Aidan Fitzsimons
Why did you choose Northwestern?
When I was considering different programs, I had a few priorities that Northwestern met perfectly. First, I cared more than anything else about finding advisors that I connected with on a work level and genuinely thought I would enjoy working with every day for five years. Northwestern and the TSB program really emphasize developing your own niche rather than just assisting your advisors on their projects, but balance that with extremely attentive advising relationships. From the first time I spoke to my advisors, I knew that we clicked, and that they (and the other advisors in the program) really prioritized student growth and helping people develop their own interests. Second, I had twelve programs on my list that I thought I would love on an intellectual level, and I struck seven of them out purely because I did not want to live out the remainder of my twenties in the location of the school. Northwestern has an amazing campus in lovely, quaint Evanston, but I really value that I can live in a city like Chicago as a PhD student. And third, while this wasn’t something I thought about as actively when I was actually applying, the fact that we have such a large, interdisciplinary group of faculty that work on issues related to HCI and Design is truly an incredible privilege. There are senior faculty members that are pioneers of the field that I have purely social relationships with and love to chat with in the hallway––there are others that I’ve built relationships with through their advice in the Design Cluster. Rather than a department with a few HCI-oriented folks, we have so many people who have something interesting to add to a student’s developing niche beyond their immediate advisors.
Could you describe the research topic you’re currently working on?
Co-advised by Dr. Liz Gerber in the Delta Lab and Dr. Duri Long in the Creative Interfaces Research + Design Studio, I am working on co-designing human-centered intelligent coaching tools that support adolescent self-concept development when developing personal narrative writing. In circumstances where high school students have to write about themselves (e.g., for selective US college admissions essays), we are finding that many students––especially those without strong personalized coaching resources––are turning to general purpose large language models (LLMs) to support their writing process. We are seeking to design systems to support high schoolers applying to college with developing their personal narrative essays that 1) meet student needs for why they’re turning to LLMs, 2) foster constructive self-concept development through the writing process, and 3) help students of all resource backgrounds access quality supplemental coaching.
Can you share a specific project or study that you are particularly proud of, and what impact do you hope it will have on the field of HCI?
In a recent study, we audited LLM-generated college application essays for narrative biases based on the provided gender of the student. We find that LLMs reify dominant master narratives in society about students of different genders, in particular that essays produced for students of marginalized genders (especially trans folks) tell stories about struggle and overcoming how society views or treats them. This demonstrates some of the risks of using general-purpose LLMs to produce example narratives, and holds a mirror up to what we expect of different students in their personal narrative essays. I hope that this will bring in a new lens with which to continually evaluate large language models: for LLM-produced personal narratives, to what extent do produced essays reify (potentially harmful) master cultural narratives in society? And, in turn, that continued evaluation may propagate modifications in model training and behavior.
How do you stay current with the rapidly evolving field of HCI, and what resources or communities do you find most valuable for keeping up-to-date?
Oh this is a great question, and I’m not the right person to ask. The one thing that I do is I have an RSS bot that searches all newly published papers in all of my main journals for keywords relevant to my personal work, but I am kind of terrible at this otherwise. I also read Communications of the ACM every month, which is fun and approachable!
How does HCI impact how you view or approach challenges in life, society, etc.?
I think the biggest thing that has shifted in my thinking since getting into HCI is the importance of, and methods for, bringing in stakeholders to solve problems in a meaningful way. Lots of people and companies search for evidence by designing solutions in a room full of people without the lived experiences or perspectives of the people they’re trying to serve. Many of these groups think they’re doing enough by using cursory user research methods to confirm their own concept rather than bringing people in and involving them in the conception and ideation process––and that may result in decent solutions, but not solutions that actually meet user needs in the best way for them. While I knew this before becoming an HCI person, I had no idea what goes into really involving and honoring the people who power our research and the incredible mutual value of the participatory design process.