Home

Thanks to all the participants for playing such an active part in making the workshop a success!

Please go to the Workshop outcomes page for details of outcomes, and presenters' slides.
 
The BCS HCI 2012 workshop chairs will be organising publication of accepted workshop papers in due course, in the e-wic repository.
 
 
 
Call for Papers (Closed)
Submissions are invited for the workshop HCI Research in Sensitive Contexts: Ethical Considerations, which will be run in conjunction with BCS HCI 2012 (http://hci2012.bcs.org/index.html) in Birmingham, UK in September 2012.
 
As technology progressively pervades all aspects of our lives, HCI researchers are engaging with increasingly sensitive contexts. Areas under scrutiny include the provision of appropriate technology access for those approaching the end of life, the design of a social network site for parents of babies in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and the design of interactive memorials in post-genocide Rwanda. The ethical and methodological considerations generated by research in sensitive contexts can go well beyond those addressed by standard ethical approval processes in Computing Science departments and research groups. Such processes need time to catch up with the innovative areas which HCI research is engaging with.

 

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners with a common interest in conducting HCI research in sensitive contexts. Examples of ‘sensitive contexts’ include working with potentially vulnerable individuals such as children, adults with disabilities and cloistered nuns, and working in communities affected by a traumatic event. By sharing their experiences and reflections, participants in the workshop will generate a collective understanding of the ethical issues surrounding HCI research in sensitive contexts. We hope that participants will subsequently use this understanding to inform the design of ethical review processes in their own research groups, and incorporate awareness of ethical considerations into research design.

 

We invite 2-4 page submissions in BCS format (http://ewic.bcs.org/category/15364).   Both completed and in-progress work is welcome. Submissions should focus on ethical considerations surrounding HCI research in sensitive contexts. Submissions should be made via EasyChair (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=hciethics2012), and will be selected based on range, originality, quality, and potential to generate discussion.Topics include, but are not limited to:

·        What are the ethical considerations surrounding HCI research in sensitive contexts?

·        What approaches used by other disciplines (e.g. health, psychology, sociology) could be useful to HCI researchers?

·        Reflective accounts of research experiences – what went well, what went badly, what could be improved?

·        Impact on research reliability of research context and choice of methodologies.

·        Approaches to protecting the physical and emotional wellbeing of the researcher.

·        Informed consent to participation.

·        Mining publicly available online data.

·        Issues specific to fieldwork.

·        Maintaining confidentiality when reporting results.

·        Anonymity – is it always possible and desirable?

Accepted papers will be published in the British Computer Society's e-WIC repository.