- Great, hi everyone, my name is
Nicki Dell, I am a faculty member
at Cornell Tech, Neha is at Georgia Tech.
We are going to split up this presentation,
less for taking equal credit, but more
for splitting the work load I think.
So we're really happy to be here,
and talk to you about the ins and outs
of HCI for development, which I'm
going to use HCI4D, as an acronym for that.
And what we really wanted to do,
is provide a couple different
perspectives on HCI4D research.
First for people inside the community who might be
intimately familiar with the concerns and the goals that
this work seeks to address. But also for the larger
community, the larger CHI community,
particularly as we grapple with the theme of
CHI for good, we wanted to provide the insights
and experiences of the field of HCI4D in the hopes that
we can offer something to the larger community.
And so what we wanted to do was provide a concise,
high level overview of the work and the goals
and the domains that it's worked in and the people
that it's seeking to help.
And offer the insights that a lot of these researchers
have put together over the years in one place,
where for new comers to the field, they can find that all
and hopefully learn from that.
So we focused on the last six years of work,
from 2009 to 2014, and we're building on a variety
of other papers that have also sought to provide these
middle level insights.
The last major review of HCI4D was in 2009
by Ho and colleagues, and they had 65 different articles
that they looked at, so, we have a few more than that,
but there's a variety of other papers that have tried
to do this.
We have done it more recently, so there's been no,
as I said, no other reviews since 2009, but also we are
combining the quantitative data of looking at these papers
with insights from experts in the field, so it's kind of
a nice balanced perspective in that way.
So we started out by doing an online survey to try
and identify what other publication venues that people
care about, where they're submitting their work,
where it's getting accepted, where they want to submit it,
and from this we distill down to 11 HCI or ICTD venues
that we focus on and I'll talk about those in detail
in a second.
We then went through these, the proceedings from these
conferences for the last six years,
for ICTD conferences we looked for papers that had
an HCI focus, for HCI conferences we looked for papers
that had a focus on marginalized communities or ICTD.
And from this we ended up with 259 papers that fit the bill
for HCI4D, and we've analyzed them according to the domain
that they were targeting, the people, the country
and I'll talk about all of those details shortly.
And then we went and we did qualitative interviews
with eleven expert researches in this field,
and that's what Neha's gonna talk about in a little bit.
So let's start with a bird's eye view of the field.
As I mentioned, we looked at 2009 up to 2014,
you can perhaps tell from this graph that there's
no real pattern here in terms of the number of papers
that are being published every year, and this is just
summed over all the conferences.
It's certainly inferenced by conferences that are held
either every 18 months or every other year as opposed
to annually, but as I mentioned in Ho and her colleagues'
work they had a total of 65 papers, whereas we have 259
from the last six years, so hopefully that speaks
to the growth of the field.
When we look at where the work has been published,
ICTD has been the biggest venue, followed by CHI,
and perhaps what's more striking here is that venues
like Ubicomp or UIST only have two or three papers
across this entire period.
And hopefully that's highlighting some room for growth
in those areas.
We then looked at where the work was conducted,
so we're looking here not at the countries where
the researchers are from but more where the research
is actually taking place, and by far, Asia was the focus,
in fact there were 108 papers that were based in India,
probably due in part to Microsoft research, India has a
very productive lab there, the next highest was 27
from South Africa, so India was really in the lead
but there was work done in 48 different countries,
43 of which were low and middle income countries.
So incredibly diverse set of places to work.
We then analyzed who the work was focusing on,
and so we identified ground level users as being individual
so these would be individual patients or individual
farmers for example who were using technology
as opposed to human access points which we identified
as being people a little bit higher up in the stakeholder
system so this would be teachers or health workers
who themselves are facilitating access to services
through technologies.
The collective entities referred mostly to organizations
like non-governmental organizations or ministries,
perhaps Unicef, that's the talk we just had.
And then general users were papers that didn't really
define any particular population and seemed to be targeting
humanity as a whole.
There's been an embracing of different methods in this work
so 134 which is about half of the papers were primarily
qualitative with 38 being quantitative and then 79 having
mixed methods and using both.
And we think that it speaks to the strengths of HCI
in embracing these different epistimological leanings,
and has been something that HCI4D and ICTD has certainly
benefited from because I think HCI is in general really
good at this kind of diverse embracing of different methods.
We then looked at what the technologies were being developed
or being deployed, unsurprisingly basic and feature phones
were the lion's share of work, with 120 papers focusing
on those.
Perhaps surprising is that not very many papers are actually
looking at smartphones yet in these contexts,
27 in the last six years and of that I think 23 of those
were in the last three years, so smartphones are really
still quite a new phenomenon, but there's been a real
drop off of focus on anything like laptops or desktops.
