Talking with Talhouk: Reem’s HCI Interests and Ambitions

 

Reem Talhouk has brought a valuable new perspective to this year’s CDT cohort thanks to her Lebanese origins and passions regarding refugees. I got a chance to sit down with Reem to find out what makes her tick, how she’s finding the course so far and where she sees herself going in the future.

One of the areas of HCI that Reem has found the most interesting has been the use of participatory design techniques during the project development process, due to the potential is has to empower participants. The current refugee crisis has resulted in many people losing control of the direction of their lives, but Reem hopes that deeply involving them in the design process can produce positive changes.

She is also interested in project sustainability—projects running beyond the scope of the initial research would likely increase the chances of lasting, meaningful change. One of the ways this could happen is if the project/system is designed to be sustainable, with the project’s participants relinquishing the system from the researchers’ control and running it as their own.

However, the ways of going about doing these things are still mostly theoretical to Reem—she currently finds the idea of configuring participatory design so that it empowers desirable, but sees actually putting it into practice as a significant challenge. She particularly struggles with how you would even go about doing this, as empowerment techniques seem extremely subjective and differ from case to case. Reem said that she would find concrete examples of this in action would help give her a grounding for her own work and solidify the concepts in her mind.

Another of Reem’s emerging research interests is cross-cultural design. With the continued march of globalization having technologies be accessible and understandable across multiple cultures should be a huge priority, however Reem points out that we have yet to explore it in great depth as part of the course. She would like to explore the ideas of designing technologies not only with who the user is in mind, but also where and when the technology is being used. With this in mind I would recommend she read “Beyond strict illiteracy: abstracted learning among low-literate users” (Medhi et al, 2010- DOI: 10.1145/2369220.2369241), which explores the ideas of the cognitive differences between literate and non-literate users beyond simply the ability to read. Another interesting paper would be “Words are not enough: empowering people with aphasia in the design process” (Galliers et al, 2012- DOI: 10.1145/2347635.2347643) which investigates the empowerment of those living with communication disorders through design. These papers might help give Reem some insight into the issues of developing across cultures beyond language differences alone.

One of the people I would recommend Reem talk to would be Elizabeth Sanders at Ohio State University, an expert in participatory and cross-discipline design from human-centred perspectives. She is of the opinion that participatory design isn’t a set of methodologies, but a mindset and belief that all people have something to offer to the design process.

The paper I will be reading this week is “Designing Tangible Interfaces to Support Expression and Sensemaking in Interactive Narratives” (Chu, 2015- DOI: 10.1145/2677199.2693161).