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At CHI 97, thirteen researchers and practitioners met to consider new opportunities in HCI research and practice. Our strategy in considering these new opportunities was simple: Find new HCI challenges of both practical and theoretical value through examining unmet human needs and social responsibilities. We believe that these challenges will result in important progress, not only for the human needs in question, but more fundamentally for the fields of HCI. For a fuller development of this strategy, see [1].
In the interests of space, this report of our work will be brief and thematic, rather than detailed and bibliographic. In this short but public report, we call attention to critical questions that we hope other HCI professionals will recognize as significant and rich in possibility for theoretical and methodological progress. Our answers to those questions are too lengthy to appear here. For those answers and for more detailed treatments, we encourage the reader to browse the position papers (listed at the end) and related texts at the workshop's website (see "For More Information," below). Some of the bibliographic background of these efforts may also be found in a companion paper in the CHI 97 Proceedings [1].
Contributions to the workshop were diverse, representing many currents of thought in the various CHI communities. We begin our report with one of several possible organizations of the themes in the position papers and in our discussions. We continue a brief overview of implications for theory and practice in HCI. We conclude with an invitation to the readers to participate in this work.
One of the workshop organizers has summarized the themes of the workshop as follows. We note that other members of the workshop might have organized the themes in a different way.
We shared our concerns for trends in current technology development and HCI work that are troubling to some or all of us. Our list here is intended to be inclusive. Some members of the workshop (including the reporters for the workshop) might disagree with one or more items on this list.
Many members of the workshop were concerned with computer technologies as enablers of anti-social outcomes. Some of these outcomes included: internet addiction; the mediation of experience via technology; the creation of artificial needs; the increasingly intimate and pervasive ways that technologies are entering and affecting our lives; the feeling by some that they are becoming the captives of their technologies; and the general increase in the pace and demands of work life and interpersonal life. Some members of the workshop saw the following factors as driving these trends: uncritical adoption of technology as progress; the claims that technological impacts upon society are necessarily value-neutral; and the substitution of bandwidth for content as the value in communication. Many members of the workshop were concerned with the relatively uncritical acceptance of technologies and technological impacts upon human and social processes.
In the fields of HCI, some members of the workshop were troubled by the following issues: measurement strategies that emphasize questionable or incomplete human values; inattention to cultural differences among users; the verbal privilege that often makes HCI professionals more organizationally powerful than users; and the marginality of the field of HCI in software product cycles.
Many members of the workshop shared a concern for the roles of HCI and technologies in supporting or undermining democracy and democratic processes.
Some of the members of the workshop were particularly concerned with issues of access: Who has access to technologies and information? What social factors -- especially economic factors -- expand or constrain people's access? How do the meaning, experience, and definition of access vary across persons and groups that may be characterized by differences in income, social power, influence, and disability status? Are there "universal" needs in access, or are people's needs in access defined largely through group and individual identity or other issues? Who in society is held accountable for access, and what are the consequences upon them of differences in access? Who benefits from equality of access? from inequality of access? How do the issues around access change for institutional vs. consumer usage and adoption?
In keeping with some of the themes described above, many of the members of the workshop were concerned with the relationships among HCI, technologies, and human diversities (1) in both cultural and individual areas: How can HCI support greater and more sensitive attention to cultural differences? How can HCI describe, legitimize, and support the diversities of human knowledges and human ways of knowing? How can designs be made more malleable to individuals' and groups' needs? How can design support the specific needs for communication and for privacy of various human individuals and groups? How can we discover, represent, and advocate special needs of at-risk groups and individuals?
Many members of the workshop shared the general concerns over organizational power of HCI as a discipline, and HCI workers as members of organizations. On the one hand, HCI is often marginalized in academic programs and in computer industry organizations. On the other hand, HCI professionals often have more power to speak, to be heard, and to affect technologies than do their users. Some members of the workshop asked: What should be the responsibilities of HCI professionals? What responsibilities are HCI professionals willing to accept? Where in the analysis or design or development or testing process can we leverage issues of human needs and social responsibility? And perhaps most troubling: If HCI professionals became more powerful in their organizations, what existing problems might be improved? what new problems might be introduced?
Many members of the workshop were concerned with how HCI professionals give voice to human needs in their daily work: How do we make ourselves effective voices for people? What are the dimensions of effectiveness? How do our choices of criteria and measurement strategies influence our outcomes? What conceptual and/or political processes can help to guide our selection of criteria and measurement strategies that inform us about the core human issues that are most important to our users?
