Preface - Creativity and HCI: From Experience to Design in Education

Abstract included in text

Making as Pedagogical Practice in HCI: From Artefacts to Theory Building

This paper introduces the notion of making as a pedagog-ical practice in HCI education. Our focus is on generative design teaching in HCI that prioritizes collaborative en-gagements across a wide range of material encounters. We take the view that HCI education without a critical view of the relationship between people and objects results in abstract reasoning that runs the risk of an impoverished ba-sis in praxis. To support this position, we provide a series of examples from our own teaching. Through these exam-ples we locate our work in the field of new materiality and post-human design asking the question: How can HCI edu-cation account for the material turn? We observe that there is important theory-building work to be done in this area and propose some methods and a direction this work could take. HCI education remains dominated by an instrumen-talist, problem-solving, evaluative approach. We suggest meaning making through material exploration can invigorate the discipline with a new design praxis

Designing for e-Social Action An Application Taxonomy

In this paper, we present a taxonomy for understanding designs and designing of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) in the field of ‘Social Action’. We use the term ‘Social Action’ to refer to activities of individuals and organisations in civil society, which are oriented towards social (rather than primarily economic) goals. We then apply the term e-Social Action to refer to the application of ICT in these activities. This definition incorporates a wide range of initiatives, varying from: trade-unions logging safety inspections on ships, Age Concern York organising volunteers to place on-line supermarket orders on behalf of housebound elderly people; the International Red Cross using logistics software to deliver emergency aid; and Martus.org providing technology to enable victims of human-rights abuse to report their experience whilst protecting their anonymity and thus avoiding reprisals. To study designing in this broad space, it is necessary to understand key dimensions of the settings where designing takes place. The aim of this paper is to examine how information and communication technologies in social action can be understood, classified and distinguished, to allow for more refined explorations of designing in this space. Keywords: e-SocialAction, Taxonomy, design and society</p

HCI practice in Malaysia : a reflection of ICT professionals' perspective

Although Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has been practiced by Western countries over the last 40 years, very little is known about how HCI is being incorporated in Malaysian practices. We undertook a 12-week ethnographical study aimed at revealing HCI perceptions at different managerial levels in Information and Communication Technology (ICT)departments and agencies in Malaysia. We describe and discuss the factor that either drive or impede technology managers towards HCI awareness, based on the nature of ICT-related/ software development in Malaysia. The result of the study indicates that the developers and corporations' overall perception of HCI is influenced by their national and organizational culture. The lack of emphasis on usable interface design and scarce information regarding user studies and evaluation are major concerns.Within this context of developing countries, the difficulty of creating HCI awareness and adopting usability may be due to the complexity of the government's bureaucracy system. We suggest that stakeholders and policy markers such as the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC)and the Malaysian Administrative Modernization and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU)are more relevant in influencing and/ or reinforcing the incorporation of JCI in the workplace and enhancing the usability of the products and software created in the organization at the managerial level

An empirical study of the “prototype walkthrough”: a studio-based activity for HCI education

For over a century, studio-based instruction has served as an effective pedagogical model in architecture and fine arts education. Because of its design orientation, human-computer interaction (HCI) education is an excellent venue for studio-based instruction. In an HCI course, we have been exploring a studio-based learning activity called the prototype walkthrough, in which a student project team simulates its evolving user interface prototype while a student audience member acts as a test user. The audience is encouraged to ask questions and provide feedback. We have observed that prototype walkthroughs create excellent conditions for learning about user interface design. In order to better understand the educational value of the activity, we performed a content analysis of a video corpus of 16 prototype walkthroughs held in two HCI courses. We found that the prototype walkthrough discussions were dominated by relevant design issues. Moreover, mirroring the justification behavior of the expert instructor, students justified over 80 percent of their design statements and critiques, with nearly one-quarter of those justifications having a theoretical or empirical basis. Our findings suggest that PWs provide valuable opportunities for students to actively learn HCI design by participating in authentic practice, and provide insight into how such opportunities can be best promoted

Designing as Construction of Representations: A Dynamic Viewpoint in Cognitive Design Research

This article presents a cognitively oriented viewpoint on design. It focuses on cognitive, dynamic aspects of real design, i.e., the actual cognitive activity implemented by designers during their work on professional design projects. Rather than conceiving de-signing as problem solving - Simon's symbolic information processing (SIP) approach - or as a reflective practice or some other form of situated activity - the situativity (SIT) approach - we consider that, from a cognitive viewpoint, designing is most appropriately characterised as a construction of representations. After a critical discussion of the SIP and SIT approaches to design, we present our view-point. This presentation concerns the evolving nature of representations regarding levels of abstraction and degrees of precision, the function of external representations, and specific qualities of representation in collective design. Designing is described at three levels: the organisation of the activity, its strategies, and its design-representation construction activities (different ways to generate, trans-form, and evaluate representations). Even if we adopt a "generic design" stance, we claim that design can take different forms depending on the nature of the artefact, and we propose some candidates for dimensions that allow a distinction to be made between these forms of design. We discuss the potential specificity of HCI design, and the lack of cognitive design research occupied with the quality of design. We close our discussion of representational structures and activities by an outline of some directions regarding their functional linkages

We Shape Our Tools, Then They Shape Us

The artifact is a set of ten cards entitled TED’s TEN, developed by the research group Textiles Environment Design (Chelsea College of Art and Design, UAL), a group of education and practice based design academics investigating sustainability in the textile and fashion industries. When used together, the cards can serve as practical guidelines to examine, survey and highlight the problem of sustainability and the role of designers in change and innovation. They present visual evidence of strategic thinking. Each card identifies a significant, critical area for attention in the lifecycle of the product and suggests a strategy for analysis and change; approach and resolution; consideration and action, acting as a tool to overcome the barriers to improvement. Developed with a focus on textiles and fashion, they have a potential role in generating strategic concepts for the design process generally. They offer a persuasive prototype from design research and are a research tool in themselves, whose relevance becomes clear when used to facilitate design workshops. The cards promote group workshop discussions in game-play and role-play formats. They are offered as a range of entry points for positive research-led engagement from the practical to the idealistic

An Anxious Alliance

This essay presents a multi-year autoethnographic perspective on the use of personal fitness and self-tracking technologies to lose weight. In doing so, it examines the rich and contradictory relationships with ourselves and our world that are generated around these systems, and argues that the efforts to gain control and understanding of one's self through them need not be read as a capitulation to rationalizing forces, or the embrace of utopian ideals, but as an ongoing negotiation of the boundaries and meanings of self within an anxious alliance of knowledge, bodies, devices, and data. I discuss how my widening inquiry into these tools and practices took me from a solitary practice and into a community of fellow travellers, and from the pursuit of a single body goal into a continually renewing project of personal possibility