A virtual workshop for HCI practitioners, researchers, Educators and students

Due to the evolving nature of technology and its impact on individuals, communities and society, practitioners and designers in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) are expected to consider ethics in their work. This role has inspired the development of a number of resources for practice, such as tools, frameworks and methods to tackle ethical issues in HCI. But these suffer from low adoption rate potentially because they are not yet part of the standard body of knowledge. To mitigate the issue, we argue that there is an urgent need for ethics education in HCI. Beyond defining ethics, an ethics curriculum must enable practitioners to reflect and allow consideration of intended and unintended consequences of the technologies they create from the ground up, rather than as a fix or an afterthought. In this co-design workshop, we aim to build upon existing practices and knowledge of ethics in HCI and work with the CHI community to enrich ethics curriculum. We will scaffold our collective understandings of the existing resources and create guidelines that support interactive educational experiences to support HCI ethics curriculum.

This one-day workshop at CHI 2021 invites practitioners, researchers, educators and students in HCI, co-design, user experience design, design education, ethical design, and emerging technologies to explore the need for ethics education in HCI. Participants are invited to co-create a vision of future ethics curriculum in HCI programs and professional developments. This workshop aims to generate an understanding of the current practices in ethics education in HCI, identify ways through which ethics education in HCI can be enhanced through interactive experiences and forge directions for future developments. The outcomes will include a better understanding of the current state of ethics curriculum in HCI, future directions as well as how we might co-create future resources for teaching ethics in higher education.

Participants in the workshop will have an opportunity to present their views and works in this space, reflect on their own teaching, practices and understandings of ethics, and engage with other practices in the community. Participants are encouraged to submit position papers to express their interest in the workshop, describing one or more of the following: case studies, literature review, curriculum review, examples of projects relevant to ethics, ethics education, responsible HCI education or practice, possible examples of ethical pitfalls and challenges of working with ethics resources (e.g., frameworks, themes and methods), new and emerging resources to inform ethics HCI education.

workshop agenda

This workshop will be conducted online via Zoom and Miro

Introduction and position paper presentations: The workshop will begin with an introduction to the topic by the organizers. Next, participants will briefly present their proposals to give the group an opportunity to become familiar with cutting edge approaches to ethics education and practices.

Reflective exercise: A facilitated reflective activity will follow to capture the current landscape of ethics resources used by participants in research, teaching and practice. This will help participants to additionally gain an understanding of their own ethical practices. The exercise involves working in groups and using a set of visual templates and post-it notes provided by the organizers. Participants will start by sharing personal stories, then identifying challenges and opportunities based on their experiences. A group discussion will be then facilitated with the aim of establishing shared understandings and best practices around the needs and challenges for curriculum reform through an ethical lens.

Building the future: Finally, co-design activities on Miro will help participants to speculate how future ethics curriculum and resources can supplement HCI education. This is in form of a roadmap that extends from ‘now’ to ‘future’. Again, this activity is facilitated through templates provided to participants who will use post-it notes to share their throughs (on Miro).

Final discussion: Finally, those who worked in groups will present their speculated futures. All participants will engage in a discussion around the opportunities for scaffolding the ethics curriculum in HCI and reflect on how a collective future may be built. Participants will be then invited to contribute to a statement of mission to achieve this future.

Wrap up: The workshop will end with a self-reflection at this point as participants will identify how they will use the insights from the workshop in their practice.