How do we make visible the work that people do, and the diversities among persons and among groups? How do standards support and disrupt our support for human diversities? What processes in research and design can support human diversities?
These questions can and should be answered through a rich, interdisciplinary exploration. We look forward to theories that probe the intersections among two broad sets of perspectives:
We hope to see a dialogue between cognitive models and disability access -- not for the purpose of prescriptive or proscriptive interface designs, but with the hopes of opening new spaces for individuals to create new accommodations - and we hope to see an expansion of concepts of disability access into access across many types of barriers, for many groups of persons. Much of this work must address issues of particular cultures and languages among groups which are nominally parts of a more global, generic society. (2) We hope to see a searching discussion of types of measurements that can address those aspects of human needs and social responsibility that are most important to us -- including theories to support the new measurements.
Much of HCI has operated as a form of Enlightenment science, in which a scientific or engineering elite has legislated generalized solutions to other people's problems. We hope to see far more attention to a robust combination of (a) theories and practices around diversity and difference, with a consequent concern for (b) whether generalized solutions meet particular needs. We believe that the application of those theories to technological (or other) solutions will require (c) theories and practices of people contributing directly to the solutions to their problems, as part of (d) a more general enhancement of democratic processes throughout work, technology, and society. We believe that part of this work for the field of HCI will involve questioning our own power and the sources of our own authority, including some of our techno-centric or progress-implicit visions of the future. We hope that this work for our field will result in a more democratic sharing of power -- power-with rather than power-over -- in which we both give and borrow power with people unlike ourselves.
This report can only suggest the rich opportunities in theory and practice that can be addressed through our heuristic of looking for significant and attractive HCI problems in areas of human needs and social responsibility. We encourage the interested reader to examine our workshop materials more carefully, at the web site described below.
We would like to think of this workshop as opening a space for dialogue in CHI. For an initial contribution to that dialogue, we believe that the questioning tone of much of this report is appropriate: Questions open up new possibilities. Questioning the questions can lead us to reflect on whether we now have -- or someday might have -- or should have -- answers -- and when? Questioning the questions can also help us think about whom we might work with, to find those answers. We hope that these questions will stimulate a broader discussion among all members of the HCI community. We offer our own answers in our position papers (see below). We look forward to a continuation of this dialogue that includes both answers to these questions and new areas for more questions.
We hope to continue our discussion of these questions and answers in an electronic forum. For details about the forum, a full list of workshop contributors and their co-authors (including contact information), position papers, and working group reports, see the web version of this report at http://www.acm.org/sigchi/bulletin/1998.2/muller.html, or contact the first author via mullerm@acm.org.
Shannon Ford: Cultural Sustainability and Human-Computer Interaction Research
Batya Friedman: Value-Sensitive Design
Nancy Frishberg: Position Paper
Jonathan Klein, Rosalind Picard, and Jocelyn Riseberg: Support for Human Emotional Needs in Human-Computer Interaction
Sarah Kuhn: Position Paper
David G. Novick: What is Effectiveness?
John C. Paolillo: New Media and the Challenge of Linguistic Human Rights
Teri Rueb, John Wardzala, and Jessica Millstone: Billow: Networked Hospital Play Space for Children
Gary Strong: Universal Access: A White Paper
[1] Muller, M.J., Wharton, C., McIver, W.J. Jr., and Laux, L. (1997). Toward an HCI research and practice agenda based on human needs and social responsibility. In Proceedings of CHI 97. Atlanta GA USA: ACM.
Thanks to the workshop participants for their input to this report:
Shannon Ford (Carnegie Mellon University, USA), Batya Friedman (Colby College, USA), Nancy Frishberg (New Media Centers, USA), Jonathan Klein (MIT Media Lab, USA), Sarah Kuhn (University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA), David C. Novick (EURISCO, France), John C. Paolillo (University of Texas at Arlington, USA), Jocylyn Riseberg (MIT Media Lab, USA), Teri Rueb (New York University, USA), Gary Strong (National Science Foundation, USA), and John Wardzala (New York University, USA)
Michael J. Muller
Tel: +1 425 822 3119
Email: mullerm@acm.org
Cathleen Wharton,
U S WEST !NTERPRISE
Internet Services and Application Development
1999 Broadway, Suite #800
Denver, CO 80202 USA
Tel: +1 303 965 8524
Fax: +1 303 965 9281
E-mail: cwharton@acm.org
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Vol.30 No.2, April 1998 |
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