DUB Seminar (Summer 2022)

Design, Use, Build Seminar (HCID 590 A)

Instructor: Kaylea Champion / kaylea@uw.edu

Office Hours: By appointment (I'm usually available via chat during "business hours.") Use my harmonizely to schedule time with me. If you schedule a meeting, we'll meet in the Jitsi room (kayleaoffice) -- you'll get a link to it through the scheduling app.

Meeting Times: Wednesday 12-1pm and several other 90-minute sessions (see the class schedule below)

Important Links:

• We will use Canvas for announcements and assignments and for giving you grades and feedback
• We will use our own Slack Channel (mhcid590-dub-seminar on the DUB slack) for asynchronous group chat to discuss assignments and talks, ask questions, and share information throughout the week.
• DUB Seminar website with the calendar, links to information about speakers, etc

Overview and Learning Objectives

Design, Use, Build group (DUB) is a grassroots alliance of faculty, students, researchers, and industry partners interested in Human Computer Interaction & Design at the University of Washington. DUB brings together people across a range of departments at the University of Washington, gets HCI folks at UW out of their departmental silos, and exposes them to new ideas and perspectives.

DUB exists primarily in three places: the annual DUB retreat in the fall, small group activities organized 3-6 times throughout the year, and the DUB seminar. For more than 15 years, the DUB seminar has brought some of the leading researchers working at the intersections of people and computing to UW and has provided a venue for HCI researchers at UW to get their work in front of colleagues in other departments. It remains one of the best and easiest ways to connect with the broader HCI community at UW.

I am going to approach HCID 590 as an opportunity to pull in knowledge you've gained throughout the last year. Although the core of the class—the seminar itself—will be the same as in the course during the regular year, the learning goals will shift a little. It also means that the assignments and activities may change so that they we can all build upon what we have learned.

Summer 2022 Edition

In addition to the core learning goal related to building up an ability to understand and draw lessons from academic material about HCI, the fall quarter was focused on developing your skill in developing questions about academic material while the winter quarter was designed around developing and communicating an informed POV and the spring focused on applying ideas from academic HCI research to your own work. In summer, we will orient ourselves to building practices to support continuous learning and growth in HCI.

I will consider this quarter a total success if the following happens:

• Everyone attends the weekly DUB seminars, listens actively, and takes excellent notes.
• Everyone participates thoughtfully and consistently in discussions about the work presented at seminars over the quarter, both synchronously and asynchronously.
• Everyone is able to thoughtfully identify ideas from the talks we see, connect them to other experiences in HCID 590 and elsewhere, and describe how they might shape their own work now or in the future.

Class Schedule

Seminars

The DUB seminar will be hosted from 12-1pm on Wednesdays and (for this quarter once again) will conducted entirely over Zoom. I've listed the planned talks here and linked them on the calendar in Canvas. I don't schedule the DUB seminar and I know things sometimes change over the quarter. The latest version of the calendar will always be on the DUB seminar webpage and changes will be announced on the DUB mailing lists.

You must sign up for the DUB mailing list to get the Zoom link for the seminar each week.

1. Wednesday June 22: Small Group Mixers (optional)
2. Wednesday June 29: Megan Hofmann (Carnegie Mellon University)
3. Wednesday July 6: DUB Lightning Introductions (F2F!)
4. Wednesday July 13: Gabriela Richard (Pennsylvania State University) (f2f discussion@2!)
5. Wednesday July 20: Saleema Amershi (Microsoft Research) (F2F!)
6. Wednesday July 27: Sherry Tongshuang Wu (UW Computer Science and Engineering) (f2f discussion@2!)
7. Wednesday August 3: Kai Lukoff (UW Human Centered Design and Engineering)
8. Wednesday August 10: Marvin Andujar (University of South Florida) (f2f discussion@2!)
9. Wednesday August 17: MHCI+D Capstone Presentations (yay!)

There will be small group mixers on June 22. Although you're not required to attend these, I encourage you to attend these because they are low key, lots of fun, provide great opportunities to connect with folks working on related stuff at UW....and also include food :). You can follow the links above for more information.

Facilitated Group Discussions

You are expected to attend the three facilitated group discussion events. These will be at:

1. Wednesday, July 13 from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. (in person, in Alumni House classroom)
2. Wednesday, July 27 from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. (in person, in Alumni House classroom)
3. Wednesday, August 10 from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m (in person, in Alumni House classroom)

Assignments

Weekly Discussion on Slack [Due Friday following seminar @ 6pm]

I am expecting that everybody will spend a minimum of 30 minutes each week outside of the seminar time discussing each seminar on Slack. This should roughly be split between reading others' messages and posting your own thoughtful responses. Feel free to post while you are watching the seminar.

