Human computer interaction researchers engage with people to identify their needs and develop prototypes. Unfortunately, due to multiple resource constraints, populations are typically recruited locally and engaged in activities that do not introduce participants to the possibilities provided by innovative technologies.
In this talk, Dr. Katie Siek will discuss how her group developed two inclusive methods that empower underserved people to participate in the design process. They created the Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) method to engage people from all over the world to identify needs and engage in design brainstorming.
Concurrently, the group investigated how to empower people to build their own interactive systems with minimal technical knowledge to inform researchers’ ideas of what people want in smart environments. She will use case studies in women’s health and aging-in-place to show how these methods amplify understudied communities’ voices in the design process. Dr. Siek will conclude with insights on how we can iterate on these methods to make them more inclusive and apply them more broadly in computing domains.
Dr. Katie Siek is a professor and chair of Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington. Her primary research interests are in human computer interaction, health informatics, and ubiquitous computing. More specifically, she is interested in how sociotechnical interventions affect personal health and well being.
Her research is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation including a five-year NSF CAREER award. She has been awarded an NCWIT Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award (2019), a CRA-W Borg Early Career Award (2012), and Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance Distinguished Visiting Fellowships (2010 and 2015).
Prior to returning to her alma mater, she was a professor for seven years at the University of Colorado Boulder. She earned her Ph.D. and M.S. at Indiana University Bloomington in computer science and her B.S. in computer science at Eckerd College. She was a National Physical Science Consortium Fellow at Indiana University and a Ford Apprentice Scholar at Eckerd College.