PhD Course - Theoretical foundations in Human-Computer Interaction - HCI basics

Organizer(s):

Irina Shklovski (irsh@itu.dk)

Lecturer(s):

Irina Shklovski
Guest lecturer: TBD

Tentative dates of the course:
(Thursday 29th of September, 13:00-16:00) NOTE: Depends on guest lecturer*
Thursday 20th of October, 10:00-16:00*
Thursday 17th of November, 10:00-16:00
Thursday 8th of December, 10:00-16:00

Room: TBD

Course description:
This PhD-course will focus on literature that would be expected as a basic foundation in an HCI-graduate program. For each course day participants are expected to read the assigned texts. Two participants will lead the discussion on the assigned texts during the morning session. Each participant will present their perspectives on the texts from the perspective of their own current work during the afternoon session.

Learning outcomes:
After this course students will be able to:

1. Characterize and describe theoretical landscape of HCI as it relates to sociotechnical practices
2. Reflect on core concepts, contributions, main arguments, and empirical cases that underpinning the selected readings
3. Relate and reflect upon the theory towards their own research project to understand how or if the theoretical concepts can help their research move forward.

Programme:
The course will take place over the course of three full days of 2016. For each course day the participants are expected to read the assigned material and be able to present and discuss how the particular theme relate to the PhD students’ own work (detailed description will be sent out to participants).

Prerequisites:
This course is offered for PhD students enrolled in PhD programs at the IT University of Copenhagen, and other Danish, Nordic, European or International Universities.

Exam:
Type of assessment: Course participation including presentations for each lecture 
Exam registration requirements: preparation and attendance
Marking scale: completed/not completed 
Criteria for exam assessment: Preparation and Active participation  

Credits:
3 ECTS

Amount of hours the student is expected to use on the course:

 
How to sign up:
Application for attendance, please submit by email:
A personal CV (max 1 page): Including PhD affiliation, name of department, and main supervisor. 
A summary of your research experience (10 lines) as well as a description of how HCI relates to your research project and how the course will support your PhD work.
Emails should be sent to Nanna Gorm: nanj@itu.dk no later than 22nd of September 

Required readings:
(Course readings will be made available online to course participants prior the course)

1st course day readings: HCI theoretical history*

• Grudin. 2005. Three Faces of Human – Computer Interaction. IEEE Annals Of The History Of Computing, October-November, 46–62.(Note that the following texts are written in response to each other and should be read in the listed order)
• Norman. 1993. Cognition in the Head and in the World: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Situated Action. Cognitive Science.
• Vera and Simon. 1993. Situated Acton: A Symbolic Interpretation. Cognitive Science 17, 7–48.
• Greeno and Moore. 1993. Situativity and Symbols: Response to Vera and Simon. Cognitive Science 4959, June 2009
• Agre. 1985. The symbolic worldview: Reply to Vera and Simon. Fuzzy Sets and Systems 17, 1, 61–69.
• Suchman. 1985. Response to Vera and Simon’s situated action: A symbolic interpretation. Fuzzy Sets and Systems 17, 1, 71–75.

2nd course day readings: HCI theoretical history, continued*

• Nardi. 1996. Studying context: A comparison of Activity Theory, Situated Action Models , and Distributed Cognition. Context and Conciousness: Activity Theory and Human Computer Interaction
• Kaptelinin, Bonnie Nardi, Susanne Bødker, et al. 2003. Post-cognitivist HCI: second-wave theories. New Horizons, 692–693.
• Bødker. 2006. When second wave HCI meets third wave challenges. 4th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, October, 14–18.
• Harrison, Sengers, and Tatar. 2011. Making epistemological trouble: Third-paradigm HCI as successor science. Interacting with Computers 23, 5, 385–392.
  
  *1st and 2nd course day might be combined into one full day on the 20th of October depending on availability of our guest speaker.

3rd course day readings: HCI and information

• Feldman and March. 1981. Information in Organizations as Signal and Symbol. Administrative science quarterly 26, 2, 171–186.
• Bowker. 1996. The history of information infrastructures: The case of the international classification of diseases. Information Processing & Management 32, 1, 49–61
• Orlikowski and Robey. 1991. Information Technology and the Structuring of Organizations.
• Star and Griesemer. 1989. Institutional Ecology, `Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science 19, 387–420.
• Daft and Lengel. 1998. Organizational Information Requirements, Media Richness and Structural Design. Management Science, May 1986.
• Heath and Luff. 1992. Collaboration and control: Crisis Management and Multimedia Technology. CSCW 1 (1-2), 1990, 69–94.
• Suchman. 1983. Office procedure as practical action: Models of work and system design. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 1, 4, 320–328.
• Kraut, Egido, and Galegher. 1988. Patterns of contact in scientific research collaboration. CSCW ’88 Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, 1–12.

4th course day readings: On-going intellectual challenges

• Ackerman. 2000. The intellectual challenge of CSCW: The gap between social requirements and technical feasibility. Human-computer interaction 15, 2, 179–203.
• Jackson and Payette. 2014. The Policy Knot: Re-integrating Policy , Practice and Design in CSCW Studies of Social Computing. 588–602.
• Halverson. 2002. Activity Theory and Distributed Cognition: Or what does CSCW Need to Do with Theories? CSCW, 11, 243–267.
• Hekler, Predrag Klasnja, Froehlich, and Buman. 2013. Mind the Theoretical Gap: Interpreting, Using, and Developing Behavioral Theory in HCI Research. Proc. CHI 2013, 3307–3316.
• Kuutti and Bannon. 2014. The turn to practice in HCI: towards a research agenda. CHI
• Crabtree and Chamberlain. 2013. Introduction to the special issue of “The Turn to The Wild.” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human

Optional readings:

• Corley and Gioia. 2011. Building Theory about Theory: What Constitutes a Theoretical Contribution? Academy of Management Review 36, 1, 12–32.
• Davis. 1971. That’s interesting! Towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 4, 1, 309–344.