The Confluence of Interaction Design & Design: from Disciplinary to Transdisciplinary Perspectives

In keeping with the conference theme of rigour and the authors’ interest in sustainability and interaction design, we describe the confluence of design-oriented notions of interaction design and HCI-oriented notions of interaction design in terms of understanding the present and making choices about possible futures. We comment on the variety of research modes in this confluence and then take up the issue of how disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity operate and fail to operate as boundary crossing mechanisms for these research modes. As a complement and extension to disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary practices, we take up the notion of transdisciplinarity and describe how it informs the possibility of values-rich free boundary crossing between research modes in the service of real world issues, while still preserving rigour. Keywords: Transdisciplinarity; Interaction Design; Design Research; Sustainability; Disciplinarity; Multidisciplinarity; Interdisciplinarity.</p

Peering into the Discourse of Industrial Design Training through a Sustainability Lens

Now well established in HCI, the lens of sustainability may be applied to educational practices in industrial design and interaction design. By sustainability, we mean to include notions of mitigation of the environmental effects of climate change. In this paper, we present an analysis of student projects in a junior and senior industrial design class dataset. Drawing from discourse analysis, we examine how the industrial design classroom serves as a space to socially construct the philosophies and goals inherent in “good” design. We then examine how the lens of sustainability is implicated into the industrial design “way” as espoused by the discipline’s pedagogy

Designing Sustainable Food Systems

There is significant interest in designing technologies for the food system, from agricultural modeling tools to apps enabling humans to assess nutritional value of various food choices to drones for pest detection. However, a good food system must be a sustainable one. There is an urgent need for deliberation and thoughtfulness in designing for both technologies that support existing food systems and new modalities that work towards more sustainable food systems. This workshop will bring together HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners with an interest in exploring what constitutes a sustainable food system, as well as defining the role of HCI in this domain. Our key objectives for this workshop will be to identify what opportunities for design and collaboration exist and to lay the foundation for an active foodCHI community

Hungry 24/7? HCI Design for Sustainable Food Culture: Proceedings of the Workshop held in conjunction with OZCHI 2009

This workshop proposes to explore new approaches to cultivate and support sustainable food culture in urban environments via human computer interaction design and ubiquitous technologies. Food is a challenging issue in urban contexts: while food consumption decisions are made many times a day, most food interaction for urbanites occurs based on convenience and habitual practices. This situation is contrasting to the fact that food is at the centre of global environment, health, and social issues that are becoming increasingly immanent and imminent. As such, it is timely and crucial to ask: what are feasible, effective, and innovative ways to improve human-food-interaction through human-computer-interaction in order to contribute to environmental, health, and social sustainability in urban environments? This workshop brings together insights across disciplines to discuss this question, and plan and promote individual, local, and global change for sustainable food culture

Research journeys:Making the invisible, visual

We argue for a new way of using pictorial publications to communicate the social, cultural, and material contexts in which "in the wild" research is carried out. Such research often allows for partial researcher perspectives, as the researchers travel to, encounter, and leave those places. However, in HCI research, the journeys and interactions in and around those places are rarely reported directly in archival papers. We argue that those journeys and interactions directly inform how we make sense of the project, and thus should be recorded and shared appropriately. We argue that pictorials can be a format that breaks the boundary between "supplementary materials" and archival publications, and allows us to do that sharing function. We illustrate this argument through reporting of our Research Journey to a number of islands off the west coast of Ireland as part of a project that is developing technology to support rural community radio

ICT for Sustainability — Current and future research directions

This workshop brings together researchers from the entire iSchools community to propose, share and discuss their current research and future research agendas and foster collaborations on ICT for Sustainability. ICT plays a major role in sustainability. It threatens sustainability as ICT devices cause carbon emissions, produce e-waste, but it can also be an enabler of sustainability, in form of systems that support the protection of natural resources, and that foster social sustainability, in the form of systems that foster communities and participation. These supporting systems come from many intellectual traditions within and beyond the information field and design. The iSchools community provides an excellent place to discuss this crucial topic at the intersection of information, society, and technology. This workshop will bring together scholars from across the information field studying ICT for sustainability, to foster new interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary collaborations.ye

Three Key Competencies and Other Frameworks for HCI and Design Education

This article updates and tabulates some Design theory and frameworks for teaching Design in the context of an Human-Computer Interaction Design (HCI/d) program. A perspective on implications for HCI/d programs is also shared, based on my own reflections about my experiences as program director and faculty