papers to be novel, well-constructed, and interesting to read (which is a huge bonus).
+  3. It won a best paper award at CHI 2020, the mother of Human-Computer Interaction type conferences, so it *should* be good.
+
+What exactly is **trans technology**? Haimson et al. (2019) define it as any technology that 'allow[s] trans users the changeability, network seperation, and identity realness, along with other queer aspects of multiplicity, fluidity, and ambiguity, needed for gender transition.' This goal of this paper is provide insight on how such technologies could be improved for trans and non-binary people, hereafter just 'trans' for this blog post, insights which come directly from trans people themselves through participatory design and discussion. 
+
+ ## Literature Review
+
+Haimson et al. first introduce the problem of exclusionary technology design. Trans people have difficult lives in the real world, and this challenging experience is continued on the internet as well. Online, trans people can experience legal challenges (e.g. changing their deadname), transphobic and discriminatory comments, algorithmic bias, and a lack of resources and support. Haimson et. al review both existing work related to trans technologies as well as 'anti-trans' technologies which often cause harm for trans users. 
+
+In the related work section, Haimson et al. discuss anti-trans technologies and the four different categories of exisiting trans technologies: technolgies highlighting identity, supporting safety, providing resources, and building up community. For each of these four categories, the paper includes several examples of these categories and discuss those that succeed (e.g. U-Signal, a prototype technology for trans women and non-binary people of color's safety by alerting their contacts if they percieve a physical threat), as well as fail (i.e. Transdr, a trans dating app, which may not serve trans people's needs so much as it is fetishizing them). The anti-trans technology section of the related work section struck me as very extensive on providing examples of harmful technologies, as some of the examples came as a surprise to me. I would recommend anyone read this paper for that section alone, as it sheds a lot of light on unique issues that trans people face that I believe many people are unaware about. This section also notes the progress that some technologies have made, such as Facebook's gender options becoming much more inclusive over time. Finally, the related work section discusses where the exisiting literature is lacking, which is primarily that there have been broader LGBTQ+ studies, there have been no participatory design studies on *specifically* trans populations. This paper does a good job of identifying and explaining the problem (the hook) with current technologies, as well as explaining how they intend to remedy this issue.
+
+## Research Questions & Methods
+
+This paper sets out to answer two main research questions:
+  1. How can technology best support trans individuals and communities, and meet their needs?
+  2. What types of future trans technologies do trans people envision?
+
+The way Haimson et al. attempted to answer these questions was through participatory design focusing on *future-making*. Now, I had never heard of future-making before. The paper's description of this process is as follows:
+
+    In our design sessions, we intentionally focused on future-making, which Ehn et al. [21] define as “multiple 
+    futures imagined and made locally, in heterogenous communities, and with marginalized publics.” A “future 
+    workshop” includes brainstorming a list of critiques to the current situation (in this case, challenges trans
+    people face in society and in many areas of life) and then transforming those critiques to positive outcomes [9].
+    This results in a utopian set of ideas without limiting those ideas to what is real or practical [9]. Our future-
+    making involved a collaborative design process with diverse stakeholders in which we established trust, respected 
+    each others’ opinions, and facilitated mutual learning [21].
+
+So, based on this description, we are throwing concerns over practicality and feasibility out of the window. This might be an issue, but since it's more of an exploratary study in an area with very little exisiting prior work, I'm very intrigued to hear what the participants come up with, especially as this method's goal is to reduce inequity. In the results section of the paper, Haimson et al. include pictures of affinity diagrams, design sketches, and quotes from the participants which contribute wonderful qualitative data to this area of research. I personally immensely enjoyed looking at the sketches as it gives a much better idea of what the participants were thinking and also gives some insight on their unique experiences as trans people. I also liked that they updated the study design as they went along in the process (they had a 'trading cards' activity at the beginning to help with introductions between participants, but then decided to remove it to allow more time for the actual design activites). 
+
+I had two main concerns with the methods of this paper:
+
+First, they mentioned recruiting participants via their own social media networks. This struck me as very susceptible to bias as it seems like convenience sampling, which would result in more like-minded results. I suppose it would depend on the final number of participants recruited this way out of the total 21. This *might* also be ok considering that I know first-hand it can be very difficult to recruit such a small group (i.e. 0.6% of the U.S. population identifies as trans, as reported by the CDC). 
+
+Second, they said they ensured participants that their data and identities would remain confidental, but include picutres of participants working together where their faces are clearly visible. The participants gave explicit permission to be photographed and to have their pictures published, but this seems contradictory to the 'confidental' nature of the study. I felt that many participants could be easily recognized and may 'out' them to others. 
+
+## Theory and Philosophy
+
+I believe the future-making part of the participatory design contributes heavily to the theory of this paper, as well as this field, since it produces previously unseen results to the academic world. Participants identified thirteen unique challenges to trans folk: access to society, financial/employment challengers, gatekeeping, healthcare, housing, lack of access to resources, online identity (which I found very relevant to my work), polie, pressure to educate cisgender people about trans identities, racial injustice, and miscellaneous challenges (e.g., lack of access to trans history). Each of these challenges provides a path for a new direction of research, which I find very exciting, and I personally hope to contribute to the online identity body of research.
+
+Perhaps unsurprisingly given the very challenge/problem focused attitude of this paper, I believe Haimson's philosophical stance to be pragmatic. (Side note: They're giving a talk at CMU on March. 26th - do I get bonus points if they confirm this?) The world of trans technoligies is incredibly nuanced, and as a result a more objective or binary philosophy would not be well-matched to the area. As a result, something a lot more qualitative, detailed, and human-focused is required here to focus on combatting the many issues that trans individuals face, which implies a certain pragmaticism towards the problem.
+
+Overall, I really enjoyed the paper and found it eye-opening, engaging, and thorough. Would recommend 10/10.
+
+