University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom
The aim of this half day tutorial is to provoke consideration of the ethics around HCI research whilst also providing easy to apply practical tools and instruments to take away and incorporate into research studies, development projects and design activities.
The course begins with some facts and figures showing the importance and scope of ethics in HCI and then goes on to position the debate against the broad context of research ethics and research participation. From this base, the course will then consider three user groups who collectively expose many ethical challenges: Elderly people in looked after care, children with sensory and cognitive impairments and teenagers who do not have the language of the research work.
Building on experiences from the first author, in a very practical activity, each attendee will be given a portfolio of items associated with one of the three groups and the teams will work on a set of questions that will surface uncertainties about the HCI methods used.
Having brought this together, the course will then move to solutions. Solutions form the literature as well as solutions from the practical experience of the tutorial presenter, will be used and distributed along with best practice guidelines.
Target Audience:
The course is suitable for researchers, developers and engineers working in academia and in industry. It requires no prior knowledge but those who have never done any HCI research may benefit from some pre-familiarization with HCI methods.
Janet C Read is a Professor of Child Computer Interaction (CCI) with over 200 Peer reviewed articles on HCI. She directs the ChiCI group at UCLan. She is a member of the ACM SIgCHi Ethics board and is a standing panellist at the IDC (Interaction and Design for Children) Conference’s ethics board. She is editor in chief of the Elsevier Intl Journal of CCI.