Trip Report: EduCHI 2021

HCI+UX design educators have gotten pretty good at promoting collaboration and community in virtual spaces — no surprise.

The EduCHI’21 collaborative Miro whiteboard in all its virtual glory.

At a bright and early 6 A.M. Saturday in my time zone, I logged online to join one of the last events of this year’s virtual CHI 2021 conference — the 3rd Annual EduCHI Symposium on HCI Education. The EduCHI community consists of researchers, practitioners, and educators who are all interested in improving the ways we teach and learn human-computer interaction (HCI).

This symposium has been an official event at CHI for three years now, though its roots began nearly a decade ago in workshops, meetups, and various research projects. However, given the state of gestures vaguely at everything, two of those three events were relegated to virtual participation. I was lucky enough to attend the first EduCHI in 2019 in person, though I couldn’t make the 2020 virtual event. As I signed in and wrangled with audio issues, I silently hoped I wasn’t in for just four hours of Zoom lecture.

I needn’t have worried. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this community of educators — many of whom have been teaching throughout the era of remote learning and had to come up with creative ways to encourage participation from burnt-out students — designed a program of events that allowed for lots of engagement and rich discussion. Through a combination of a collaborative Miro whiteboard that contained dedicated areas for each presentation, ample Q&A time for each short paper, and a sprinkling of longer small-group discussions, the EduCHI organizers created a truly enjoyable virtual workshop. Read on to hear more about each presentation, get the links to each paper, and catch the highlights of our discussions!

Paper Session I: Diversity & Inclusion

Reflections on Remote Learning and Teaching of Inclusive Design in HCI

Kristen M. Byers, Salma Elsayed-Ali, Ebrima Jarjue, Rie Kamikubo, Kyungjun Lee, Rachel Wood, and Hernisa Kacorri (University of Maryland, College Park)

Kyungjun Lee sharing what worked and what didn’t for remote lectures.

The authors for this paper shared successes and challenges for making their HCI course on inclusive design during the COVID-19 pandemic itself more inclusive for learning. A particularly interesting bit was their discussion of the power dynamics inherent in office hours, and how virtual drop-in hours might help reduce student anxieties and create more inclusive atmospheres. Questions in the chat and on the Miro latched onto this idea, discussing ways to support equitable communication between educators, TAs, and their students. All in all, it was neat to see some positive examples of how access and inclusion were improved in the transition to remote learning.

Lots of activity and backchanneling on the Miro! Most sessions ended up looking like this.

Perspectives in HCI: A Course Integrating Diverse Viewpoints

Anna Slavina and Stephen B. Gilbert (Iowa State University)

What might a camera represent to different people?

The authors of this paper opened with a simple provocation: Picture a camera. Now, let’s think about all the different ways that camera could be viewed. For some, it’s a form of oppressive surveillance. For others, it’s a vehicle to perpetuate and reify biased algorithms. These motivating examples led into their call to integrate more diverse literature and viewpoints into our HCI courses and to teach these different perspectives in our classes. Some technical issues cut this session short, but I would highly suggest reading through the paper (linked above) for a curated reading list for higher education HCI courses. The authors did an amazing job collecting readings from disciplines and topics such as disability studies, critical race theory, culturally relevant design, intersectional HCI, feminist HCI, trans*/queer studies, and more — and they even mapped out each reading’s main takeaways for HCI students! Seriously, check it out. Then use it. This stuff’s important and they did the legwork for us.

Discussion Session I: Designing in Context

Where, Who, Why? Tools to Encourage Design In Context

Alan Dix, Anna Carter (Swansea University), and Miriam Sturdee (Lancaster University)

A mockup of a protoyping tool for tangible devices that helps designers consider context through short interaction videos.

Another tool mockup that shows a wireframe of the screen alongside a sketch of the world (in this case, a kitchen with a smart fridge that tracks food spoilage).

After the morning’s paper session concluded, we moved on to our first of three discussion-based segments of the program. Here, we’d here a few words from the presenters on an interesting challenge or topic in HCI education, then break out into smaller groups to brainstorm and discuss, leveraging our collective expertise to come up with considerations for teaching and learning HCI design. The presenters in this slot asked us to consider the ways in which the tools we used for design education might be limiting or artificially constraining students’ consideration of how designs are used in context. For instance, popular wireframing apps are excellent at prototyping screen-based interactions — but what about what’s happening beyond the screen as the device is being used? Or what if the design doesn’t have a screen at all? The presenters showed off a few mockups of tools that would support prototyping with broader contexts in mind, then sent us off to talk amongst ourselves.

