MexIHC 18
In October 2018 I attended the Mexican Conference on Human-Computer Interaction http://mexihc.org/2018/ (the Mexican CHI conference) where I was particularly keen to hear the Keynote of Saiph Savage. The event took place in the city of Merida, Mexico (right in the heart of where the Mayas used to live so there was a very inspiring vibe to create impactful knowledge).
The goal of the conference is to grow the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) scientific community in Mexico and push the boundaries of the type of HCI research that Mexico produces. The conference is backed and organized by the Mexican ACM SIGCHI chapter (CHI-México) and the Mexican Association on Human Computer Interaction (AMexIHC). These organizations facilitate organizing an excellent large scale event that connects HCI researchers across Mexico and the world! Anyone who wants to help grow the Mexican HCI ecosystem is invited to participate. This year in particular, the people who organized the event were Lizbeth Escobedo and Edgar Cambranes. Kudos and thank you for such a wonderful experience!
Mexican Research Talks.
The conference took place from Monday, October 29th to Wednesday October 31st, I was unfortunately only able to attend on October 30th I will therefore cover only the talks I had the pleasure of seeing, and also share a bit about the keynote that Saiph Savage gave.
The Future of Product Design
The first talk was by Beverley May, the founder and director of Principal Oxford Tech and of the concept labs, where she has lead global teams to design novel products and experiences, especially around healthcare.
Beverley provided an overview of the history and current state of the art research in interface design, products and creating award winning user experiences in different areas, such as Healthcare, Art, Education.
Brief History of UX.
Beverley explained how the 90s were a very positive era for the internet. People thought about bringing democracy into the world as well as reducing inequality. It was the start of ebay (helping small sellers across the world), Wikipedia, AltaVista. Designing web pages for that area was very simple. It was basically just taking printed text and putting it online. It was the birth of digital print. People saw digital print as a way to provide social good at scale.
Then the late 90s appear, and that brings the birth of analytics; and we had suddenly the birth of ads. What appeared during that time were analytics to understand people’s behavior to drive clicks to ads. In this time IDEO founded user centered design and the design process (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test). Here we had the start of IUX. It founded what we know as the internet.
Living now in the … #TECHPOCALYPSE!
Beverley mentioned that now we are living in the #TECHPOCALYPSE where many different technologies are booming and interacting, with some of the 2018 design trends being:
*Mix of virtual and physical world (Pokemon go, Snapchat, HE Healthcare: visualize the 3d rendering of the human body in real time, Google Translate)
*Voice interfaces (talking to our fridge, Alexa, interfaces for helping people who have low vision)
*Blockchain (technology that can help in the sharing of funds worldwide, West Virginia developed Blockchain for military overseas to provide more secure citizen participation experiences.)
*Drones
*Smart clothes (clothes that can respond to the environment)
*IOT (smart cities, or application that use sensors to enhance education. Beverley presented examples of how kids can use such apps to learn how to program a ball. Basically they help to make it fun to be part of CS)
*AI: facial recognition
*Robots: Military are sending human type robots to fight on the ground. Robots that interact with the world can also go out for disaster response situations. Amazon is creating robot armies for jobs.
The way to have impact now while we live in the #TECHPOCALYPSE is to take a specific problem and address it using a wide range of different technologies. Some examples of projects that Beverly mentioned are:
*Smart Bins: appliances that give real time feedback to people when they are trying to segment their garbage. Here sensor data with computer vision techniques are intermixed to address people’s difficulty in separating their trash for recycling.
* AI for healthcare: Systems that use artificial intelligence combined with sensor data to provide better healthcare to people. One of the systems covered intelligently identified immigrants with low income in order to give them access to governmental healthcare help. This example thus helped to solve the Migrant Healthcare problem. Another system covered was a wearable device that detected when an elderly person was sick and then deployed automatically a vehicle that would automatically drive the person to the hospital. Such system helped to solve the problem of providing rapid medical assistance to the elderly.
Designing for the Future.
After providing a historical context of UX design. Beverley helped us to use this historical background to design for the future. According to Beverly, the way to effectively design for the future is to first imagine a world that does not exist yet and choose a timeframe that is far away. Far enough to not get stuck with what is happening today, but not too far so that we can’t really picture what is going on. It is important to skip reasons of what is stopping people to do those things now. But instead just picture the needs of your audience in that space, and what would define the ideal future scenario in such space. It also important to start to think about the key tech trends that will shape the world at that future moment in time and to merge them with the vision of the future you started to have. Are the future trends in Crowdsourcing, the Gig Economy, AI, Blockchain? One needs to try to use those trends to achieve the vision of the future that we want to reach. It also helps to try to respond these questions in the process:
- Who will be impacted?
- Why do they need this? What will they use it for?
- What problem could be solved with this new technology?
- Future Casting: Think what topic we will work on, and think of all the different scenarios or results.
I really liked that the talk made us realize that we have to collectively think about the future we want and design it. We have the education and we have the tools. We need to focus our efforts to have the most positive impact. We have a special power, a super power to envision something that is not there right now. We can imagine and create a new positive future for our societies and that makes us have a key role in our society.
HCI Talks.
After May’s Keynote we had the first research session of the day with Jessica Beltrán as the chair. The main topics included: Modularity as a key approach to Social media privacy policies, Designing technology for the Mixtecas (a native american community in Mexico), How to turn academic projects into commercial applications, and a system for detecting when people react to novelty in user interfaces using eye tracking.
The session research session was chaired by Dago Cruz and this session focuses on assistive technologies such as: systems to help deaf people to learn new vocabulary, designing interaction in a speaking system for the blind and low vision, and a real-time tele-rehabilitation haptic device for massage therapy called RehWave.
Afterwards came the poster session and then I had the pleasure to hear Saiph’s Keynote about citizen journalism and collective action. The slides can be found on the next link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4idwleanhet5k4j/jobTalkNW2.key?dl=0
Citizen journalism is an increasingly powerful way for the public to actively participate in analysing, producing, and disseminating news reports. However, most citizen reports are the effort of just one person. As a consequence, the activity rarely takes advantage of the public’s collective and diverse knowledge. Additionally, citizen journalism is usually a time consuming activity without direct benefits to reporters. Imagine if instead we could harness citizens’ expertise to produce specialized reports and also transform the activity into one that empowered individuals to build their careers. However, systematically coordinating citizen crowds for specialized news reporting is rare today for the following reasons: first, it is difficult to design platform workflows that facilitate the participation of enough experts; second, it is non-trivial to train citizens in the specialized news reporting areas that are needed. In this talk, Saiph discussed how we can combine crowdsourcing and collective action theory to create computational systems for guiding citizen crowds to produce news reports. These news reports take advantage of citizens’ expertise and current context. The news reports are also tailored to benefit not only the community but also the individual reporter through career growth. First, she presented large scale data analysis investigating how citizen journalisms happens in the wild. Next, she discussed how to use the results from these analyses as design probes to create novel citizen journalism platforms. Then, she demonstrated how computationally-enabled citizen journalism can use people’s specializations to address knowledge gaps in the community and transform news reporting into a medium for developing an individual’s skills to access better jobs.
