HCI-E2: Workshop on HCI Engineering Education – for developers, designers and more
IFIP WG 2.7/13.4 workshop at EICS 2022, Nice, France – June, 2022
Topics and scope | Goals and Expected Outcomes | Submissions | Important dates | Organisers
The workshop aims at identifying, examining, and structuring educational resources and approaches to support the teaching/learning of HCI Engineering. It aims to cover a range of areas from challenges related to novel forms of interaction to emerging themes stemming from new application domains. Another goal is to consider the variety of students’ skills and experiences. For instance, how to incorporate and teach HCI Engineering in Computer Science curricula or in UI/UX Design curricula? How to teach HCI Engineering to students with different skills (e.g., engineers, designers)? The goal is also to consider different lecturing modalities, ranging from on-site lectures, project-based pedagogy to online/remote lecturing.
Topics and scope
Engineering interactive systems is a multidisciplinary endeavour positioned at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Software Engineering, Usability Engineering, Interaction Design, Visual Design, and other disciplines. The field of Human-Computer Interaction Engineering (HCI-E) is concerned with providing methods, techniques, and tools for the systematic and effective design, development, testing, evaluation, and deployment of interactive systems in a wide range of application domains.
The aim of such contributions is threefold:
- Improve the process of designing, developing, and evaluating interactive systems;
- Improve the quality of the user interface (UI) of interactive systems, including usability and user experience properties, and software properties (also known as external and internal properties, respectively);
- Adapt these contributions to the specific requirements and needs of the various application domains.
In recent years, the range of interactive techniques and applications has broadened considerably and can be expected to grow even further in the future. While new interaction techniques offer the prospect of improving the usability and user experience of interactive systems, they pose new challenges, not only for methods and tools that can support their design, development, and evaluation in a systematic engineering-oriented manner, but also to the designers and developers who must use them. Examples of interactive applications include mobile systems, wearable medical devices, safety and mission critical systems, and AI-based systems. Such interactive applications require a broad range of HCI-E techniques, methods, and tools.
These techniques, methods, and tools, as well as many other novel forms of interaction, involve aspects that need to be adequately addressed in the curricula of programs in HCI, Software Engineering and Computer Science. This begs the question of how best to address these topics in those curricula, and what the best approaches to address them are. When considering education about HCI Engineering, we need to think about who is being educated as there is likely to be different curriculum scope and educational methods for different types of learners. There are two main distinctions that are likely to influence these methods:
- Technical vs. non-technical – Students in Computer Science and similar areas are likely to be the main consumers of detailed HCI-E education. However, the creation of interactive applications “requires input from science, engineering and design disciplines” and multidisciplinary teamwork requires from participants an increased understanding and appreciation for other disciplines. It is also important for those who are likely to have a more interface design or user research role to be able to appreciate the limits of technology and the potential impacts of architectural design choices.
- Student vs. practitioner – It is likely that the primary interest of many participants will be university education. However, developers are often involved in lively online discussions about different frameworks, and even in the use of monads in interactive JavaScript. Interaction Design Foundation courses attract tens of thousands of UX practitioners worldwide, evidencing the desire for on-the-job learning in both communities.
Participants may target one or more of these types of learners, have interests that cover several, or indeed may address other groups.
Goals and Expected Outcomes
The workshop aims at identifying, examining, and structuring educational resources and approaches to support the teaching/learning of HCI Engineering. It aims to cover a range of areas from challenges related to novel forms of interaction to emerging themes stemming from new application domains. Another goal is to consider the variety of students’ skills and experiences. For instance, how to incorporate and teach HCI Engineering in Computer Science curricula or in UI/UX Design curricula? How to teach HCI Engineering to students with different skills (e.g., engineers, designers)? The goal is also to consider different lecturing modalities, ranging from on-site lectures, project-based pedagogy to online/remote lecturing.
We identify two types of potential outcomes that could define the group activities during the workshop:
- Educational resources – One goal is to create a repository of educational resources for HCI-E including cases studies, projects and exercises. These educational resources need to be described in a common structure. The definition of this structure was started at the previous workshop. A goal of the workshop will be to extend and consolidate this structure as well as to describe these resources according to this structure.
- HCI-E Education Roadmap – Edited volume: Depending on the quality of the submissions and the workshop results, revised versions of the contributions will be published on an edited volume. Alternatively, we will produce a journal paper summarizing and consolidating the contributions, in the form of an HCI Engineering Education roadmap.
Submissions
We aim to bring together expertise both on HCI Engineering and on Education. Hence, we solicit contributions from the HCI-E related communities, and we will be very interested to welcome members of the educational community, for a fruitful discussion.
Position papers (4-8 pages in ACM single column format) must report experiences related to HCI Engineering education. Submissions could report software engineering units including some aspects of HCI-E, curricula or teaching units dedicated to HCI-E, case studies/projects demonstrating aspects of HCI-E, evaluation of students’ skills related to HCI-E, training non-technical and mixed students in HCI-E, training appropriate aspects of HCI-E to professionals/practitioners, a new teaching modality promising for teaching HCI-E, introducing HCI-E into existing curricula, etc. Authors could also provide in their submission a short summary of their experience in the field and their motivation to participate in this workshop.
Important dates
- Submission deadline:
April 15, 2022April 22, 2022 (extended deadline) - Notification deadline:
April 22, 2022May 6, 2022 - Workshop: June 21, 2022
Deadlines are AoE.
Organisers
- José C. Campos, University of Minho & HASLab/INESC TEC, Portugal
- Laurence Nigay, University Grenoble Alpes, France
- Alan Dix, Computational Foundry, Swansea University, Wales, UK
- Anke Dittmar, University of Rostock, Germany
- Simone DJ Barbosa, PUC Rio, Brazil