EduCHI 2024

The use of dark patterns has become ubiquitous within digital platforms. It has been argued that to address this issue, there is a need to integrate ethics education within design pedagogy and practice. This paper reports a lab protocol study conducted to observe if and how sensitizing design students about the issue can affect their design thinking. For this study, n=15 students attended a 2-hour workshop focused on persuasive HCI design, dark patterns and ethics. Pre/post design sessions following the think aloud protocol were conducted to observe the effects of the workshop. Post-workshop interviews were conducted to gather student perspectives. The data collected from the design sessions was analyzed using the linkography technique. The findings reveal the qualitative nature of ethics related design considerations that emerge when participants are engaged in an ethically nuanced design task. It also shows how ethics sensitization can shape convergent and divergent thinking processes.

Metacognition is vital for learning in general, and its value for HCI educational practices warrants investigation. In general, metacognitive awareness can help student designers consider how their thought processes might influence their design outputs. More specifically, it may also have relevance for helping HCI students develop intercultural competence—particularly when students interrogate their own cultural biases and can reflect on the cultural implications of their work. However, there are several challenges associated with developing metacognitive skill in instructional settings, and these may be exacerbated in intercultural settings. In this paper, we share an account of how we engaged with students participating in a study abroad experience, using daily reflection sessions to encourage students to develop their metacognitive awareness and intercultural competence while they worked on digital civics projects in an unfamiliar cultural setting. We describe the metacognitive strategies that we identified within our students’ reflections. Through our narrative, we are able to highlight the intersecting roles that digital civics design prompts, new cultural contexts, and metacognitive questioning may play in how students develop and express their intercultural learning.

Critical making practices often involve engaging with tangible objects to generate new knowledge, or what Matt Ratto calls “thinking with your hands.” This paper explores the pedagogical goals and outcomes for an assignment created for a graduate course in speculative design called “present/future objects.” In this assignment, students are asked to take an everyday object, break it apart, and rebuild it into an imagined future object. The goal is not to build a better or futuristic version of the object they broke apart but rather to imagine something entirely new with the pieces they have. This assignment engages students in both critical and creative practice, while also challenging them to think about the physical affordances and material effects of the individual parts in their creation, as well as the way these pieces support the development of a whole new design concept. In speculative design, tangible, physical objects are often the most evocative way to demonstrate something about a future world because they offer concrete representations that generate new forms of knowledge about possible future worlds. This project helps HCI and interaction design students to move away from digital space, screens, and designing web experiences, and toward working and thinking with their hands, making playful tangible objects, and grappling with the possibilities and limitations of the materials they choose to work with and how they might represent different futures.

To assist students and educators in more deeply grasping user technology needs in busy outdoor settings, we recommend using diary study assignments adapted from social science and human-computer interaction (HCI) research. This suggestion is based on insights that the field of HCI has expanded from computer use in controlled, indoor environments to technology application research in broader contexts, especially outdoor environments, where diary studies yield important insights. This can be seen in areas like social media, augmented reality, citizen science, and geolocation-based games, where it is difficult to understand the user experience for these areas through short-term, controlled exposure. Instead, educators must encourage students to step out of the classroom and into the real world to observe and experience interactions during multiple-use sessions over an extended time period, which offers students in-depth insights into real-world technology use, thereby setting the stage for them to design more human-focused technology applications and services that better meet user needs. This paper explores the utilization of the diary study methodology within the context of HCI education, examining its distinctive benefits and exposing tradeoffs in its challenges. Benefits discussed in the paper include adaptability to a wide array of user needs and circumstances, the capability to yield profound insights into the application of technology in real-world settings, and effectiveness in uncovering privacy concerns in daily life. Concurrently, we identify some practical challenges and introduce targeted strategies for addressing them, such as maintaining consistent student engagement, devising creative approaches for analyzing data, and encouraging deeper reflective practices among students. In so doing, this manuscript seeks to provide actionable guidance for crafting more impactful and immersive HCI educational initiatives through diary study assignments.

