Exploring Participatory Design Methods to Engage with Arab Communities

ArabHCI is an initiative inaugurated in CHI17 SIG Meeting that brought together 45+ HCI Arab and non-Arab researchers/practitioners who are conducting/interested in HCI within Arab communities. The goal of this workshop is to start dialogs that leverage our "insider" understanding of HCI research in the Arab context and assert our culture identity in design in order to explore challenges and opportunities for future research. In this workshop, we focus on one of the themes that derived our community discussions in most of the held events. We explore the extent to which participatory approaches in the Arab context are culturally and methodologically challenged. Our goal is to bring researchers/practitioners with success and failure stories while designing with Arab communities to discuss methods, share experiences and learned lessons. We plan to share the results of our discussions and research agenda with the wider CHI community through different social and scholarly channels

A participatory approach for digital documentation of Egyptian Bedouins intangible cultural heritage

The Bedouins of Egypt hold a unique intangible cultural heritage (ICH), with distinct cultural values and social practices that are rapidly changing as a consequence of having settled after having been nomadic for centuries. We present our attempt to develop a bottom-up approach to document Bedouin ICH. Grounded in participatory design practices, the project purpose was two-fold: engaging Egyptian Engineering undergraduates with culturally-distant technology users and introducing digital self-documentation of ICH to the Bedouin community. We report the design of a didactic model that deployed the students as research partners to co-design four prototypes of ICH documentation mobile applications with the community. The prototypes reflected an advanced understanding for the values to the Bedouins brought by digital documentation practices. Drawing from our experience, three recommendations were elicited for similar ICH projects. Namely, focusing on the community benefits; promoting motivation ownership, and authenticity; and pursuing a shared identity between designers and community members. These guidelines hold a strong value as they have been tested against local challenges that could have been detrimental to the project

Challenges and paradoxes in decolonising HCI: A critical discussion

The preponderance of Western methods, practices, standards, and classifications in the manner in which new technology-related knowledge is created and globalised has led to calls for more inclusive approaches to design. A decolonisation project is concerned with how researchers might contribute to dismantling and re-envisioning existing power relations, resisting past biases, and balancing Western heavy influences in technology design by foregrounding the authentic voices of the indigenous people in the entire design process. We examine how the establishment of local Global South HCI communities (AfriCHI and ArabHCI) has led to the enactment of decolonisation practices. Specifically, we seek to uncover how decolonisation is perceived in the AfriCHI and ArabHCI communities as well as the extent to which both communities are engaged with the idea of decolonisation without necessarily using the term. We drew from the relevant literature, our own outsider/insider lived experiences, and the communities’ responses to an online anonymised survey to highlight three problematic but interrelated practical paradoxes: a terminology, an ethical, and a micro-colonisation paradox. We argue that these paradoxes expose the dilemmas faced by local non-Western researchers as they pursue decolonisation thinking. This article offers a blended perspective on the decolonisation debate in HCI, CSCW, and the practice-based CSCW scholarly communities and invites researchers to examine their research work using a decolonisation lens

Artificially Intelligent Technology for the Margins: A Multidisciplinary Design Agenda

There has been increasing interest in socially just use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in the development of technology that may be extended to marginalized people. However, the exploration of such technologies entails the development of an understanding of how they may increase and/or counter marginalization. The use of AI/ML algorithms can lead to several challenges, such as privacy and security concerns, biases, unfairness, and lack of cultural awareness, which especially affect marginalized people. This workshop will provide a forum to share experiences and challenges of developing AI/ML health and social wellbeing technologies with/for marginalized people and will work towards developing design methods to engage in the re-envisioning of AI/ML technologies for and with marginalized people. In doing so we will create cross-research area dialogues and collaborations. These discussions build a basis to (1) explore potential tools to support designing AI/ML systems with marginalized people, and (2) develop a design agenda for future research and AI/ML technology for and with marginalized people