After the presentation, we moved into breakout rooms of 5–6 people apiece, with a few guiding questions from the presenters to get us thinking about how we can help design students consider broader contexts. My group chatted about our experiences with getting students to overcome design fixation, where they can get stuck with an idea of how a design “should” look and become less willing to explore or ideate on alternatives. The topic of worldbuilding to also arose as means to encourage consideration of the environment outside of the screen. I brought up this CHI’21 paper on Timelines as a means of envisioning alternate yet co-occurring design futures — maybe there was some way to combine those ideas with a tool interface that asked students to generate different scenarios of use for their design? We also discussed how to resist students’ implicit conceptions of “average” users by helping them name and consider different kinds of human diversity. A few mentioned they’d had good results in that area by integrating critical STS readings — such as those described in Anna and Stephen’s Perspectives in HCI paper above — into the foundations of their design courses, giving students the language and expertise to describe and address the power dynamics inherent in design work.

When we hopped back into the main room, we got to hear even more perspectives on the challenge of getting students to think beyond their wireframed screens. Some reported back that they’d discussed how tools could support other parts of the design process outside of prototyping — for instance, what would a contextual peer critique tool look like? Others had thought more about the students’ contexts, noting that sometimes students’ desires to learn particular tools (Figma, Sketch, etc.) overshadowed their desires to necessarily learn design, so they could list the proficiency on their CVs for internships and jobs. Another group brought up the importance of supporting collaboration in these tools, especially with much learning happening remotely right now, as well as the tensions between tools having enough freedom for creativity while still having enough constraints and support for educational contexts.

Paper Session II: Classroom Strategies

Using Group Norms as a Teamwork Technique in an HCI Class

Eliane Wiese, Koriann South, and Kaylee Martin (University of Utah)

Teamwork can be learned, so long as we can know how to teach it.

This presentation spoke to the disconnect around teamwork that we often see in design classes: Educators LOVE teamwork because it enables collective learning, provides team support, and encourages different perspectives on a single task. Students often DREAD teamwork because they now have to work around others’ busy schedules, manage interpersonal conflict, and rely on potentially-unreliable others for their grades. The paper details ways that explicit norm-setting around group work can encourage better collaboration. Students discuss their goals at the beginning of the term (e.g., “I really care about learning everything I can and want to shoot for an A+!”, “I am super busy this term and this isn’t my top priority so I am fine with a B”) and gain an understanding of where everyone is at. Then, they co-create documentation and policy for group norms so that they have shared resources to refer to when something breaks down. Most students started out the term believing that a team was just a collection of individuals — that they could split up work, do things independently, and stitch them together at the end. The most successful teams realized, over the course of the term, that working together synchronously and leveraging each others’ unique expertise were key parts of successful teamwork.

A quick shout-out to the presenters here for their method. Elaine and Koriann co-presented their results, with Elaine voicing the educator perspective and Koriann voicing the students’ perspectives. It was very neat to watch! Many people commented in the chat how it helped convey students’ unique presence and voice, more so than your typical presentation format.

Creative Pedagogical Activities for User Evaluation Methods Courses

Carine Lallemand (University of Luxembourg / Eindhoven University of Technology)

Carine breaks down the skills and knowledge that contribute to UX researcher expertise.

In this presentation, we learned about different ways to help students know which design evaluation methods to use in which situations. There’s a surprising amount and expertise needed to choose an appropriate method for figuring out if a design works as well as you hope it does, and it’s even harder for novices, who don’t even necessarily know what their options are. Exacerbating this is the fact that many HCI educators are pressed for time in their courses and, as a result, focus on teaching the steps of each evaluation method, but not necessarily the meta-knowledge of when to apply each one. This paper described a few different activities designed to address this, each of which could be used in-person or remotely: Self-exploration booklets (which scaffold stepping through a design from a user’s point of view); flipped classroom presentations (where students create/synthesize knowledge into a educational video on a method for peers); and scenario-based debates (given a context and scenario, students debate and decide on an evaluation method, justifying their choices). One challenge brought up and discussed during Q&A was teaching about the tradeoffs of each method, especially when novice designers don’t have the real-world experience to anticipate what could go wrong when applying each one.

Discussion 2: Teaching HCI Online

Disrupting Tertiary User-Centered Design Course with Design Thinking 2.0

Eunice Sari (UX Indonesia) and Ellya Zulaikha (Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember)

Conclusions from the Design Thinking 2.0 project, which closely couples design thinking with Agile development principles.

In our second discussion period of the day, Eunice and Ellya shared their experiences teaching their Design Thinking 2.0 framework, which brings together Agile software development ideas with the classic Design Thinking steps, and doing all of this in the time of remote learning. They described a case study they’d done where they introduced the technique to a cohort of students through remote learning, sharing that the added structure and guidance seemed to help reduce confusion around design process for students. It also helped them ground their design work better in industry-relevant points of view and articulate their designs in more professional ways — less “fluff”, according to the presenters.

