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HWID Policymaking
Abstract
This chapter provides policymakers with a HWID platform for regulating socio-technical HCI phenomena and issues. After a brief introduction to HCI and policymaking, the chapter presents policy work done on the HWID platform about sustainable digital work design. The HWID relation artefact Types I–IV are revisited from a policy perspective, and policymaking is discussed related to socio-technical HCI design for digital work environments, well-being at work, a notion of decent work, and more. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of geopolitical issues and reflections on benefits and challenges of HWID and policymaking.
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Computer technology is often designed in technology hubs in Western countries, invariably making it “WEIRD”, because it is based on the intuition, knowledge, and values of people who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Developing technology that is universally useful and engaging requires knowledge about members of WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies alike. In other words, it requires us, the CHI community, to generate this knowledge by studying representative participant samples. To find out to what extent CHI participant samples are from Western societies, we analyzed papers published in the CHI proceedings between 2016-2020. Our findings show that 73% of CHI study findings are based on Western participant samples, representing less than 12% of the world’s population. Furthermore, we show that most participant samples at CHI tend to come from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries with generally highly educated populations. Encouragingly, recent years have seen a slight increase in non-Western samples and those that include several countries. We discuss suggestions for further broadening the international representation of CHI participant samples.
The aim of many forms of digitalized welfare is to offer a personalized, holistic service that is affordable, sustainable, efficient, encouraging and leaves room for voluntary action. We argue that for these goals to be achieved, consideration has to be given both to the design of the system delivered by the welfare provider and to the ecosystem that further shapes the experience of the system. In such an ecosystem not only should state-provided welfare be considered but so too should community support, as well as alternative methods of accounting for societal contribution. In this paper, we use theoretical perspectives on access and security to ideate sketches that invoke new user experiences of welfare. These sketches reflect the importance of both designing for and understanding the ecosystem in which welfare systems are accessed, in order to articulate a different welfare ethos that can encompass both complementary and conflicting perspectives. Using the ideas of Buchanan (1992, 2001a) our synthesis of theories related to security with the practical implementation of digital welfare aims to shape the placement (Buchanan 1992) of digital welfare by embedding access points of different types further into the welfare ecosystem.
Background: The concept of vulnerability is a cornerstone of the theoretical basis and practical application of ethics in human subjects research. Risks to humans participating in research must be minimized; that is, subjects must be offered protection from risks. Vulnerable subjects require additional protections.
Methods: This paper reviews the ethical and conceptual basis of vulnerability within the context of human subjects research and suggests a basic approach that institutional review boards (IRBs) can use when considering if the research includes adequate safeguards to protect the rights and welfare of subjects who are likely to be vulnerable.
Results: Two distinct approaches to describing the features that make a person vulnerable are the categorical approach and the contextual approach. The categorical approach considers certain groups or populations as vulnerable. This approach is not optimal because it does not address persons with multiple vulnerabilities, does not account for variation in the degree of vulnerability within the group based on individual characteristics, and classifies certain persons as vulnerable rather than identifying situations in which individuals might be considered vulnerable. The alternate contextual approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of the nature of the vulnerability than the categorical approach and therefore a more focused approach to safeguards. The IRB is charged with ensuring that additional safeguards to protect the rights and welfare of subjects who are likely to be vulnerable are included in the study under review. To make this determination, the IRB might be advised to consider two questions: (1) is inclusion necessary? and (2) if so, are safeguards adequate?
Conclusion: Although vulnerability is often presented as a yes/no consequence related to some characteristic of a group, a more accurate approach is to consider vulnerability as occurring along a spectrum of seriousness and as a consequence of situations and context. With this idea in mind, investigators and IRBs are advised to take a stepwise approach to determining if the study meets the regulatory and ethical admonition to ensure that safeguards protect the rights and welfare of vulnerable subjects.
We present a review of 80 papers representing efforts to support participation in democratic decision-making mostly related to local or national governments. The papers were published in leading human–computer interaction (SIGCHI conferences) venues. Most of this literature represents attempts to support assembly- oriented participation, wherein decisions are made through discussion, although referendum-type participation, involving decision-making based on voting, has gained attention too. Primarily, those papers addressing agenda-setting have examined organization-led forms, in which the agenda is controlled by those issuing the call for participation. Accordingly, the authors call for more research into support for representative models and participant-driven agenda-setting. Furthermore, the literature review pinpoints areas wherein further interdisciplinary engagement may be expected to improve research quality: in political science, HCI-informed methods and new ways of using physical input in participation merit more research, while, from the HCI side, cultivating closer relationships with political science concepts such as democratic innovations and calculus of voting could encourage reconsideration of the research foci. These observations speak to the benefits of a new research agenda for human–computer interaction research, involving different forms of participation, most importantly to address lack of engagement under the representative model of participation. Furthermore, in light of these findings, the paper discusses what type of interdisciplinary research is viable in the HCI field today and how political science and HCI scholars could usefully collaborate.
