An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design / Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, Amy S. Bruckman

Fiesler et al. conduct a case study on Archive of Our Own (AO3), an online fan fiction archive website, to demonstrate how to implement Bardzell’s Feminist HCI into practice. Using a series of interviews and exploration of the site, the authors explore how AO3’s design centers around participation, pluralism, advocacy, and more. Although AO3 is not the perfect platform for every user and some of the study’s participants explained why, AO3’s design and careful policy-making reflects feminist values and advocates for empowerment for a diversity of fanfiction writers. This article provides a specific series of design choices that reflect these values.

Fiesler, Casey, Shannon Morrison, and Amy S Bruckman. 2016. “An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design.” In CHI ’16 Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2574–85. Santa Clara, CA. https://caseyfiesler.com/2016/02/09/an-archive-of-their-own-a-case-study-of-feminist-hci-and-values-in-design-chi-2016/.