Sense, Feel, Design

This paper presents the results of the workshop on Human-centred Technologies for Sustainable Development Goals (HCT4SDG) - Challenges and Opportunities. The workshop was part of the 18th International Conference promoted by the IFIP Technical Committee 13 on Human-Computer Interaction (Interact 2021). Nine papers were presented by authors from several different countries and discussed in the workshop. Six of these papers were extended in this proceedings. After discussion, seven challenges and eight research opportunities were listed as expression of the participants’ views on HCT4SDG.

The proposed video game offers to post-adolescent players educational contents about garbage recycling, implementing a gameplay that merges the Action and Management game genres with a pixel-art inspired graphic style. A preliminary user-based evaluation has been performed with three players using the Thinking Aloud technique. Comments about the game mechanics were generally positive and the sustainability topic was perceived well-integrated and non-invasive, proving the need of further experimentation and evaluation.

Citizen science has been recognized for its potential to contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals in multiple ways (e.g., for defining and monitoring indicators, data production, etc.). In this paper, we focus on Extreme Citizen Science, which includes a set of situated, bottom-up practices, used for environmental monitoring purposes and for recording local indigenous knowledge, mainly in the Global South. Here we present and discuss the human-centered approach that the implementation of extreme citizen science requires, and we identify and discuss the challenges that we face as well as the opportunities that extreme citizen science initiatives can create for contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals.

Several of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations have direct or indirect environmental concerns. These SDGs naturally require a greater involvement of ordinary people in achieving their targets. Data visualizations in general, and map visualizations in particular, can play an important role in assisting people to better understand environmental challenges the world is facing, and consequently change their behaviour towards a more sustainable future. In this paper we present a summary overview of the main factors that need to be considered when designing interactive map visualizations in support of these SDGs. We also provide a few examples of the use of interactive maps in web-based information systems, decision support systems, and computer games that focus on environmental issues.

Several of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are directly or indirectly concerned with improving health and well-being of the world population. This paper presents an informatics-based approach to the management and monitoring of infectious diseases, in the context of one of these SDGs focusing on the eradication of vector-borne diseases such as malaria, Zika and other neglected tropical diseases. Here we outline the challenges faced by many conventional approaches to ecoepidemiological modelling and proposes a distributed interactive architecture for teamwork coordination, and data integration at different levels of information, and across disciplines. This approach is illustrated by an application to the surveillance of Leishmaniasis, a neglected tropical disease, in remote regions.

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), as stated by UNESCO, should empower learners towards new ways of thinking and acting for a more sustainable and just society for all. However, it is often narrowly interpreted and taught as scientific knowledge about the environment, failing to trigger relevant social changes. In this preliminary study, we visit the computer science literature to analyse some potential roles of technology, more specifically the Internet of Things (IoT), with a human-centred design perspective to be applied in ESD. Through these lenses, we propose some preliminary guidelines to apply IoT-based projects to educate and empower students related to environmental Sustainable Development Goals. We then apply these guidelines to set up an experimental study for students to sense and discuss the impact of ultraviolet (UV) radiation on their health.

When referring to sustainability, the expression must be understood in terms of environmental, social and economic factors, with an emphasis on the breadth of its scope. Computational solutions involve consumer goods and hence it should be responsibility of the software and hardware industry, (as well as its designers and developers), to ensure that there is an awareness of the need for sustainability. The literature includes several works that address the question of sustainable design. However, there are few studies that deal with sustainability in terms of design and its Computing technology is still in its early stages. In light of this, this paper has formalized a set of recommendations to guide the designers in the creation of computational solutions, and thus allow the sustainability factors in design to be considered. The guidelines were applied in an academic scenario and three specialists evaluated the solutions made with and without them. The results suggest that the guidelines supported the sustainable development of Computing technologies.