As digitalization pervades diverse types of workplaces, an increasing part of employees’ work is with interactive technologies. Therefore, user experience of the technologies at work has an important influence to the job satisfaction, work motivation, and employee wellbeing. However, previous research on these topics rarely considers the digitalized work processes and the tools used at work. This workshop invites experts studying work with digital technologies to discuss the impact of these kind of tools on employee wellbeing. The UX@Work workshop aims to build a research agenda for tackling a multitude of overlooked research topics in this area.
There is a growing body of literature in HCI examining the intersection between policymaking and technology research. However, what it means to engage in policymaking in our field, or the ways in which evidence from HCI studies is translated into policy, is not well understood. We report on interviews with 11 participants working at the intersection of technology research and policymaking. Analysis of this data highlights how evidence is understood and made sense of in policymaking processes, what forms of evidence are privileged over others, and the work that researchers engage in to meaningfully communicate their work to policymaking audiences. We discuss how our findings pose challenges for certain traditions of research in HCI, yet also open up new policy opportunities for those engaging in more speculative research practices. We conclude by discussing three ways forward that the HCI community can explore to increase engagement with policymaking contexts. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Field studies.
This study aims to understand how information in design briefs affects the creativity of design outcomes. We tested this during a Collaborative Sketching (C-Sketch) ideation exercise with first-year undergraduate student designers. We focus on four types of stimuli - quantitative requirements, a visual example (video), a physical example, and contextual information - and we measure creativity according to three metrics – novelty, appropriateness, and usability with either the participants’ gender or the gender diversity of the participants’ groups. The findings suggest that the main effect of providing a video example results in high appropriateness and usability scores but low novelty scores, and that physical-contextual briefs have high novelty and usability scores. In addition, we did not find any correlation between gender or gender diversity and creativity scores.
arXiv:1902.07244 [cs.SE] Context: Designing usable products is important providing a competitive edge through user satisfaction. A first step to establish or improve a usability process is to perform a process assessment. As process assessment may be costly, an alternative for organizations seeking for lighter assessments, especially small organizations, may be self-assessments. Self-assessments can be carried out by an organization on its own to assess the capability of its process. Although there are specific assessment methods to assess the usability process, none of them provides a self-assessment method, nor has been developed considering the specific characteristics of small organizations. Objective: The objective of this research is to propose a method for self-assessing the capability of the usability process in small organizations. The method consists of a usability process reference model, a measurement framework, an assessment model, and a self-assessment process supported by an online tool. Method: Based on systematic mapping studies on usability capability/maturity models and software process self-assessment methods, we identified the specific requirements of such a method. The UPCASE method was systematically developed using a multi-method approach based on the ISO/IEC TR 29110 and ISO/TR 18529 standard. The method has been applied and evaluated with respect to its reliability, usability, comprehensibility and internal consistency through two series of case studies. Results: The proposed method enables small organizations to assess their usability process. First results indicate that the method may be reliable. Feedback also indicates that the method is easy to use and understandable even for non-software process improvement experts. Conclusion: The UPCASE method is a first step to the self-assessment of the usability process in small organizations supporting the systematic establishment and improvement of the usability process contributing to the improvement of the usability of their software products.
