CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGIES FOR SOCIAL INTERACTION

MONDAY 24 AND TUESDAY 25 AUGUST 2009

Workshop on CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGIES FOR SOCIAL INTERACTION

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Various activities, including making friends, job hunting, education and daily purchasing, have been supported by social software, such as discussion groups, blogs, wikis, and social networking sites, across the world. Designing user interfaces for these technologies requires intensive attention on understanding social interactions among users and acknowledging demographic diversity. In today’s global marketplace, these processes reflect world-wide cultures. Despite its importance, however, we are far from having a detailed theoretical understanding of the role of culture in interfaces that support social interactions.

This workshop will bring together a mix of HCI researchers and practitioners,  social scientists and psychologists who are interested in areas of social technologies and culture, from a wide variety of backgrounds, in order to (a) examine the design and use of technologies for social interaction in different cultures; (b) explore various viewpoints on key issues for future research; (c) outline various approaches and identify some basic guidelines for understanding cultural impacts in building social technologies as well as user interfaces; and (d) foster new collaborations in the community.

Workshop format

We will address the goals above through three activities: (a) workshop participants will work on collaborative activities and collectively examine a set of case studies, theoretical papers, experience reports and methods for cross-cultural studies on social software; (b) participants will present short papers on their own current research; (c) group discussion will address specific issues such as:

  • Culture-specific use of social technologies
  • Identification or categorization of culture-independent (i.e. cross culture) and culture-dependent (i.e. culture-specific) social interactions and technologies.
  • UI, HCI and software design for culture sensitive social interaction
  • Study methodologies for culture sensitive social interaction
  • Evaluation of social interfaces from a cross-culture point of view

Workshop application:

Please submit a 2-4 page position paper in PDF describing your experience, findings, views or interests relevant to the themes of the workshop to [email protected].

For more details visit http://sites.google.com/site/crosscultureworkshopinteract09/

Workshop organizers
Qinying Liao, IBM China Research Lab.
Susan R. Fussell, Cornnell University
Sheetal K. Agarwal, IBM India Research Lab.
Arun Kumar, IBM India Research Lab.
Amit A. Nanavati, IBM India Research Lab.
Nitendra Rajput, IBM India Research Lab.
Yingxin Pan, IBM China Research Lab.