Contributing › alt.IHM

What is alt.IHM?

alt.IHM is a session for different presentations: controversial, risky and boundary-pushing topics in HCI. The principle is to give space to work and directions that are not usual in the HCI scientific community, or to position papers that provoke debate on the HCI community itself, or on topics for the HCI community. Possible topics include both an alternative view of the usual HCI topics and more extreme topics that may be relevant to confront as a community. We also encourage contributions that are relevant to HCI but come from other disciplines (philosophy, arts, history, political science, physics, etc.).

How to contribute?

The format of the contributions is free: video, article, artistic performance, panel organization, state of the art, comic strip, poem, proposal for a new conference, demo, ... or of any other type not listed here. This freedom implies care brought to the form of the contribution. For example, for a panel, its complete organization (identification of participants, invitation, on-site organization) is expected, and for all artistic forms, the aesthetic and reflective qualities must be evident. Papers and presentations may be in French or English.
All submissions must include a 2-6 page paper in extended abstract format, not anonymized. Other formats are encouraged, and will be returned. They may also be submitted to PCS by the start of the conference.
Papers from alt.IHM will be included in the extended conference proceedings, and thus available on HAL and indexed in Google Scholar, PubMed and DBLP (but will not be included in the ACM Digital Library).

Submissions are made on the PCS system: https://new.precisionconference.com/ihm23

Evaluation of the contributions

Each submission will be evaluated by the alt.IHM committee, which may call upon one or two external experts if necessary. The choice will be made on the basis of the scientific interest of the argument and the form chosen for the presentation of the debate during the conference.

Themes

Although the themes for contributions are free, we would like to broaden the classical topics of alt.IHM (such as interactivity in art, alternative design methods, links with artificial intelligence, ...) to current issues concerning the human-technology relationship. Some of the contemporary problems, present in everyone's mind, inevitably question the human-technology relationship, at different scales: global warming, transhumanism, post-truth, innovation and degrowth, ...
We propose to explore what an HCI approach can bring to these issues. What do we mean here by HCI approach? This is only part of the question: it can be about design methods, needs analysis, use or invention of interaction modalities or societal values. But this list is undoubtedly not exhaustive, which presents an opportunity to question the contributions of our community.
As examples, we propose below some lines of thought to open the debate:

  • Ecology: How could HCI contribute to break the deadlock of the current growth model? There are already several approaches that aim to make our modes of production and consumption more "sustainable": from eco-feedback approaches that allow consumers to be informed about the consequences of their actions, to ecological design - concerned with technological obsolescence - to technologies associated with participatory economies. Which technologies, such as low-tech, can be used? Are the methods used in HCI, such as user-centered design, appropriate? Should we change scale to integrate socio-technical and environmental dimensions? Should we, like More than human design, decentralize design to include other perspectives?
  • Ethics: In order to serve us better, interactive systems are becoming more and more intelligent and make more and more decisions by themselves. How do we define ethics in such a complex digital world? How do we ensure that human values remain a priority? What is the responsibility of HCI in these ethical questions?
  • Body-technique link: Transhumanism allows our biological bodies to become in turn the object of a design that could go against our organic obsolescence: to avoid our degradation by science and technique. If this leads to the human as an interface of his own body-machine, how to clarify this question? How to rely on the knowledge and know-how of HCI for this?
  • Provoking to provoke: In many ways, Mark Weiser's utopia gave rise to the dystopias of the Black Mirror television series. What role does or could HCI have in this opposition?-
  • Politics: We saw digital technologies play an important role in citizen and political uprisings during the 2010s (such as FireChat during the 2014 Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong). So, this year could mark the moment when we question the place of HCI in new contexts: what would be its role in new forms of public debate, in post-colonial studies, in feminist ideas and actions, in the positions and productions of Makers, in social-political protest movements, even in the analysis of human organizations? On the other hand, with the methods of participative design and the debate adaptive ergonomics vs. co-evolution, could not the HCI implement a useful know-how for political experimentation?
  • Scales, systemic: HCI is sometimes positioned in a rather modest way in relation to large technical systems: it should therefore only intervene at the "interfaces" of systems that are otherwise well specified and not as the main applicant of a system whose objective would be a "humanist" vision conceived in the name of a better human-technology balance?

For all these topics, another question arises: what if the actors of the HCI community all had something to express, but did not have the space a priori to do so?

Examples of contributions:

Submission procedure

Article submissions are made on the PCS system: https://new.precisionconference.com/ihm23

Dates

  • Deadline for submission of contributions: Thursday, January 12, 2023 (23:59 AOE).
  • Sending of evaluations to authors: Thursday, February 23, 2023 (23:59 AOE).
  • Deadline for sending the final versions of the abstracts: Thursday, March 16, 2023 (23:59 AOE)

Responsible

- Catherine Letondal
- Valérie Maquil

Contact

ihm23-alt@afihm.org