Industry 4.0 has potential for qualitative enrichment of factory work: a more interesting working environment, greater autonomy and opportunities for self-development. A central element of Industry 4.0 is human-centricity, described as development towards Operator 4.0. Our Operator 4.0 vision includes smart factories of the future that are perfectly suited for workers with different skills, capabilities and preferences. The vision is achieved by solutions that empower the workers and engage the work community. Empowering the worker is based on adapting the factory shop floor to the skills, capabilities and needs of the worker and supporting the worker to understand and to develop his/her competence. Engaging the work community is based on tools, with which the workers can participate in designing their work and training, and share their knowledge with each other. We gathered requirements from three manufacturing companies in different industries and interviewed 44 workers in four factories in order to study their expectations and concerns related to the proposed Operator 4.0 solutions. Adaptation was considered useful both in manufacturing systems and in production planning. However, worker measuring and modelling raised many doubts within workers and also with factory management. Therefore it is important to provide early demonstrations of the ideas and to design them further with the workers in order to find acceptable and ethically sustainable ways for worker modelling. The workers would like to be more involved in the design of the work place and manufacturing processes, and they thought that participation would decrease many problems that they currently face in their work. However, there were also doubts concerning whether they really could have possibilities to impact on their work. The results show that there are clear needs for knowledge sharing and adaptive learning solutions that would support personalized competence development and learning while working. An easily accessible platform for knowledge sharing could evolve to a forum where good work practices and ways to solve problems are shared not only within the work community, but also with machine providers and other stakeholders. The interviewees saw the virtual factory as a promising platform for participatory design and training.
Personas have become an important tool for Human-Computer Interaction professionals. However, they are not immune to limits and critique, including stereotyping. We suggest that while some of the criticisms to personas are important, the use of personas is open to them in part because of an unquestioned focus on explicating user needs and goals.
Traditionally indeed, personas and the associated scenarios are created by focusing on needs and goals of the target users. This focus, while helping designers, also obscures some other potentially relevant aspects. In particular, when the goal of the product or software being designed is associated with social and political goals rather than with bringing a product to the market, it may be relevant to focus personas on political aspirations, social values and the will of personas to take action. We argue that it would be possible when producing personas (and associated scenarios too) to partially move away from representing needs and embrace personas which more explicitly represent political or social beliefs. We suggest that drawing on phenomenography will allow to achieve this. We provide empirical evidence for our position from two large-scale European projects, the first one in the area of Social Innovation and the second in the area of eParticipation.
The emergence of online digital labour platforms has been one of the major transformations in the world of work over the past decade. This report focuses on web-based platforms, wherein tasks can be outsourced by businesses and other clients through an open call to a large, flexible workforce (“crowd”), which is geographically dispersed around the world.
The report provides one of the first comparative studies of working conditions on five major microtask platforms that operate globally. It is based on an ILO survey covering 3,500 workers living in 75 countries around the world and other qualitative surveys. It documents the characteristics of crowdworkers, the type of work they perform and their motivations and perceptions towards this work, and finds both commonalities and differences between workers from the global North and global South.
The report analyses the working conditions on these micro-task platforms, which includes pay rates, work availability, work intensity, rejections and non-payment, worker communication with clients and platform operators, social protection coverage, work-life balance and workers’ prospects for future career development.
The report shows that while digital labour platforms provide a number of opportunities, there are also some drawbacks. In this context, the report reviews the different initiatives that have been put forth, including the Crowdsourcing code of conduct initiated by IG Metall and the German crowdsourcing platforms to improve working conditions. The report recommends 18 principles towards ensuring decent work on digital labour platforms.
The evaluation of research artefacts is an important step to validate research contributions. Sub-disciplines of HCI often pursue primary goals other than usability, such as Sustainable HCI (SHCI), HCI for development, or health and wellbeing. For such disciplines, established evaluation methods are not always appropriate or sufficient, and new conventions for identifying, discussing, and justifying suitable evaluation methods need to be established. In this paper, we revisit the purpose and goals of evaluation in HCI and SHCI, and elicit five key elements that can provide guidance to identifying evaluation methods for SHCI research. Our essay is meant as a starting point for discussing current and improving future evaluation practice in SHCI; we also believe it holds value for other subdisciplines in HCI that encounter similar challenges while evaluating their research.
This special interest group addresses the status quo of HCI research with regards to research practices of transparency and openness. Specifically, it discusses whether current practices are in line with the standards applied to other fields (e.g., psychology, economics, medicine). It seeks to identify current practices that are more progressive and worth communicating to other disciplines, while evaluating whether practices in other disciplines are likely to apply to HCI research constructively. Potential outcomes include: (1) a review of current HCI research policies, (2) a report on recommended practices, and (3) a replication project of key findings in HCI research.
More than a decade into Sustainable HCI (SHCI) research, the community is still struggling to converge on a shared understanding of sustainability and HCI's role in addressing it. We think this is largely a positive sign, reflective of maturity; yet, lacking a clear set of aims and metrics for sustainability continues to be the community's impediment to progressing, hence we seek to articulate a vision around which the community can productively coalesce. Drawing from recent SHCI publications, we identify commonalities that might form the basis of a shared understanding, and we show that this understanding closely aligns with the authoritative conception of a path to a sustainable future proffered by Naomi Klein in her book emphThis Changes Everything. We elaborate a set of contributions that SHCI is already making that can be unified under Klein's narrative, and compare these categories of work to those found in past surveys of the field as evidence of substantive progress in SHCI.
