A collage combining the sedimented temporalities of Wieczorek and Dr. Anh-ton Tran’s field work for the presentation of Whose Time Counts?

Related Publications

Catherine Wieczorek. Forthcoming. Critical Approaches to Temporality in Human-Computer Interaction. Ph.D. Dissertation. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA.

Catherine Wieczorek, Sylvia Janicki, Annabel Rothschild, Carl DiSalvo, and Shaowen Bardzell. 2026. Speculating the Archive: Research through Design with Incomplete Histories. In Proceedings of the 2026 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2140–2155. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3812795

Wieczorek, C., Tran, A., Lin, C. K., Forlano, L., DiSalvo, C., & Bardzell, S. Whose Time Counts? Temporal Arrangements in Sociotechnical Infrastructures. CHI '26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790780

Wieczorek, C., Lin, C. K., & Bardzell, S. Making Sense of Trauma Over Time: Interweaving Feminist Temporalities to Understand Histories. PACM HCI, 9(2), CSCW130. https://doi.org/10.1145/3711028

Wieczorek, C., Biggs, H., Payyapilly Thiruvenkatanathan, K., & Bardzell, S. Architecting Utopias: How AI in Healthcare Envisions Societal Ideals and Human Flourishing. CHI '25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713118

Wieczorek, C., & Forlano, L. Reimagining Temporality: Exploring the Intersection of Time and Trauma in Design Research. DRS 2024. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1032

Temporality has become a central concern in HCI and design research, where time is understood not as a neutral backdrop but as something produced, negotiated, and distributed through sociotechnical systems. In my dissertation, I have studied temporality in computing and design, both as something to make visible and something to examine within my field sites.

Examining design methods. Design research relies on time to ground findings and project futures, yet its core tools, such as journey maps, diary studies, and temporal probes, mostly assume time moves in a straight line. In Reimagining Temporality (Wieczorek & Forlano, DRS 2024), we ask what these methods erase when experience loops back, runs in parallel, or never resolves. Drawing on feminist temporality and crip time, we propose cyclical, pluriversal, and relational time as frames that unsettle design's habit of moving toward a fix, and ask what design becomes when it stops trying to resolve what it maps.

Making time visible. My design practice gives time material form, both as exhibitions for broader audiences and as tools for the people who work within a system. In Grid(a) Temporali, layers two incomplete Great Lakes datasets, shipwreck records and decades of wolf and moose data from Isle Royale, with AI-generated images and text. Its prints and zines can be read in many directions, so the past appears as scattered moments rather than a continuous history, and the gaps in the record stay visible (Wieczorek et al., DIS 2026). With public library workers, we developed a toolkit that helps staff trace a single incident as it moves through a branch at different speeds. Diagramming these temporalities lets people working within the same branch “see” how one moment unfolds differently for each of them, opening broader conversations about patron rights, worker accountability, and possible paths forward.

Tracing time in everyday life. I also study how institutions and infrastructures distribute time among the people who must navigate them. Returning to my Chicago fieldwork, Making Sense of Trauma Over Time (Wieczorek, Lin, & Bardzell, CSCW 2025) draws on feminist temporalities to reframe trauma as felt historically and communally across generations rather than as a discrete event. Whose Time Counts? (Wieczorek & Tran, et al., CHI 2026) carries this historical attention forward, defining temporal arrangements as the patterned ways infrastructures allocate time, placing unequal demands on who waits, who moves, and who must continually adjust. In the Chicago case, compression condensed histories of reproductive harm into a fifteen-minute consultation, while gaps left youth to reconcile conflicting guidance from church, school, clinic, and peers on their own. Architecting Utopias (Wieczorek et al., CHI 2025) turns to the futures being built now, finding that 21 AI healthcare products envision omnipresent monitoring and data-driven bodily optimization for an affluent, able-bodied user, and argues instead for participatory, feminist utopian approaches to healthcare AI.