Crossing borders, building bridges

A workshop HCI for development (HCI4D) was conducted at CHI 2016 to understand what a global, collaborative HCI agenda might look like. Abstracts put together by 71 participants from 20 countries were included in the workshop. Participants were organized into groups of up to eight or nine individuals, attempting to align research interests based on submissions. These were titled Agriculture, EdTech, Health, Methods, Mobile, Refugees, Social, and Sociotech. There was also a “Meta” team that included members keen to chart out potential directions for the field, both for those in the room and for the community at large. The Meta team proposed a toolkit of activities to encourage HCI and HCI4D researchers and practitioners to be more reflexive. The Methods group proposed the production of a set of case studies (perhaps as a blog), exploring the way various methods are used in HCI and HCI4D research across borders, whether political, cultural, demographic, or otherwise. An example was the application of participatory design (PD) in a rural village setting, where the researchers had to step back to engage in a long-term process of capacity building in order for the villagers to engage in participatory design.