Tag: Seminar

Start the Semester with Some Splendid Seminars

On Friday the 19th of January we have the pleasure of starting the day with two open seminars, so if you wish you can join us. From Reykjavik University we have Associate Professor Marta Lárusdóttir and from openhagen Business School professor Torkil Clemmensen. Torkil Clemenssen will talk about the socio-Technical Future of HCI and Marta Lárusdóttir will discuss research on the integration of UCD in industry.

The seminars will start at 10.00 in the Faculty Room at Ångström laboratory.

Marta Lárusdóttir
Integrating UCD in Agile Projects in Industry: Research Results and Future Work

Marta will give a talk on the interplay between usability activities and agile software development processes used in the IT industry. Marta has conducted research on this topic for many years collaborating with international researchers and students. Marta will give a summary of the results of these studies and describe future work on this important topic.

Marta Larusdottir is an Associate Professor at Reykjavik University with a PhD in Human-computer interaction. Marta has extensive leading knowledge in the area of evaluation and user feedback in software development. Particularly, she is a well known researcher in agile software development and how the user perspective is integrated in agile processes and has written several papers and arranged workshops on that subject.

This presentation will be followed directly by the presentation by professor Torkil Clemmensen.

Prof. Torkil Clemmensen, Copenhagen Business School
The Socio-Technical Future of HCI

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) builds on the ideology of empowering the end-users of computers, so that they understand what is happening and can control the outcome (Nielsen, 2005). How does that work for HCI in organizations and societies? While HCI historically has been based on applying cognitive psychology to understand the individual user (Card, Moran, & Newell, 1983), one strong trend in modern and contemporary HCI is to study applications in business, managerial, organizational, and cultural contexts. To design HCI for organizations, the big thing may be to do some kind of HCI design action research that constructs or modifies one or more HCI artefacts within their existing organizational contexts: sketches, prototypes, templates, running systems – anything that changes the interactions that managers and employees do and experience. Hence, the future topics and theory of HCI may indeed be socio-technical.

Torkil Clemmensen is a professor at the Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His research interest is in psychology as a science of design with a focus on cultural psychological perspectives on usability, user experience, and digitalization of work. He contributes to Human-Computer Interaction, Design, and Information Systems.

Torkil Clemmensen will also lead the discussion in the afternoon when we have the half time seminar for yours truly.

A Seminar (in Swedish) on the Implementation of IT in Healthcare

Back in December I was invited to give a seminar in Swedish at the EPJ department of Region Uppsala, the department in charge of many of the health-related IT systems used at the hospitals and primary care facilities in the region. My seminar was on the the current state of research in relation to how to implement IT in healthcare. Out of all the perspectives one can use to approach this area of challenges for healthcare, I devoted most of the seminar to presenting barriers and enablers to change management projects as well as IT development projects, and discussing these with the participants. The seminar was recorded and is now available on YouTube, if you find the topic interesting (and are comfortable with the Swedish language).

The HTO group, and more generally the HCI group at the Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, have an ongoing collaboration with the EPJ department at the region, and there will be more seminars on a variety of topics given by us during the spring.

Seminar on the ethical handling of field research data

Last Monday, I held a seminar on “the ethical handling of field research data”. There are indeed many laws and regulations researchers need to follow when collecting, processing, publishing and preserving research data. In Sweden, the requirements related to good record keeping in public institutions are particularly high since the principle of public access to official documents applies. This is why I decided to prepare a seminar on this particular topic as my examination in the Research Ethics course I took last month at BMC.

Following Åsa’s recommendation, I decided to do an interaction-based seminar instead of holding a more “traditional” presentation. In my preparation, I determined the topics I was interested in and wanted to include in the seminar, and gathered information about each of them.  In the PowerPoint presentation I created for the seminar, I then added a few slides per topic. During the seminar itself, I started off by explaining to my audience which topics I had worked on, and asked them what aspects they were interested in talking about, or whether they had any question related to the topics I had prepared. They mentioned the three following questions of interest:

  • Can I take my data with me when I leave the University? Whom do the data belong to, and what does that imply for informed consent?
  • Video recordings: what do I need to pay attention to when handling such data?
  • What if I have messed up (lost my data, not submitted an application for ethical review, did not ask participants for consent)?

I addressed each topic one after the other, first giving some input with the support of the relevant slides from my PowerPoint presentation, then asking the audience for additions, examples and possibly other related questions. The discussions that each topic / question gave rise to were animated and thought-provoking, and always led to the generation of more questions than what we had started with! In spite of this, it seems that, based on the feedback I received later from some of the participants, the opportunity to discuss and reflect over those different ethical aspects of research was appreciated.

As for myself, I really enjoyed giving the seminar, and feel like I have learned quite a few things on the subject – even if one of them is that the legal framework we work with is difficult to put into practice. One of the main challenges I see is that it is hard to determine when a certain condition is fulfilled in practice. For example, is a so-called “working document” an official document? When does a document become official? Unfortunately, the fact that the interpretation of the different laws and guidelines that apply varies from institution to institution certainly does not make things easier…