The growing trend of co-creation and co-design in cross-cultural design teams presents challenges for the design thinking process. We integrate two frameworks, one on reasoning patterns in design thinking, the other on the dynamic constructivist theory of culture, to propose a situation specific framework for the empirical analysis of design thinking in cross-cultural teams. We illustrate the framework with a qualitative analysis of 16 episodes of design related conversations, which are part of a design case study. The results show that cultural knowledge, either as shared by the cross-cultural team or group specific knowledge of some team members, shape the reasoning patterns in the design thinking process across all the 16 episodes. Most of the design discussions were approached by the designers as problem situations that were formulated in a backward direction, where the value to create was known first. Then the designers were using available cultural knowledge to articulate the unknown what to design (products/services) and how the design would work (the working principles of product/services). In conclusion, we demonstrate a novel approach for understanding how cultural knowledge shapes core design thinking in specific situations.
We conduct a mixed-method study to better understand the content consumption patterns of Middle Eastern social media users and to explore new ways to present online data by using automatic persona generation. First, we analyze millions of content interactions on YouTube to dynamically generate personas describing behavioral patterns of different demographic groups. Second, we analyze interview data on social media users in the Middle Eastern region to generate additional insights into the dynamically generated personas. Our findings provide insights into social media users in the Middle East, as well as present a novel methodology of using computational analysis and qualitative data enrichment to generate descriptive and culturally receptive
personas from social media audiences.
This note discusses opportunities for the HCI community to engage with environmental public policy. It draws on insights and observations made during the primary author's recent work for a policy unit at Global Affairs Canada, which is a federal ministry of the Government of Canada. During that work, the primary author identified several domains of environmental public policy that are of direct relevance to the HCI community. This note contributes a preliminary discussion of how, why, with whom, and in what capacity HCI researchers and practitioners might engage with three types of environmental public policy: climate change, waste electrical and electronic equipment, and green ICT procurement policies. This builds on existing public policy and environmental knowledge within the HCI community and responds directly to calls from some members to engage with environmental public policy.
Despite increasing interest, Sustainable HCI has been critiqued for doing too little, and perhaps also at times for doing the wrong things. Still, a field like Human-Computer Interaction should aim at being part of transforming our society into a more sustainable one. But how do we do that, and, what are we aiming for?
With this workshop, we propose that HCI should start working with the new global Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that were formally adopted by the UN in September 2015. How can Sustainable HCI be inspired by, and contribute to these goals? What should we in the field of HCI do more of, and what should we perhaps do less of? In what areas should we form partnerships in order to reach the Sustainable Development Goals and with whom should we partner?
Minority and indigenous languages have a complex relationship with contemporary communication media. Social media, in particular, provide new venues for language use and revitalization, but also subject minority languages to inhibiting technological and social pressures. The present study contributes to a better understanding of social media and language use dynamics via an analysis of a survey of Irish language users (n=617) and their sociotechnical contexts. We develop a typology of social, linguistic, and technical factors that provide a theoretical and analytical foundation for future work. A complex interplay of social and technical factors impact minority language use in social media, and we suggest potential interaction design strategies for language activists and technologists to promote more effective engagement.
This monograph lays out a discussion framework for understanding the role of human-computer interaction (HCI) in public policymaking. We take an international view, discussing potential areas for research and application, and their potential for impact. Little has been written about the intersection of HCI and public policy; existing reports typically focus on one specific policy issue or incident. To date, there has been no overarching view of the areas of existing impact and potential impact. We have begun that analysis and argue here that such a global view is needed. Our aims are to provide a solid foundation for discussion, cooperation and collaborative interaction, and to outline future programs of activity. The five sections of this report provide relevant background along with a preliminary version of what we expect to be an evolving framework. Sections 1 and 2 provides an introduction to HCI and public policy. Section 3 discusses how HCI already informs public policy, with representative examples. Section 4 discusses how public policy influences HCI and provides representative public policy areas relevant to HCI, where HCI could have even more impact in the future: (i) laws, regulations, and guidelines for HCI research, (ii) HCI research assessments, (iii) research funding, (iv) laws for interface design - accessibility and language, (v) data privacy laws and regulations, (vi) intellectual property, and (vii) laws and regulations in specific sectors. There is a striking difference between where the HCI community has had impact (Section 3) and the many areas of potential involvement (Section 4). Section 5 a framework for action by the HCI community in public policy internationally. This monograph summarizes the observations and recommendations from a daylong workshop at the CHI 2013 conference in Paris, France. The workshop invited the community's perspectives regarding the intersection of governmental policies, international and domestic standards, recent HCI research discoveries, and emergent considerations and challenges. It also incorporates contributions made after the workshop by workshop participants and by individuals who were unable to participate in the workshop but whose work and interests were highly related and relevant.
