Previous seminars

BIG TALK: Amanda Lazar, University of Maryland

Topic: Centering the tension between critical perspectives and practice to advance HCI research on health and aging
When: August 5, 2024 13:00–14:00 GMT, in person

Technology designers and developers have focused on the domain of health and aging for decades. Recently, researchers are adopting critical perspectives which push back on prior ways of approaching technologies in these spaces. For example, researchers are calling attention to how the overwhelming focus of aging interventions on addressing cognitive and physical decline links to a deficit-view of aging which can contribute to stigma and neglect other needs of older adults. I center these and other tensions between practice-based and critical approaches in my work, arguing that it is important to rigorously attend to and learn from both of these approaches. In this talk, I will present several projects on technology for health and aging. First, I will argue for the importance of understanding the tension between critical and practice-based approaches, and how these can be traced in our research. Then, I will present my work that seeks to leverage these tensions to advance design.

Bio: Amanda Lazar is an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies, with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Computer Science, at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her PhD from the University of Washington in Biomedical and Health Informatics. Her research in Human-Computer Interaction examines the design of technology for older adults, with a particular focus on older adults with dementia, to support social interaction and engagement in activities. Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR).

Topic: Children doing HCI work with us: Fair, Fun and Fruitful Engagement
When: July 22, 2024 13:00–14:00 BST (in person)

Over the last twenty years, Janet has worked with children on design, evaluation, and research studies with a constant wish to ensure their time is well spent, their contributions are recognised and that as many children as possible can be included and empowered in HCI research while having a fabulous time. This talk will bring together empirical studies around the inclusion of children as design partners, methods for the better treatment of children’s ideas, contributions, and practical advice on gaining informed assent with children.

Topic: Intimate Health as a site for Design Research
When: March 14, 2024 13:00–14:00 GMT, in person

For the last 15 years my research team have been designing, developing and deploying technologies that relate to intimate health, and women’s health topics. The early work that myself and my research team undertook sought to establish women’s health and women’s bodies as a place that has relevant research opportunities for the HCI and IxD community. We attempted to show how working within this context required new design methods; and to showcase the role that design and interactive technology might play in helping to providing knowledge, skills and access to resources so urgently needed to reduce women’s health inequalities. In this talk I will reflect across this programme of research, taking time to explore some of the challenges of undertaking work on the intimate body within HCI, and arguing for the role that research outside of the mainstream can play in enabling innovation.

Bio: Madeline Balaam is an interaction design researcher working at the intersection of intimate health, the body and touch. She is a Professor in Interaction Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where she leads a team who focus on improving the ways in which bodies and intimate health issues are responded to by design and technology. She takes a feminist perspective to her research and brings with her a strong belief that design and technology can be used to make positive change in the world. Madeline has published her work extensively at ACM CHI and ACM DIS and has received five best paper awards from the venues over the last six years. Her work is funded by several national funding agencies in Sweden (VR, SSF and Digital Futures) and an ERC consolidator grant (’Intimate Touch: Designing for where technology meets the Body”).

Topic: Translating public values to the design of a public platform
When: November 28, 2023 13:00–14:00 GMT, in person

Commercial social media platforms, such as Facebook or X, focus on ratings, page views and user engagement for advertisers and this may reduce user trust in media (polarization, filter bubbles, disinformation etc.). The aim of a public organization is not to make profit, but to create public value for citizens and other stakeholders. This process of public value creation in the digital sphere is complex, however, and there is a lack of understanding on how to translate abstract public values,such as privacy, inclusion or safety, into concrete (governance) solutions for organizational, moderation and software design. In her talk, Mathilde will share some of her research findings on how public values could be embedded in decentralized social media networks (DOSNs) in general and – more specifically – in a new DOSN called PubHubs that is currently being built with Dutch government funding by cyber security scholars and developers at the Radboud University in Nijmegen (The Netherlands). The design of PubHubs and its user requirements is explored in collaboration with a large coalition of Dutch public organizations (such as public broadcasters, libraries and patient federations) that join forces under the name of PublicSpaces to reclaim the internet as a public domain for the common good.

Bio: Mathilde Sanders is an organization scientist and postdoctoral researcher. She works for the interdisciplinary group Governing the Digital Society at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. Her research focuses on ownership, business models and the governance of (old) media firms and non-profit or public, decentralized, open source social networks (DOSNs). Her empirical case-study is PubHubs, a joint research project with Radboud University Nijmegen and PublicSpaces. Mathilde holds a PhD in Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and a Master in Political Science (University of Amsterdam). Before moving to Utrecht University, Mathilde was a researcher at the thinktank Rathenau Instituut in The Hague. She also worked at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (RSM) and the Journalism School in Utrecht (HU). She was a journalist during the first part of her career.

