designing the digital future slides
TRANSCRIPT
AGENDA LUNCH Table 1
Sayan Bandyabadhyay • grad student in Computer Science sayan• [email protected] Nordby• Architect in Iowa City • [email protected] Clegg• University of Maryland College of Ed/College of information studies • [email protected] Thompson• from IC and Coralville, child advocate looking to collaborate with
others Momina Tabish• Computer science PhD • [email protected]
Definitions
I asked for a definition of Human Computer Interaction, since it is so new to me, and this is how Tammy and Sayan explained it to me – technology design with people at the forefront of that design, emphasis on design, emphasis on process rather than product, designs that make the human as comfortable with the technology as possible • Sayan provides an example of the slow evolution of computer
displays/monitors over time: we started with no display at all, then moved on to a basic display once we realized it was good to be able to see what you were doing while you were doing. As technology became more advanced we were able to make those displays better and easier to use. Now we are even starting to think about how displays might work for people who are visually impaired – adding texture to output so that displays can be used with touch and sound
Where do people’s interests at your table
connect with informatics or HCI?• Sayan: math and HCI – references second session in 10:45am
block - the way that the speakers approach the technology through a human perspective, there is an emotion that is involved in this that doesn’t always come through when working through technology, this might be helpful in thinking about how math could be more human based
• Rodney: thinking about design and technology (including the limitation of technology) opens up the whole concept of having a problem and finding a solution. HCI has to do with questions, how you ask questions and the questions you come up with while trying to resolve your problems, this will be useful in any kind of problem solving
• Grant observes that HCI is very aware of audience. Since audience shapes what we talk about, we might learn from HCI’s audience awareness. He notes connecting with human side of computing is something architectural software does to make it easier for experts to show work to non-experts
Where do work/teaching areas intersect at your table?
Is there potential for collaboration?• Grant (architect) explains that in his work every day is
about communication, uses modeling programs to help visualize products and data, make knowledge accessible to others, empowering people to make decisions. This connects with a central tenant of other areas of interest
• Rachel (computer science, joined our group later, did not get full name) thought the interdisciplinary class that Meena and H.S. presented on this morning was interesting and surprising, is starting to think about how this might be possible in her program
• Grant asks Tammy how interdisciplinary programs create focused research projects and research programs. Tammy explains that they have weekly brown bags where people give research talks. Additionally, a yearly symposium helps to draw people together
What would you like to see happen at UI in
informatics and/or HCI next year? In 5 or 10 years?• Grant – make technology more accessible for people who
don’t like code, lower some of the technological barriers. Notes that grasshopper has opened some doors to people who don’t know code. Enable a more DIY approach!
• Tammy would like to see more diversity in HCI research and education, a continued/greater focus on making impactful tools that change the world in a lasting way. More tools that might appeal to different groups of people
• (another student who joined later and whose name I did not catch) wants to see better voice recognition tools that might recognize the emotional and lead to better search parameters
What would you like to see happen at UI in
informatics and/or HCI next year? In 5 or 10
years?• Sayan would like to see not just the advancement of
technology, but greater accessibility for everyone and anyone (for example, the blind - more intuitive touch screens/not just flat smooth touch screens)
• Rodney – would like to see conferences like this include more people from the community and especially children, use it for a networking opportunity amongst kids. Also, more questions! A little bit of preaching to the choir here, we should pose more questions about what we are trying to accomplish
Overall, we all seem to want more space for people who don’t yet have a voice in this conversation
Other notesRodney reads his proposal for web-based tools that kids can use to promote peace and justice
Ideally, a safe place online that will help empower kids to become better adults by giving them more opportunity to define their own terms for a better future
This leads to an interesting conversation about how we need to harness people’s natural tendencies to make technologies more powerful i.e. if we want to appeal to kids, design a program to be more game-like
Tammy notes that a teenager (Jake Andraka) has done some monumentally powerful stuff in HCI and is worth looking to as an example of young people in HCI
Other NotesGreat quote from Grant about having a bunch of non-experts at the table and why that is useful: “That’s why you involve an outside voice, to ask the really dumb [seemingly straightforward] questions that everyone else forgot to ask”.
