Apr 2018: Exploring Inside & Around Body Boundaries for Body-Centric Computing Design CHI 2018

21 April and 22 April 2018 at CHI 2018, Montreal, Canada

CHI 2018 Workshop
The Body as a Starting Point: Exploring Inside & Around Body Boundaries for Body-Centric Computing Design
21 April and 22 April 2018 at CHI 2018, Montreal, Canada

Led by: m.c. schraefel  University of Southampton, UK; Elise van den Hoven  University of Technology Sydney, Australia; Josh Andres  IBM Research Australia & Exertion Games Lab RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

No position papers required! Register your interest and apply for a place by 2nd February 2018.

OVERVIEW

Are we designing the best tools, from tracking to play, that make it as easy as possible for us to be as resilient and brilliant as possible, for as long as possible? More of us are designing tools for what is becoming known as “body-centric computing” aimed at a range of goods from innovations in play to disease prevention. That said, even in this body-oriented work, the body itself is still mainly treated as a black box, where few of us in HCI know much about what goes on under our body’s hoods. Knowing more about this wonderfully complex system ourselves, rather than relying on the kindness of interdisciplinary colleagues to tell us how it works, we hypothesize, will enable us to innovate in more powerful and effective ways, as we are able to consider research and design opportunities based on this body science but informed by our methods: for instance, knowing about how sleep cycles affect our memory, learning, tissue repair, longevity, would we ever design “smart” alarms to disrupt our sleep? Or would we focus on the more challenging problem of how to get sufficient sleep for our wellbeing?

We invite you to a practical two-day workshop where we will:

• Present knowledge of how we work, from to gut to brain to fat to muscles and hormones and heart to bacteria all actually combine to make better ‘us’s or worse ‘us’s
• Explore and test in multiple design exercises throughout the workshop how this knowledge can be applied in design and research
• Use these insights to refine new research agendas for body-centric computing.

More details and workshop schedule at https://bodyasstartingpoint.tumblr.com/

THIS WORKSHOP IS FOR YOU IF YOU'RE INTERESTED IN...

• A fast, practical accessible primer about how the body works and
• Opportunities to explore how that knowledge may affect your designs for body-centric computing,

HOW TO PARTICIPATE – IT’S EASY!

If you would like to attend, you are invited to complete the form athttps://bodyasstartingpoint.tumblr.com/

Participants will be selected based on the relevance of their replies. No position papers required!

Note: As part of the CHI2018 conference, all workshop participants are required to register for both the workshop and at least one day of the conference.

KEY DATES

Deadline to register your interest: Friday 2 Feb 2018
Notification of acceptance: Friday 23 Feb 2018
Workshop dates: Saturday 21 April and Sunday 22 April 2018 (2 day workshop)