Challenges for Establishing a Latin American Community in HCI/UX

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1 Challenges for Establishing a Latin American Community in HCI/UX J. Alfredo Sánchez Universidad de las Américas Puebla, México alfredo.sanchez@udlap.mx Elizabeth S. Furtado Universidade de Fortaleza, Brazil elizabethsfur@gmail.com Natalia Vivas Usaria, Colombia nataliavivas@gmail.com Abstract In this paper, we provide an overview of the efforts carried out in Latin America to develop a community around the multidisciplinary field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). We highlight our accomplishments, but also discuss major obstacles we have faced in order to take advantage of commonalities for developing both the academic and professional communities in HCI and User Experience (UX). We focus on the challenges that need to be addressed in order to strengthen and consolidate the community, and provide perspective on the advantages of further developing the HCI/UX community and its synergies with related areas, such as CSCW, design and ergonomics. Author Keywords Latin America, Latin America HCI community; Latin America UX community, CLIHC, ISA. Paste the appropriate copyright/license statement here. ACM now supports three different publication options: ACM copyright: ACM holds the copyright on the work. This is the historical approach. License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an exclusive publication license. Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open access. The additional fee must be paid to ACM. This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single-spaced in Verdana 7 point font. Please do not change the size of this text box.. Introduction Research and practice in the multidisciplinary field of HCI have evolved significantly in Latin America (LA) throughout the last decade. There have been efforts to generate and strengthen a community around the field to take advantage of cultural similarities among LA countries, and to study the needs and opportunities for areas such as novel interaction paradigms, user experience, user interface design, and usability. Although much progress has been accomplished, there are still many challenges ahead that need to be addressed so HCI in LA develops and benefits from a stronger identity in the context of a global community.

2 Some historic landmarks HCI communities at the country level originated in the late 1990s in Brazil and Mexico, in the context of their computer science societies. In each of these countries, workshops have been organized to provide forums for researchers to share their findings. It was not until the early 2000s that efforts were initiated to organize a LA community. In 2001, a group of LA researchers gathered at the Development Consortium: Anyone. Anywhere. In Latin America in the context of the CHI Conference in Seattle, Washington [3]. Participants from Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Guatemala discussed opportunities for collaboration and the potential of establishing an HCI LA community. One of the main results of this meeting was the definition of a conference that would become the main forum for sharing progress in research and practice in HCI in the region. Thus, two years later, the Latin American Conference in Human- Computer Interaction (CLIHC, after its initials in Spanish and Portuguese) was held for the first time in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [4]. The CLIHC 2003 conference was a success in terms of the number and diversity of participants who submitted papers, taught tutorials and presented posters, as well as the number of attendees (over 200). Given this, it was decided to organize CLIHC biannually, alternating with the national workshops and conferences that already were held, particularly in Brazil and Mexico ( Since then, CLIHC has taken place in Cuernavaca, Mexico (2005), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2007), Mérida, Mexico (2009), Porto de Galinhas, Brazil (2011), and Guanacaste, Costa Rica (2013). It is interesting to note that, after the first two editions, CLIHC has been held jointly with related conferences. In 2007, it was held in the context of the Interact Conference. Then, in 2009, CLIHC was jointly organized with the LA Web Conference. In 2011, the organization efforts were shared with the IHC Brazilian conference. Finally, in 2013, CLIHC joined efforts with the Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence conference. Similarly, the CLIHC proceedings have been published in different venues: the ACM Digital Library (2003, 2005, 2011), IEEE Computer Society (2009) and Springer (2013). Other initiatives The aforementioned initiatives are mostly academic, but there have been also initiatives promoted by practitioners organizations that have made efforts towards integrating the LA community. Their target community includes designers, HCI researchers, and UX professionals, who work in areas related to the quality of UX with interactive products. Some key initiatives include: i) ACM SIGCHI efforts to support HCI collaboration in LA: In 2012, SIGCHI sponsored a regional workshop for LA HCI representatives. This was an unique opportunity for participants to talk and learn more about each country s reality and to discuss how LA countries could act collaboratively to strengthen HCI in the region [2]; and ii) Initiatives of organizations such as the IxDA and UXPA, to unite the UX community, as presented in the next section. Stakeholders in these communities study or work within the HCI discipline, or with UX approaches, such as User-Centered Design and Design Thinking. They comprise people with different backgrounds and coming from different environments, cultures and countries, and even languages. All these aspects make the creation, maintenance and articulation of a community a highly complex task, given the level of heterogeneity and diverse disciplines. Regardless of whether their emphasis is on practice or research, HCI and UX share principles, methods and techniques, always focused on the users. HCI is a discipline with various concepts and methods focusing on a software, while the UX approach is applied to any type of interactive product, including computer hardware and software products. Thus, one does not comprise the other, but there is a significant overlap among them [1]. In the remainder of this article, we

