Christopher Lueg Presentation

Christopher Lueg will give a 45 minute presentation on "Embodiment matters when designing for others" followed by 15 minutes Q&A.

Abstract: Over the past few decades we have seen at least three waves of HCI along with the refinement of a considerable number of human centered design approaches that provide solid advice as to how to design, develop, deploy, and evaluate usable and useful interactive digital systems. Design thinking has spread to industries outside traditional design contexts. Despite all this it is a common experience that interactive systems are frustrating to use, to put it mildly. In this talk I will argue that reflecting on embodiment helps explain an apparent mismatch between what people get from designers and developers and what they actually need. It also helps shed light on current discourses regarding the so-called attention economy and monetization if not exploitation of this precious resource. This suggests that we need to reconsider how we conceptualize HCI as a discipline. HCI should be about using interactive digital technologies to empower people, and I would argue we making good progress in this regard, however we rarely share more widely the knowledge that people need to interrogate and critique interactive systems. It's time that being able to articulate expectations regarding interactive digital systems is recognized as an essential literacy of the 21st century. Would you like a revolution with that?

Lueg is a professor of medical informatics at Bern University of Applied Sciences in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. He specializes in human computer interaction, interaction design, and information behavior research with a special interest in embodiment and what it means when designing for others. Prior to returning to Switzerland, where he obtained his doctoral degree at the University of Zurich, he spent almost 20 years in Australia teaching at the University of Technology, Sydney; Charles Darwin University; and the University of Tasmania, respectively. At Tasmania he served as a co-director of two of the university's research themes, Data, Knowledge and Decisions (DKD) and Creativity, Culture, Society (CCS). He served as deputy head of the then School of Computing and as an interim director of the newly established Human Interface Technology Lab Australia (HITLab AU). A past honorary research fellow with the iSchool, he is currently serving as an associate editor of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. He was general co-chair of the 2016 Australasian Conference in Computer Human Interaction (OzCHI 2016), general co-chair of the 2017 Australasian Conference in Information Systems (ACIS 2017), and papers co-chair (with Kalpana Shankar, UCD) of the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T 2018).