Its important to create space to fail. Recognize that failure can be awesome because it leads to creative solutions, greater awareness of the problem, etc. We all need the freedom to fail!
AGENDA LUNCH Table 2
• Jen Shook; English, UICB; [email protected]
• Elizabeth Deifell; Second Language Acquisition; [email protected]
• Lisa Anthony; UF/ Comp Sci; [email protected]
• Jon Winet; Art/Humanities; [email protected] Director for Digital Arts and Humanitieso Experimental literature; using Twitter as the platform
• Jacki Rand; History; [email protected] Faculty advisor for History Core; graduate student led
Where do people’s interests at your table connect
with informatics or HCI?• What brought grad students to the symposium?
o Elizabeth: looking at HCI; interdisciplinary dissertation. Really tiny dataset; naturalistic and complex; justify a small n; justify legitimacy; bridge education and communication studies; good to get interdisciplinary perspective• Post-structuralist; non-Gosseian statistics• Using technology combined with close observation ; precision is lost
o Lisa: small n is no problem in HCI; qualitatively; you don’t have to justify in HCI; in an HCI study, 20-30 is a lot
o Depends on how representative you’re trying to geto Point of connection with HCI: methodologies; small n and open to exploratory
studies ; when publish in own communitieso Qualitative but still has points of percentages; percentages as a structure that
justify how to dig into that; case studies; digging into the story behind the numbers
• Jon: o UI: names, dates database; 99,000 names; 64 incomplete columns of data and
second project looking at rich literature of Iowa City; narrative as central point of research; all through multimedia narrative
Where do work/teaching areas intersect at your
table? Is there potential for collaboration?• Elizabeth: to Jackie: language, space
o Talk from Univ. of Oregan; place-oriented game; layers o You walk past a certain place you can watch a video etc.o Jackie: tribal people do this but don’t have the same
resources; tribal prioirities; concerns about what’s happening in this vacuum
o “It’s just amazing what a few hundred miles will do to a people” • Re-enactments• Interventions
o Jon: worked in Silicon Valley in the 90s; non-traditional uses of existing technologies; HistoryCore: AINIS; incubator; experimentations• Last minute decided to teach course as an object
based space • Want to be a “change agent” in the dept • Classroom in anthropologist dept; everything based
in real research; didn’t look at object until week 8 ; context being built the whole time
What would you like to see happen at UI in
informatics and/or HCI next year? In 5 or 10 years?• Jacki: course release on HistoryCore• More collaboration between tech and arts and humanities;
more collab between arts and humanities; public piece• Jen: Hard to find research assistantships when you’re
teaching; digital humanities work; Informatics• Jacki: administration has to reflect and show commitment;
team teaching problem areas o Transnational feminism; diaspora; more efficient
Collaboration not challenges but opportunities ; you have to have collaboration for HCI
AGENDA LUNCH Table 3
• Lindsay Mattock, LIS [email protected]• Janet Davis, Computer Science, Grinnell
[email protected]• Jean Finlay, Journalism/Education
[email protected]• Prakash Nadkarni, Iowa, healthcare
[email protected]• David Eichmann, SLIS
Where do people’s interests at your table
connect with informatics or HCI?• JD – HCI researcher, potential interconnect to
Grinnell Mellon proposal• PN – medication reconciliation example• Shared interest in usability testing• JF – institutional Web site redesign – who is the
audience and how are they being served?o Administrators interested in serving a lot of datao Practice-base experience as life cycle drivero Utility of digital signage in information disseminationo Balancing scarce resources against equal access to limited bandwidth
channels
Where do work/teaching areas intersect at your
table? Is there potential for collaboration?• Institutional outreach/engagement juxtaposed
with design principles / information architecture• How to craft a message for dissemination• How relevant are our existing conceptualizations
of use cases for information systems, archives, etc.?o Are new approaches to constructing use cases required? (user models,
cultural sensitivities, …)
• “digital repatriation”• Cultural informed consent
o Differences in the scope of forgetting
What would you like to see happen at UI in
informatics and/or HCI next year? In 5 or 10 years?• Inter-institutional collaboration enabled (e.g.,
Grinnell Mellon proposal)• More collaboration and discussion about
information in the public sphereo How do we train our students and ourselves to evaluate those data
critically?