For our subsequent small-group discussions, we were prompted to think about our experiences with online teaching and learning in HCI contexts. What techniques and tools had we found to be effective in remote design learning? What might we keep doing when, or if, we went back to in-person instruction? In my group and when we returned to the main room, folks brought up many positive things about online learning. Some upsides were:

• Recording lectures and providing transcripts helped make courses more accessible.
• Miro boards and other collaborative tools helped increase participation in ways that weren’t always possible for in-person large courses, providing new new methods of engagement at scale.
• All the documentation of the design process students do during remote learning affords opportunities for students to reflect upon their actions and become more mindful practitioners.
• Sometimes students formed stronger community ties within courses, such as when one group of students met up to watch recorded lectures together and discuss them afterwards.

However, as I’m sure surprises no one, remote learning can also introduce challenges for teaching and learning design:

• Classroom management can be difficult, since you can’t “eavesdrop” on small group work as easily — it’s very obvious when you pop into a team’s breakout room, and it changes the conversation flow. One educator noted this made it more difficult to pick up on microaggressions.
• Though the tools used in remote learning make the course more accessible and engaging to some, we still lack a comprehensive overview of which tools are accessible and in what ways. Most educators mentioned relying on word of mouth to know which tools to use or to stay away from, if they thought of it at all.
• Distractions are always a problem in remote contexts where everything’s done through screens — especially because students are expected to keep tabs on so many different platforms for all their various classes. It’s easy to check out mentally when nothing physical anchors you to a lesson.
• All the setup that it takes to run a good online course is difficult and time consuming, and educators are often tired, stressed, and under-prepared to take on this labor, especially because there’s little guidance on best practices.

Hearing all these different perspectives really illuminated a lot of the nuances and opened up insights into even more challenges. Remote HCI pedagogy will surely continue to evolve over time, but for now it seems to remain a mixed bag.

Paper Session 3: Curriculum Design

HCI-Collab: Collaborative Network Supporting HCI Education in Iberoamerican Countries

Huizilopoztli Luna-García (Universidad Autonóma de Zacatecas), César A. Collazos (Universidad del Cauca), Jaime Muñoz-Arteaga (Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes), and Antoni Granollers (Universidad de Lleida)

Some context on the HCI-Collab effort to increase access to and participation in HCI education in Latin America.

The authors of this presentation shared with us their efforts to build and sustain an HCI education focused community in countries across Latin America. They began by noting a number of challenges particular to the context: that HCI was still seen as an emerging discipline in the computing landscape; that there were few HCI conferences located in Ibero-American countries or other ways for practitioners to connect; and that there are few HCI teaching materials available in Spanish, among others. After some recent successes organizing workshops related to teaching HCI — one as early as 2005, and then a handful in the years since 2018 — they spun up the HCI-Collab: A network to support HCI education and tackle these challenges. HCI-Collab brings together members of 47 universities in 13 countries, as well as industry practitioners, to promote community, build awareness of HCI, and create materials that can be used for HCI education. One very neat thing they described was their repository of HCI webinars: A year-long series of talks on HCI and UX design topics organized by the HCI-Collab crew, with slides and videos archived and made freely accessible to educators for use in their classes. They’ve also created an HCI reference book written entirely in Spanish to make the concepts accessible to more practitioners and students. HCI-Collab has seen tremendous interest and success over the past few years in growing the Latin American HCI community, encouraging interdisciplinary collaborations, and increasing access to HCI education materials.

Research and Education in Accessibility, Design, and Innovation (READi) Training Program: Preparing Graduate Students for Careers in Accessibility Research and Design

Jin Kang, Chantal M. J. Trudel, Audrey Girouard, and Adrian D. C. Chan (Carleton University)

The four parts of the READi program: a course, a project, a retreat, and a workshop series.

In our final paper presentation of the day, we learned about READi: a 4-part training program to help grad students to learn to advocate for accessible design, whether they intended to go into academia or into industry. The first component, a graduate level course titled “Accessibility and Inclusive Design”, gives students a primer on the topic through invited speakers and discussion. Some of the topic covered in the past include legislation around access, accessible gaming, and designing for neurodiversity. Second, students engage in an Action Team Project (ATP), which is what makes READi unique. In these ATPs, students work with community partners on real-world access issues. They’re not expected to necessarily solve the issue by the end of their project, but they should at least be able to provide guidelines that fit the environment and the needs of their stakeholders. Through doing this, they gain context on how tradeoffs, constraints, and other limitations can create barriers to accessible design. Once these projects wrap up, students present their projects at a two-day retreat which includes faculty, community partners, industry professionals, and the general public. Finally, alongside the course-ATP-retreat experience, students take part in workshops on various accessibility-related topics throughout the year.

