Coffee & Registration

📍Great Hall, Sutherland Building, Northumbria University (In Person Only Event)

Welcome Event

Digital Citizens Team, Northumbria University

We will give a brief overview of the DCX activities for the next two weeks, along with some helpful housekeeping. Austin Toombs will then kick off the Student Design Challenge and introduce each of the project hosts. Student will then get into their groups and start working with their project hosts. 

📍Great Hall, Sutherland Building, Northumbria University (In Person Only Event)

Lunch

Articulating and Embedding Impact into Digital Civics Research

Lucy Moorcraft, Impact and Engagement Officer, Northumbria University

This workshop will aim to work collaboratively to evaluate different understandings of Digital Civics, ways of embedding impact within Digital Civics research approaches, designs and engagement activities and ways of articulating how proposed Digital Civics research intends to deliver impact. 

📍Great Hall, Sutherland Building, Northumbria University (In Person Only Event)

DCX Project Work

📍CIS 103, Ellison Building, Northumbria University (In Person Only Session)

Lunch

CHI Howay: Get to know the Research

Researchers from across the globe are invited to join together and present accepted and rejected pieces of work submitted to CHI 2024. The presentations will be in a interactive style with 8 minutes per-presentation, with opportunities for open discussion (7 minutes per presentation).

📍Ellison Lecture Theatre 0001, Ellison Building, Northumbria University 

💻 Teams Link

Sebastian Prost, Northumbria University

Digital Technologies for Nature-Friendly Agriculture: Tensions and Speculations

Agri-tech promises us that agriculture can be more sustainable thanks to IoT sensors, AI, and autonomous drones and robots running the data-driven farm. However, many such visions just reinforce existing unsustainable industrial food systems. Since small-scale community-based farms already produce food sustainably, we ask, what can technology designers learn from them about appropriate and responsible digital farming technologies? We report tentative findings from ongoing reserach with smallholder farmers in Northern England. We present tensions related to the relationship between technology and farming practices and unfinished design speculations intended to foster critical reflection and debate among farmers.

Sara Wolf, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany

Still Not a Lot of Research? Re-Examining HCI Research on Religion and Spirituality

My talk presents a sequel to Buie and Blythe's review on religion and spirituality (R/S) and assesses the evolving landscape of HCI research on R/S. Given that the last decade has seen transformative shifts catalysed by technological advances and the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we wondered whether and how HCI research on R/S has changed, too. Providing a snapshot of the current research, we document changes in research lines with a shift towards community, an increased consideration of R/S in related areas such as health, education, and society, and the broadening of challenges for HCI research on R/S.

Ana O Henriques, Interactive Technologies Institute, University of Lisbon

Fostering Feminist Community-Led Ethics

This talk explores the intersection of feminism, digital civics, and ethics within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). It discusses the evolving nature of ethics in HCI, emphasizing the need to move beyond prescriptive frameworks and adopt a dynamic, processual approach informed by feminist principles. We highlight the potential for feminist action-based praxis to drive transformative agendas within digital civics and advocate for the integration of feminist perspectives into ethics discussions within HCI to promote more nuanced and responsive ethical practices.

Emily Nielsen, Swansea University

UnMute - Empowering The Digitally Unheard

This talk will discuss research in low-resource language communities to create speech-based interfaces. Our work utilises a community-focused approach include languages which are often neglected in existing speech recognition. This talk will discuss our toolkit which works on small amounts of data to 'unmute' the digitally unheard.

Denise Lengyel, Open Lab, Newcastle University

Traveling Arts x HCI Sketchbook: Exploring the Intersection Between Artistic Expression and Human-Computer Interaction

Arts in HCI is often thought of as limited to prominent realms such as sketching for UX Design and design probes. Inspired by Toselli’s Sketchnote Army Travelling Sketchbook, researchers and artists contributed to a ’Travelling Sketchbook for Arts in HCI’, showcasing their arts-based practice in HCI and the variety of arts-based expressions by researchers, the researched and third parties. The sketchbook illustrates fruitful possibilities for extending research and dissemination methods in HCI. It also questions current practices, which often do not recognise the significance of artist attribution and advocates for equal authorship between principal researchers and contributing artists.

Caroline Claisse, Open Lab, Newcastle University

Understanding Antenatal Care Needs through Co-Creation with Roma Women to Inform the Design of mHealth Technologies

Women from the Roma community experience significant health disparities during their pregnancy. Whilst Mobile Health (mHealth) technologies have the potential to improve antenatal care experiences and health outcomes, research on women from ethnically marginalised backgrounds in developed countries remains limited. We report on a series of Co-creation Workshops with 11 Roma women who have settled in the North of England. In this paper, we present thematic insights about their experiences and needs during pregnancy, and their perceptions and attitudes towards digital technologies to inform the design of culturally sensitive mHealth. We contribute to Human Computer Interaction (HCI) with new empirical research to discourses on Critical Digital Health, Intersectional HCI and Women-centred Design, highlight implications for design and encourage a more critical and intersectional design approach to accommodate better the experiences of ethnically marginalised groups whose needs arguably tend to be overlooked and stereotyped.

