How would you describe your work in 90 seconds?

I look at technologies and how humans interact with technologies. My focus is on how disabled people and minority genders look at technologies because I’m interested in marginalized perspectives. We often know how a majority interacts with technologies, but that’s not where we discover a new thing, or an interesting thing, or where technology breaks. At the margins, we often find there is a critical point where there’s a mismatch, and that’s what I’m interested in. I often say I look at technologies, and then I tell technologists that sometimes it’s (ed. note: the technology) quite damaging for some people. I’m trying to bring in a critical perspective of understanding what a good assessment is between the harm technologies can do and the good they can do. We often focus on the good parts and the potential that technologies have, but then don’t look at where they can be harmful. When it comes to where they can do harm, we often have marginalized populations that are made vulnerable by technologies. I also consider what ‘access’ to these technologies means, understanding that access is always afforded within technologies, but more so to specific groups that are already normative within society and less so in marginalized communities, and I work a lot with disabled people there.

How did you get in touch with informatics?

I started out with cultural studies. I was also really interested in looking at how humans and technology interact or don’t interact and about their impact on society. That’s when I started reading more literature in the field of media philosophy, or digital media philosophy. It was there I came across a book by a theorist, and he talked about image systems, and what it means to have a digital image. In the entire book, he never understood the difference between a vector graphic and a pixel graphic. I think that differentiation has fundamental theoretical implications for the theory, and the theory could have been so much stronger and better if he had engaged with that difference. I thought, I don’t want to make those mistakes. I want to know what I’m talking about. So, I started studying media systems at the Bauhaus Universität, which is their computer science degree. I got a scholarship to do that because otherwise, I couldn’t have afforded it. So, I ended up with multiple backgrounds in this weird corner where you don’t find a lot of people who understand the perspective that I’ve taken, where it comes from, and how it’s a core part of computer science as well. The thing is, if we lack an understanding of what technologies functionally do in our environment, we don’t understand these technologies all that well. For example, in one of my studies, I looked at how non-binary people, or intersex people, interact with database systems and web forms, and that uncovered a fundamental issue with how we conceptualize databases. It is technically relevant that we do this kind of research.

Where do you see the connection between your research and everyday life?

We use technology every day, and it impacts us every day. It impacts us in ways where we aren’t immediately implicated, especially when it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI). I find it interesting how persuasive these things are, and I find it important to acknowledge their limits more. We need to understand when we are overloading specific tasks using systems that are not built for that.

For example, with the AMS Berufsinfomat, there was a lot of critique about the biases that were in there at the beginning. They tried to figure that out, and that led to some of the biases being mitigated. The intent of the Berufsinfomat was to gain access to three different dispersed databases that had different makeups and different kinds of information in them and to provide information in a meaningful way for people who are looking for it. That could have been done with an excellent search engine and a chatbot. Instead, it was built on a language model that generates language on a set of complicated procedures. It’s not just stochastics and probabilities, but those are the basis. What is more likely to happen in that context with a shift in likelihood, different weights, etc.? It’s a procedure. It’s a procedural assembly of words, and it’s not intelligent, and it does not have any relationship to the world or to the context that it’s working in. From this word pool, sentence pool, or language pool, just take the most adequate thing that we assume is there, but that will always harm minorities or marginalized people in this context. It doesn’t even have to be minorities, because women and cis women* are often also marginalized within our society. Essentially, you end up using something that requires more energy, more calculation power, and is more detached from what it should actually do when you could have used a lower-level technology that could have done a better job.

Also, when it comes to assistive technologies, you have a lot of research, resources, and money wasted on developing technologies that are pointless for the disabled community. For example, the deaf community doesn’t always identify as disabled but is marginalized within our society. You have things like sign language gloves that are being presented as ways for making signing understandable to hearing people, but they don’t really work. The ones that are commercially available cost a lot of money and are a huge disappointment for anyone who interacts with them. Sign language is not just based on hand signs, it’s also based on the entire upper body and facial expressions that also have a grammatical function. If you only have one hand, and it doesn’t even know where it’s at within the space in front of you, that’s not going to cut it in terms of understanding sign language. A lot of money and resources are used for technologies like that when deaf people aren’t even sure what they can ask for because they constantly have to fight against things that are brought to them. So, in my work, I do this critique part, which is relevant to understanding how we work within societies, but I also do this generative design part where I ask questions like: What do people want? What is in their interest? And what would they do within a space that has potential for self-determination, but is not necessarily afforded?

