Mobility as involvement: on the role of involvement in the design of mobile support systems for industrial application

Traditional human–computer interaction (HCI) allowed researchers and practitioners to share and rely on the ‘five E’s’ of usability, the principle that interactive systems should be designed to be effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, and easy to learn. A recent trend in HCI, however, is that academic researchers as well as practitioners are becoming increasingly interested in user experiences, i.e., understanding and designing for relationships between users and artifacts that are for instance affective, engaging, fun, playable, sociable, creative, involving, meaningful, exciting, ambiguous, and curious. In this paper, it is argued that built into this shift in perspective there is a concurrent shift in accountability that is drawing attention to a number of ethical, moral, social, cultural, and political issues that have been traditionally de-emphasized in a field of research guided by usability concerns. Not surprisingly, this shift in accountability has also received scarce attention in HCI. To be able to find any answers to the question of what makes a good user experience, the field of HCI needs to develop a philosophy of technology. One building block for such a philosophy of technology in HCI is presented. Albert Borgmann argues that we need to be cautious and rethink the relationship as well as the often-assumed correspondence between what we consider useful and what we think of as good in technology. This junction—that some technologies may be both useful and good, while some technologies that are useful for some purposes might also be harmful, less good, in a broader context—is at the heart of Borgmann’s understanding of technology. Borgmann’s notion of the device paradigm is a valuable contribution to HCI as it points out that we are increasingly experiencing the world with, through, and by information technologies and that most of these technologies tend to be designed to provide commodities that effortlessly grant our wishes without demanding anything in return, such as patience, skills, or effort. This paper argues that Borgmann’s work is relevant and makes a valuable contribution to HCI in at least two ways: first, as a different way of seeing that raises important social, cultural, ethical, and moral issues from which contemporary HCI cannot escape; and second, as providing guidance as to how specific values might be incorporated into the design of interactive systems that foster engagement with reality.     

A different way of seeing: Albert Borgmann’s philosophy of technology and human–computer interaction

Traditional human–computer interaction (HCI) allowed researchers and practitioners to share and rely on the ‘five E’s’ of usability, the principle that interactive systems should be designed to be effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, and easy to learn. A recent trend in HCI, however, is that academic researchers as well as practitioners are becoming increasingly interested in user experiences, i.e., understanding and designing for relationships between users and artifacts that are for instance affective, engaging, fun, playable, sociable, creative, involving, meaningful, exciting, ambiguous, and curious. In this paper, it is argued that built into this shift in perspective there is a concurrent shift in accountability that is drawing attention to a number of ethical, moral, social, cultural, and political issues that have been traditionally de-emphasized in a field of research guided by usability concerns. Not surprisingly, this shift in accountability has also received scarce attention in HCI. To be able to find any answers to the question of what makes a good user experience, the field of HCI needs to develop a philosophy of technology. One building block for such a philosophy of technology in HCI is presented. Albert Borgmann argues that we need to be cautious and rethink the relationship as well as the often-assumed correspondence between what we consider useful and what we think of as good in technology. This junction—that some technologies may be both useful and good, while some technologies that are useful for some purposes might also be harmful, less good, in a broader context—is at the heart of Borgmann’s understanding of technology. Borgmann’s notion of the device paradigm is a valuable contribution to HCI as it points out that we are increasingly experiencing the world with, through, and by information technologies and that most of these technologies tend to be designed to provide commodities that effortlessly grant our wishes without demanding anything in return, such as patience, skills, or effort. This paper argues that Borgmann’s work is relevant and makes a valuable contribution to HCI in at least two ways: first, as a different way of seeing that raises important social, cultural, ethical, and moral issues from which contemporary HCI cannot escape; and second, as providing guidance as to how specific values might be incorporated into the design of interactive systems that foster engagement with reality.     

