Ph.D. Candidate: Christie Abel
Contact info: abelca@uci.edu
Keywords: Child-Computer Interaction; Trauma-Informed Design; Justice-Centered Design
CV available upon request
Christie Abel is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, focusing on creating inclusive digital play environments for at-risk youth. Christie is a member of the Made with Play and the Connected Learning Labs at UC Irvine, where she has worked on projects researching how to mitigate harm and empower marginalized youth as positive change agents within their digital play spaces. She is also a former member of the Research Justice Shop in the Newkirk Center for Science & Society, where she conducted research on how to better support faculty to conduct justice-centered community-engaged research across the university. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University, where she majored in Sociology and Science & Technology Studies.
Christie’s research interests investigate digital play spaces, trauma-informed design, and the lived experiences of marginalized and vulnerable youth in online communities. Her research is strongly informed by community-engaged research methods, emphasizing collaboration with community organizations and centering the voices of marginalized youth to ensure equitable and safe digital experiences. She is currently writing her dissertation on the youth perceptions and enactments of care within digital play spaces, emphasizing the experiences of marginalized and vulnerable youth. Her dissertation is focused specifically on how to better support youth who are grieving the death of a loved one, exploring how digital play spaces can be designed to support their emotional well-being and foster connections with others who have had similar experiences.
Publications
Grace, T., Abel, C., Salen, K., “Child-Centered Design in the Digital World: Investigating the Implications of the Age-Appropriate Design Code for Interactive Digital Media,” Proceedings of Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’23), June 19–23, 2023, 10.1145/3585088.3589370, pp. 289-297. [Honorable Mention]
Abel, C, Pei, L, Larson, I, Olgado, B.S. & Turner, B., ““Tinder Will Know You Are A 6”: Users’ Perceptions Of Algorithms On Tinder,” Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference On System Sciences (HICSS ’22), 10.24251/HICSS.2022.351, January 3-7, 2022.
Abel, C.A. and Grace, T.D., “Designing Dyadic Caregiver-Child Personas for Interactive Digital Media Use,” Proceedings of Interaction Design and Children (IDC ‘20), June 21-24, 2020, 10.1145/3392063.3394391, pp. 198–204. [Honourable Mention]