And then finally, we looked at the domain areas that this
work has focused on, and at the top I hope you can
see those categories, the three that really stood out
were Education, Access and Health,
these were the lion's share of the work and Access
referred to access to the internet, promoting access to
computing in general, and that was definitely a focus.
So Neha is now going to talk about the more grittier
insightful part of the paper.
- So we thought at first that we had learned so much
from reading all of these 259 papers that we could write
a full paper just about the challenges and opportunities
of doing HCI4D work.
We found out quickly the hard way I think that we
were mistaken, and through no smaller number of rejections
and iterations we realized that even with 15 years of work
under our belts we didn't really have the final say
on the field.
So what we decided to do then was to actually interview
the experts who had given us these, you know,
I mean certainly not the same reviewers but the reviewers
who had given us this insightful feedback.
And we spoke with 11 with them as Nicki mentioned.
This was by no means an exhaustive list of the strongest
or the best researchers in HCI4D, but it was aimed at
prioritizing a balance of geographies, genders, domains
and methodologies, and together these researchers have
contributed to about 81 of the papers that were part
of our review.
I will now talk about these interview findings in brief
and I'm breaking them down into two chunks.
The ground we've covered thus far and the road that
lies ahead.
So we organize our findings around these four key themes,
one, understanding what exactly HCI4D means,
two, discussing how the community has evolved and how
it might continue to grow, three, identifying major trends
in technologies and human infrastructures and research
contributions that have influenced this field,
and four, deconstructing notions of development
as it pertained to this work.
We asked our participants what HCI4D meant to them,
and we found that at once represents many things.
A body of work looking at particular populations or places
that HCI has perhaps neglected,
a community of scholars spread across the world with
common research interests, a key word for publications,
a club defined by strong Euro-American values,
socially motivated computing,
and a natural progression of work that goes back
to when technology was first seen as a cure for
underdeveloped economies.
It is perhaps just a new name for an old idea,
as one participant shared.
Several refer to it as a crossing over of disciplines
such as computer science, social science and design,
with a common goal of making technology more accessible
to people who have so far been excluded.
When we asked how the field had evolved,
we heard that though it had grown considerably,
critical mass was missing.
There is a need for more focused community efforts,
suggestions we received were along the lines of organizing
conferences differently so that people in developing
countries have the resources to attend as well as allowing
for remote participation and encouraging new ways
of community interaction and knowledge sharing.
I do want to mention that we took a small step
towards this goal with a 75 person three day CHI workshop
that Susan also helped organize in no small measure.
And we're grateful also that SICHI sponsored the attendance
of participants from 19 other countries, some of which
had never been represented at CHI before.
HCI4D work has moved towards being less technologically
deterministic than before, with, as one participant said,
people calling BS on the hype, and aims for a more nuanced
and holistic view of the role of technology in development.
As another participant remarked, we have a much more
realistic way of thinking about the role of technology
in the context of everything else and the broader space.
With regards to major trends in HCI4D research,
we found that smartphones are a step back in some ways,
the trend towards smartphones as shown by our survey
findings concerned our participants because smartphones
do not have the same power profile and robustness
as basic phones, an Android phone will last for two years
compared to a basic Nokia phone that would last for 10.
The ecosystem has expanded to other issues such as
battery life, robustness, sustainability, power,
OS updates and more.
There are also the relatively slower changes in human
infrastructures, as one participant said, just because
the physical infrastructure has improved doesn't mean
the human infrastructure has improved.
Those things don't change over night.
Another said, I think one of the encouraging trends
is that for a long time we were thinking of the user
as a consumer of information, but in the last few years
they've become the producers of content, IVR for instance
is allowing them to do that.
So is HCI4D really for development?
What does the D mean?
One of the differences we heard was that HCI is about
publishing early while development studies do deep, patient,
slow evaluations, thus HCI4D often stirs the imagination
but doesn't go all the way to development.
We publish and we move on to a new project,
even if there is the aspiration to do more.
Some of our participants agreed with the following view.
First, show an output that suggests some kind of impact
or influence, second show that this output could lead
to an outcome.
The most successful is to go all the way to an outcome,
but all three are contributions.
They all have a special role in science.
If you're actually changing an outcome and showing it,
then that has a great deal of weight, but it can take years.
In some degree the responses we received from our
participants suggested that HCI4D is for development
outputs as much as it is for development outcomes.
Where development may be defined concretely in terms of
millennium development goals or the more recent sustainable
ones, externally as an objective of collaborators,
broadly in terms of happiness and well being,
or simply in terms of geographic locations.
We view this approach as generative and critically so
for the community that is in it's formative stages.
Now for the road that lies ahead.
These are the essential questions that were raised
by our participants.