The art of interaction

Interactive art has become much more common as a result of the many ways in which the computer and the Internet have facilitated it. Issues relating to human–computer interaction (HCI) are as important to interactive art making as issues relating to the colours of paint are to painting. It is not that HCI and art necessarily share goals. It is just that much of the knowledge of HCI and its methods can contribute to interactive art making. This paper reviews recent work that looks at these issues in the art context. In interactive digital art, the artist is concerned with how the artwork behaves, how the audience interacts with it and, ultimately, in participant experience and their degree of engagement. The paper looks at these issues and brings together a collection of research results and art practice experiences that together help to illuminate this significant new and expanding area. In particular, it is suggested that this work points towards a much needed critical language that can be used to describe, compare and discuss interactive digital art.     

HCI ‘Intraface Model’ for System Design

We outline an alternative model of the interface in HCI, the ‘intraface’, in response to design issues arising from navigational and learning problems in hypertext domains. Ours is a model of general application to computer systems. It is composed of four key elements, identifiable within a dynamic interconnected context. These are the user; his/her interests; the tools employed and the ‘ensemble’ of representations brought to bear. In this paper we sketch the present shortcomings of HCI design before outlining the background for the model which draws upon two themes in contemporary psychology, conversational analysis and ‘affordance’ realist theories in perception. This framework allows for the development of principles of cooperation, user engagement and learning in HCI environments.     

Feminist HCI meets facebook: Performativity and social networking sites

In this paper, I reflect on a specific product of interaction design, social networking sites. The goals of this paper are twofold. One is to bring a feminist reflexivity, to HCI, drawing on the work of Judith Butler and her concepts of peformativity, citationality, and interpellation. Her approach is, I argue, highly relevant to issues of identity and self-representation on social networking sites; and to the co-constitution of the subject and technology. A critical, feminist HCI must ask how social media and other HCI institutions, practices, and discourses are part of the processes by which sociotechnical configurations are constructed. My second goal is to examine the implications of such an approach by applying it to social networking sites (SNSs) drawing the empirical research literature on SNSs, to show how SNS structures and policies help shape the subject and hide the contingency of subject categories.     

Constructing and constraining participation in participatory arts and HCI

Social practice art may suggest new understandings of and strategies for participation in HCI—but not in a straightforward way. Based on participant-observation at a major arts festival, we describe how a set of artists, concerned with environmental issues and community engagement, frame and enact participation, and describe how the nature of this participation deviated from both artists’ and our ideas of what participation would be. We delineate how the disciplinary context of art both enables and limits the kinds of participation that can be achieved. We characterize 3 strategies these artists use to achieve participation: participation in spectacle, participation in making, and participation in inquiry. We develop the implications of this work to inform HCI through three case studies related to sustainability – spectacle computing, heirloom computing, and citizen science – to demonstrate the potential for similar strategies for participation and to call attention to how HCI, too, implicitly constructs, enables, and constrains participation.     

Rethinking HCI Education for Design: Problem-Based Learning and Virtual Worlds at an HCI Design Studio

The practice of teaching and learning human–computer interaction (HCI) design has to develop its own approaches that balance method and technology use with reflective and situated practice. This article presents our HCI design studio course that makes a combined use of constructivist pedagogies and virtual worlds aiming to aid students critically review and reflect on the use of related methods and technologies in design and to cultivate more general skills like self-directed learning, intrinsic motivation, and critical thinking. Our HCI design studio course can be thought of as an iterative and incremental teaching and learning process that blends HCI methods, design practice, and technology between a real and a virtual design studio. The course introduces problem-based learning to the pedagogies of project-based learning and studio-based learning currently employed in most HCI design studios. The positive student responses and our reflection and experiences focusing on a number of challenges for further implementation are also outlined.     