3 refer to our target community as the LA community in HCI/UX. Challenges: HCI/UX Associations around the LA: Differences, similarities and lack of integration In this sub-section, we describe some examples of associations related to HCI/UX in order to illustrate first the profile of who takes the coordination of an association then the challenges of each one to follow its purposes. In these organizations, leaderships are volunteers and there is no cost for membership. We use the following three examples: the SIGCHI Latin HCI American Community (LAIHC), the Interaction Design Institute in Latin America (IDI-LA) of IxDA, and UxPA. The SIGCHI LAIHC community started in 2012 and its officers include two volunteers from academia and one from industry. Its main missions are the organization of the CLIHC conference, as well as to consolidate a LA HCI/UX community in order to identify students, researchers and professionals who are active or interested in the field. IxDA, the Interaction Design Association, was founded in IxDA is responsible for the creation of an international design community via the organization of annual events, mainly the Interaction Conference. In LA, IxDA has been led by volunteers usually coming from industry, mostly from the design area. They are proposed by the LA IxDA community and are responsible for the organization of the ISA conference, which is held in LA countries. The goal of Local UXPA Chapters is to offer people interested in UX venues to gather regularly and share their experiences and to support each other in the usability profession. Their focus is on truly local activities connecting usability professionals with each other and they supports the World Usability Day A survey conducted in April 2012, with a sample of 220 people, found that countries with higher concentration of Usability Professionals in LA, with the exception of Brazil, are currently Colombia (41%), Argentina (22%), Chile (16%), Mexico (7%), Peru (5%), Panama and Uruguay (1%). Results show also that the most popular organization is IxDA (69%), followed by UPA (30%) and SIGCHI (7%). The organizations mentioned above operate separately but have common purposes: to create their own community and organize their events. Creating communities is a research topic in CSCW : many works on collaborative social systems study how to keep a community and in a participatory manner. A well-accepted categorization for user participation [5] defines communities that attract users from the appealing of a common identity (identity-based communities) and those that attract users who want to create and strength their social ties (bond-based communities). We don t know yet what kind of community could motivate LA people to join it in order to create an integrated one: one where a common purpose is shared and the contents are related to the purpose of the community (identity-based community, like LA SIGCHI), one where social interactions are fundamental (bond-based community, like IxDA), or a mix of them. The isolated actions of the organizations cause the following challenges: It is difficult to create an integrated community. The communities are organized using diverse technologies: Facebook groups, twitter, mail lists and specific systems (as it is the case of SIGCHI LAIHC community). An integrated database of communities is needed in order to avoid duplicity and inconsistencies of information, as well as to produce more synergies. The aforementioned organizations have no formal collaboration channels. Each organization has its own membership, for example, the first two are managed by ACM SIGCHI, which has strict rules to support and sponsor events. An integrated event organized by IxDA that could be supported by ACM

4 SIGCHI or vice-versa remains an open challenge. Also, the aforementioned events do not share scientific committees. A specific challenge is to have academic researchers get credit for participating in mostly industry-oriented events and volunteer to be part of their committees. Among the benefits that an integrated HCI/UX community could bring to the LA Context, we have considered the following: (i) The curricula of universities and of various autonomous courses could be enriched if there was participation of each organization in the discussions of the main themes, such as: the multi-disciplinary nature of a the field and the practical application of theories; and (ii) HCI/UX research in LA could be better if there were organizations of varied profiles for cooperation between countries, for instance, in international projects or other type of initiatives. In general, there is a consensus that it is important to make connections between different communities and between academic and practitioner communities. We are particularly optimistic about the benefits integrated events could bring for the LA Context. Since the areas involved are relatively new, resources are not abundant. This statement may lead to the following question: If external relationships (among LA countries) were privileged, could they still promote the internal growth of the community of a single country? The LA HCI/UX community could benefit significantly from interacting with communities with related goals and issues, such as the CSCW Latin American community. Another important aspect is the following: Good communication is one of the most significant ways of promoting learning. Whether integrated events in English could be beneficial or harm those who know only Spanish or English remains an open question. Finally researchers take advantage when an organization provides the appropriate conditions for the publication of their articles. However, this typically raises the cost of events, which may deter participation from community members who would like to have access to low cost registration. Perspectives It is clear that the LA community in HCI/UX has been growing and that interest in various aspects of the field also has been on the rise. However, a lot of work needs to be done to increase the community s cohesiveness and to promote the field in geographical areas of the region where HCI and UX have not been present thus far. The SIGCHI LA Community [6] can play a key role in increasing awareness on both HCI/UX research and practice in the region. Moreover, in order to promote an improve communication with the community of HCI and UX practitioners, opportunities are being explored to organize CLIHC 2015 in conjunction with the ISA Conference. References [1] Guimarães, D. B.; De Carvalho, C. R. M.; Furtado, E. S. Panorama, oportunidades e recomendações para o contexto brasileiro de interação humano-computador e design centrado no usuário a partir do uso de personas. In: proc of IHC+CLIHC '11. [2] Prates R., Barbosa, S. Silveira, M., De Souza, C. Baranauskas,C., Maciel, C., Furtado, E., Anacleto, J., Melo, P., Kujala, T., HCI Community in Brazil Sweet 16!. ACM Interactions [3] [last access: December 2014]. [4] [last access: December 2014]. [5] Yuqing Ren, Kraut, R., & Kiesler, S. (2007). Applying Common Identity and Bond Theory to Design of Online Communities. Organization Studies, 28(3), doi: / [6] [last access: December 2014].

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