Consent: A Research and Design Lens for Human-Computer Interaction

ABSTRACT Consent has become an important concept across multiple areas within HCI/CSCW, community advocacy work, and the tech industry, for understanding social computing problems and designing safe and agentic computer-mediated communication. Recent research has studied consent in various topics, such as online-to-offline interaction and harm, data privacy and security, research ethics, and human-robot interaction. The goal of this panel is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss how consent has been defined and studied within HCI and adjacent fields, and how cross-field discourse around consent can inform future work that pursues safe and equitable computing. We aim to introduce consent as a multifaceted research and design lens to the HCI and CSCW community and illuminate ways that consent can contribute to better understanding or re-imagination of contemporary research interests. Lastly, the panel aims to spark cross-field communication around consent to identify latent connections across research topics and foster synergistic collaborations.