Waves and forms: constructing the cultural in design

While research in HCI on dealing with cultural issues when designing ICTs tended to adopt fixed and taxonomic views, recent theoretical perspectives closer to the social sciences have called for attending to the contingent, fluid, and dynamic aspects of the notion of culture. In this article, we contribute to translating these perspectives into an approach for informing design. We focus on abandoning prior conceptions of culture to allow the discovery of cultural differences through inductive field research while engaging with the target community. This allows a view on cultural difference that is generative for design: it is unique to each case, and it also remains close to the concerns of community members. We base our approach on Basile Zimmermann’s (2015) waves and forms framework, and we illustrate it through our engagement and design with VOCI, a local voluntary community of tech-savvy university students in Syria between 2011 and 2015.

     

HCI and education: a blended design experience

Teaching HCI in an undergraduate course for computer scientists is often a challenging experience, because the skills that characterize HCI are different from scientific and computational thinking that are the focus of most subjects of the curriculum. Often HCI teaching is organized as a set of lectures that are useful to learn concepts, but don’t increase the design skills of the students. This work reports the results of an educational experience where both learners and teachers were actively involved in a process of knowledge construction and design. This process usually happens in other domains, such as architecture or industrial design, but is not part of most computer science curricula. We chose as project a challenging theme: the design of eco-feedback interfaces that inform people about the consequences of their actions for the environment and help to take decisions for lowering energy consumption. Eco-feedback interfaces are also representative of the gap between the products available on the market and the results of scientific studies, evidenced also by a recent workshop about HCI education. The workshop evidenced a number of pitfalls in HCI education that in our educational experience we tried to overcome with appropriate methodologies. An additional challenging task was the attempt to organize all the design activities taking advantage of a platform for remote learning, stressing its limits. The paper will discuss all these issues, evidencing where the applied methodologies gave good results and where they need further improvements, with the final goal of giving useful advices for HCI educational experiences to come.     

Using GOMS and NASA-TLX to Evaluate Human–Computer Interaction Process in Interactive Segmentation

HCI plays an important role in interactive medical image segmentation. The Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selection rules (GOMS) model and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) questionnaire are different methods that are often used to evaluate the HCI process. In this article, we aim at improving the HCI process of interactive segmentation using both the GOMS model and the NASA-TLX questionnaire to: 1) identify the relations between these two methods and 2) propose HCI design suggestions based on the synthesis of the evaluation results using both methods. For this, we conducted an experiment where three physicians used two interactive segmentation approaches to segment different types of organs at risk for radiotherapy planning. Using the GOMS model, we identified 16 operators and 10 methods. Further analysis discovered strong relations between the use of GOMS operators and the results of the NASA-TLX questionnaire. Finally, HCI design issues were identified, and suggestions were proposed based on the evaluation results and the identified relations.     

Human computer interaction methods for electronic flight bag envisionment and design

This paper reports on the application of a range of human computer interaction (HCI) methods to the re-design of an electronic flight bag (EFB), as part of a commercial software development project. Specifically, it focusses on the use of participatory design methods, for resolving EFB usability problems. The purpose of this case study is to: (a) Show how participatory design methods can be effectively combined with ethnographic techniques and more formal methods in HCI, for the development of human-friendly EFB systems, (b) Illuminate the specific EFB usability issues encountered in this research and related HCI solutions, (c) Generate an awareness of the challenges faced by HCI practitioners adapting HCI methods to meet commercial project constraints. The HCI methodology outlined in this case study may be of interest to practitioners tasked with process and technology envisionment and/or working with limited resources.Joan Cahill has worked as an (HCI) consultant to Aircraft Management Technologies     

