The paper views social acceptability of technology from a gender studies research perspective. It asks how questions regarding power relations, social inequalities, situatedness, universalism vs a partial perspective in knowledge production can be made productive for interactive system design and computing R&D, in general. To integrate theoretical insights from gender research into practice, the “Gender Extended Research and Development” (GERD) process model is proposed.

The CHI workshop ‘(Un)Acceptable!?! - Re-thinking the Social Acceptability of Emerging Technologies’ is intended to foster critical re-thinking of social aspects in the adoption of novel, interactive technologies, which is often embraced by ‘social acceptance’ and ‘social acceptability’, together with researchers and practitioners from the industry. The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction and will take place on 21-26 April in Canada.