What makes you happy in your work?

For me, it’s the little things. I’m also very privileged that I was able to choose the members of the core team that I work with myself (we call ourselves the Crip Collective). Everyone relates to disability in one way or another, mostly by having a disability. There’s just so much solidarity that comes from that, and every day, we try to carve out a space where things are possible. We try to figure out how we can do research from this positionality and from this collective standpoint. There aren’t many examples of how to do this kind of research, as the majority of people who do research look and sound and do things very differently. Carving out that space has been a privilege, but it also makes me happy in terms of allowing people who are often not considered knowledge producers within the academy to flourish. I also see how team members bring in more and more people from the outside as experts and knowledge makers and give them the space to get a foot in the door in terms of defining what is researched with them and not just about them. I also enjoy seeing that my research has a positive effect on people’s personal lives, even if it’s small.

The previous disability consultant yelled at me the first time I met her because I have a lot of invisible disabilities that I hadn’t disclosed. She asked me why I was doing research on disabled people when I wasn’t disabled myself. And I was, like, that seems rude. But it showed me how important it is to disclose that and to position yourself, and that is also important when it comes to teaching. People come to my courses and are happy to see someone teaching them that they can identify with. That is why I do what I do, despite all the stuff that stresses me out about it or that I find kind of tedious. It’s important to create spaces where we can be more of us, and where we are afforded the same chances as everyone else. I was extremely lucky to get to that point. Creating those spaces is what motivates me; that’s what makes me happy. And I wish I had the luxury of not researching things that are aspects of my own personality. I wish I had the luxury of not talking about being intersex or non-binary. I wish I had the luxury to not talk about being disabled, but rather do studies on nice gadgets and prototypes. But in my understanding, in my ethos, that would be a waste of the privilege that I’ve been given, so I do that, even though it’s incredibly hard.

Why do you think there are still so few women in computer science?

I’m not a woman, so I have my own specific ways of relating to all of this, but it starts with when you start studying computer science. Back when I started, I was perceived as female and did not have the words to talk about it, and I was also not aware of my intersex conditions. I had to tell people not to touch my keyboard because I understood that people try to help you and that those people are usually men who have more experience in programming, but then I wouldn’t do it myself, and so I wouldn’t learn it. I saw some of the women in our program not succeed because they never got the chance to do things themselves and learn them because people were trying to be helpful. Sometimes, people make inappropriate comments and make others feel unsafe. Sometimes, it’s very subtle, sex-based discrimination that leads to people not feeling safe in their environment, and that ultimately leads to them dropping out of computer science and feeling like they want to go use spaces where they are not exposed to those things. However, there has been a change in recent years, and I feel there’s a lot that’s being done. There’s Laura Kovacs who does an outreach program for primary schools. There’s my colleague Peter Purgathofer, who teaches ways of thinking in informatics and who has a strong ethos of showing that this is a safe space for all marginalized people. Also, in my interaction with students, I do notice a change in that generation, which is now different from mine. There’s more awareness and there’s more care and solidarity. I also hope that at some point I will not be the only intersex professor in Austria because that is a bit weird.

I think if we understand power and care and solidarity more generally, that also helps us to understand why there are so few disabled people in computer science, even though at least 10% of the population is disabled (more like 20%). Not all of them identify as disabled, so it’s difficult to point to a specific number. For example, deaf people are kept out of the school system because they are not afforded an education in sign language. They are expected to compensate for a lot of things, and then people are surprised that they don’t succeed academically where hearing people are provided with so much more support. Within the deaf community, I’ve seen a lot of deaf people going into educational fields or cultural studies because they say that we first need to figure out how to support deaf kids and understand and advocate more for the deaf community itself before going into technology research. I think it’s good that we think about women, but I think it would be better if we thought about it more holistically. There are subconscious biases in terms of how people behave and how people interpret things. We need to understand how we do that and acknowledge that we do that before we can change that and make these spaces safer for people who are not that represented within them.

*Ed. note: cis women: Cisgender is a term that is used to describe people whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.

Katta Spiel is Assistant Professor at the Research Unit Human Computer Interaction at TU Wien Informatics. Their current project, ACCESSTECH, investigates how Access is experienced in interaction with modern technologies. The project is funded by an ERC Starting Grant und will continue until 2029.

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