Negotiating Ontological Boundaries in User-Authored Personal Sensing Systems

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.