Interactive Discussions and Break

Colin Watson, Open Lab, Newcastle University

Digital Benefits and Disbenefits

Digitisation of public services is often problematic for citizens; Colin Watson will introduce his work on digitisation design of UK public services that implement policies providing financial support for people most in need.

Lauren Scott, Northumbria University

Have you heard about this?: Exploring receivers, Spreaders and External Actors in Misinformation Correction Interactions

Misinformation is a societal issue infiltrating our day-to-day lives. Misinformation comes from online and offline sources, including friends and family networks, where we are more likely to trust information shared, due to close relationships with family and friends. This impacts both misinformation spread and correction. Drawing on findings from a survey of UK residents (n=61), we find that within family and friend networks, misinformation spreads primarily offline, We find inadvertent misinformation spread occurring when people vent or ask for support from their social circles. This talk will explain these roles, and implications they may have for future misinformation correction research.

Lisa Mekioussa Malki, University College London

Exploring Privacy Practices of Female mHealth Apps in a Post-Roe World 

My talk will focus on our recently-accepted CHI paper about the privacy practices of female mobile health apps and their implications in a post-Roe world. I will briefly present the study's rationale, our methodological approach to analysing app privacy policies and interfaces, and summarise the key takeaways for researchers, developers, and designers working in the intimate health space.

Mark Warner, University College London

“Lose the vagueness, waffle and arse-covering”: Effects of Lived Experience, Training, and Health Condition on Distinguishing AI from Human Health Advice

When people engage in online health communities, community trust must be maintained. Yet, use of generative AI may erode this trust. We report on a controlled experiment measuring attitudes towards transparency and trust around AI use in such communities, and assessing people’s ability to differentiate between AI-generated and human-written advice across two health conditions. We consider how lived experience with a specific health condition (diabetes or back pain), AI-recognition training, and the health condition itself, may affect people’s ability to discern advice authorship. 

Jessica McClearn, Royal Holloway University of London

Security Patchworking; Making the (in)security of failing socio-technical infrastructures visible

This talk will introduce an ethnographically informed study which took place in Beirut, Lebanon in 2022 to uncover how the failures of multiple infrastructures – electricity provision, public spaces, identification and authentication documents, access to money and financial resources as well as reliable Internet access – necessitated infrastructuring, to establish everyday security. This work highlights the value of `security patchworking’ as a lens and an extension of infrastructuring literature that makes visible forms of security and insecurity in HCI research.

Jamie Mahoney & Effie Le Moignan, Northumbria University

Online Image Sharing: Rapid Covid Test Imagery as an Indicator of Perceived Stigma and Pandemic Narration

The invisible nature of viruses renders them as having a high degree of fear attached due to the unknowability of infectivity and transmission during a pandemic. Fear and a lack of control which arise in this context can contribute to the emergence of stigma around infected individuals or those exposed. Stigma may exacerbate issues such as social isolation, but also has detrimental impact on public health control measures. Individuals may avoid compliance with testing regimes and wait longer to present for diagnosis if stigma is perceived. Focusing on UK tweets of rapid Covid tests (LFTs) during the Covid-19 pandemic this work explores how sharing exceeds the functional diagnostic purpose of the tests themselves, and if there was any evidence of self-stigmatisation in testing for, or contracting, Covid. The images demonstrate little evidence that either Covid was a socially stigmatised condition or reticence in sharing participation with the testing regime. 

Rob Wilson, Northumbria University

Exploration and Co‐creation of Community Infrastructures for mutual engagement between HEIs and local areas - Towards University as a Platform

This talk reflects on our experiences throughout 2022-23 as university researchers, ‘collaborating’ with local authorities and community organisations in North East England to build a community research partnerships with the overall aim of attempting to understand what a University can do beyond rather trite ideas as anchor institution. The overarching research aim of this project was to explore the basis of an alternative strategy using the concept of a HEI as a potential space and provider of tools/assets for the co‐production (intermediation and brokerage) of these challenges for such platforms and services the notion of a ‘University as a (safe and ethical) site of collaboration and

partnership provision’ or ‘University as a Platform’ (UaaP).

Interactive Discussions

Poster Session and Coffee

📍CIS 103, Ellison Building, Northumbria University (In Person Only Session)

Downtime 

Networking and Further Discussions 

📍The Holy Hobo, Jesmond, Newcastle

DCX Project Work

📍CIS 103, Ellison Building, Northumbria University (In Person Only Session)

Lunch

Visualising Digital Citizens (updated)

Denise Lengyel, Innovation Fellow at the Centre for Digital Citizens within Open Lab, Newcastle University

Research into digital civics includes investigating aspects of digital citizenship, what digital citizens are and how they can be supported and need to be protected. This touches on issues of age and (inter-)generational use of technology, health and wellbeing, security and safety as well as equity, resilience and sustainability. Arts-based methods such as drawing and other forms of visual storytelling, e.g. cartoons and comics, have been shown to help illuminate concepts as complex as digital citizenship. They offer a different lens for exploring such concepts and your connected experiences, a way to navigate and express what you might not have words for or find difficult to disentangle. A different kind of thinking, on the page with your hands and your pen.