A Systematic Mapping Study of HCI Practice Research

ABSTRACT

Human–computer interaction (HCI) practice has emerged as a research domain in the HCI field and is growing. The need to transfer HCI practices to the industry began significantly with the works of Nielsen on usability engineering. To date, methods and techniques for designing, evaluating, and implementing interactive systems for human use have continued to emerge. It is, therefore, justified to conduct a systematic mapping study to determine the landscape of HCI practice research. A Systematic Mapping Study method was used to map 142 studies according to research type, topic, and contribution. These were then analyzed to determine an overview of HCI practice research. The objective was to analyze studies on HCI practice and present prominent issues that characterize the HCI practice research landscape. Second, to identify pressing challenges regarding HCI practices in software/systems development companies. The results show that HCI practice research has steadily increased since 2012. The majority of the studies explored focused on evaluation research that largely contributed to the evaluation methods or processes. Most of the studies were on design tools and techniques, design methods and contexts, design work and organizational culture, and collaboration and team communication. Interviews, case studies, and survey methods have been prominently used as research methods. HCI techniques are mostly used during the initial phase of development and during evaluation. HCI practice challenges in companies are mostly process-related and on performance of usability and user experience activities. The major challenge seems to be to find a way to collect and incorporate user feedback in a timely manner, especially in agile processes. There are areas identified in this study as needing more research.     

Group decision process support system for regional planning—A perspective from Japan

Regional planning has been regarded as a design activity. Usually planners focus on physical design rather than on societal issues. Nowadays, mass communication, environmental issues and social awareness lead to often complex and conflicting needs and interests of the public in regional planning. This paper focuses on the regional planning as a group problem solving process from the view of information processing. It offers an analysis of the causes of conflicts in the group decision process, and defines the characteristics of group decision process support systems     

Public Discourse, Community Concerns, and Civic Engagement: Exploring Black Social Networking Traditions on BlackPlanet.com

This study explores community life on a black social network site, BlackPlanet, to see whether and how participants engage in public discussions; if these discussions center on issues considered to be critical to the black community; and if so, the extent to which participants' online networks are used to foster some level of civic engagement. Participation analysis, content analysis, and a thematic analysis were used to analyze public discussions on the site's community forums. The findings show that participants are deeply committed to ongoing discussions about black community issues. However, none of these discussions moved beyond a discursive level of civic engagement, suggesting that the potential for mobilization through social networking online has not yet been realized, despite the traditional orientation to community service among blacks in America.     

Seven HCI Grand Challenges

This article aims to investigate the Grand Challenges which arise in the current and emerging landscape of rapid technological evolution towards more intelligent interactive technologies, coupled with increased and widened societal needs, as well as individual and collective expectations that HCI, as a discipline, is called upon to address. A perspective oriented to humane and social values is adopted, formulating the challenges in terms of the impact of emerging intelligent interactive technologies on human life both at the individual and societal levels. Seven Grand Challenges are identified and presented in this article: Human-Technology Symbiosis; Human-Environment Interactions; Ethics, Privacy and Security; Well-being, Health and Eudaimonia; Accessibility and Universal Access; Learning and Creativity; and Social Organization and Democracy. Although not exhaustive, they summarize the views and research priorities of an international interdisciplinary group of experts, reflecting different scientific perspectives, methodological approaches and application domains. Each identified Grand Challenge is analyzed in terms of: concept and problem definition; main research issues involved and state of the art; and associated emerging requirements.

BACKGROUND

This article presents the results of the collective effort of a group of 32 experts involved in the community of the Human Computer Interaction International (HCII) Conference series. The group’s collaboration started in early 2018 with the collection of opinions from all group members, each asked to independently list and describe five HCI grand challenges. During a one-day meeting held on the 20th July 2018 in the context of the HCI International 2018 Conference in Las Vegas, USA, the identified topics were debated and challenges were formulated in terms of the impact of emerging intelligent interactive technologies on human life both at the individual and societal levels. Further analysis and consolidation led to a set of seven Grand Challenges presented herein. This activity was organized and supported by the HCII Conference series.     