Several software systems struggle with different contexts of use, e.g., due to a huge variety of end-user groups or various application scenarios. In some cases, the use of software systems may change due to external factors such as a pandemic. However, in other cases, software systems are known to be used in various contexts even before they are developed. In this case, it is crucial to consider as many different contexts of use as possible right from the beginning in order to avoid costly changes later on and, above all, user dissatisfaction. However, even when it is known that the software system will be used in different contexts, these contexts are often neither obvious nor easy to identify.We propose to use workshops with stakeholders as a mean to identify different contexts of use. These workshops can be conducted at different points in time, but in this paper, we present a workshop conducted before starting the development phase, that is, during the requirements elicitation phase (to identify the different contexts of use as early as possible). We conducted such a workshop in a large interdisciplinary research project with different institutions from research and practice. In this paper, we present the workshop structure and its results, our experiences, as well as take-aways highlighting how (online) workshops might support the requirements elicitation when different contexts of use are to be expected.

It can be hard to understand the context in which a software system is used and how the whole work environment affects the usage of a particular system. In this project, we modified the Persona method to include aspects of the digital work environment and the context to extend the understanding of these aspects during software development. The modified version of the Persona method is based on the traditional Persona method, on theories on healthy work and research on the digital work environment. The objective of proposing the modifications of the method is to give software developers more insights into the complexity of the digital work environment. University students tried the modified Contextual Persona method in a user-centred software development course. Students worked on designing a new system for 12 weeks using the Contextual Persona method during the fourth week of software development. The students gave feedback on what positive and negative aspects they experienced while using the modified Contextual Persona method and their thoughts on how the method could be improved. In the paper, we analyse reports from 30 students and summarise the feedback gathered. We conclude by summarising the possible improvements to the method based on our findings.

Assistive systems in industrial assembly, such as cranes, hoists, and robotic arms are installed to reduce the ergonomic stress operators are exposed to. Whether such a system is suitable for a certain assembly step is currently evaluated based on ergonomic criteria. This does not seem sufficient as operators often choose not to use the assistive system. It is therefore important to ask why this is the case and what can be done to minimize the chances that support tools are not used.To address the why-question, we ran contextual inquiries at three large production companies and used the results to design a simple scoring sheet to evaluate and compare the usability aspects of assistive systems in industrial assembly. This scoring sheet represents a design space: it provides an overview of different attention points relevant to the operators. As a first evaluation, we retroactively compared the (then) current to the desired situations in the visited companies. Further research is necessary to evaluate the design space and its representation.

Software engineers are sedentary and need technological help for a more healthy life. Current software engineering tasks are mostly confined to the standard sedentary desktop user interface. We believe that software engineering should be restructured so that it offers a non-sedentary alternative. In this paper, we describe a new research approach, called Post-sedentary Software Engineering. Our ambition with this approach is to provide an alternative, healthier work context without decreasing productivity. We take a spatial approach to post-sedentary tool design, starting from the assumption an interactive 3D environment with appropriate metaphors is necessary for full body movement. We discuss available technologies for achieving this goal and outline four studies that incorporate the software engineering phases of code comprehension, code creation and debugging in a non-sedentary context.

With the fourth industrial revolution, there is a digitization wave going on for the transformation of existing systems into modern digital systems. This has opened the window for many opportunities, but at the same time, there is a multitude of cyber-security threats that need to be addressed. This paper considers one such threat posed by phishing and ransomware attacks to the healthcare infrastructures. Phishing has also been the most prevalent attack mechanism on the healthcare infrastructures during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The paper proposes two intervention strategies as a step towards catering to the challenges posed by phishing and ransomware attacks in the context of healthcare infrastructures.

Integrating security and privacy requirements at every stage of the software development cycle is critical to guarantee the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the system and consequently of the data. Developers need to be supported in this challenge, as many different skills are required to respond effectively to the growing number of cyber-attacks. In such a context, this research study endeavors to define the key elements that support decision-making in privacy oriented software development. A Privacy Knowledge Base (PKB) is defined to support developers’ decisions in all software development phases, and a prototype (PKB-Tool) is developed to operationally integrate privacy and security requirements into the development of new systems and the re-engineering of legacy systems. An ongoing experimentation in the context of an industrial project is presented to validate the efficacy of the 5 key elements in supporting developers in integrating privacy and security requirements in the software life cycle.