Including critical Approaches in HCI Curricula::A provocation

This is not a paper [1]; it is more of a collection and reflection of tangled ideas and discussions on the politics of engaging multiple worlds in design. Discussions brought on by three African HCI researchers on their journey to define an identity for an African HCI curriculum. We invite the readership to engage with our stories and ponder with us these questions: 1) How might we help future designers engage and navigate multiple worldviews, some of which are less dominant? 2) How might we help them navigate uncontested politics and ethics of design encounters? 3) What are the challenges that we educators might face as we introduce critical approaches in the classroom

In the eye of the student : "An intangible cultural heritage experience, with a human-computer interaction twist"

We critically engage with CHI communities emerging outside the global North (ArabHCI and AfriCHI) to explore how participation is configured and enacted within sociocultural and political contexts fundamentally different from Western societies. We contribute to recent discussions about postcolonialism and decolonization of HCI by focusing on non-Western future technology designers. Our lens was a course designed to engage Egyptian students with a local yet culturally-distant community to design applications for documenting intangible heritage. Through an action research, the instructors reflect on selected students' activities. Despite deploying a flexible learning curriculum that encourages greater autonomy, the students perceived themselves with less agency than other institutional stakeholders involved in the project. Further, some of them struggled to empathize with the community as the impact of the cultural differences on configuring participation was profound. We discuss the implications of the findings on HCI education and in international cross-cultural design projects

Artificially Intelligent Technology for the Margins: A Multidisciplinary Design Agenda

In recent years there has been a growing body of work from the CHI communities that looks at designing for inclusivity and for the unique and specific constraints of diverse populations. This has included but is not limited to, work on designing within patriarchal contexts, designing around issues of gender and sexual orientation and designing around literacy. In tandem, local HCI initiatives such as ArabHCI [3] have emerged to address the misrepresentation of these populations in HCI research, highlighting the fact that Western originated design methods would require delicate adaptations to suit non-Western cultural contexts. With the same approach towards inclusivity and co-existence the aim of this workshop is to bring together HCI researchers and practitioners who engage in studies and interventions within Muslim majority communities around the world. The goal is to understand the Muslim identity and perceptions around it, the unique constraints and limitations within Muslim communities and to identify core issues and concerns within these populations. We will explore the following themes: refugees and islamophobia; Muslim feminism and Digital financial services

Prediction-Based Prefetching for Remote Rendering Streaming in Mobile Virtual Environments

Remote Image-based rendering (IBR) is the most suitable solution for rendering complex 3D scenes on mobile devices, where the server renders the 3D scene and streams the rendered images to the client. However, sending a large number of images is inefficient due to the possible limitations of wireless connections. In this paper, we propose a prefetching scheme at the server side that predicts client movements and hence prefetches the corresponding images. In addition, an event-driven simulator was designed and implemented to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The simulator was used to compare between prediction-based prefetching and prefetching images based on spatial locality. Several experiments were conducted to study the performance with different movement patterns as well as with different virtual environments (VEs). The results have shown that the hit ratio of the prediction-based scheme is greater than the localization scheme in the case of random and circular walk movement patterns by approximately 35% and 17%, respectively. In addition, for a VE with high level of details, the proposed scheme outperforms the localization scheme by approximately 13%. However, for a VE with low level of details the localization based scheme outperforms the proposed scheme by only 5%

Envisioning a Decolonial Digital Mental Health

The field of digital mental health is making strides in the application of technology to broaden access to care. We critically examine how these technology-mediated forms of care might amplify historical injustices, and erase minoritized experiences and expressions of mental distress and illness. We draw on decolonial thought and critiques of identity-based algorithmic bias to analyze the underlying power relations impacting digital mental health technologies today, and envision new pathways towards a decolonial digital mental health. We argue that a decolonial digital mental health is one that centers lived experience over rigid classification, is conscious of structural factors that infuence mental wellbeing, and is fundamentally designed to deter the creation of power differentials that prevent people from having agency over their care. Stemming from this vision, we make recommendations for how researchers and designers can support more equitable futures for people experiencing mental distress and illness