CHI 2008 report

Just got back from CHI 2008 (Conference on Human Factors in Computing) in Florence where I participated in the HCI for Community and International Development workshop, a followup on a similar workshop from CHI 2007 in San José, California and a more recent one from DIS 2008 in Cape Town. For me the workshop was about meeting good people working in this area and exchanging ideas about design. There was also some planning for community building. Most notably, due to Andy Dearden's efforts, there will be an IFIP TC 13 working group dedicated to design and international development. I'm also expecting a formal report of the workshop outcomes as happened with CHI 2007.

At the conference itself, the key session for me was on Healthcare in the Developing World, though I must confess I was disappointed with the low attendance of the CHI community, especially considering one of the papers won Best Note. And it probably should have been called "Healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa" since the three papers were about work in Tanzania, Ghana, and Angola.

The two papers that really struck me as important works at CHI were "Designs on dignity: perceptions of technology among the homeless" (Le Dantec CA, Edwards WK) and "Participant and interviewer attitudes toward handheld computers in the context of HIV/AIDS programs in sub-Saharan Africa" (Cheng KG, Ernesto F, Truong KN). The Cheng article, presented at the "Healthcare in the Developing World" session, described an experiment in urban Angola that found that the use of PDAs vs. paper forms by interviewers resulted in more socially desirable responses to questions about sexual behaviors in the context of HIV/AIDS knowledge-attitude-practice (KAP) interviews. It's a critical contribution because we have very little understanding of the cultural perceptions of such technology. We must consider not only how handheld computers will improve the quality of data from input to surveillance/analysis, but also how the value and meaning that people place on the technology can affect the quality of data that we're getting in the first place.

And here was all the stuff Mongolian from CHI... Irene McAra-McWilliam in her opening plenary mentioned Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Ballad of Kubla Khan" (Khublai Khan). Colleagues from Uruguay and Argentina said initial OLPC experiments in Mongolia revealed issues with insufficient Mongolian language content and with a high density of OLPCs causing mesh networking failures ("cannot update routing tables fast enough"). I heard a rumor that Ben Bederson from U of Maryland was taking the International Children's Digital Library to Mongolia (confirmed here).

Two addenda [27-Apr-2008]:

Jono writes about Peter Wright's paper on empathy and design in HCI.

Nate Bolt posted his notes from Bill Buxton's closing plenary "Being Human in a Digital Age" (and Bill himself commented on the post).