The ability to create and maintain a highly accurate model of an end user’s context is an extremely useful feature. Achieving this ability poses many challenges, especially since a great degree of partial information and uncertainty is involved in capturing the user’s context. The bRIGHT human-computer interaction (HCI) framework and workstation address these challenges by creating a highly accurate context model of a user engaging with a computer system. In this paper we discuss the architectural design of bRIGHT, which addresses performance and scalability to build accurate user context models, and the benefits we expect from this improved version. We also discuss technological advances in other related fields that influenced our decision-making.

Automatically adapting an interactive application to its use context is highly dependent on the existence of a declarative model. The Model-Based User Interface Development research made important progress in fully declarative specifications on interactive applications. However, the Abstract User Interface declarative models, such as task-based or communication-based models, are unfamiliar to designers and developers. This paper presents early explorations into a research program aimed at achieving fully declarative interactive applications: outlining a static concrete user interface and deriving the interaction from its affordances. The basic assumption is that for a well-designed user interface, the UI function can be derived from its form through affordance mechanisms. As the static aspects like the UI initial form are already being described declaratively in industrial practice, fully declarative interactive applications would result from the new research program.

As modern User Interfaces (UIs) are used in varying context-of-use situations, sophisticated mechanisms to control UI adaptations are needed. UI adaptations describe the process of manipulating the initial UI to fit the current context-of-use. Typically, the UI and context-of-use are formalized by models. If these adaptations are not well-defined or checked properly, undesirable application of multiple adaptations may threaten consistency. To prevent conflicting UI adaptations and ease the specification of UI adaptation rules, we introduce a notion of adaptation consistency based on Triple Graph Grammars (TGGs) augmented with a 0–1 priority system. We choose TGGs because it is a formalism for consistency maintenance in model-driven engineering. We extend the TGG semantics with a 0–1 priority system to assess for consistency regarding application order. Based on this solution idea, we present the implementation of a prototypical TGG interpreter to suggest a design- and run-time solution for ensuring consistency of UI adaptations.

The paper presents the work carried out at the HCI Engineering Education workshop, organised by IFIP working groups 2.7/13.4 and 13.1. It describes four case studies of projects and exercises used in Human-Computer Interaction Engineering courses. We propose a common framework for presenting the case studies and describe the four case studies in detail. We then draw conclusions on the differences between the presented case studies that highlight the diversity and multidisciplinary aspects to be taught in a Human-Computer Interaction Engineering course. As future work, we plan to create a repository of case studies as a resource for teachers.

The master in HCI of the University Toulouse III Paul Sabatier is a degree in Computer Science that aims to educate specialists in HCI that are able to develop interactive systems that match user needs. A particularity of the this master in HCI compared to other ones in France or in the world is that it implements a large set of courses dedicated to the engineering of interactive systems. This set of courses belongs to a curriculum in engineering interactive systems and distributes amongst the 2 years of the degree following a progression in level of knowledge and skills. This paper presents this curriculum in engineering interactive systems, its motivations, and the pedagogical approach implemented for the curriculum.

This paper describes a small unit for teaching interface implementation to user experience (UX) designers. Where human–computer interaction (HCI) textbooks and courses include aspects of user interface engineering, they are usually focused towards computer science students. The unit described here is part of a larger online HCI course where the majority of learners are UX professionals, who found it hard to understand why they needed to learn about implementation. The paper explains why the author felt it important to include aspects that help the UX designer understand the behavioural and practical implications of ‘low level’ coding, and also the elements included in the unit. The resulting unit includes many concrete examples linking user behaviour to internal structure and having produced the material, it seems that this may also be a good way to introduce the topic to more technical students before digging into lower level details.

We provide our experience-based vision on teaching Interaction Design-related courses in multiple cultures. We explain how students should be treated as adults with their own learning goals and their own competence of assessing the level of professionalism reached. We analyse our approach in relation to the ACM-IEEE CC2020 Curriculum Guidelines. Finally, we provide an example of our teaching approach during lock-down.

