Lecturer: Jan Smeddinck
Fields: Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, User Experience, Embodied Interaction, Human-AI Interaction, Tangible Interaction, Natural User Interfaces, Reality-Based Interaction, Multimodal Interaction, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Digital Health
Content
With the realization of Weiser’s vision (Weiser, 1991) and computing becoming truly ubiquitous, pervading application areas including education, health, manufacturing, and many more, human-computer interaction (HCI) – or more generally speaking human-technology interaction – is more relevant than ever. Concepts that arguably originated in the melting-pot of HCI research have been adopted in many areas outside of research labs, including the formation of dedicated professional occupations, e.g. in user experience or interaction design.
Looking at our co-existence and co-evolution with ubiquitous and pervasive technologies both at work and in our private lives, HCI as a research field addresses two key questions:
I) How do we create/make/design/implement technologies that work well (or better) for people?
and
II) What does it do to people (individuals and groups) to be living and working so closely with these technologies?
Clearly this necessitates in interdisciplinary angle that sits at the heart of HCI and resonates well with the IK interdisciplinary college in combining foundations from computing, psychology, sociology and further fields with technology and societal developments.
Across three sessions, the course will provide considerations based on lecturing, discussion and practical elements around human-technology interaction concerning a) minds, b) bodies) and c) things, emphasizing the dynamics of experience that arise when using interactive systems.
These elements are arguably important to consider as we turn to recognize that technological progress increasingly does not only concern technological artifacts separately from (or independently of) human beings as the other main subject of study in HCI. Following on ideas of digital tools as extensions of our bodies (McLuhan & Lapham, 1994), recent developments in genetics, implanted technologies and brain-computer interfaces clearly indicate the relevance of beginning to understand humans as augmented beings in complex – often quite literally integrated (Mueller et al., 2020) and ever more rapidly changing – interplay with technologies. In parallel, agent systems and conversational interfaces are becoming more commonplace and frequent interaction partners, enabled by considerable advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence. In the light of the innate human tendency to anthropomorphize, this clearly warrants approaches to HCI development and research that are deeply informed by psychological and sociological theory and methodology. These observations indicate important directions for further socio-digital research in exciting emerging avenues for HCI, particularly around application areas such as digital health and wellbeing, and with stakeholder groups who could greatly benefit from enabling and empowering human-augmentation and technologies, such as older adults. However, in the light of the already considerably challenging impact of relatively loosely coupled technologies, such as social media consumed largely through hand-held personal devices, these developments must also be studied and understood with a critical perspective on the potential dangers and entailing radical societal changes. How to sustain and improve inclusive and equitable technology design in such complex scenarios is an important research motif.
Literature
- General Reading:
- Dix, A., Finlay, J., Abowd, G. D., & Beale, R. (2003). Human-Computer Interaction (3 edition). Prentice Hall.
- Dourish, P. (2001). Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. The MIT Press.
- Höök, K. (2018). Designing with the Body: Somaesthetic Interaction Design. The MIT Press.
- Moggridge, B. (2006). Designing Interactions. MIT Press.
- Sharp, H., Preece, J., & Rogers, Y. (2019). Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction (5th edition). John Wiley & Sons.
- https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-glossary-of-human-computer-interaction/tangible-interaction
- Cited in course description:
- McLuhan, M., & Lapham, L. H. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Reprint edition). The MIT Press.
- Mueller, F. F., Lopes, P., Strohmeier, P., Ju, W., Seim, C., Weigel, M., Nanayakkara, S., Obrist, M., Li, Z., Delfa, J., Nishida, J., Gerber, E. M., Svanaes, D., Grudin, J., Greuter, S., Kunze, K., Erickson, T., Greenspan, S., Inami, M., … Maes, P. (2020). Next Steps for Human-Computer Integration. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376242
- Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American, 265(3), 94–104.
- Further reading:
- Buolamwini, J., & Gebru, T. (2018). Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification. Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, 77–91. https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html
- Qian Yang, Aaron Steinfeld, Carolyn Rosé, & John Zimmerman. (2020). Re-examining Whether, Why, and How Human-AI Interaction Is Uniquely Difficult to Design. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376301
Lecturer
Jan Smeddinck is currently a Principal Investigator at – and the Co-Director of – the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital Health and Prevention (LBI-DHP) in Salzburg, Austria. For the LBI-DHP, he leads research programme lines on digital health applications and data analytics. Prior to this appointment he was a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Digital Health at Open Lab and the School of Computing at Newcastle University in the UK to which he retains a visiting association. He also spent one year as a postdoc visiting research scholar at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley and his PhD alma mater is the TZI Digital Media Lab at the University of Bremen in Germany. Building on his background in interaction design, serious games, web technologies, human computation, machine learning, and visual effects, he has found a home in the research field of human-computer interaction (HCI) research with a focus on digital health.
Affiliation: Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital Health and Prevention & Open Lab, Newcastle University
Homepage: https://smeddinck.com/ and https://dhp.lbg.ac.at/