Sayan Bhattacharjee

PhD Student

Department of Human-Centered Design & Engineering

Sayan Bhattacharjee is a doctoral student in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering Program at the University of Washington. He has a background in computer science engineering, cultural studies, and documentary filmmaking. Sayan’s research methodology is characterized by a commitment to historicism and attention to critical technical practice. Currently, he inspects the organizational processes and assembly of networks through which social critique is translated and eventually transformed into novel technical capacities. The first paper to come out of this, “Technical Responses to Critique: The Case of Skin Tone” co-authored with David Ribes is slated to be presented at CHI 2025 in Yokohama, Japan. This paper traces the role of critique in the developmental arc of a novel skin tone sensitive smartphone camera at Google.

keywords: valuation studies, anthropology of ethics, studies of scientific and technical practice in STS, sociology of worth

Output

Technical Responses To Critique: The Case Of Skin Tone

Sayan Bhattacharjee and David Ribes. 2025. Technical Responses To Critique: The Case Of Skin Tone. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3714150

Positionality of Researchers Identifying with the" Global South": Shared Heritages, Ways of Thinking and Doing Research

Upadhyay, P., Bhattacharjee, S., Paudel, S. (2024, November). Positionality of Researchers Identifying with the" Global South": Shared Heritages, Ways of Thinking and Doing Research. In Companion Publication of the 2024 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 679-683).