This paper arises from experience by the authors in teaching software engineering courses. It discusses the need for adequate coverage of Human-Computer Interaction topics in these courses and the challenges faced when addressing them. Three courses, at both licentiate and master’s levels, are used as triggers for the discussion.The paper argues that the lack of relevant Human-Computer Interaction concepts creates challenges when teaching and learning requirements analysis, design, and implementation of software systems. The approaches adopted to address these challenges are described.

The combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made it possible to introduce numerous automations in our daily environments. Many new interesting possibilities and opportunities have been enabled, but there are also risks and problems. Often these problems originated from approaches that have not been able to consider the users’ viewpoint sufficiently. We need to empower people in order to actually understand the automations in their surroundings environments, modify them, and create new ones, even if they have no programming knowledge. It is thus important that the curricula of programs in several disciplines (artificial intelligence, computer science, human-computer interaction, psychology, design, …) discuss these problems and some possible solutions able to provide people with the possibility to control and create their daily automations. In this paper I propose a possible way to organise and structure teaching of the concepts, methods and tools for this purpose, and which can be adopted in the relevant curricula.

The training of the Master’s degree in software engineering of the University Grenoble Alpes covers foundational courseware in computer science (programming, complexity, database, networks, interactive systems) during the first year and more advanced engineering courses (in terms of cloud computing, large-scale data management, architecture, program testing and verification) during the second year. This paper focuses on two HCI courses as part of this curriculum in software engineering, and describes the content and the pedagogical approach we implemented for teaching HCI to computer science students. The paper explains why the authors adopt a tool-based approach for the first-year course on engineering HCI and a project-based approach with experimental evaluation for the second-year course on advanced interaction including multimodality.

As defined in Paper 2 presented at the workshop, whose presentations and discussions are introduced in this paper, “control rooms are work spaces that serve the purpose of managing and operating physically dispersed systems, services and staff”.

Control rooms are workspaces that serve the purpose of managing and operating physically dispersed systems, services and staff. They embed multiple types of systems and software, which may themselves have several characteristics. Configuration management consists in processes and techniques to systematically identify and manage the characteristics of these systems and software, as well as their changes, in order to ensure the reliability of the operations. However, systems and software are not the only elements for which several characteristics are to be managed in order to ensure the reliability of the operations in a control room. The following elements are also important: procedures, organizational processes, team structures and crewmembers. In addition, the characteristics of these elements may also vary over time. Operational procedures may change, as well as processes, team structure and crewmembers skills’ level and knowledge level. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework to address in a systematic and integrated way, and from a socio-technical point of view, the configuration management of all of the elements of a control room. These elements are systems and software, crewmembers that are in charge of the operations, operational procedures the crewmembers apply, as well as processes and standards released by organizations that are responsible for the operations.

Control rooms are essential for the functioning of critical infrastructure, and thus for the economy and society as a whole. Since disruptions in control rooms can have severe cascading effects, it is of utmost importance that control rooms are designed in a way that contributes to the resilience of the cyber-physical system they are monitoring. Even though the importance of resilience for control rooms is generally acknowledged, cognitive resilience is often not taken into account properly during control room design. This vision paper aims at improving the cognitive resilience in control rooms through advancements in three key research areas: 1) automated detection of upcoming disruptions, 2) visualization of spatio-temporal uncertainty, 3) cognition-aware interaction design. The paper then discusses challenges related to our vision and the crucial advancements required to overcome these challenges.

Medical systems are currently being developed that integrate the multiple devices that are often connected to patients, for example in intensive care or where there are multiple patients in medical wards managed by limited numbers of clinicians. This position paper considers a model of such integrated devices, and the human factors engineering challenges that are important considerations in their development. The model is used as a basis for proof that specific use-centred safety requirements hold of a design that satisfies the model. The paper describes how a model may be used to prove two classes of use-related properties. The first concerns the consistency of multiple displays of the same information while the second proves that actions relating to the same device and patient invoked in different work stations have equivalent effect.