Interaction criticism: An introduction to the practice

Though interaction designers critique interfaces as a regular part of their research and practice, the field of HCI lacks a proper discipline of interaction criticism. By interaction criticism I mean rigorous interpretive interrogations of the complex relationships between (a) the interface, including its material and perceptual qualities as well as its broader situatedness in visual languages and culture and (b) the user experience, including the meanings, behaviors, perceptions, affects, insights, and social sensibilities that arise in the context of interaction and its outcomes. Interaction criticism is a knowledge practice that enables design practitioners to engage with the aesthetics of interaction, helping practitioners cultivate more sensitive and insightful critical reactions to designs and exemplars. Benefits of such an engagement can include informing a particular design process, critiquing and innovating on design processes and methods more generally, developing original theory beneficial to interaction design, and exposing more robustly the long-term and even unintended consequences of designs. In this article I offer a synthesis of practices of criticism derived from analytic philosophy of aesthetics and critical theory, including the introduction of five core claims from this literature; I outline four perspectives that constitute a big-picture view of interaction criticism; and I offer a case study, demonstrating interaction criticism through each of these four perspectives.     

The role of user's perceived control in interface design, employing verbal protocol analysis

This paper outlines some general strengths and weaknesses of using psychological theoretical approaches beyond their original domains, focusing on Rotter's (1966) Internal and External (I/E) Locus of Control construct. Rotter's theory examines perceived locus of control of individuals during their social interactions. The issues of why and how I/E may be a useful theoretical approach to human-computer interaction (HCI) are addressed. Specific problems encountered in importing I/E into HCI are then described.

An interface evaluation experiment is discussed. First, the system used for evaluation purposes is described, as well as the verbal protocol technique used, and the methods of analysis. Finally, the conclusions about the interface are presented. In this contect, I/E as an interface evaluation tool is discussed, as are related issues of importing psychological theories into HCI.     

Database systems: challenges and opportunities for graphical HCI

Databases and their applications form one of the most important classes of computer systems yet they have received relatively little attention from the HCI community. They have nevertheless spawned some notably innovative user interfaces and it is interesting to examine these in the light of contemporary HCI issues. The paper addresses the relationship between HCI and database systems, reviews some of the major themes running through existing database user interfaces and postulates some issues which are likely to be important to database usability in the future. The underlying argument is that databases are sufficiently different from other classes of application to necessitate a raft of user interface techniques specifically for the needs of database users which would reward increased attention by the HCI community.     

Designing for ethical innovation: A case study on ELSI co-design in emergency

The ever more pervasive ‘informationalization’ of crisis management and response brings both unprecedented opportunities and challenges. Recent years have seen the emergence of attention to ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) in the field of Information and Communication Technology. However, disclosing (and addressing) ELSI issues in design is still a challenge because they are inherently relational, arising from interactions between people, the material and design of the artifact, and the context. In this article, we discuss approaches for addressing such ‘deeper’ and ‘wider’ political implications, values and ethical, legal and social implications that arise between practices, people and technology. Based on a case study from the BRIDGE project, which has provided the opportunity for deep engagement with these issues through the concrete exploration and experimentation with technologically augmented practices of emergency response, we present insights from our interdisciplinary work aiming to make design and innovation projects ELSI-aware. Crucially, we have seen in our study a need for a shift from privacy by design towards designing for privacy, collaboration, trust, accessibility, ownership, transparency etc., acknowledging that these are emergent practices that we cannot control by design, but rather that we can help to design for—calling for approaches that allow to make ELSI issues explicit and addressable in design-time.     

Understanding civic engagement behaviour on Facebook from a social capital theory perspective

This paper applies the social capital theory to construct a model for investigating the factors that influence online civic engagement behaviour on Facebook. While there is promising evidence that people are making concerted efforts to adopt Facebook to address social issues, research on their civic behaviour from a social capital viewpoint in the social media context remains limited. This study introduces new insights into how Facebook is shaping the landscape of civic engagement by examining three dimensions of social capital – social interaction ties (structural), trust (relational), and shared languages and vision (cognitive). The study contends that these dimensions will influence individuals’ online civic engagement behaviour on Facebook. We also argue that social interaction ties can engender trust, and shared languages and vision among its members, and that shared languages and vision can increase trust among Facebook members. Empirical data collected from 1233 Facebook users provide support for the proposed model. The results help in identifying the motivation underlying the online civic engagement behaviour of individuals in a public virtual community. The implications for theory and practice and future research directions are discussed.