{Access|Use|Sustain|_}-ability: Exploration and Quantification of a Linguistic Structure and Its Use in HCI

Abstract

Language plays a crucial role in research and technology design, throughout problem formulation, method descriptions, analysis of findings, and interpretation. In this paper, we focus on a particular, trending linguistic pattern in the Human-Computer Interaction literature, which we call -abilities. Examples include usability, accessibility, and explainability. These -abilities have become increasingly popular, with potential impacts on the discipline. They take a verb, turn it into an adjective, and finally nominalize it. We approach the -abilities phenomenon with a survey of the HCI literature between 1988 and 2025. All in all, we identified 349 different -abilities. Moreover, the use of -abilities notably increased since the late 2000s, both in the absolute number of different -abilities and the frequency of use of the most popular ones. The majority of -abilities we found had a positive notion, and most -abilities with a negative notion are prefixed counterparts of their positive opposite (e.g., un+sustainability). We critically discuss implications of their increased use. First, -abilities change the literal meaning of design intentions. For example, acceptability reduces the concrete verb accepting into only its potential (acceptable), and finally nominalizes it, claiming the existence of acceptability as a somewhat stable and real, abstract characteristic of a technology. Second, the prefix-based opposite construction can weaken the design goal. Un+sustainability avoids clarification of the -ability's meaning (here e.g., ecological or financial), and does not spell out the expected impact of designs that are not sustainable (e.g., the destruction of nature). Future work should compare the use of -abilities in English with other languages to better understand the ways in which they transform meaning.