In the Eye of the Student

Abstract

We critically engage with CHI communities emerging outside the global North (ArabHCI and AfriCHI) to explore how participation is configured and enacted within sociocultural and political contexts fundamentally different from Western societies. We contribute to recent discussions about postcolonialism and decolonization of HCI by focusing on non-Western future technology designers. Our lens was a course designed to engage Egyptian students with a local yet culturally-distant community to design applications for documenting intangible heritage. Through an action research, the instructors reflect on selected students' activities. Despite deploying a flexible learning curriculum that encourages greater autonomy, the students perceived themselves with less agency than other institutional stakeholders involved in the project. Further, some of them struggled to empathize with the community as the impact of the cultural differences on configuring participation was profound. We discuss the implications of the findings on HCI education and in international cross-cultural design projects.

Bridging cultural heritage and communities through digital technologies

“…The attention towards accessibility is not exhausted with offering content in the language of community members, but it should also pre-explore cross-cultural meaning attributed to visual content such as images and icons as well as the way in which participants approach and consume information held in a digital environment. A possible solution to mitigate cultural distance in the adoption of technology could be the inclusion of participants in the design process [31], and indeed this resonates with previous research on ICT4D [41,75].…”

What do we study when studying politics anddemocracy?A thematic analysis of how politics and democracy aretreated in SIGCHI conference papers

“…(Höök et al, 2016). (Strohmayer et al, 2018;Lyle et al, 2018;Knouf, 2009;Giglitto et al, 2018;Linehan and Kirman, 2014;Wong-Villacres et al, 2020;Elsden et al, 2016;Knowles et al, 2014;Cutrell, 2011;Wolters et al, 2017;Shapiro, 1994;Nelimarkka, 2008;Latulipe, 2013;Howard and Irani, 2019;Preston, 1998;Ahmed et al, 2018;Allen, 1998) (Nelimarkka, 2008) Continued on next page Keyword: democracy Technology democratisation "a communally accessible, standalone voice interface which democratizes family access to technology." (Beneteau et al, 2020) and "[for] visualization [-] to be democratized, we need to provide means for non-experts to create visualizations that allow them to engage directly with datasets.…”

No More “Solutionism” or “Saviourism” in Futuring African HCI: A Manyfesto

“…This is not surprising as research has shown how even during African HCI winter schools, students prefer the engineering and technical dimension of interaction design to the aspects that explore values, culture, and meaning (See. [74,100,101]). This is further complicated as society has accorded high status to engineers, technicians and artists that are deemed worthy of recognition since they often engage in extensive mental activities that require rational (and in some cases non-rational) navigation of variations and probabilities.…”

“…In Africa for example, Giglitto and colleagues reported the saviourism attitude of some engineering students toward the conditions of sociability in Egyptian communities [74]. The specific mindset of the student is that of having the expertise and knowledge to fix the social world, thus conceiving design thinking as an instrument that exists within an Enlightened and agential subject.…”