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Workshop Call for Papers.
Quality Value(s) and Choice: Exploring Deeper Outcomes for HCI Products
To run on Sunday 4th April 2005, at CHI 2005, Portland, Oregon www.chi2005.org
Organisers.
Ann Light (Usability News)
Peter J Wild (University of Bath)
Andy Dearden (Sheffield Hallam University)
Michael Muller (IBM Watson Research Center)
The Topic:
This workshop grows out of issues raised at the HCI2004 panel on "Values in HCI". In that panel, a tension was raised between dispassionately providing support to the design of products and services, regardless of the intended use, and the social responsibility of the scientist. Consequently, both personal values and the value that good analysis can bring to design were discussed. The technical challenges of HCI are great. However, it is a reasonable assertion that many members of the HCI community feel a need to do good for the world. But what kind of "good", and in whose definition of "the world"? We feel that this implicit motivation has received too little explicit attention with HCI. This workshop will give centre stage to values: both the values that motivate the direction of our work and the value that we seek to deliver.
Sometimes it seems the only driving force behind HCI work is "to make better products", where the definitions of what "good" and "better" come directly from the industries that will then market and sell these products. In turn this notion of "better" carries the burden of commercial concerns. "Better" implies creating more market share, and in turn profit, for a company. Explicitly or implicitly, many in the HCI community work to create profit for others, but have no say in how this profit is generated or what the wider effects of this are. Is this profit-as-proof-of-value philosophy the only way we have to think about value? How far is this aspect dominant because we operate in a research world where funding hinges on business sense and appeal to commercial partners?
In the last few years there has been a shift away from usability as a purely objective property of the product to its impact on quality and from this to investigating issues relating to value, values, and ethical aspects of HCI.
A workshop at CHI 2004, demonstrated that the more reflective areas of HCI theory and practice ask what underpins the projects we select to pursue, the methods chosen to progress them, and our choice as to how we present our findings. But HCI is a vast multi-disciplinary field. Theory itself is often implicit, value and values can be even more obscured. Here we call to account a range of approaches and ask about intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
With regards to choice, our concern can turn to scenarios of use generally involving two or more persons or groups of users or interested parties, with opposing interests in a particular piece of HCI design or technology. For example, when we consider parental supervision software for web surfing, do we think of this kind of technology and design differently, if the child in question is a teen: with an addiction risk; or a teen who is growing up lesbian or gay in a religious fundamentalist family? For a second example, when we think about degrees of control in workflow systems, do we think of this kind of technology and design differently, if the workflow supports hospital informatics, or supports the production of environmental impact reports?
How do we go beyond the statement "Well it all depends on context" to be able to guide users, designers and the HCI discipline as a whole? The workshop will offer participants the chance to reflect on the variety of approaches that inform HCI practice, from the purported objectivity of hard science to the more reflective thinking of sociological and humanities based methodology.
Some of the preliminary issues we raise are:
:- What is the role of values and value in design?
:- What values do the interdisciplinary components involved in the study of HCI have in common?
:- What techniques can be applied to enable the exploration of values within design practice?
:- How is true commitment to people expressed in the theory and methods we employ?
:- Are user centred approaches user centred enough, is focus on users and their tasks enough to drive design for quality, value and choice?
:- Is there always a true concern for the people in the system? Or is this a means to an end, a commercially better product?
:- Is our discussion of "user centered approaches", inclusive of wider stakeholders?
:- Can traditional approaches be adapted to encompass concerns raised here and in the workshop?
Topic Relevance:
The workshop directly follows up a panel at HCI 2004 focusing on values in HCI , and less directly follows a CHI 2004 workshop on "reflective HCI". It also builds on the work looking at social responsibility, ethics, designing for a civil society, justice, politics in participatory design, value sensitive design, value driven software engineering and social capital.
Goals:
The following are goals of the workshop:
1) to explore in more depth issues relating to quality, value, values and ethics;
2) to bring together people from different disciplines and different moral philosophies to discuss and address these issues;
3) to bring together researchers and practitioners to better inform both research and practice and the exchanges between them;
4) To stimulate a wider debate and reflection about values within the CHI community at large.
Structure and Organization:
The workshop will provide a forum for those interested in the issues of quality, value and choice and related issues of ethics and values to interact and discuss relevant issues. This will be undertaken through the following structure. The workshop will break down into two parts. The morning session will be taken up by 15-minutes presentations of submitted position papers. Each paper will have a follow on question and answer period. The afternoon will be given over to discussion. The discussion session will draw on a number or real scenarios which will be distributed prior to the workshop.
Expected Participants:
The workshop will provide a forum for researchers and practitioners interested in quality, value, values and ethical aspects of HCI to present their work and ideas. Researchers would provide views of their own and their respective discipline's contribution to understanding of the workshop themes. Practitioners would provide insights and scenarios from "real world" experiences.
Dissemination Of Results:
A poster based on the ideas generated in the workshop, in addition to writing up a summary for the SIGCHI Bulletin. If enough interest is garnered from the participants, we will explore alternatives such as a special journal issue focused on Quality, Value and Choice. Precedents for this include the proposers previous workshop related special issues in Interacting with Computers, TOCHI and HCI.
Participation:
Position papers of between 4 and 6 pages in length should be submitted to Peter Wild (details below)
Participant submission deadline: January 3rd, 2005
Notice of participant acceptance: January 31st, 2005
Contact Information.
The main person to contact is
Peter Wild,
[log in to unmask]
University of Bath,
Bath
BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
Workshop URL: http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~pwild/workshops/QVC
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