Gender-Inclusive HCI Research and Design: A Conceptual Review

Touch-sensitive fabrics let users operate wearable devices unobtrusively and with rich input gestures similar to those on modern smartphones and tablets. While hardware prototypes exist in the DIY crafting community, HCI designers and researchers have little data about how well these devices actually work in realistic situations. FabriTouch is the first flexible touch-sensitive fabric that provides such scientifically validated information. We show that placing a FabriTouch pad onto clothing and the body instead of a rigid support surface significantly reduces input speed but still allows for basic gestures. We also show the impact of sitting, standing, and walking on horizontal and vertical swipe gesture performance in a menu navigation task. Finally, we provide the details necessary to replicate our FabriTouch pad, to enable both the DIY crafting community and HCI researchers and designers to build on our work.

We seek to engage a broad and diverse audience in discussing emerging challenges in HCI technologies that have potential for significant social impact. In a town hall forum, members of the ACM Technology Policy Council will introduce four emerging challenges for discussion: ethical HCI in global contexts; privacy protection in human-AI interaction; accessible interactions in HCI design; and the environmental impact of HCI. Discussion will be launched with a question from the panel; additional questions will be posted and ranked from the audience. The session will support digital and remote audience participation, and participants will have access to a summary report when the session concludes. These discussions provide an opportunity for CHI members to contribute to emerging policy and governing environments to facilitate ethical, accessible, and environmentally sensitive HCI research, design, and development.

New research areas in HCI examine complex and sensitive research areas, such as crisis, life transitions, and mental health. Further, research in complex topics such as harassment and graphic content can leave researchers vulnerable to emotional and physical harm. There is a need to bring researchers together to discuss challenges across sensitive research spaces and environments. We propose a workshop to explore the methodological, ethical, and emotional challenges of sensitive research in HCI. We will actively recruit from diverse research environments (industry, academia, government, etc.) and methods areas (qualitative, quantitative, design practices, etc.) and identify commonalities in and encourage relationship-building between these areas. This one-day workshop will be led by academic and industry researchers with diverse methods, topical, and employment experiences.

Many HCI products exclude potential users unnecessarily. Such exclusion often arises because of a mismatch between designers’ perceptions of the wants and needs of the end-user and their actual wants and needs. Sometimes the mismatch originates from the designer being unaware of the need to design inclusively, or of methods for implementing inclusive design. Other times the mismatch comes from the commissioner of the design, for example the client of a design consultancy. If the design commissioner specifies a target socio-economic group, but does not explicitly recognise that the group consists of users of varying functional capabilities, then the designers will often be given a design brief that overlooks the need to address the wider range of users, beyond simply the able-bodied. In either case, for universal access to be achieved effectively, information is required to identify the need for inclusive design and thus to generate demand, and design guidance is needed to help designers make inclusive design a reality. Currently, that information is largely unavailable to designers in an appropriate off-the-shelf format. This paper investigates methods for researchers to provide the kind of information that HCI designers need to design for universal access. It focuses on the profiling, recruitment and selection of users, along with the interpretation of the data gathered. In many instances, the HCI designer may also be the person performing the research, where specialist researchers are not available.

<p class="first" id="d1020840e85">We present a film exhibiting eight case studies of projects dealing with the intersections of environmental sustainability, data and technology, which have all been led by and rooted in the creative industries in Scotland. The film highlights how the creative sector has been utilising data and technology to address the climate crisis, by responding artistically to environmental data, as well as developing tools and technologies to empower individual and systemic change. Through presenting the film, we demonstrate the synergies between HCI research and technology-focussed work in the creative industries, in context of the shared goal of sustainability. Our overarching aim is to promote discussion about how knowledge from the creative industries can be seen as a powerful resource to be learned from in HCI and to inspire further HCI design and research, as well as to demonstrate the potential value of collaborative work between creative practice and HCI.

Museums have been a domain of study and design intervention for Human-Computer Interaction for several decades. However, while resources providing overviews on the key issues in the scholarship have been produced in the fields of museum and visitor studies, no such resource as yet existed within HCI. This book fills this gap, and covers key issues regarding the study and design of human-computer interactions in museums. Through an on-site focus, the book examines how digital interactive technologies impact and shape galleries, exhibitions and their visitors. It consolidates the body of work in HCI conducted in the heritage field, and integrates it with insights from related fields and from digital heritage practice. Processes of HCI design and evaluation approaches for museums are also discussed. Hornecker and Ciolfi draw from their extensive knowledge of case studies and from their own work to provide examples, reflections, and illustrations of concepts and problems throughout the book. This book is for students and early career researchers in HCI or Interaction Design, for more seasoned investigators who might approach the museum domain for the first time, and for researchers and practitioners in related fields such as heritage and museum studies or visitor studies, as well as designers, who might wish to understand the HCI perspective on visitor-facing interactive technologies.

Museums have been a domain of study and design intervention for Human-Computer Interaction for several decades. However, while resources providing overviews on the key issues in the scholarship have been produced in the fields of museum and visitor studies, no such resource as yet existed within HCI. This book fills this gap, and covers key issues regarding the study and design of human-computer interactions in museums. Through an on-site focus, the book examines how digital interactive technologies impact and shape galleries, exhibitions and their visitors. It consolidates the body of work in HCI conducted in the heritage field, and integrates it with insights from related fields and from digital heritage practice. Processes of HCI design and evaluation approaches for museums are also discussed. Hornecker and Ciolfi draw from their extensive knowledge of case studies and from their own work to provide examples, reflections, and illustrations of concepts and problems throughout the book. This book is for students and early career researchers in HCI or Interaction Design, for more seasoned investigators who might approach the museum domain for the first time, and for researchers and practitioners in related fields such as heritage and museum studies or visitor studies, as well as designers, who might wish to understand the HCI perspective on visitor-facing interactive technologies.

