

Monthly Online Seminars on
Human Computer Interaction and User Experience
Presented by
British Computer Society Interaction Group
and Interacting with Computers
A monthly series of online seminars about human computer interaction (HCI) and user experience (UX). Hosted by the British Computer Society (BCS) Interaction Group and the BCS journal “Interacting with Computers”
Everyone who is interested in HCI and UX is welcome to join, whether you are a student, practitioner, researcher, teacher or just interested.
Seminars will be a mix of presentations by authors of papers recently (or soon to be) published in Interacting with Computers and other topics of wide interest to the research and practitioner community of people involved in HCI and UX.
If you have questions, comments or would like to give a seminar, please email Professor Helen Petrie (helen.petrie@york.ac.uk), Editor of Interacting with Computers and seminar convenor.
Jan Gulliksen, Joakim Lillesköld and Stefan Stenbom, KTH, Stockholm Sweden
The “new” new normal – digitalization and hybridization of work and education before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic
PREVIOUS SEMINARS:
Monday 27th February
Alan Dix (Computation Foundry, Swansea University and Cardiff Metropolitan University), Raymond Bond (University of Ulster at Jordanstown), and Ana Caraban (Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Tecnico)
Monday 30th January
During the COVID-19 pandemic the use of social media offered a possible way to address the difficulties of social relationships for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), as well as a way to ease the problems of their caregivers. To gather information on the feasibility of this solution, we conducted an online questionnaire about the first lockdown period in Italy (March-May 2020) with 29 caregivers of ASD individuals. The questionnaire investigated their living conditions, the way time was spent during isolation, the availability of technological equipment, the perceived level of anxiety, and the perceived utility of social media. The results showed that the difficulties of using social media had not been overcome, even at this time of greatest need. However, caregivers who take care of ASD people with high levels of anxiety perceived social media as more useful. This result invites further reflection on how to implement social media effectively for people with ASD.
Unfortunately, recording of this seminar failed!
Monday 28th November
Helen Petrie, Professor Emerita of Human Computer Interaction, University of York, UK
Monday 31st October: 13:00 UTC/GMT (UK will be back on winter time!)
Professor Marian Ursu, School of Arts and Creative Technologies, University of York
Object-Based Media: Foundations of Interactive Storytelling with Audio and Video
Watch the recording on our YouTube channel
Interactive storytelling, despite having been around for quite a while now, still represents a rather amorphous area of artistic expression and human-computer interaction. It is sharply clear in definition – stories in which the viewers have agency – but it is very poor in exemplars, particularly those taking as reference the linear film. A few examples, such as Netflix’s Bandersnatch, keep the quest alive, but making good interactive film is still an unsolved challenge. A, possibly the, key reason is the mutual dependency between the concept development and production tools. Developing rich interactive-film concepts is very hard, if not impossible, without dedicated tools to support storytellers in their creation. Designing such dedicated tools is very hard, if not impossible, without rich interactive-film concepts to drive their requirements. In my talk, I will describe Object-Based Media (OBM) as a generic approach to developing interactive film and present the research we carried out in the Digital Creativity Labs at the University of York in the development of more effective means to imagine and produce interactive narratives. I will focus on a set of basic interactive narrative structures which we implemented an authoring/sketching tool – Cutting Room – which allows creative thought to be immediately realised through the software.
Coming in 2023
Grace Eden, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, India
Speculative Design is increasingly being used as a tool to facilitate thinking outside the box. It engages imagination as a resource and uses it to envisage how technologies might transform our world in the future. Through a combination of what-if scenarios, prototypes, and alternative world building; palpable objects and interactions are embedded into future situations.These imagined worlds are used to guide critical reflection about the choices we might make for how technologies are integrated into society, implications, and possible trajectories. Fundamentally, speculative design invites us to engage in a dialogue about the future before it happens. This talk will introduce concepts and techniques used in speculative design and provide suggestions for how it can be used to enhance UX practice.
Previous seminars
The inaugural seminar was on Monday 23rd May 2022
Professor Alan Dix, Computational Foundry, Swansea University
What Next for UX Tools: from screens to smells, from sketch to code, supporting design for rich interactions
Watch the recording of this session on our YouTube channel
Every interaction with a digital device is set in some form of physical and human context, and yet the most commonly used tools for UX design are focused purely on the screen. Rather than being a scaffold to build better interfaces, wireframes can feel like the barriers in a cattle ranch, herding us towards a small range of design options, looking inwards towards the device rather than outwards towards our users. The situation is even more difficult when we want to design interactions that involve other senses, such as sound, smells, and touch; or new forms of interaction, such as flexible displays, autonomous cars, smart buildings, and digital fabrication. In this talk I’ll describe both some of my own personal journey and the InContext project that is thinking about more wholistic tools for design that incorporate rich context, multiple modalities, and end-to-end connections between design and development. The talk will outline both our own thinking and outcomes from a series of InContext workshops, most recently at CHI 2022. We do not have answers to all the open questions, but I will also demonstrate several early prototypes addressing different facets of design that are underrepresented in current generation design tools. Most important, I hope that this will open up a roadmap of ideas that others may also follow to create better tools for the next generation of UX designers and developers.
Monday 27th June, 2022
Professor Pei-Luen (Patrick) Rau, Tsinghua University, China
Watch the recording of this session on our YouTube Channel
The paper associated with this seminar is now available on the Interacting with Computers website
Talking with an Internet of Things conversational agent
Internet of things conversational agents (IoT-CAs) are making human– computer interactions ubiquitous. In this study, we experimentally examined the effects of IoT-CA use on face-to-face conversations between close partners. One hundred and thirty-six participants (68 close relationship dyads) participated in the experiment. We prepared an IoT chat environment and provided chat topics for each dyad. The dyads were randomly assigned into one of two IoT-CA use pattern groups (joint use: two persons using an IoT-CA together; individual use: one person using an IoT-CA alone) and three interaction conditions (no IoT-CA use; conversation content-relevant IoT-CA use; conversation content-irrelevant IoT-CA use). The results showed that compared with no IoT-CA use, IoT-CA use did not have negative effects on conversation experiences but produced feelings of greater closeness to the IoT-CA in the partners. Furthermore, joint IoT-CA use in the content-relevant condition (IoT-CA made comments relevant to interpersonal interactions) helped increase interpersonal self-disclosure.
Monday 25th July, 2022
Dr Sione Paea and Mr Gabiriele Bulivou, University of the South Pacific, Fiji
Watch the recording of this session on our YouTube Channel
The paper associated with this seminar is now available on the Interacting with Computers website
Information Architecture: Using Open Card Sorting Data Analysis
Open card sorting is a well-established method for discovering how people understand and categorize information. This paper addresses the problem of quantitatively analyzing open card sorting data using the K-means algorithm. Although the K-means algorithm is effective, its results are too sensitive to initial category centers. Therefore, many approaches in the literature have focused on determining suitable initial centers. However, this is not always possible, especially when the number of categories is increased. This paper proposes an approach to improve the quality of the solution produced by the K-means for open card sort data analysis. Results show that the proposed initialization approach for K-means outperforms existing initialization methods, such as MaxMin, random initialization and K-means++.
Monday 26th September: 13:00 BST (i.e. UTC + 1)
Gilbert Cockton, Emeritus Professor, University of Sunderland and Northumbria University
What I Discovered in a Design School That Many in Computing Don’t Know – and Some May Not Accept
Watch the recording of this session on our YouTube Channel