On July 11, José Abdelnour Nocera will be giving a talk at M-ITI’s classroom, at 3 pm about “Sociotechnical HCI and Service Design for Ethical Value Exchange.”
Abstract
Ensuring ethical value exchange is moving to the forefront of the global challenges that HCI will have to address in the coming years. In my talk I will argue that applying a context-sensitive, sociotechnical approach to HCI can help meet the challenge. The background is that the life of marginalized people in contemporary society is challenging and uncertain. The marginalized can face health and cognitive issues as well as a lack of stability of social structures such as family, work and social inclusion. Three questions are of concern when innovating together with people ‘at the margins’: how can we describe users without attempting to stereotype badly, what sociotechnical HCI methods fit the local societal context, and how to make the design sustainable in face of current planetary challenges (e.g.,climate change)? I discuss a sociotechnical HCI approach called human work interaction design (HWID) to meet the challenges of designing for ethical value exchange. I introduce three ongoing cases of service design, and present in detail a fourth similar case based on a field trip to Alibaug in India where I evaluated as part of a team the sociomaterial infrastructure surrounding a mobile app to support sustainable fishing. This is done through the lens of HWID. I conclude that applying a context sensitive sociotechnical HCI framework implies that both the backend and frontend of service design and product innovations should be executed and valorized from within the local context.
Short Bio
José Abdelnour Nocera is Associate Professor in Sociotechnical Design at the University of West London and Affiliate Associate Professor at M-ITI. He is the current Chair for UNESCO IFIP TC 13.8 working group in Interaction Design for International Development as well as Chair for the British Computer Society Sociotechnical Specialist Group. His interests lie in the sociotechnical and cultural aspects of systems design, development and use. In pursuing these interests, he has been involved as researcher and consultant in several projects in the UK and overseas in the domains of mHealth, e-learning, social development, e-commerce, e-governance and enterprise resource planning systems. Dr. Abdelnour-Nocera gained an MSc in Social Psychology from Simon Bolivar University, Venezuela, and a PhD in Computing from The Open University, UK.
