Category: Uncategorized

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”).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Topic: Sonic Interaction Design Explorations
When: January 27, 2022 13:00–14:00 GMT

Sound can be immersive, engaging, and culturally meaningful. A challenge for design in the post-screen world is how to develop design methods and practice for non-visual interaction with interactive systems. This talk presents over ten years of research into approaches to Sonic Interaction Design which combine Audio, Interaction Design, and Physical Computing to allow designers to explore the potential role of sound in interaction, and to sensitize designers to the use of sound for interaction. The approach foregrounds design explorations of the possible connections between human action and sonic responses of interactive systems. This talk will present and discuss design and evaluation techniques that can be reliably used in these situations and show how Sonic Interaction Design can be informed by careful and rigorous consideration of human experience.

Bio: Nick Bryan-Kinns is Professor of Interaction Design and Director of the EPSRC+AHRC Media and Arts Technology Centre for Doctoral Training at Queen Mary University of London, and was Visiting Professor at Hunan University, China. He is Director of EECS International Joint Ventures, Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the British Computer Society, Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery, and leads the Sonic Interaction Design Lab in the Centre for Digital Music. He has published international journal papers on cross-cultural design, participatory design, mutual engagement, interactive art, and tangible interfaces. His research has been exhibited internationally and reported widely from the New Scientist to the BBC. Bryan-Kinns was Deputy Dean at QMUL, held a Royal Academy of Engineering Industrial Secondment for commercialising academic research, and has provided expert consultation for the European Commission and National Science Foundation on Creativity and IT. He chaired the Steering Committee for the ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference series, and is a recipient of ACM and BCS Recognition of Service Awards. In 1998 he was awarded a PhD in Human Computer Interaction from the University of London.

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Topic: Technological and Cultural Values in Digital Musical Instrument Design
When: September 30, 2021 13:00–14:00 BST

Every year, many new musical instruments are created in research and industry. New instruments are often promoted for technical novelty, range of sonic or expressive capabilities, or accessibility to novice players. However, most new instruments drop out of regular use after just a few years, while classic acoustic and electronic designs remain ubiquitous in many styles of music, highlighting the central role of human factors in determining instrument uptake.

This talk queries the broader context of why we build new musical instruments and examines some of the values we embed into them. The aesthetic context in which an instrument is created will strongly influence its design, regardless of what technology is used. At the same time, our tools and materials are not aesthetically neutral: they contain subtle assumptions about the form and structure of music, and they make certain design choices easier or more apparent than others. This talk will consider several examples illustrating these technical and cultural influences, concluding with open questions and reflections for creators seeking to engage with the human factors of new music technologies.

Bio: Andrew McPherson is Professor of Musical Interaction in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London. A composer (PhD U.Penn 2009) and electronic engineer (MEng MIT 2005) by training, his research focuses on digital musical instruments, especially those which extend the capabilities of traditional musical instruments. Within the Centre for Digital Music, he leads the Augmented Instruments Laboratory (http://instrumentslab.org), a research team investigating musical interface design, performer-instrument interaction and embedded hardware systems. He currently holds a Senior Research Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Notable projects include the magnetic resonator piano (http://instrumentslab.org/research/mrp.html), an electromagnetically-augmented acoustic grand piano which has been used by dozens of composers and performers worldwide; TouchKeys, a sensor overlay which transforms the electronic keyboard into a nuanced multi-touch control surface; and Bela, an open-source embedded hardware platform for ultra-low-latency audio and sensor processing. TouchKeys (http://touchkeys.co.uk) and Bela (http://bela.io) both successfully launched on Kickstarter (2013 and 2016) and are now available to the public via spinout companies.

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Topic: Conversational AI for Mental Health: Mind Perception and Self-compassion
When: July 1, 2021 13:00–14:00 BST

Minha Lee is an assistant professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology‘s Industrial Design department. Her research explores how we can design interactions with conversational agents like robots or chatbots as our moral mirrors for exploring moral emotions and concepts like compassion or fairness. If technology extends who we are, what does it mean to treat AI compassionately or fairly?

Lee’s interest in moral emotions centers on compassion and how it can help with mental well-being. She is curious about other moral emotions like gratitude, guilt, or awe, and if technology can be incorporated to explore them. She has been interviewed about her research on television, podcasts, and the web.

She completed her PhD at the TU/e’s Human-Technology Interaction and Philosophy & Ethics groups. Her dissertation was on interactional morality. Previously she studied Human Centered Multimedia at University of Amsterdam, Philosophy at University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, and Digital Arts at Pratt Institute where she created works like an animated short that was apparently banned by a festival. More information can be found on her CV

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