HCI & practices (from a public health perspective)

Kuutti and Bannon’s paper on the turn to practice in HCI presented new ways to look at HCI with the theories of practices being integrated in to HCI designs. In order to critically analyse the paper’s proposed theories I linked them to theories related to public health practice as public health is one of he many fields that HCI has branched in to.

The idea that interventions should be looked at and evaluated in isolated moments, as they are in the interaction paradigm, has been realised to be impractical in public health where the aims of the interventions are to make long term changes in the unhealthy practices within a community. Therefore, integrating practice approaches into HCI research would be of a great added value when thinking of the role of HCI in public health.

Additionally, experience in working with under resourced communities has shown that for sustainable designs of interventions (whether HCI or public health) it is important to consider what the authors termed as research ‘in the wild’. This is because if we want long term change technological interventions should become part of the community’s everydayness. Another step towards practice orientation that goes hand in hand with the basic paradigm of public health is that interventions should aim at solving complex real-world problems, that are influenced by many dynamic factors. The complexity of the problems would not be captured through interactional paradigms that are rooted in science where parameters and confounding factors are controlled for when evaluating the effectiveness of drugs for example. In real world problems factors can not be controlled for.

Therefore, I agree that HCI researchers should study the practices of the community they are working with before, during and after an intervention/design. That being said, it is important to note that practice research is long-term and managing to properly evaluate impact in these situations may prove to be difficult and costly therefore making research difficult in terms of attaining funding and in setting up evaluation criteria.

The article I found to embody HCI titled “Walking and the social life of solar charging in rural Africa” can be found by clicking here.