Exploring Cultural Differences in HCI Education

The discipline of human-computer interaction has become a subject taught across universities around the world, outside of the cultures where it originated. However, the intercultural implication of its assimilation into the\ud syllabus of courses offered by universities around the world remains underresearched. The purpose of this ongoing research project is to provide insights for these implications in terms of the student and teacher experience of HCI. How this subject is socially represented across the different universities studied is a key question. In order to develop intercultural awareness of these questions\ud universities from UK, Namibia, Mexico and China are collaborating in a multiple case study involving students and lecturers engaged in evaluation and design tasks. Findings will then be used to propose an international HCI curriculum more supportive of local perspectives. This paper describes the initial steps of this study and some preliminary findings from Namibia, India and Mexico about cognitive styles and cultural attitudes

Augmenting usability: cultural elicitation in HCI

This paper offers context and culture elicitation in an inter-cultural and multi-disciplinary setting of ICT design. Localised usability evaluation (LUE) is augmented with a socio-technical evaluation tool (STEM) as a methodological approach to expose and address issues in a collaborative ICT design within the Village e-Science for Life (VeSeL) project in rural Kenya. The paper argues that designers need to locally identify context and culture in situ and further explicate their implications through the design process and at the global level. Stakeholders’ context, culture, decisions, agendas, expectations, disciplines and requirements need to be locally identified and globally evaluated to ensure a fit for purpose solution

The centre for internationalization and usability: enabling culture-centred design for all

The Centre for Internationalisation and Usability within the School of Computing and Technology at The University of West London aims to enhance understanding of cultural differences in international software development. A particular focus is the development and usability of ICT products in a global market, both in terms of international software development and economic, community and social development. We host a number of researchers and PhD students working in topics such as usability evaluation and culture, socio-technical participatory design, internationalization attitudes of software engineers, mobile learning and library cognitive design

A cross-cultural evaluation of HCI student performance - reflections for the curriculum

Human-computer interaction has become a subject taught across universities around the world, outside of the cultures where it originated. However, the implications of its assimilation into the syllabus of courses offered by universities around the world remain under-researched. Our research project provides insights on these implications by studying the performance of HCI students in universities in UK, India, Namibia, Mexico and China engaged in a similar design and evaluation set of tasks. It is argued that the predominant cognitive styles and cultural attitudes of students located in different types of institutions and countries will shape their learning of HCI concepts and tools. This paper in particular reports the analysis of cognitive styles and cultural dimensions of students engaged in a heuristic evaluation of a science education portal. An emergent pattern between adaptive cognitive styles and high uncertainty avoidance is identified in the assessment of the richness of students’ heuristics exercise completion

The challenges for participatory design in the developing world

Participatory design within the context of developing countries is an emerging area of interest in the Participatory Design community. This workshop will provide a unique forum for participants to exchange their experiences, consider the different approaches needed in developing country's context, encourage new partnerships and learn from each others past difficulties and how these were solved

Exploring local cultural perspectives in user interface development in an Indian offshoring context: a view from the UK

In this paper, we present the results of an exploratory case study on the impact of culture on software development in an offshoring context in India. Our research aims to understand the role of culture in outsourced software development. We interviewed human-computer interface professionals such as frontend developers, user interface designers and usability specialists working for a software development outsourcing vendor in India. The interviews were analysed for occurrence of common themes. Thereafter the cultural models of Hofstede and Hall were used to make sense of these emerging themes.. Our results indicate that cultural influence occurs and has an overarching influence in software development. Three proposals are made in response to the cultural issues highlighted

A resource kit for participatory socio-technical design in rural kenya

We describe our approach and initial results in the\ud participatory design of technology relevant to local rural\ud livelihoods. Our approach to design and usability\ud proceeds from research in theory and practice of crosscultural\ud implementations, but the novelty is in\ud beginning not with particular technologies but from\ud community needs, and structuring technology in terms\ud of activities. We describe our project aims and initial\ud data collected, which show that while villagers have no\ud clear mental models for using computers or the\ud Internet, they show a desire to have and use them. We\ud then describe our approach to interaction design, our\ud expectations and next steps as the technology and\ud activities are first introduced to the villages