As information systems become more integrated into everyday use, people generate and store significant data through their lifetimes. Only recently have researchers and companies started to pay attention to digital legacy issues. Google has been one of the first companies to support users in planning the future of their digital assets through Google Inactive Account Manager (IAM). In this work, we present a systematic analysis of IAM and discuss how it structures users’ digital legacy decision space and deals with challenges regarding future impact of these decisions.
Digital tools are an essential part of the work environment of many civil servants working at public authorities. They should therefore follow the prevalent work environment legislation. This paper describes a method to conduct digital work environment rounds to assess the usability of digitalized work to assess work environment risks and identify improvements. The methodology used is following a participatory action research project in collaboration between users, union representatives, managers and IT experts. The case presented in this paper describes the development of the digital work environment round in collaboration with a court in Sweden. It was based on an international standard in the making and collaboratively developed and adapted to the situation at the public authority. Based on this work the public authority has now decided to make this method a part of their annual systematic work environment management and other organizations are following in their tracks.
In response to an increasingly ageing world population, the World Health Organization has recently proposed a new framework – called Healthy Ageing – to better cater to older adults’ life needs and desires. This framework calls for transdisciplinary approaches to answer the challenges and opportunities posed by an ageing society. Following this framework, it is argued that the first step to accomplishing the goals of Healthy Ageing is to address the existing biases and stereotypes in the language used for addressing ageing issues. In this paper, we propose a series of linguistic guidelines that can help improve the lexicon used to talk about ageing in design research and practice, by countering many subconscious ageist biases and stereotypes. Ageism, especially in its implicit form, is a pervasive negative force that can affect not only design practitioners and researchers but also older adults, who often use ageist language to describe themselves. The proposed guidelines would also help the “false friends” of ageing people, who may be using apparently innocuous words, terminology, and remarks to refer to ageing, without perhaps realising the underlying ageist attitudes and stereotypes hidden in their used language. Overall, we aim to foster a change in design researchers’ and practitioners’ perspective on ageing, by paving the way for a transdisciplinary discourse on designing for ageing, which could then be further expanded and explored to eliminate ageism in design.
This paper discusses the relevance of Georg Lukács’ 1923 book History and Class Consciousness in the context of digital capitalism. It does so by analysing how Lukács’ concepts of the dialectic of subject and object, ideology, reification, reified consciousness matter today in the context of big data and digital capitalism. The essay shows that History and Class Consciousness’ critique of reification, ideology, and reified consciousness remains highly topical in the age of digital capitalism and big data. Lukács’ analysis allows us to critically analyse how social media, big data, and various other Internet technologies are used as tools of reification. At the same time, Lukács reminds us that only human praxis can establish alternatives.
The current special issue of the Journal of Vocational Behavior focuses on an exploration of decent work in different national contexts. Specifically, the special issue consists of eight papers written by research teams from eight different countries. In each article, researchers developed a reliable instrument to assess decent work with clear evidence of validity within the particular cultural and national context. In addition to the quantitative analyses used to construct the scale and assess its validity, qualitative analyses revealed how individuals from those specific cultures conceptualize decent work. This collection of papers has considerable relevance in advancing research on how people experience and construct decent work in different cultural, economic, and social contexts.
Swarachakra is an Abugida text input keyboard available in 12 Indian languages. We enhanced an accessible version of Swarachakra Marathi with speech input. However, speech input could be error-prone, and especially so for languages where speech recognition technologies are new. Such errors could either slow the user down due to the need for editing, or go unnoticed, leading to high uncorrected error rates. We therefore conducted a within-subject empirical study to compare the user performance of keyboard-only input method with keyboard+speech input method with 11 novice visually impaired users. We found that keyboard+speech input was almost 11 times faster, reaching 182 characters per minute, and had a lower uncorrected error rate than the keyboard-only input, and in spite of having higher corrected error rates. Though we used a wide variety of phrases in our study, we observed that all phrases were faster on average with the keyboard+speech input method. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first empirical study to evaluate the performance of speech enabled text input in Marathi for visually impaired people. This is the highest reported speed by visually impaired users in any Indian language.
