Crossing Borders, Building Bridges

摘要

Though every country and context is unique, and much of human-computer interaction (HCI) research aims to design for situatedness, there are lessons we might learn when we work across borders and across contexts. At CHI 2016, 71 participants representing 20 countries and six continents came together to ask questions such as these: What are common themes that tie together different geographic contexts? Could a mobile health project in India benefit from lessons learned from a project in the same domain but in Kenya? How might we, as a global HCI community, work within countries and across them as well? The short-term goal of our event, the Development Consortium, was initially to link research and practice across disparate HCI for development (HCI4D) contexts by creating a forum for conversations in which global community members could identify common interests and work toward potential projects or proposals. Our larger objective was to advance HCI4D so that we could engage productively as a community to leverage learning and collaborating across contexts. In that spirit, we named our event HCI4D Across Borders and invited cross-border collaborations on themes selected by participants-researchers actively involved in HCI projects in disparate geographies, many of whom conduct research on the margins of the so-called developing world.