This paper documents an ongoing curriculum building project at the University of Toronto centered on scaffolding software skill acquisition within a user experience (UX) design classroom. The expansion of UX design as a formal discipline of study has yielded larger and more diverse cohorts of students, many of whom do not hail from STEM or design backgrounds. This shift presents the pedagogical challenge of how to effectively teach relevant software to students who vary vastly in baseline technological proficiency in classroom sizes of 60+, where one-on-one support is at a premium. This project focuses on annual iterations of a required course on user interface design in a UX-aligned professional master’s program. This course tasks students with learning Figma, an industry-standard application for designing and prototyping user interfaces. Drawing from existing pedagogical theories, our work aims to improve Figma skill acquisition by adapting a flipped classroom approach that has been successfully used in computer science, alongside associated forms of computer-based scaffolding. In this paper, we summarize progress developing instructional materials for students since 2020, discuss opportunities for computer-assisted evaluation, and introduce a prospective plugin for Figma that could holistically scaffold skill acquisition while providing UX educators with timely and detailed learning metrics.

Understanding that not all users are the same is a foundational principle in teaching Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Learning to recognize how the diversity of users and their circumstances condition their experience of interacting with computers is essential in educating reflective, effective, and user-centric HCI professionals. Within this field, the term affordance has been a both heralded and contested term for years, but remains important. A recent contribution to the discussions is the Mechanism and Conditions Framework by Jenny Davis that productively nuances the term. However, translating the framework into a context of HCI education presents itself with a set of challenges. In this paper, we present insights from teaching Davis’ framework to over 500 university students within a constructivist/socio-cultural tradition of HCI. Our work articulates pedagogical strategies that enhance students’ understanding of context-specific analyses of user interfaces and in so doing it advances the HCI affordance discourse. By integrating theoretical critique and educational practice, we aim to aid the spread of the mechanisms and conditions framework among future HCI professionals.

Drawing on our collective experience as educators and preliminary results of an in-progress research study, we explore the complexities of integrating storytelling into Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education. Within the user experience (UX) industry, storytelling is considered essential for collaborating, engaging stakeholders, and shaping professional identities. However, despite that importance, effectively teaching storytelling presents an unsolved educational challenge in HCI. We begin by examining storytelling’s multifaceted and elastic nature in UX practice and how that contributes to the challenge of teaching it, demonstrating key points with quotes and anecdotes from our ongoing research. We then discuss various pedagogical approaches to help students understand good storytelling, practice their storytelling skills, and better appreciate how storytelling can shape their academic and professional success. We hope that by sharing what we are grappling with as we investigate UX storytelling in practice, we can engage the EduCHI community in productive discussions to help us move our collective teaching practices forward.

This article describes a Teachable Moment we refer to as the “Buckets and Lenses” approach, which aims to shift student thinking from rigid categorization (“bucket thinking”) to a more flexible, nuanced perspective (“lenses thinking”) that better aligns with the interdisciplinary field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Given HCI’s amalgamation of diverse disciplinary concepts, students often struggle with the application of “fuzzy” concepts, leaning on their prior educational experiences that favor definitive labeling over exploration and context-dependent application. This approach challenges students to re-frame their engagement with HCI concepts, encouraging open-ended exploration and the embracing of ambiguity. By illustrating the method’s application through classroom examples, such as discussions on the “waves” and “paradigms” of HCI and the role of sketches and prototypes in the design process, this paper highlights a strategy for fostering an adaptive mindset. This Buckets and Lenses approach is a pedagogical strategy that we have found helpful for enhancing HCI students’ cognitive flexibility and promoting a deeper, more critical engagement with the field’s inherent complexities.

As an inter-discipline or trans-discipline, HCI includes or references many different sources of knowledge in which students are expected to be conversant. The education of HCI practitioners requires exposure to an increasingly large number of these perspectives. However, how should this exposure be structured, with what level of depth, and through what metaphors? In this unsolved challenge, we outline the complex range of perspectives required and the limitations of typical curriculum and program design techniques. We then illustrate how HCI educators might use three different perspectives to consider and communicate program complexity to students: 1) content themes; 2) transdisciplinary lenses; and 3) design materials. We conclude with opportunities for HCI educators to leverage these insights to build courses, projects, and other program structures.