• Data literacy enhancing information literacyo Disciplinary distinctions in acceptable levels of literacy
AGENDA LUNCH Table 4
• Joe Kearney – Associate Dean, CLAS, Comp Sci• Dan Reed – OVPRED, Computer Science, UI• Celine Latulipe - Creativity, supporting the arts,
dance, UNC-Charlotte• May Beth Rosson - Gender, science, public access,
Dean of iSchool, Penn State• Ron Wakkary - Design practice, SFU• Juan Carlo Hourcade – Computer Science, UI• Tom Keegan - Libraries, Rhetoric, UI• Teresa Mangum – Gender, Women's, Sexuality
Studies, Director, Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, UI
Where do people’s interests at your table connect
with informatics or HCI?• Traditional connections to Libraries and then crossover to
business, engineering, etc. to the point where "everything looks like HCI."
• The College "is the glue" between units within institutions.• Strong desire to see data visualization incorporated into
the curriculum: as both low-grade intro level course content and higher-level courses tailored to that focus.
• Informatics as a new "literacy." Do we teaching it that way at the undergraduate and graduate level across disciplines?
• How do we de-silo the institution and get credit for teaching transdepartmental courses?
Where do work/teaching areas intersect at your
table? Is there potential for collaboration?• Can business schools, computers science departments, etc.
be leveraged to provide a service to institutions more broadly (as a certificate or some other credential)?
• Do institutions address the interdisciplinary nature of informatics in research and pedagogical structures?
• Do or can universities dynamically change their administrative structures to accommodate new initiatives?
• Can we see undergraduate education and faculty research as a two-sided means of encouraging uptake of new practices, approaches.
What would you like to see happen at UI in
informatics and/or HCI next year? In 5 or 10 years?• Encouragement of (informatics) collaboration across
disciplines free from administrative structures that silo disciplines.
• Uptake of an informatics/digital skillset across the disciplines.
• Scalable practice-oriented courses within majors that move from emphasizing applied knowledge to closer study of long histories supporting the discipline.
• Get departments in conversation about best practices.
AGENDA LUNCH Table 5
• Katie Walden, American Studies and Sports Studies, [email protected]
• Luiza Pantoja, Informatics and Information Science,
[email protected] • Katie Wetzel, English Literature, [email protected] • Eric Simpson, Department of English at Grinnel,
• Lisa Nathan, Library, Archival, and Information Sciences, University of British Columbia,
• Elena Osinsky, Language, Literature, and Culture; Informatics,
Education, [email protected]
Where do people’s interests at your table
connect with informatics or HCI?• We are concerned with…
o Pedagogy and work within the classroom (Literature, Rhetoric, Informatics, Anthropology, sociology, education classrooms)
o Accessibility of information and skillso Imagined memory of place
• We see connections with HCI occurring througho The demand at Grinnell for Public Digital Humanities, o Collaborating between Institutions (Grinnell/UI)
Where do work/teaching areas intersect at your
table? Is there potential for collaboration?• Collaboration between Grinnell and UI Public
Digital Humanities• Incorporate Critical Thinking into Projects: Join
Reflection or Constructive Critique with Building• Our various areas offer alternative (sometimes
more abstract) solutions to one another that deal with the temporal and skills-based problems we encounter in the digital humanities curriculum
What would you like to see happen at UI in
informatics and/or HCI next year? In 5 or 10 years?
• We’re interested in establishing skills “bootcamps” and seminars to engage undergraduates, graduates and faculty between various local institutions
• We’d like to see HCI and UI informatics deal with the temporal problems of reconciling skill building and complex course projects with the academic calendar
• These various avenues of thought might help reconciling humanities academic work with the public, making it more accessible or relevant.