KeywordsSpeech-based text entryAccessibilityLongitudinal studyVisually impaired users
Since its inception in the early 1980's, HCI and UX have sought wider recognition and influence. Now digital transformation, a pervasive shift in the role of information technology, will offer both practitioners and researchers far more influential roles in organizations. This shift, which is taking place in industry, education and government is part of a larger shift to a global, digitally connected society.
This panel builds on the theme of CHI'19 - Weaving the Threads - through its focus on how HCI/UX, research and practice will be integrated as organizations transform into digitally-driven entities.
The panel brings together thought leaders with backgrounds in both academia and industry. With extensive audience participation, we will explore the implications of digital transformation on the roles of HCI/UX, the challenges, and the new skills needed to support a culture change and collaborate with a wider range of stakeholders.
It is our hope that this panel can become a jumping off point for future work, built on our belief that HCI/UX are vital drivers of new technologies, and of beneficial societal transformations. Through national agencies and, perhaps in time, becoming part of the UN's Sustainable Development Agenda, would position HCI/UX to fulfill its role as a key driver of both business and social transformation.
We investigate whether additional photos beyond a single headshot makes a persona profile more informative without confusing the end user. We conduct an eye-tracking experiment and qualitative interviews with digital content creators after varying the persona in photos via a single headshot, a headshot and photo of the persona in different contexts, and a headshot with photos of different people with key persona attributes the gender and age. Findings show that contextual photos provide significantly more persona information to end users; however, showing photos of multiple people engenders confusion and lowers informativeness. Also, as anticipated, viewing additional photos requires more cognitive focus, which is measured by eye-tracking metrics; these metrics are correlated with levels of informativeness and confusion. Furthermore, various interpretations of the persona based on the choice of photos are biased by the end users’ experiences and preconceptions. Concerning persona design, findings indicate that persona creators need to consider the intended persona use objectives when selecting photos and when producing persona profiles. Using contextual photos can improve informativeness, but this demands more cognitive focus from end users. Thus, adding contextual photos increases the perceived informativeness of the persona profile without being obfuscating, but multiple photos of different people do evoke confusion about the targeted persona.
Decent work is an important contemporary theme in the career field which requires strong research regarding its social impact in worker's lives. The goal of the current study is to examine the validity and reliability of the Decent Work Scale (DWS) and extend our understanding of the construct among 345 working adults in Portugal. In addition to the validated translation of the Portuguese version of the 15 item DWS with 5 factors/subscales corresponding to the 5 components of decent work, we gathered data on measures of job satisfaction, withdrawal intentions, work meaning, work engagement, burnout, and life satisfaction. The results showed the Portuguese version of the DWS displayed adequate psychometric properties. In particular, we first compared three alternative models of the DWS measurement structure: a first-order correlation model, a second-order model, and a bifactor model. The correlational and the bifactor model provided the best solution and the more parsimonious 5-factor CFA model would be preferred. Results also provide support for the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the DWS. In regards to the qualitative thematic analysis, our findings revealed that in addition to the 5 dimensions evaluated by the DWS there were other subjective dimensions of decent work experience that emerged in the writings of participants.
Personas are valuable tools to help designers get to know their users and adopt their perspectives. Yet people are complex and multiple identities have to be considered in their interplay to account for a comprehensive representation-otherwise, personas might be superficial and prone to activate stereotypes. Therefore, the way users' identities are presented in a limited set of personas is crucial to account for diversity and highlight facets which otherwise would go unnoticed. In this paper, we introduce an approach to the development of personas informed by social identity theory. The effectiveness of this approach is investigated in a qualitative study in the context of the design process for an e-learning platform for women in tech. The results suggest that considering multiple identities in the construction of personas adds value when designing technologies.