Topic: Supporting Doctors’ Decisions with AI: An Industry Case Study
When: June 29, 2023 13:00–14:00 GMT, in person

Artificial intelligence (AI) supported clinical decision support (CDS) technologies can parse vast quantities of patient data into meaningful insights for healthcare providers. Much work is underway to determine the technical feasibility and the accuracy of AI-driven insights. Much less is known about what insights are considered useful and actionable by healthcare providers, their trust in the insights, and clinical workflow integration challenges. In this talk, I’ll discuss both an AI model and a conceptual prototype to suggest diabetes medications, and how they raised clinical and design objective tensions, and suggest implications for AI-supported clinical decision tools.

Bio: Jofish Kaye runs research teams to integrate qualitative and quantitative data, design, and prototyping to make user-driven products. He has worked at various tech and healthcare companies, and co-chaired CHI 2016. ChatGPT recently claimed he is one of the top ten “influential and well-known academics in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)”, which is unlikely to be true.

Topic: Self-Logging with Painpad
When: March 23, 2023 13:00–14:00 GMT, in person

Monitoring patients’ pain is a critical issue for clinical caregivers, particularly among staff responsible for providing analgesic relief. However, collecting regularly scheduled pain readings from patients can be difficult and time-consuming for clinicians. We have been working on the Painpad device, a tangible device for patients to self-log pain, since 2017. In this talk we outline the academic work (from designing the device to assessing it’s capabilities), the clinical uses of the device, and the lessons learnt from this longitudinal investigation of pain.

The Digital Health Lab at the Open University has interests across a wide-range of health and wellbeing issues. These range from monitoring pain to tracking mood, from using AI in cardiology to developing assistive technologies for gait rehabilitation. In this talk we outline some of our current projects, as a prompt for exploring potential routes for collaboration.

Bio: Daniel’s research focusses on social computing across various domains, including healthcare – leading to setting up the Digital Health Lab alongside Prof Price. He has significant experience in using citizen-science methodologies, particularly participatory design. This has included running the citizen innovation program of MK:Smart and running the HCI stream of the EPSRC STRETCH and SERVICE projects. His interests lead to his work being very user-centred, although he also dabbles in quantitative analysis as needed for some of the digital health projects he is involved in.Bio: Prof Price has broad interests and experience working in multidisciplinary research areas from ubiquitous computing, life logging technologies and interaction design, to privacy awareness and the law. His research has focused on lifelogging and self-quantifying applied to healthcare. His public engagement activities on self-quantifying for healthcare include interviews with BBC Radio 4 and BBC 1 Breakfast Television, a Horizon programme on BBC 2, and a TEDx talk.

Topic: The Body is Not a Neutral Design Space: Designing Self-tracking Technologies with Feminist and Phenomenological Values
When: June 23, 2022 13:00–14:00 BST

Self-tracking technologies are increasingly used to track, interpret and diagnose the insides of our bodies. Sarah Homewood explores societal perspectives on bodies embedded in these self-tracking devices through designing and testing out alternative prototypes. She uses the complementary theories of feminism and phenomenology to design self-tracking devices that challenges the medicalisation of non-medical bodily processes and the reduction of the lived experience of the body into a limited set of data points. These devices acknowledge the non-clinical and social environments and contexts these devices will be used within. In this talk, she will present her research addressing the tracking of menstrual cycles, ovulation, post-exertion malaise in the context of Long Covid and continuous glucose tracking by those without diabetes.

Bio: Sarah Homewood (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Human Centred Computing at the University of Copenhagen. She has a background as a professional contemporary dancer and her research within human-computer interaction is informed by her interest in how technologies shape understandings of our bodies.

Topic: The Use of Theories in HCI and Game Design
When: May 26, 2022 13:00–14:30 BST

I’m an assistant professor in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Aalto University. Drawing from my background in psychology, I research motivational and emotional aspects of the User Experience and Games to establish a better understanding of how we conceptualize and study “good” interaction. In particular, my work investigates how interactive systems support aesthetic and meaningful user experiences that “stay” with users well beyond interaction.

Moreover, I’m interested in metascientific questions, especially with regards to the role of psychological theories in HCI and game design. In 2021 I was awarded an ERC StG to investigate the use of theories in game design and production practice, and develop methods for how HCI can more productively translate theories from other disciplines into actionable knowledge for research and practice.

Topic: Engaging Values and Ethics through Design and Design Futuring
When: March 3, 2022 16:00–17:00 GMT

Growing public discussions, regulations, and worker actions call for greater consideration of social values and ethics during technology development. This talk discusses several relationships between design and ethics—design as a form of labor to address ethical issues, design as ethical intervention and provocation, and design as research method and reflective practice.

I report on qualitative research studying North American user experience (UX) professionals at large technology companies who see addressing social values as part of their work practice. While they attend to values as a part of everyday UX work, they also engage in activities aimed at re-shaping their organizations. They sometimes engage in tactics of soft resistance, seeking to subvert existing practices towards more values-conscious ends while maintaining legibility as conducting business-as-usual within the organization. I also discuss how design fiction and speculative design approaches were used as forms of research engagement in this project—as a research method to prompt critical reflection on issues related to privacy and surveillance, and as an analytical method to analyze and reflect on the qualitative data (“design fiction memos”). This talk suggests new ways to consider values and ethics as a part of design futuring, research, and practice.