Call for papers
Designing for sustainability extends beyond merely reducing resource consumption and waste. It encompasses environmental, social, and economic dimensions while acknowledging their potential conflicts. Today, designers need to anticipate the impact on future generations, and social equity and justice between workers, while also considering financial performance. It appears clear that focusing solely on individual behaviour change, without considering workplace practices and reaching decision-makers, can only have a limited influence. While interactive systems to support sustainability have been proposed, it is crucial not to overlook the interactive systems used by workers in this endeavor.
Beyond being mere tools, automation and AI systems must become work partners collaborating with workers to enhance their performance by taking over repetitive and tedious tasks. However, as these systems increasingly handle high-level cognitive tasks, designing meaningful roles for workers is even more challenging when designers already have to deal with known issues such as complacency, deskilling, monitoring, and takeover performances when automated systems reach their operational limits or fail. Consequently, methods, tools, and processes need to be refined to ensure a positive user experience and identify novel forms of human-automation cooperation for sustainable workplaces.
Theme, scope, and focus
The theme of HWID'24 emphasizes the insights into the relationship between the sustainability of workplaces, the anticipatory potentials of design, and how automation and AI may fit the picture. It calls for a workplace design oriented towards sustainability, responsibility, and explainability.
Examples of relevant questions include:
What does the very notion of design imply from the point of view of being sustainable, responsible, and explainable, and how can these values be embodied in workplaces?
How to design environment-friendly and humane workplaces?
What individualistic vs collectivistic frictions may emerge from unethical practices, and how can design mitigate them?
How to design workplaces ensuring social equity and well-being when we deal with both biased humans and automated systems?
How to identify, evaluate, and support the new UX interactional patterns between workers and AI and maintain workers' efficiency and well-being?
How can alternative forms of job design (e.g. job crafting) mitigate conflicts between the pursuit of financial profit and the reduction of companies’ impact on the environment? Can automation help?
Topics of interest include:
Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Augmentation in the workplace
Collaborative robots
Virtual Assistants
Digital Twins
Cyber-physical systems
Automation for social equity and well-being
User experience in workplaces and novel forms of human-computer cooperation
Sustainability, Responsibility, and Ethics of Technology in Workplaces
This working conference aims to answer these and more questions by involving professionals working in academia, national labs, and industry who are engaged in human work analysis and interaction design for sustainable workplaces. We will discuss tools, procedures, and professional competencies needed to face issues and opportunities provided by workplace design's sustainable and automatization perspectives.
Important dates
Submission deadline: April 21st, 2024 May 10th, 2024
Notification to authors: June 2nd, 2024 June 16th, 2024
Camera ready: June 28th, 2024 July 7th, 2024
Conference: September 5-6, 2024
Submissions
We invite authors to submit full papers (max 8 pages, excluding references) formatted according to LNCS template available on the Springer website: https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines
Here is the link to the submission system: https://equinocs.springernature.com/service/HWID2024
Each paper will be reviewed by two reviewers. The collection of all accepted papers will be distributed to the participants as digital proceedings before the conference. During the review process, the reviewers will be asked to evaluate whether an extended version of the paper is suitable for an IFIP Springer book (IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology) that will be edited and published after the conference (before the end of 2024).