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Teaching & Learning Positionality in HCI education: reflecting on our identities as educators and facilitating the discussion in the classroom

Published: 28 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

UX designers and practitioners acknowledge users’ different skills and try to address their needs to design better products and experiences. As HCI educators, we searched for tools to help our students to recognize that they might have different perspectives from the users they will be designing for, generating bias and assumptions in the design process. Positionality refers to the personal and social constructs that define our identity, shaping how we see and interpret the world around us, as well as the way the world sees and interprets us. Practicing positionality in HCI education is a meaningful way to reflect on our teaching approaches, our measures and expectations of students’ performance and engagement. For the students, learning about positionality and reflexivity can have an impact on their design work and research, raising awareness on relationships of power and subjectivity. During this Masterclass, we present tools and methods that can be used for teaching and learning (T&L) activities about positionality. We invite attendees to create their positionality statement and share their experience, facilitating a discussion about the challenges that are common both to T&L and interaction design, such as ethics, privacy, stereotypes and stigmatization.

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  1. Teaching & Learning Positionality in HCI education: reflecting on our identities as educators and facilitating the discussion in the classroom

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        cover image ACM Other conferences
        EduCHI '23: Proceedings of the 5th Annual Symposium on HCI Education
        April 2023
        106 pages
        ISBN:9798400707377
        DOI:10.1145/3587399
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 28 April 2023

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        Author Tags

        1. Design
        2. Diversity
        3. Inclusion
        4. Positionality
        5. Reflexivity
        6. Representation

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        EduCHI: 5th Annual Symposium on HCI Education
        April 28, 2023
        Hamburg, Germany

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        View all
        • (2024)Design Opportunities to Facilitate Tangible Play and Promote Healthy Nutrition in Low-resource Healthcare Settings in Peru: Co-designing Low-fidelity Prototypes with Caregivers and Healthcare WorkersProceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3674829.3675071(167-178)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
        • (2024)Designing Socio-Technical Digital Health Interventions for and with Low-resource CommunitiesProceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2024: Situated Actions, Doctoral Colloquium, PDC places, Communities - Volume 310.1145/3661456.3666080(118-121)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2024

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