Discussion Session III: Academic-Industry Partnerships

Shaping UX Academia-Industry Alignment: A Strategic Partnership Through an Industrial Advisory Board

Nadya Shalamova, Amii LaPointe (Milwaukee School of Engineering), Rob Nero (Spotify), and Michael DelGaudio (Google)

Takeaways presented from the IAB experiment: Acknowledge the differences in perspective, be mindful of who the right leaders are, and take time to communicate and build strong relationships.

For our final discussion section of the day, the presenters brought our attention toward a model of industry collaboration they’d been practicing at their institution: Industrial Advisory Boards (IABs). One known challenge facing HCI and UX design programs is that there really aren’t any standards or accreditation processes for the courses they teach or for the programs overall. These folks discussed how industry-academic partnership by means of committee-based IABs can serve to fill that gap, with both working together to define learning outcomes and proficiencies students should gain throughout their time in the program. Sharing results from a trial run of the IAB model, they highlighted its efficacy in promoting close partnerships between the department and the local UX community, which helped graduates gain mentorship as well as get jobs. They also shared some insights gained from trying to get academics and industry professionals to work together smoothly, such as being sensitive to differing timelines and communication styles.

Off to our breakout rooms we went for the final time, with priming questions about what sort of role IABs might play in assessment and accreditation, as well as how industry could best support the growing HCI and UX education community. This session was a quick one to account for time, so conversation was somewhat limited. My group chatted about the tensions between supporting industry’s fast-changing preferences (e.g. this tool is the current standard, this method is now the default, but it might change at the drop of a hat) and teaching more enduring understandings of what it means to design well, agnostic of context or tools. Perhaps industry reps could be more involved in near-term planning (1–5 years), but might be less suited to discuss longer timelines (10 years), someone proposed.

I did notice an implied assumption in this session’s framing and presentation: Students were largely being referred to as future workers that would inevitably enter the UX industry, and therefore should be molded to best fit its needs. This isn’t wholly unwarranted — many HCI and UX students do go into their programs with this intent, after all — but prioritizing industry perspectives first and foremost can easily lead to ethical conundrums, especially when partnering with profit-driven companies and relying on them for financial support. What happens, for instance, if an IAB advocates for primer courses that teach current design tools and frameworks rather than courses that teach students to critically consider their positionality as designers and their ethical responsibilities? With recent tech controversies like Timnit Gebru’s forced departure from Google AI after attempting to publish research that might have reflected poorly on the company, and the ensuing string of resignations and firings, I can’t help but be wary of the way these constraints might show up in industry-led-and-funded HCI education spaces, too. I didn’t get a chance to raise these issues in the discussion, but it’s certainly a consideration we need to be aware of as programs begin to integrate industry partnerships into their curriculum development and assessment processes.

Closing

As we wrapped up the day, the organizers shared several exciting updates for the future of EduCHI:

• There’s going to be a special issue on Teaching and Learning Human-Computer Interaction in the Frontiers in Computer Science journal this year! More info here. Deadline for (optional) abstracts July 16th; manuscripts October 13th.
• EduCHI has joined up with the ACM’s EngageCSEdu initiative to do a special issue on HCI teaching materials! The cool part about this is that the materials are peer-reviewed (double-blind) and accepted materials will be indexed in the ACM Digital Library. This is the start to the living curriculum that is one of EduCHI’s major goals! If it takes off, it can become a permanent fixture and they’ll start recruiting editors and such. More info here. Deadline July 15th.
• We’ve got plans to one day spin EduCHI up into a conference of its own! But until then, we remain a symposium, and we need volunteers to chair next year (among a myriad of other tasks). Express your interest here! Students are encouraged to apply, too. I was on the program committee this year — would definitely recommend as a way to get involved.
• And, as always, to keep up with what’s hip and happening in the HCI education community, we have a number of communication channels you should join.

With that, we all wished each other a pleasant morning/afternoon/evening/middle of the night and went our separate ways.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised that the virtual format worked so well — though given how many of those attending had been using Miro to teach remotely for so long, maybe I shouldn’t have been. It was fun to see the board fill up with so many diverse perspectives on each presentation, providing an alternate engagement style and pseudo-backchannel. Even better, there are plans to freeze and archive the board on EduCHI’s site, so all these great thoughts can be shared with the virtual universe too.

It’s neat to watch the community grow year over year. When I started my PhD program in 2018, one of my major challenges was finding literature relevant to my interest area of inclusive software design education. There just wasn’t a lot out there at the time (though what existed was good solid work to build upon). But just three years later, there’s enough interest for EduCHI’21 to have an entire paper session about diversity and inclusion! I look forward to seeing where the EduCHI community goes next — and hopefully, meeting some of these people in real life rather than through a screen (one can dream).