State-of-the-art control rooms are equipped with a variety of input and output devices in terms of single-user workstations, shared public screens, and multimodal alarm systems. However, operators are bound to and sitting at their respective workstations for the most part of their shifts. Therefore, cooperation efforts are hampered, and physical activity is limited for several hours. Incorporating mobile devices, wearables and sensor technologies could improve on the current mode of operation but must be considered a paradigm shift from control rooms as a collection of technically networked but stationary workstations to control rooms as pervasive computing environments being aware of people and processes. However, based on the reviewed literature, systematic approaches to this paradigm shift taking usability and user experience into account are rare. In this work, we describe a root concept for control rooms as human-centered pervasive computing environments and introduce a framework for developing a wearable assistant as one of the central and novel components. Furthermore, we describe design challenges from a socio-technical perspective based on 9 expert interviews important for further research on pervasive computing environments in safety-critical domains.

Control room operators rely on a range of technologies to communicate crucial information and dependably coordinate a disparate collection of tasks and procedures. Tools that are capable to design, to implement, and to evaluate interactive systems that can assist the tasks of control room operators in these environments therefore play an important role. This paper offers a framework that facilitates the early research steps into evaluating work flows, interfaces, and wearable sensors in the context of an emergency dispatch center. It entails a primarily web-based, quick-to-deploy, and scalable method that specifically targets preliminary studies in which large-scale and situated deployments are not feasible. By using open-source and affordable wrist-worn sensors, it furthermore enables investigating any relationships between interaction design in control rooms and operators’ physiological data. Our evaluation on a preliminary study with 5 participants shows that basic scenarios are able to induce differences which can be measured by reaction times in the interactions as well as in the data from the smartwatch.

When designing an interactive system, considering usability is important in order to ensure that users can perform their tasks with the interactive system and that each information or function they need to perform their tasks is available at most relevant time. Consideration of the user experience is also important in order to take into account how users feel about using the interactive system. In case where users belong to different user profiles, design of the interactive system may have to consider conflicts between target usability and user experience. From study of the documentation and users’ knowledge, we present a multi-user and multi-property control center: Jupiter 2 Control Center at Guiana Space Center of French space studies center (CNES). As public audience and press are allowed to assist to launch in the Jupiter 2 Control Center, they can see operators’ work and information displayed in the control center. Then, specificity of this control center compared to others is that different user profiles with different goals use it at the same time. Some users use it to perform their work, whereas others use it to enjoy the launch. We use the Jupiter 2 Control Center as an example to find potential design issues for a future control center with similar characteristics. Conflicts between the different users’ goals and the related properties are discussed in this paper.

Pilot implementations are field tests of properly engineered, yet unfinished, systems. By exposing systems to their intended environment, pilot implementations emphasize realism and collect real-use feedback for system finalization. While practitioners recognize pilot implementations as a means of testing the fit between a system and its use environment, pilot implementations have received less attention from researchers in human-computer interaction. The workshop on pilot implementation for testing human-work interaction designs aimed to create research interest in pilot implementation and to provide a forum for discussing and maturing such research. The seven workshop papers included in this post-proceedings volume span a variety of angles on pilot implementation. They contribute valuable insights but also leave open questions. Collectively, they provide illustrative case studies and inspiration for further research.

Most of the prospective university students, especially from abroad, search on the online social networks what other students, present and former, are saying about the universities and the programs. Students express their sentiments regarding universities, programs, and courses they attended, or they are attending, in informal conversations on online social networks. We aim to understand how universities’ and programs’ enrolment numbers, relate to students’ sentiments expressed on online social networks, and how this electronic word of mouth relates to the dissemination of information about the universities and the programs on online social networks. The research goal of this study is to test an approach to engage with students on online social networks and measure the impact of this interaction by analyzing the feedback from former and present students, and the enrolment numbers of new students.

Pilot implementation can be seen as a socio-technical design approach. This paper presents a design case that focused on the optimal implementation and organizational change process when a new IT system is to be implemented in an organization. The case was a pilot implementation of a new self-service-oriented IT system for both customers and employees in a Danish SME ‘proptech’ company. ‘Proptech’ denotes companies dealing with property and technology. The underlying epistemic view of the design case was that of functional pragmatism, and the collection and interpretation of data were aimed at analyzing how the case company managed to implement a new IT system from technical, organizational, and economical perspectives. The analysis revealed that though the case company management did not do what the current theory in the area prescribes, the company still thrived with the pilot implementation. Our position is thus that organizational alignment is an important aspect of pilot implementation, and that it can be analyzed by analyzing various management practices related to the pilot implementation.