Social computing systems—such as social media and e-commerce platforms as well as search engines and collaboration software— not only drive vast economic value and societal impact, but are also becoming prominent topics in policy discourse. Although social technology companies heavily recruit students from Computer and Information Science (CS and IS) programs, and social computing is a well-established scholarly field within human-computer interaction (HCI) focused on the social interactions between people mediated through computational systems, little is known about social computing education. Consequently, in this paper we analyzed 25 undergraduate and graduate level courses titled “social computing.” First, as a fast-paced discipline that follows developments in computing as well as related societal implications, we highlight foundational and emergent topics. Second, we map these topics onto the life cycle of social computing systems to highlight gaps in coverage. Third, we map social computing topics to the 2023 ACM CS Curricula Body of Knowledge to provide a framework for introducing social computing concepts into CS and IS curricula. We find that social computing courses require diverse skill sets both within HCI and CS, as well as inter-disciplinary concepts from Sociology, Economics, among others. We conclude with guidelines for designing new social computing courses and discuss ways to critically examine the role of—and the power held by—system builders.

Generative AI (GAI) is impacting teaching and learning directly or indirectly across a range of subjects and disciplines. As educators, we need to understand the potential and limitations of AI in HCI education and ensure our graduating HCI students are aware of the potential and limitations of AI in HCI. In this paper, we report on the main pedagogical insights gained from the inclusion of generative AI into a 10-week undergraduate module. We designed the module to encourage student experimentation with GAI models as part of the design brief requirement and planned practical sessions and discussions. Our insights are based on replies to a survey sent out to the students after completing the module. Our key findings, for HCI educators, report on the use of AI as a persona for developing project ideas and creating resources for design, and AI as a mirror for reflecting students’ understanding of key concepts and ideas and highlighting knowledge gaps. We also discuss potential pitfalls that should be considered and the need to assess students’ literacies and assumptions of GAIs as pedagogical tools. Finally, we put forward the case for educators to take the opportunities GAI presents as an educational tool and be experimental, creative, and courageous in their practice. We end with a discussion of our findings in relation to the TPACK framework in HCI.

The list of generative AI tools is ever-expanding, as is the hype around such systems. Many such tools are oriented towards augmenting or complementing the existing work of designers. Tools such as Midjourney and others provide features that easily fit into the long-standing processes, research, and creative work currently done by interface designers. For example, generative AI tools may speed the process of developing and iterating on interface prototypes. However, as happens with all technologies when acquiring broader use, these systems are being creatively repurposed.

Of interest to the EduCHI community are those unanticipated uses that serve to contribute to user experience design and research in novel, unexpected ways. This position paper provides an overview of existing generative AI tools, their intended purpose, and their unanticipated uses within the design and research process, as evidenced by a brief review of related literature and selected classroom examples. This position paper aims to pose questions relevant to CHI educators, namely how can these possibilities be woven into existing courses? How might our students contribute to these creative approaches and at what level of maturity shall these tools and techniques be presented alongside more traditional methods? Lastly, we raise ethical questions about the use of these tools and highlight the challenges of using them in the context of design.

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies become increasingly important for designing human-computer interactions and user experiences, designers must prepare for the challenge of developing meaningful, creative, and technically feasible AI-based systems. We present a teaching format that we implemented to equip design students with the necessary intuition for AI technologies to develop sensor-based AI-driven interactions. The format consisted of two parts: a role play, which provided a playful, low-threshold introduction to the basics of machine learning for classifying sensor data; and an exploratory part, supported by readymade hardware and software modules, which enabled active engagement with the technology to support creative ideation processes. With this teaching format, we met our teaching objectives of increasing students’ technical literacy, teaching the technical language, and providing the necessary tools and knowledge for working with technology as creative material.