Keynote speakers

Torkil Clemmensen

Relation Artefacts

(5 September 2024)

In this talk, I propose that relation artefacts should be a central future perspective on HWID, across work domains including safety critical domains. “Relation artefacts” are IT/digital artefacts that relate the social and the technical. The social is any organizational and work analysis of relevance for the worker’s experience of and actions towards task, procedures, workspace/place, and work domains. This includes society level analysis. The technical focusses on interaction designs activities such as persona and scenario writing, sketching, prototyping, think aloud usability evaluation, and more. Also, interaction in a wider sense such a collaboration with technology can be in focus. To emphasize the ambiguity of human work interaction design – that the designed artefacts are both social and technical - I talk about relation artefacts. While the term relation artefact may be novel, related ideas have been around in for example 1990ties HCI/CSCW and in cultural psychology. Relation artefacts are however different from the common view that humans should control technical things by embedding these in functioning social order in strong and stereotyped forms. In contrast, relation artefacts equal technical and social science designs. Relation artefacts is an attempt to re-interpret socio-technical design from a dual-system theory into a single approach, much as Cognitive Work Analysis attempted to model the social and technical scientific analysis of work into a single approach for designers based on description of the constraints within a domain, but with relation artefacts much simpler and more worker-centric.

Torkil Clemmensen is a full professor at Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School. He received his PhD in psychology from University of Copenhagen. He is on the steering board for NordiCHI, and a senior editor for AIS Transactions of Human-Computer Interaction. As a founder of International Federation of Information Processing’s Working Group TC13.6 on Human Work Interaction Design (HWID), he co-organizes a series of international workshops and working conferences on work analysis and interaction design in organizational, human, social, technical, political, and cultural contexts. He is engaged in Interaction Design for International Development. He contributes to key conferences and journals within Human-Computer Interaction, Design, and Information Systems.

Daniela Fogli

Fostering a Sustainable Digital Transformation through End-User Development

(6 September 2024)

End-User Development (EUD) has been on the scene of Human-Computer Interaction for more than twenty years. The talk will report on its history and main characteristics, explaining how it goes beyond the narrower concepts of End-User Programming, End-User Software Engineering, and Low-Code/No-Code programming. Given the recent technological evolution and digital transformation, EUD reveals a promising solution to support the social and labor sustainability of the ecological, energetic, and demographic transition. Indeed, current surveys about jobs of the future highlight that workers will be demanded to do fewer clerical and secretarial tasks in favor of problem-solving activities requiring analytical and creative thinking. We suggest that these cognitive skills can be fostered through EUD environments that empower end users to create, adapt, and extend digital artifacts to solve novel and wicked problems. A reflection on the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its relationship with EUD will also be provided, showing examples of how EUD may help democratize AI and how AI may empower even more end users performing EUD activities.

Daniela Fogli is full professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Department of Information Engineering, University of Brescia, Italy. She got the Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Bologna (Italy), in 1994 and the Ph. D. degree in Information Engineering from the University of Brescia, in 1998. In the period 1998-2000, she has been a research scholar at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission. Since 2000 she has been working at the University of Brescia. Her current research interests are in the Human-Computer Interaction area and include end-user development, meta-design, usability and accessibility, user interfaces for decision support systems, collaborative robots and internet of things. She has been visiting scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA, and she is an active member of SIGCHI Italy (the Italian Chapter of ACM SIGCHI - ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction). She is chair of the steering committee of the International Symposium of End-User Development (IS-EUD), and she has been program co-chair of IS-EUD 2021.

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