Apple paper studies how users negotiate ontological boundaries in personal sensing systems
Apple Machine Learning Research and Stanford University authors published "Negotiating Ontological Boundaries in User-Authored Personal Sensing Systems." They built two open-ended Wizard-of-Oz probes that let participants experience training a personalized machine learning system on phenomena they define themselves, then ran a week-long exploratory study. The authors identify four sites of ontological boundary negotiation — the boundaries of a phenomenon, the subject as part of relations, what counts as signal versus noise, and the objectivity of data — and offer design starting points for supporting such negotiation.
Why it matters: It argues that user-authorable AI systems should be judged not only on usability, usefulness or technical feasibility, but also on how they let people negotiate ontological boundaries.
research area Human-Computer Interaction
content type paperpublished October 2026
Negotiating Ontological Boundaries in User-Authored Personal Sensing Systems
AuthorsNava Haghighi†**, Danielle Olson, Halden Lin**, Erdrin Azemi, Gierad Laput, Kayur Patel**, James Landay†
Designed artifacts are ontological, shaping, and at times limiting, what becomes possible or imaginable. One path toward mitigating such foreclosures is giving people power over how systems are designed and built. Despite decades of scholarship around systems that enable such authorship, these systems are often evaluated on whether or not they are usable, useful, or technically feasible, leaving questions of ontological boundary negotiation, unexamined. We design two open-ended probes that utilize a Wizard of Oz technique to enable the experience of training a personalized machine learning system on phenomena people define themselves. In a week-long exploratory study, participants use one of two probes in the course of their everyday lives. We identify four sites where ontological boundaries were negotiated; the boundaries of a phenomena, the subject as part of relations, what is signal and what is noise, and the objectivity of data. We offer starting points for supporting boundary negotiation through design and discuss open-ended probes as a method for ontological design.
- † Stanford University
- ** Work done while at Apple
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