Academic Research
Tejaswini Joshi, Heidi Biggs, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell
Who is “I” in research?
In UX and HCI, we often strive for neutrality. Observing others while trying not to be seen. But what happens when we acknowledge that we’re part of the picture? That our feelings, identities, and histories shape what we notice, what we ask, and what we build?
This reflection draws from my co-authored CHI 2024 paper, where we explore subjectivity as a strength in ethnographic research. Through stories from the field — working with small-scale sustainable farmers in Indiana — we trace how the researcher’s inner world is entangled with the research itself. It’s a piece about humility, honesty, and designing with awareness.
Tejaswini Joshi, Heidi Biggs, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell
This paper is rooted in fieldwork from Pune, India — a city where water systems are patchy, informal, and yet deeply embedded in everyday life. We studied how residents navigate these infrastructures not just as “users,” but as citizens negotiating belonging, access, and care.
Using the concept of hydraulic citizenship, this work reveals how infrastructure is never just technical — it’s political, relational, and unfinished. The study offers a grounded, culturally specific perspective on urban technology that pushes back against Western smart city ideals, centering how people improvise and adapt within unstable systems.
PhD Dissertation, Penn State University, 2025
My dissertation begins with a simple idea: the true instrument is you. Inspired by Rick Rubin’s insight and grounded in interpretive ethnography, this work explores how the researcher’s subjectivity is not a bias to eliminate — but a powerful source of insight, creativity, and meaning-making.
In Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), ethnographic methods are often used to understand sociotechnical systems. But too often, the researcher’s own role — their emotions, histories, and ways of knowing — is hidden beneath a veneer of objectivity. This monograph brings that hidden self to light.
Through fieldwork, theory, and writing-as-method, I introduce The Humanistic Ethnographic Essay™: a reflexive approach that invites researchers to write with their subjectivity rather than around it. The dissertation is both a contribution and a performance — a speculative design artifact in itself — embodying the very epistemic shift it advocates: from post-positivist empiricism to a more humanistic, postmodern understanding of knowledge and design.