This hands-on workshop aims to explore the concept of digital citizenship through visual storytelling. You will create your own comic strip(s) to reflect on aspects you consider crucial to being a digital citizen. (A short introduction into digital citizens will be provided to help you jump-start your reflection.) In groups, you will then share and discuss your creations. The goal is to foster discussions around the concept of digital citizens in order to critically reflect on its meaning, possibly refine its definition and thus identify future research avenues in the realm of digital civics.

📍CIS 103, Ellison Building, Northumbria University 

💻 Teams Link

DCX Project Work

📍CIS 103, Ellison Building, Northumbria University (In Person Only Session)

Lunch

Envisioning Collaborative Futures: Advancing the Frontiers of Embedded Research

Anna R L Carter, Northumbria University and  Tiffany Knearem, Google Boston 

Starting off with a seminar talk from Tiffany with open Q and A session on: Solidarity not Charity! Empowering Local Communities for Disaster Relief during COVID-19 through Grassroots Support. We will then head into our workshop around envisioning collaborative futures:

Participatory design initiatives, especially within the realm of digital civics, are often integrated and codeveloped with the very citizens and communities they intend to assist. Digital civics research aims to create positive social change using a variety of digital technologies. These research projects commonly adopt various embedded processes, such as commissioning models. Despite the adoption of this process within a range of domains, there isn't currently a framework for best practices and accountability procedures to ensure we engage with citizens ethically and ensure the sustainability of our projects. This workshop aims to provide a space to start collaboratively constructing a dynamic framework of best practices, laying the groundwork for the future of sustainable embedded research processes. The overarching goal is to foster discussions and share insights that contribute to developing effective practices, ensuring the longevity and impact of participatory digital civics projects.

📍CIS 103, Ellison Building, Northumbria University

💻 Teams Link

DCX Project Work

📍CIS 103, Ellison Building, Northumbria University (In Person Only Session)

Lunch

Fostering Feminist Community-Led Ethics: Building Tools and Connections

Ana O. Henriques, ITI/LARSyS, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa

This workshop will advocate for a dynamic, community-led approach to ethics in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) by integrating principles from feminist HCI and digital civics. Traditional ethics in HCI often overlook interpersonal considerations, resulting in static frameworks ill-equipped to address dynamic social contexts and power dynamics. Drawing from feminist perspectives, the workshop aims to lay the groundwork for developing a meta-toolkit for community-led feminist ethics, fostering collaborative research practices grounded in feminist ethical principles. Through pre-workshop activities, interactive sessions, and post-workshop discussions, participants will engage in dialogue to advance community-led ethical research practices. Additionally, the workshop seeks to strengthen the interdisciplinary community of researchers and practitioners interested in ethics, digital civics, and feminist HCI. By fostering a reflexive approach to ethics, the workshop contributes to the discourse on design's role in shaping future interactions between individuals, communities, and technology.

📍SQX 117/118 School of Design , Northumbria University 

💻 Teams Link

UK Bank Holiday

DCX Project Work

📍CIS 103, Ellison Building, Northumbria University (In Person Only Session)

Lunch

Merging Activism and Academia

Debora de Castro Leal, University of Siegen

How rural communities in the Amazon region cope with economic and technological challenges? In this talk, Débora will explore the integration of digital technology into these communities and the broader global supply chains. 

📍CIS 103, Ellison Building, Northumbria University 

💻 Teams Link

DCX Project Work

📍CIS 103, Ellison Building, Northumbria University (In Person Only Session)

Lunch

"How Will I Know If He Really Loves Me?": A Speculative World-Building Workshop About AI, Communication, and Future Human-Human Relationships

Austin Toombs, Indianna University Bloomington, Kyle Montague, Northumbria University, Suchismita Naik, Purdue University & Paul Parsons, Purdue Univeristy

Join us for a half-day workshop where we will collaboratively explore future possible configurations of personal AI assistants (PAIAs) and their potential capabilities to interact with other humans and other personal AI assistants. Participants (and organizers) will engage in design fiction world(s)-building activities to help map the paths, landmarks, and boundaries of acceptable roles that personal AI assistants may play in our relationships in the future. The goal is for participation in the workshop to help attendees think through their own research and design work as it relates to exploring the impact that PAIAs and PAIA-like systems might have on our relationships with others and our relationships with technology. Anyone who wants to prepare for this workshop ahead of time can write their own design fictions, sci-fi analyses, or case studies that relate to this topic. Our hope is to publish a collection of design fictions together, depending on participant interest. 

📍CIS 103, Ellison Building, Northumbria University 

💻 Teams Link

DCX Closing Showcase

DCX Team, Northumbria University

The showcase event will see the closing of the week with group presentations showing the work completed across the student projects.

📍Great Hall, Sutherland Building, Northumbria University

💻 Teams Link

Lunch