Category: DISA

This year’s INTERACT conference took place in Mumbai, India. It started off with field trips and workshops on Monday and Tuesday. The main conference was held from 27-29. September. The conference was extremely well organised and I am very glad that I could attend, listen to interesting talks, present our own paper, and meet so many kind and open people who do extremely interesting research.

What is INTERACT?

INTERACT is a biennial conference and is organised by the Technical Committee on Human–Computer Interaction (IFIP TC13) of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). IFIP is a non-governmental umbrella organisation of national societies working in the field of Information technology. IFIP is organised through technical commitees; TC13 is the committee on Human-Computer Interaction and consists of serveral working groups. This year’s INTERACT conference was the 16th conference; the previous one took place 2015 in Bamberg (Germany). INTERACT in Bamberg was my first international conference, where I  presented a paper on the use of online reviews in the design process and how they can help designers to take the perspective of the people they are designing for.

Field Trip

This year was the first time, that researchers could propose field trips. As the deadline for registrating one’s interest was before I was notified that our short paper was accepted, I thought that participation was not possible any more. However, Arne Berger, the organiser of one field trip saw on Twitter, that I was attending the conference and asked whether I was interested in joining one day, as there was still a free spot. Excellent opportunity indeed! The field trip Understanding The Informal Support Networks Of Older Adults in India aimed to get a nuanced view on older adults’ practices of receiving from and providing support to peers, family, friends, and neighbors. It was a two-day fieldtrip, however, I only attended on Monday. Here we were split into two groups and I was forming a group together with Dhaval Vyas (Queensland University of Technology) and Antonella De Angeli (University of Trento). We conducted two interviews during the day. The couple we interviewed first felt more comfortable speaking in Hindi, so Dhaval interviewed them, and every now and then translated his question and/or their answers in English. That was a really interesting experience and Dhaval did a great job also including us, when he translated every now and then, what was said. Of course, this was not always possible, as this would have disturbed the flow of the conversation. Something I noticed was that the idea of “older people receiving support” was challenged: This couple was not receiving support from their family in that sense. Instead, they were providing tremendous support for their children, because they took care of the grandkids.

The second interview took place in the afternoon, where we met a 85 year old woman, who had worked as a teacher until she was 80 years old. She felt comfortable speaking English, so all of us could ask her questions. I found her to be very inspiring and positive; it was a great pleasure talking to her and learning how she goes about her day. For example, she likes playing chess on the iPad and, according to her son, her memory improved since she does this. Every evening, she meets a couple of her female friends outside the house, where they all sit on the bench, enjoy each other’s company, and watch the grandkids play. We were invited to join her when she was meeting her friends right after the interview, which was really nice, too.

Presenting our Paper on “Critical Incidents as Workshop Format”

I also was able to present our short paper on “Using Critical Incidents in Workshops to Inform eHealth Design”. This paper is based on the workshop we organised at NordiCHI 2016 and was written together with some of the organisers and participants. Practitioners, researchers and patients were invited to contribute with a critical incident related to eHealth services for patients and relatives. We accepted five critical incidents, of which three focussed on the patient perspective and two on the developer’s perspective. You can find the critical incidents submitted and analysed in the workshop here.

In the paper, we reflect on Critical Incidents as a format, which we made use of in our workshop. In sum, the participants and we as organisers found it very helpful to reflect together in a group on eHealth projects. Even though the format was quite unusual and some participants reported, that they struggled to follow our instructions related to the critical incidents, it also helped to re-examine and re-frame their particular project. I really enjoyed presenting this at INTERACT on behalf of my co-authors. I have to admit, that the time constraint of 8 minutes was quite tough. But our session chair Jacki O’Neill did a wonderful job creating a positive atmosphere while keeping the time.

In part 2, I will write about the poster & demo session.