Intertextual design: the hidden stories of Atari women

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the Atari Women who made important contributions to gaming in the early days of computer science including Carol Shaw, Carla Meninsky, Dona Bailey, Suki Lee, Rebecca Heineman, Chris Maddox, Brenda Laurel, Betty Ryan, Patricia Goodson, Laura Nikolich, Carol Thomas, Lucy Gilbert, Dawn Epstein, Noelie Alito, Jane Terjung, Jamie Fenton, Ava Robin Cohen, Amy Hennig, Cathryn Mataga, Marilyn Churchill, Wanda Hill, Evelyn Seto, Sylvia Day, Susan McBride, Anne Westfall, Kathlean O’Brian, Anita Sinclair and any other women who worked on Atari games in the 70s and 80s. We also want to thank all the student who was part of Atari Women at Comic Con: Cara Pangelinan, Esther Lin, Kellie Dunn, Victoria Lijing Teng, Carina Dempsey, Rachel Kangas, Tanya Chang, Lynda Nguyen, Monina Nepomuceno, Melody Xu, and Julie Sayigh. Finally, we also want to thank Kate Edwards, Katherine Cross, Joseph Decuir, Mark Ackerman, Jim Turner, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, Steven Drucker, Robert Schmuck, Aaron Alcorn, Lauren Bayer who all supported this research project in different ways. This research was funded by the Fulbright Association, HCDE at University of Washington, and FemTech.dk. Parts of this work were also made possible by the support of NSF grants #1453329, #1423074, and #1523579.

Notes

¹ We use the phrase “gender minorities” to recognize the range of gender identities that are also under-represented within computer gaming fields but that are not contained by the category “women” (e.g., not non-binary, gender fluid, or, trans men).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fulbright Association [visiting scholar]; NSF USA [1423074,1453329,1523579].

Notes on contributors

Pernille Bjørn

Pernille Bjørn is Full Professor & Deputy Head of Department for Research at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (DIKU). In 2016, she initiated the research initiative Femtech.dk aimed at changing the gender diversity in computing eduction and profession by utilising Makerspace Methodologies. In September 2019, she returned from 1-year Fulbright Scholarship as visiting professor at University of Washington, in the HCDE department. During this year, she co-founded Atari Women (atariwomen.org). Professor Bjørn research is within the area of Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Human Computer Interaction and her work includes “Translocality in Global Software Development: The Dark Side of Global Agile” and “Tech Entrepreneurship including “Intrastructural inaccessibility: Tech Entrepreneurs in occupied Palestine”. She is also part of the guest editors of the upcoming special issue “The Diversity Crisis in Software Development” published by IEEE. Beside spending time at University of Washington, she have been at the Informatics Department at University of California, Irvine; at the Department of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Canada; and at the Indian Institute of Management (IIMB) Bangalore, India. Pernille Bjørn have served in numerous trusted high ranking research community positions such as paper co-chair for CHI2020, ECSCW2018, and CSCW2016. Currently she serves as papers co-chair for CHI2021.

Daniela K. Rosner

Daniela Rosner is an Associate Professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington. Her research investigates the social, political, and material circumstances of technology development, with an emphasis on foregrounding marginalized histories of practice, from maintenance to needlecraft. Rosner's work has been supported by multiple awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER award. She is the author of several articles on craft and technoculture, including “Legacies of craft and the centrality of failure in a mother-operated hackerspace,” Journal of New Media & Society, 2016 and “Binding and Aging,” Journal of Material Culture, 2012. In her book, Critical Fabulations, she investigates new ways of thinking about design’s past to rework future relationships between technology and social responsibility (MIT Press, 2018). Rosner earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Chicago. Rosner serves as an Editor-in-Chief of Interactions magazine, a bimonthly publication of ACM SIGCHI.