In this paper, we propose a prototype design for manifold refinement to fine grained text-to-image generation by using Attentional Generative Adversarial Network (AttnGAN) We concentrate on creating realistic images from text descriptions. We have used a collection of Attentional Generative Adversarial Network layers that are able to correctly select the modal meaning at the word-level and sentence-level. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) prove to be fundamental structure for many design applications from Game design, Art, Science and Modelling applications. We use GANs for contrastive learning and as a information maximisation approach, and we do extensive research to find the further advancements in image generation. Our prototype is easy to implement and practical; choosing the most relevant word vectors and using those vectors to generate related image sub-regions. The prototype in its current state generates image designs only for the bird species to satisfy the claim for its image generation ability. With due consideration to findings of usability testing, the develpment team in future iterations of the application, hopes to improve the generated image resolution. They plan to provide a choice for created variety of images with further improvements to the image generation algorithm.

Hate-Speech Detection and filtering of hateful content is an important aspect of any social media post. The ever increasing amount of content posted daily on social media has led to an excessive amount of digital hate being spread in the form of posts, images and comments. The proposed system is developed in order to act as a tool for determining if a particular social media post is hateful and is aimed to aid any benign social media user who has been affected by hate speech and wants to report it. The proposed system uses a multimodal artificial intelligence based approach by classifying different formats of posts, i.e., images and comments or captions separately. An ensemble convolutional neural network architecture is used for this classification, thus, proving to be a strong tool for finding evidence of any prevalent hate speech. This system is tested using the Likert scale for its user interface, accuracy and utility. Based on the result this paper proposes a prototype design of a web application which can be used for hateful content detection.

Driving is considered one of the most difficult tasks because the driver is responsible for a variety of other responsibilities in addition to driving. The primary responsibility of a driver should be to properly operate a vehicle while concentrating solely on driving. However, he/she must also complete various secondary jobs at the same time. For example, operating the steering wheel and the controls situated on the dashboard and steering wheel, operating the brake, accelerator, and clutch pedals while shifting gears as needed, and so forth. Modeling realistic driving behaviour proved tough for researchers and scientists. In this work, we examine the necessity for driver behaviour analysis as well as a method for visualising and estimating driver behaviour patterns utilising smart phone sensor data.

This study has investigated how a complex multi-level organisation like a London-based airport can benefit from participatory design workshops using ecological interface design tools (i.e., Abstraction Hierarchy) for selecting or designing better future systems. Many complex organisations are using trials (pilot in our context) for selecting future autonomous technologies. This case is driven by a member of the innovation department of the airport and UX researchers. Our main objective was to employ participatory design and work domain analysis (WDA) as part of a framework to co-design and plan trials for future automated systems for smart work in airport terminal operations. The term automation in this paper also covers some of the so-called AI or more sophisticated automation. Over two weeks in two workshops in a London-based airport, we ran co-design workshops to help the decision-makers understand workplace needs and employee welfare while selecting future automated systems. We also explored potential issues in the work domain that the traditional user-centred design (UCD) methods could not systematically assess (e.g., information exchange or contextual effects). We conclude that WDA as part of co-design workshops prior to selecting the trials could be considered part of the pilot implementation for selection and design systems in complex workplaces, but it has complications.

This position paper is about socio-technical interventions in pilot implementation contexts. It argues that human work interaction design provides massive push towards such interventions. It does so through theorizing the continuous relation-building between empirical work analysis and interaction design activities that creates new local solutions for the stakeholders involved. It raises the question of how hard of soft that this push should be. The discussion provides clarity as to what is implemented in the Relation Artefact theory of pilot implementation and gives examples that may help to judge how hard or soft the push should be.