New security threats and increasing traveler flows as well as needs to enhance facilitation and security in EU external cross-border traffic have accelerated the use of novel technologies in border control. Especially at airports, automated border control, more commonly known as e-gates, have been taken widely into use. With e-gates, travelers perform border check as self-service, and the role of the border guards is to monitor or possibly also assist travelers passing the border. The introduction of automated systems significantly reshapes current ways of conducting border control from the border guard’s perspective, and automation thus requires new skills from them. Understanding the effects of automation on the work tasks and work performance of border guards requires thorough examination. This paper introduces key Human Factors issues affecting border guard and border control system performance. The results are based on literature review and field studies conducted in different border control points within six European countries. The paper presents a Human Factors framework for understanding the complex nature of the border control and different factors influencing to both border control process and border guard performance within it.
With digital wearables becoming a popular trend, this paper explores understanding user behavior and acceptance of e-textile prior to designing a textile wearable that has roots in Indian culture. The potential of traditional textile designs to become part of the emerging e-textile wearable scenario is crucial in order to preserve design traditions and also to prevent redundancy of crafts skills due to advancement of technology. In order to explore attitudes and acceptance of embedding traditional design elements by the younger generation of e-wearable adopters, a study was conducted in India, wherein prototypes were tested for their potential and acceptance of becoming interactive communication aids in the social space. A hand-embellished scarf with micro RGB LEDs named as Aster, has been prototyped with traditional motifs local to India so as to gather response for the capacity of e-textiles to aid non-verbal communication. The perception of respondents towards acceptance of Aster based on Technology Acceptance Model was analyzed. Thirty users took part in the preliminary study to understand user behavior and sixty users took part in the subsequent study pertaining to assessment of the digital wearable scarf. The analysis of responses reveal high acceptance towards textile wearables for daily interactions and improved self-expression. Usability assessment indicates positive experience of users while using Aster for daily interactions in specific social contexts. The inferences drawn from the study are encouraging and indicate optimism for inclusion of traditional craft design elements in digital textile wearables. The results provide optimism for craft makers to expand their traditional skills towards embedding electronic components thereby ensuring relevancy of traditionally skilled work without having to face work redundancy due to technology advancement.
The purpose of this study was to adapt the Decent Work Scale (DWS; Duffy et al., 2017) and extend the research on the Psychology of Working Theory (PWT; Duffy, Blustein, Diemer, & Autin, 2016) within the Swiss context. The results indicated that the Swiss French, German, and Italian versions of the DWS are valid measurements. We then tested PWT predictors and outcomes of decent work. Work volition fully mediated the negative link between unemployment, quantitative job insecurity and low education, and decent work. Perceived social class and qualitative job security predicted decent work with partial mediations through work volition. Work volition and decent work predicted job and life satisfaction. With the exception of age and social class, work volition or decent work fully mediated the relation between predictors and outcomes. Qualitative analyses on an open-ended question showed that the perceived components of decent work covered both the PWT dimensions of decent work and the needs that work is expected to satisfy. These findings highlight the pertinence of using the DWS and applying the PWT in Western and prosperous countries, such as Switzerland.
This position paper illustrates the research and development work done in the last years for understanding how to support domain experts in the rescue operations of migrants who attempt to reach Italian coasts via sea journeys on Mediterranean routes. The context, characterized by humanitarian, social, and organizational issues, presents complex challenges that can only be tackled with a multidisciplinary, participatory, and internationalized approach. The final system takes inspiration from other projects developed for different purposes but acting in similar context and according to similar socio-technical dimensions.
KeywordsParticipatory designHuman work interaction designInternational developmentDomain expertsMigrationEmergency medical services
Calls for heightened consideration of fairness and accountability in algorithmically-informed public decisions---like taxation, justice, and child protection---are now commonplace. How might designers support such human values? We interviewed 27 public sector machine learning practitioners across 5 OECD countries regarding challenges understanding and imbuing public values into their work. The results suggest a disconnect between organisational and institutional realities, constraints and needs, and those addressed by current research into usable, transparent and 'discrimination-aware' machine learning---absences likely to undermine practical initiatives unless addressed. We see design opportunities in this disconnect, such as in supporting the tracking of concept drift in secondary data sources, and in building usable transparency tools to identify risks and incorporate domain knowledge, aimed both at managers and at the 'street-level bureaucrats' on the frontlines of public service. We conclude by outlining ethical challenges and future directions for collaboration in these high-stakes applications.