In this paper we argue that the idea of design in HCI is changing. For many years the design-as-engineering approach has dominated HCI research and practice, but now technological developments and new conceptions of 'the user' require more interdisciplinary conceptions of design. In particular, the turn to experience in HCI has lead us to consider a design-as-craft perspective which we exemplify in this paper by the work of digital jeweller, Jayne Wallace. But our aim is not to supplant one design perspective with an other. On the contrary, we argue that experience design requires a new form of radically interdisciplinary dialogue between different design perspectives that span the arts, sciences and humanities. However, such radically interdisciplinary dialogue is not without its problems and points of contention. We conclude by arguing that not only new conceptual tools but also new HCI curricula may be helpful in achieving this interdisciplinary dialogue.

The concept of power pose originates from a Psychology study from 2010 which suggested that holding an expansive pose can change hormone levels and increase risk-taking behavior. Follow-up experiments suggested that expansive poses incidentally imposed by the design of an environment lead to more dishonest behaviors. While multiple replication attempts of the 2010 study failed, the follow-up experiments on incidental postures have so far not been replicated. As UI design in HCI can incidentally lead to expansive body postures, we attempted two conceptual replications: we first asked 44 participants to tap areas on a wall-sized display and measured their self-reported sense of power; we then asked 80 participants to play a game on a large touch-screen and measured risk-taking. Based on Bayesian analyses we find that incidental power poses had little to no effect on our measures but could cause physical discomfort. We conclude by discussing our findings in the context of theory-driven research in HCI.

Access to the internet and digital technology are reported determinants and enablers of social capital and community resilience. However, despite rural areas facing ecological, social, and economic uncertainties across the world, communication technologies and the design of civic technologies in HCI are not designed with the rural in mind. In this paper, we explore information infrastructures within and across rural villages in the UK focusing on the interplay between human, social, and technical infrastructures. We report on the existing communication practices, underlining the impacts of transitioning to digital communication technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings point to the fragility of information infrastructure, the "civic duty" of bridging information and skills gaps, and the role of technology as a threat to social norms and disrupter of the 'politics of the rural'. The work presented here has implications for Rural HCI researchers and designers interested in design from the rural.

Designing interactive computer systems to be efficient and easy to use is important so that people in our society may realize the potential benefits of computer-based tools. . . . Although modern cognitive psychology contains a wealth of knowledge of human behavior, it is not a simple matter to bring this knowledge to bear on the practical problems of design-to build an applied psychology that includes theory, data, and knowledge. (Card, Moran, & Newell, 1983, p. vii)Integrating theory, data, and knowledge about cognitive psychology and human performance in a way that is useful for guiding design in HCI is still not a simple matter. However, there have been significant advances since Card, Moran, and Newell (1983) wrote the previous passage. One of the key advances is the development of cognitive architectures, the subject of this chapter. The chapter will first consider what it is to be a cognitive architecture and why cognitive architectures are relevant for HCI. In order to detail the present state of cognitive architectures in HCI, it is important to consider some of the past uses of cognitive architectures in HCI research. Then, three architectures actively in use in the research community (LICAI/CoLiDeS, EPIC, and ACT-R) and their application to HCI will be examined. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the future of cognitive architectures in HCI.

In this workshop, we will explore the emergent methodological space of social media based HCI design and research. We will gather scholars and practitioners from different areas within HCI to discuss how social media platforms might support their practice. Through short presentations, open discussions, and design-led activities, we will examine the affordances of existing social media platforms and speculate future developments in this methodological space. The outcome of the workshop will be an interactive data visualization of existing social media platforms, their main characteristics, and their affordances for HCI design and research. Overall, we will begin to characterize the methodological space of social media based HCI design and research, setting the foundation for future developments in this space.

The widespread adoption of social media brings both challenges and opportunities for the field of disaster management. However, there has been limited scholarly work on social media usage for disaster preparation. Our work explores how social media sites can be designed to help individuals and communities prepare for disasters, in particular with regard to crowdsourcing information, digital mobilization, and community resilience. We present preliminary findings from 4 online focus groups (N=31), which reveal two emergent themes that may prove useful for future research and design in HCI. We also propose four design recommendations for social media sites as tools for disaster preparation. These findings support the design and evaluation of social media sites to aid in community-based disaster preparedness.

In this chapter, we focus on longitudinal first-person research methods in HCI. First-person research involves data collection and experiences from the researcher themselves, as opposed to external users (or participants). We present three projects where longitudinal ‘auto-approaches’ to research and design in HCI were applied, namely one auto-ethnography and two autobiographical designs. These projects help illustrate the benefits and challenges of using these first-person research methods in longitudinal HCI and interaction design research. We conclude the chapter by reflecting on themes and lessons that resonate across the three projects (i.e., range of participation, data collection, time to reflect, concluding).

Despite the capacity of play to spontaneously emerge in our daily life, the scope of application of play design in HCI is generally narrower, specifically targeting areas of pure leisure, or wholly utilitarian and productive play. Here we focus on the value of play design to respond to and support our natural gravitation towards emergent play that helps to meet our social and emotional needs. We present a bridging concept: Technology for Situated and Emergent Play, i.e. technology design that supports playful engagement that emerges interwoven with our everyday activities outside leisure, and that enriches these activities with socio-emotional value. Our intermediate-level contribution has value as a synthesis piece: it weaves together theories of play and play design and bridges them with concrete design examples. As a bridging concept, it contributes: i) theoretical grounding; ii) inspiring design exemplars that illustrate the theory and foreground its value; and iii) design articulations in the form of valuable experiential qualities and design features. Our work can help to focus design agendas for playful technology and inspire future designs in this space.