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Hanna Schneider, Malin Eiband, Daniel Ullrich, Andreas Butz
Empowerment in HCI - A Survey and Framework
In CHI '18: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Montreal, Canada, April 21 - 26, 2018. ACM, New York, NY, USA.

Empowering people through technology is of increasing con- cern in the HCI community. However, there are different interpretations of empowerment, which diverge substantially. The same term thus describes an entire spectrum of research endeavours and goals. This conceptual unclarity hinders the development of a meaningful discourse and exchange. To bet- ter understand what empowerment means in our community, we reviewed 54 CHI full papers using the terms empower and empowerment. Based on our analysis and informed by prior writings on power and empowerment, we construct a frame- work that serves as a lens to analyze notions of empowerment in current HCI research. Finally, we discuss the implications of these notions of empowerment on approaches to technology design and offer recommendations for future work. With this analysis, we hope to add structure and terminological clarity to this growing and important facet of HCI research.