One, how can we further build capacity?
And there are already efforts underway like I mentioned
with the work shop and with conferences such as AfriCHI.
Two, how can we broaden the scope of HCI4D?
And recognize that it isn't about context in some far away
marginalized locations, but also frequently in our
neighboring communities here in the US and in other
developed countries.
Three, how can we engage with a wider audience?
And be more a part of mainstream HCI, because we are
dealing with questions that are relevant to the non-HCI4D
HCI community as well, and I talk about these two questions
in a little more depth, how can we design
for non-traditional settings, and how can we improve
interactions for diverse users?
Several participants called for a stronger focus
on designing for non-traditional computing environments.
One participant asked, why would you have an office,
QWERTY keyboard, desktop metaphor, textual interface
for people who don't think about things in that way?
The traditional appliances and systems embed middle aged
white guys from the Pacific Northwest.
They are the ones in the corner office whose language
is premised in QWERTY.
The appliance is really focused on that context and
no wonder it can be alienating to different contexts.
HCI4D is about breaking out of these rich, white, male
US systems into all kinds of other systems.
Who speak, read,
How can we improve interactions for diverse users
who speak, read, think and engage with technologies
differently from one another?
One participant shared, the whole spoken assistant thing
is interesting, it's completely a first world app,
but it could be so huge for poor, low-literate people.
We also heard that it would be extremely challenging
to internationalize these services for diverse populations
around the world.
You can internationalize a GUI fairly easily.
If you want to internationalize Siri or Cortana,
it's basically impossible, the costs of internationalizing
these personal assistants.
I don't think people have appreciated this yet.
Now for our main takeaways.
Our findings show that the movement from preliminary
research to substandard bodies of work that have made
an impact, we also provide a unique look at how HCI4D
has grown intellectually and as a community,
and highlight areas that we need to focus on if we are
to continue this advancement.
HCI4D strives to understand users and context
that are still little understood, and to design and deploy
technologies for these users and context.
Highlighting HCI4D work can present a diverse and balanced
view of the world, stress the ways in which human
computer interactions can directly benefit all sections
of society, leading, we aspire to greater good,
and allow the larger HCI community to recognize
the assumptions they might make when they work in resource
rich settings alone.
With that I come to the end of our talk, we are most
grateful to these folks, not only for giving us their input
and feedback but also just for being incredible researchers
and being an incredible source of inspiration to our
community, without whom we would likely not be here.
Please join me in giving them a round of applause.
(audience applauds)
Thank you.
- [Man] Thanks Nicki and Neha, we have time for one
or two questions.
- [Amir] Thank you, my name Amir Doshi from Bombay,
so thank you for the wonderful paper, and congratulations
for getting your paper accepted at CHI and winning an award.
I obviously, there are many things that resonate with
what I felt and saw, and I just came to the paper house
also but not to the, one thing really stuck in my throat
and I think this is more of a (mumbles) problem,
which is that I'm now just looking at the list of papers
that you looked at, or the contents that you looked at,
and none of them are from developing countries.
Whereas there are quite a few developing country
conferences and I know that this will probably not
go very well with the viewers and there's always sort of
a bias to selecting, but you also on the other hand
acknowledge that many developing country contributors
do not come to these conferences.
So and then there is this natural self selection of,
selection bias that kind of creeps in.
So you know, the, I mean you said 108 papers about India,
but the other view about India, it says missing.
And similarly for Africa, I notice the slightest intel
very fast, but you notice Africa, you didn't notice
the CHI UX conference that happens in Indonesia.
And so on, so, I mean, how do you grapple with this and,
do you think, I mean I don't know if you acknowledge
the distribution thought process here.
- So yes, we agree with everything that you said.
Yes it's absolutely true that there are, there is work
that is not represented in our paper and we did struggle
with that, I think, which is why we started with the
process of actually doing a survey and sending it out
to everyone that we knew that was working in the space
and so certainly that was limited by the people
that we knew in the space.
That's not to say at all that, - [Amir] No I'm saying that
the views of the conferences particularly, I mean, yeah,
people obviously have a limited circle, but the conferences
they do interviews, - Yes, no, no,
even for the conferences, so that was part of our
methodology so we had actually sent out a survey to ask
people what conferences they published in,
what conferences they had published in the last five years
and the next five years and so on.
So um, - [Amir] Okay.
- And then we took the top 10, there was a tie at the
10 place so we took the top 11,
- [Amir] Okay. - To look at papers, yeah.
- Just to add that hopefully the next paper like this
in five years will be able to include things like Africa
and other conferences that are starting to happen,
they haven't happened yet, certainly Africa hasn't happened
yet, but.
- [Man] Okay, thank you again. - Thank you.