We present a case study of persona development, foregrounding gender as a primary axis of design. In a participatory design process, we developed personas to represent users of a learning and networking platform for female IT professionals. These personas are a means of ensuring that the female perspective is represented in the design process. We consider the phases of persona development in the light of existing concepts to confront the gendered status quo. We then show how these considerations regarding gender were implemented in our project IT&me.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Third IFIP WG 13.6 Working Conference on Human Work Interaction Design, HWID 2012, held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2012. The 16 revised papers presented were carefully selected for inclusion in this volume. The papers reflect many different areas and address many complex and diverse work domains, ranging from medical user interfaces, work and speech interactions at elderly care facilities, greenhouse climate control, navigating through large oil industry engineering models, crisis management, library usability, and mobile probing. They have been organized in the following topical sections: work analysis: dimensions and methods; interactions, models and approaches; and evaluations, interactions and applications.
Human Work Interaction Design (HWID) studies the integration of work analysis and interaction design methods to foster new strategies aimed at designing systems that may effectively and efficiently change the way people work. Pervasive technologies and smart places deeply influence traditional physical boundaries and operational modes, leading to important changes in work practice. The goal of this paper is to provide the basis for an improved co-operation and mutual inspiration among public employees by using End-User Development (EUD). EUD in the e-Government context provides non-professional software developers with methods, techniques, and tools for configuring services that citizens can use to interact with public offices. The paper describes how, by using EUD-enabled tools, the work practice of the public staff changes, and how this transformation allows public employees with limited technical background to create services according to their expertise and expectations, and to share them.
Understanding users becomes increasingly complicated when we grapple with various overlapping attributes of an individual's identity. In this paper we introduce intersectionality as a framework for engaging with the complexity of users' "and authors" "identities", and situating these identities in relation to their contextual surroundings. We conducted a meta-review of identity representation in the CHI proceedings, collecting a corpus of 140 manuscripts on gender, ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality published between 1982-2016. Drawing on this corpus, we analyze how identity is constructed and represented in CHI research to examine intersectionality in a human-computer interaction (HCI) context. We find that previous identity-focused research tends to analyze one facet of identity at a time. Further, research on ethnicity and race lags behind research on gender and socio-economic class. We conclude this paper with recommendations for incorporating intersectionality in HCI research broadly, encouraging clear reporting of context and demographic information, inclusion of author disclosures, and deeper engagement with identity complexities.
Sustainability has been a major topic of discussion over the last couple of years. Project management is also a discipline that is starting to focus on sustainability, but the focus is more on the environmental aspect of the project itself. Information systems (IS) projects do not have such a major impact on the environment as construction and engineering projects do. There is currently little or no knowledge about sustainability within the IS domain and whether sustainability is incorporated. A structured questionnaire was adapted based on previous studies and circulated to the project management community. A total of 1099 responses were received. The responses covered all industries and for the purpose of this article, 387 IS projects (35.2% of the total projects) were analysed. The objective of the study was to determine the level of capability regarding sustainability. Determining sustainability project management capability provides insight into how project managers as well as organisations are incorporating sustainability. The analysis indicates that the focus is on the economic dimension of sustainability. The results also highlight the complete lack of integrating social and environmental sustainability into project management. The research highlights that sustainability in business or IS projects is not being considered. The second contribution is more of a philosophical nature. Exploratory factor analysis indicates that there should be five dimensions when it comes to IS project management instead of the usual three.
A large majority of articles published at prominent HCI venues such as CHI and CSCW reports on studies with WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) participants, ignoring that the results might not apply to other subject populations. This workshop aims to have the following two main outcomes: (1) A list of major principles that HCI researchers often build on and that are unlikely to apply to users in other countries and cultures. (2) An action plan that describes how we can extend these previous findings, such as by collaborating across countries and cultures, conducting large-scale online experiments, or creating a culture of replications and extensions with more diverse subject populations. Furthermore, the workshop aims to establish an interest group with the goal to improve the external validity of HCI research and to inform the design of further research studies in this area.
Digital assets are produced in large scale by technology users, especially after the advent of the Internet. This paper aims to analyze Brazilian users’ experience with Google Inactive Accounts, under technical, legal and cultural perspectives. Regarding legal aspects, Brazilian laws are still inceptive. Some projects are being designed or analyzed by governmental institutions, and the right to oblivion is one of the main controversial points. The experiment was part of an exploratory research by means of questionnaires, which were answered by web software engineers, who are users of that application too. The answers were organized into four main categories: (a) inheritance rights; (b) the Right to be Forgotten; (c) temporal contact information; and (d) technical stalemates. All those data were analyzed according to a literature review on technical and legal issues regarding death, legacy and technology, so as to better understand the advantages and disadvantages of the options provided by Google Inactive Accounts.