About

Daniela Rosner is an Associate Professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington. Her research investigates the social, political, and material circumstances of technology development, with an emphasis on foregrounding marginalized histories of practice, from maintenance to needlecraft. She has worked in design research at Microsoft Research, Adobe Systems, Nokia Research, and as an exhibit designer at several museums, including the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum. Rosner's work has been supported by multiple awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER award. She is the author of several articles on craft and technoculture, and her book, Critical Fabulations, explores new ways of thinking about design’s past to rework future relationships between technology and social responsibility. Rosner earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Chicago. She serves on the Editorial Board of Artifact: Journal of Design Practice and is the editor of the “Design as Inquiry” forum for Interactions Magazine, a bimonthly publication of ACM SIGCHI. Along with Professor Beth Kolko, she co-directs HCDE's Tactile and Tactical Design Lab (TAT Lab).

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Engineering
• Epistemology
• Human–computer interaction
• Social Science
• Business
• World Wide Web
• Computer Security
• Psychology
• Mechanical engineering
• Law
• Philosophy
• Architectural engineering
• Social psychology
• Internet privacy
• Environmental ethics
• Public relations
• Law and economics
• Art

Selected publications

• “AI is Soulless”: Hollywood Film Workers’ Strike and Emerging Perceptions of Generative Cinema

  ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction · 2025-02-06 · 12 citations

  articleSenior author

  Why were Hollywood film workers striking or supporting strikes against AI in 2023? To investigate this question, we conduct participant observation on the picket line and interview 15 film workers, including 12 union members from SAG-AFTRA, WGA, and IATSE, as well as three non-unionized workers, across roles. From screenwriting to acting, our interlocutors described how studio use of AI might exacerbate wage squeeze, estrangement from embodied co-creation, rush for results, and inauthentic creativity. We find that film worker resistance to emergent and projected uses of AI echoes earlier technical developments, such as the incorporation of sound, color, HD, DVD, and CGI. These innovations initially sparked anxieties about the demise of cinema, but ultimately created new aesthetic possibilities and professions. We end with a reflection on core concerns for worker engagement, including topics of prophesy and the “soul” of sociotechnical labor.

  PublisherDOI

• Already here

  Environment and Planning D Society and Space · 2025-12-08

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Underground AI? Critical Approaches to Generative Cinema through Amateur Filmmaking

  2025-04-24 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Ontologies in Design: How Imagining a Tree Reveals Possibilities and Assumptions in Large Language Models

  2025-04-24 · 5 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Amid the recent uptake of Generative AI, sociotechnical scholars and critics have traced a multitude of resulting harms, with analyses largely focused on values and axiology (e.g., bias). While value-based analyses are crucial, we argue that ontologies -- concerning what we allow ourselves to think or talk about -- is a vital but under-recognized dimension in analyzing these systems. Proposing a need for a practice-based engagement with ontologies, we offer four orientations for considering ontologies in design: pluralism, groundedness, liveliness, and enactment. We share examples of potentialities that are opened up through these orientations across the entire LLM development pipeline by conducting two ontological analyses: examining the responses of four LLM-based chatbots in a prompting exercise, and analyzing the architecture of an LLM-based agent simulation. We conclude by sharing opportunities and limitations of working with ontologies in the design and development of sociotechnical systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• ’The world has changed...’ — Unlocking Teen Perspectives on Technological Futures through Design Fiction Workshops

  2025-04-23 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Should AI Mimic People? Understanding AI-Supported Writing Technology Among Black Users

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025-10-16 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  AI-supported writing technologies (AISWT) that provide grammatical suggestions, autocomplete sentences, or generate and rewrite text are now a regular feature integrated into many people's workflows. However, little is known about how people perceive the suggestions these tools provide. In this paper, we investigate how Black American users perceive AISWT, motivated by prior findings in natural language processing that highlight how the underlying large language models can contain racial biases. Using interviews and observational user studies with 13 Black American users of AISWT, we found a strong tradeoff between the perceived benefits of using AISWT to enhance their writing style and feeling like ''it wasn't built for us'''. Specifically, participants reported AISWT's failure to recognize commonly used names and expressions in African American Vernacular English, experiencing its corrections as hurtful and alienating and fearing it might further minoritize their culture. We end with a reflection on the tension between AISWT that fail to include Black American culture and language, and AISWT that attempt to mimic it, with attention to accuracy, authenticity, and the production of social difference.

