Track chairs
Dr Abhishek Behl, Keele Business School, UK
Dr Connie Barber, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA
Dr Marc Schmalz, Boise State University, USA
Track description
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is an interdisciplinary field that has grown from traditional UI and UX to modern-day extended reality and spatial design. The changing nature and design of online gaming environments have further fuelled the advancement of HCI in dimensions including cybersecurity, deepfakes, and digital twins that cut across the interface of engineering, psychology, and information management. As HCI’s traditional literature changes with interventions from other disciplines, its spread and depth must be assessed to simplify the assortment of such technologies. There is a growing demand from firms to have innovative designs that score high on both value and valuation of user engagement and satisfaction. Moreover, the intervention of artificial intelligence (AI) has, to some extent, helped HCI scholars understand patterns and use them to their advantage; a large part of it remains unexplained and does not address problems for populations at large.
While some designs appeal to the universal masses, other designs are reserved for specific users, thereby asking critical questions of the reproducibility of designs and its data sufficiency for its generalizability. Thus, the future of HCI artificial general intelligence (AGI) would explore new boundaries of prompt engineering that would transform the current nature of agentic AI, which would be more productive and environmentally more sustainable. The nature of data fed into such systems and the nature of information processed would also require scrutiny, bringing an innovative data collection process and improving data processing to understand prompts and hidden meaning behind those prompts that the users wish to explore answers for.
In parallel, ethical considerations surrounding HCI are gaining prominence. As technology complicates the landscape of human interactions, issues around privacy, data security, and algorithmic bias become critical topics of discussion. Designers and researchers must navigate these challenges, creating systems that protect user data while still offering personalized experiences. The ethical implications of design decisions play a crucial role in building trust and ensuring the responsible deployment of technologies in society.
The role of gamification in HCI is another exciting area of exploration. By incorporating game design elements into non-gaming contexts, researchers can investigate how these mechanics can enhance user motivation and engagement. Moreover, the rise of ubiquitous computing and cross-device interactions poses new challenges and opportunities for HCI. As users increasingly navigate multiple devices throughout their daily lives, understanding how to design seamless transitions and cohesive experiences across platforms is paramount. This complexity invites research into how context, environment, and user intent influence interactions, driving the need for more adaptive and responsive designs.
Track areas include but are not limited to:
- Usable and useful user design and experience in the age of AI.
- Gamification in Nongame contexts
- Context-aware design and business process improvement
- Deepfakes and delusional data and information processing
- Redefining HCI in the age of AGI
- Ethical, explainable, responsible and replicable HCI designs
- Gesture-based HCI design and deployment
- Virtual Economies and Interoperability between physical and metaphysical space
- More than human design in practice
- Theoretical and methodological evolution in HCI