Extended Reality (XR) technologies such as head-mounted displays are deemed beneficial for the collaboration of co-located as well as distributed people. As such, XR technologies appear particularly promising for supporting distant and hybrid teaching which became highly relevant during the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite the potential awarded to such technologies, practical applications are still very rare. In order to investigate the impediments to the practical adoption of XR technologies, the respective systems should be evaluated in real-world settings. Existing evaluation tools are, however, not suited for this purpose. In this paper, we explain why today’s evaluation tools such as questionnaires, observation, and performance measurements are not sufficient for evaluating long-time, exploratory, and collaborative tasks that are typical in educational settings. To address this gap, we follow a top-down approach: Based on an existing model of user acceptance, we specify the variables that are to be optimized by HCI research and outline the potential of wearable-based measuring instruments to quantitatively assess these parameters. Eventually, we point out related research gaps that should be addressed by future research.

This paper analyses the artistic dimensions of fine art, focusing on film and performances, and the aspects of experience by the audience of this type of art. We analyze the contribution of sound, and consider a way to, either translate relevant aspects of sound to other modalities, or use other modalities to artistically enhance the experience. We provide a conceptual framework of dynamic and interactive types of art and we discuss the development of the relation between visual art and sound and the concept of experience of art. We discuss the problems of experience if sound is not available and consider the translation of sound to other modalities. We propose an experimental design, “Ears on my Back” and show the initial development of a garment that aims at experiencing relevant sound aspects in alternative modalities. Finally, we show the challenges and opportunities of multidisciplinary collaboration in this domain.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a shift from learning in classrooms to learning at home. However, currently applied learning methods are not optimized for learning at home. Therefore, we explore how the unique benefits of a home environment could be used to inform the design of learning experiences. In particular, we explore the applicability of wearables and IoT devices as flexible and affordable learning tools. Based on our findings, we present our prototype of an NFC-based learning application for mobile devices.

An argument is presented for the use of the concepts of Micro-Politics and Semiotic Power by Bijker, and Infrastructural Inversion by Bowker to understand the geopolitical dynamics of career-building, knowledge and value creation in the field of human computer interaction (HCI). This is illustrated with brief references to examples of HCI academic and professional practice and dissemination in local and global contexts. It is shown how local and global micro-politically dominant groups in the HCI field can construct scripts that define quality, impact and relevance. These scripts in turn have a direct effect in career-building and what is considered valid and useful knowledge and practice. The political leverage of these scripts is therefore embedded in artefacts used for different types of transactions in the HCI field. Infrastructural inversion is finally presented as a possible framework to deconstruct and make visible these scripts and the different types of historical and political tensions inscribed in them at disciplinary, local, national, regional and global level.

Most software interfaces are designed in the Western world. Western metaphors (such as the concept of menus to organize functions) are implicitly built into these designs. This may affect users in other parts of the world, in that they lack an intuitive feeling of how to use these interfaces and applications, causing a disappointing user experience, low efficiency and even unsatisfactory usability. This is the case in many parts of Africa, including South Africa. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that tertiary Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) curricula at undergraduate level are usually based exclusively on international textbooks. This article discusses the need for research on the Africanization of HCI teaching and learning. Some international and local work that has been done on the decolonization of HCI and the localization of Information Systems is acknowledged. Emic (intra-cultural) and etic (cross-cultural) aspects that influence the decolonization of HCI, such as Ubuntu and the hacker ethic are discussed in addition to geopolitical tensions and powers that encourage or counteract this endeavor. The paper argues that indigenous perspectives should enrich the HCI discipline at theoretical and practical levels. A few practical pointers are provided to make the ideal of Africanization relevant for and feasible within HCI.

Nowadays, the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) can be seen as a contact zone where different cultures, paradigms and worldviews meet. A critical analysis of these encounters brings to light several contradictions, asymmetrical relations of power, and other geopolitical issues that discourage the open discussion of large-scale societal issues, due to the controversies and divisiveness that can be found in the intersection between HCI and public policy. In this paper, we explore some of the factors that contribute to this divisiveness, and examine different design practices that have been used in the HCI community for approaching wicked social problems. Then, we present Autonomous Design as a legitimate practice in HCI that tackles these divisive issues, and introduce Punk narratives and aesthetics as a tool for prototyping better futures where multiple worlds co-exist in a relational manner.