  PublisherDOI

• Care Layering: Complicating Design Patterns

  Designing Interactive Systems Conference · 2024-06-29 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  Over the past two decades, discussions of design patterns have turned from encouragement (what to do) toward discouragement (what to avoid). Termed dark, deceptive, or otherwise harmful, user experience (UX) patterns that serve to monetize engagement while reproducing and sedimenting structural inequities are prevalent, which calls for a shifting conversation around UX development and learning. This pictorial uses a visual case study of a childcare worker platform to help critically contextualize largely abstracted or universalizing UX patterns. Developing a form of critical documentation we call Care Layering, we show how approaching UX patterns as embodied and culturally-situated resources sheds light on both limitations and opportunities around gig work platform engagement. We end with a discussion of how Care Layering helps designers work towards greater accountability in UX design.

  PublisherDOI

• Worlding with Tarot: Design, Divination, and the Technological Imagination

  Designing Interactive Systems Conference · 2024-06-29 · 5 citations

  article

  Design cards have long played an important role in reflection-directing the designer's gaze toward unasked questions, hidden consequences, and new horizons for speculative futuring. But few questions have been asked about what motivates the design process and how deck designers see their role in inquiry and/or world building. This paper looks to the Tarot deck as one iconic example of such a process. Drawing on interviews with nine Tarot deck creators, we surface themes of Tarot as scaffolding modes of personal and collective growth, forms of carework, and pathways for different ways of knowing. We discuss expanding design inquiry methods for understanding and elevating forms of spiritual connection and care; and moving from anti-appropriation to ante-appropriation.

  PublisherDOI

• Porous by Design: How Childcare Platforms Impact Worker Personhood, Safety, and Connection

  Designing Interactive Systems Conference · 2024 · 10 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Computer Science

  Care work is always already unequal. It involves looking after others’ physical, psychological, emotional, and developmental needs. Paid care work tends to be conducted in private spaces, lack regulation, and reproduce unequal dynamics between clients and workers. These conditions lead to porous boundaries, a permeability experienced by workers between care and work, professional and personal, and private and public (sectors and spheres). Drawing on interviews with 16 workers who find work using Care.com, we argue that the porous boundaries of care work are reified in new ways through the design and use of emerging digitally mediated matching platforms. This has particular impacts for ranking personhood, reducing worker safety, and increasing atomization. In contrast, we find benefits in the forum-like structure and visible, interactive conversations of other platforms used to access childcare work. We end with a discussion of porousness by design and the trouble of locating design within worker platforms.

  PublisherDOI

• Resistive Threads: Electronic Streetwear as Social Movement Material

  Designing Interactive Systems Conference · 2024-06-29 · 14 citations

  articleSenior author

  Informed by legacies of textile activism, we design Resistive Threads as a wearable probe to investigate potential roles and trajectories of electronic streetwear in US urban social movements. Resistive Threads is an interactive denim jacket that refashions the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s (Dis)location Black Exodus print zine. The jacket plays audio stories, poetry, and music from embedded speakers when interactive patches sewn with conductive thread are tapped upon. Examining the artifact with 10 community organizers and partners, we find that augmented streetwear may take on the role of a housing organizing instrument or speculative garment. In turn, we discuss how we might learn from textile histories and solidarities to recognize—not rehearse—damage-centered research. We close with a reflection on what makes the electronic aspect of e-textiles meaningful to social movement practice and performance.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Examining the Design and Use of Internet of Things Technology in Public Life

  NSF · $250k · 2015–2019

• CAREER: Enhancing the Integration of Craft and Computing

  NSF · $549k · 2015–2021

• CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Repair, Maintenance and Sustainability: Enhancing Sustainability by Strengthening the Design/Repair Nexus

  NSF · $202k · 2015–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Mikael Wiberg

  Umeå University

  22 shared

• Jonathan Bean

  University of Arizona

  19 shared

• Alex Taylor

  18 shared

• Sarah Fox

  11 shared

• Cynthia L. Bennett

  Google (United States)

  8 shared

• Alex Taylor

  8 shared

• Morgan G. Ames

  University of California, Berkeley

  7 shared

• Caitlin Lustig

  University of Washington

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of California, Berkeley

• M.S., Computer Science

  University of Chicago

• Other, Graphic Design

  Rhode Island School of Design

Awards & honors

• NSF CAREER Award