A simple starting point will be to simply pose a question for the cohort in the slack itself! If you don't feel the desire to share your question or if there are already an interesting set of questions posted, you can spend time responding to others.

Alternative assignment: If you're not coming up with sufficient useful questions or comments to demonstrate your engagement with the class, don't post filler :) :) :). Instead, reflect on our summer quarter learning goal: "building practices to support continuous learning and growth in HCI" -- responding to this goal might look like sharing ideas about what approaches work for you, or digging up resources online and describing why you think they'll be helpful.

Discussion Participation Assessment

For the purposes of tracking participation, I am logging our Slack channel and will generate statistics each week of who has participated and when/how much they posted. I don't have a target word count that I'm looking for and I definitely understand that sometimes a thoughtful short message may reflect a bunch of research. That said, I do expect that (a) everybody will post every week, and (b) the posts will be substantial enough to suggest something in the range of 15-20 minutes of thoughtful effort.

Group Synthesis Responses [Due Monday after our discussions @ 6pm ]

There are six research talks this quarter, and three face-to-face discussion sections. After each "set" -- two talks and a face to face discussion section -- your task is to set aside 45-60 minutes to discuss each pair of talks and our follow-up meeting with your capstone project groups. I'm hoping this makes things easier logistics-wise because you'll be meeting with these folks regularly as part of your projects. Your objective is to develop a synthesis response.

Synthesis Response Examples

Your response might be inspired by one of these formats or you might follow your own path:

• Analysis: Why or how is the research being presented considered to be important? What conversation does it contribute to? What's puzzling or confusing about what was described?
• Same Approach, New Context: Given the same approach, methods, or point of view that you saw described in the talk, what would it look like to explore a different context or problem space using this approach?
• New Approach, Same Context: Given the same overall problem space, organization, cultural phenomenon, etc. that you saw described in the talk, what would it look like to explore it using a different approach or method?
• Short-term Application: How might ideas in the talks influence your capstone projects? Are there things you might approach differently? Don't let resources or time be a barrier. I'm not asking you to actually apply the ideas from the talks or to rework your projects as you go. My main goal here is prompt you to think about how you could.
• Long-term Application: If you think beyond your time in the MHCI+D program, how you might apply these ideas in your career or your other work and projects?
• Skill Practice -- The Pitch: How would you summarize one/several of these talks to others outside MHCI+D -- in the context of a meeting, coffee conversation, e-mail, etc.? Who needs to know about this research and why? Give each other a pitch and refine your delivery.
• Skill Practice -- The Interview: Imagine you are talking to one of the leaders of the research project being described and you're seeking a job on the team. How does your MHCI+D background and skills position you to contribute to their work? Offer each other feedback and consider potential follow-up questions or responses from a hiring manager.
• Retrospective: Thinking back over these talks and all the many other talks you've attended as part of the DUB seminar (see past talks list), what themes do you identify? Are there tensions or conflicts that emerge within these themes?

Synthesis Response Assessment

Your deliverable is to post to pinned Slack discussion threads that I'll create for the purpose.

This post should be a short summary of your conversation, using one of the above ways of responding or your own approach (shoot for 200 words).

My understand is that all the project groups have three people. As a result, I'll expect each of you to take the lead in posting your group's contributions to the pinned thread during the quarter. Also, please remember to mention your teammates when you post so that I know whose conversation you are reporting back about!

Grading and Assessment

This course is offered credit/no credit. Although you will not receive a numeric grade, passing this class is not automatic and I will assess your work and evidence of learning throughout the quarter. You can find details about my approach to assessment and my very detailed grading rubric on my assessment page. Although I don't expect this to be a problem, you'll need to have credit for at least 2/3 of the assignments in the class in order to get credit for the class:

I will assign points for each of following items according to the weights below:

• Weekly slack conversation: 40%
• Productive and thoughtful participation in face-to-face group discussions: 30%
• Contributing to your group's discussion response and posting your group's discussion response (one time this quarter): 30%

Administrative Notes and Resources

Dealing with Paywalls

As part of this class, you'll be linked to academic articles on a regular basis. Many of these articles are behind paywalls in the sense that you will often be asked to pay for access to the full text. Whatever you do, don't pay for the articles! UW has already paid for them which means that you have already paid for them, in small part, as part of your tuition!

Although you can often do a web search and find a "preprint" (usually an earlier version of the article available online for free), UW libraries have bought subscriptions to everything (or almost everything) we'll be talking about in this class. As a result, my recommendation is to get the real version from the publisher.

If you're on campus, the paywall will simply not appear because the UW libraries subscription covers free access from on campus. If you're off campus, you should visit the UW libraries page about off-campus access. That page will direct to you to one of two options: (a) the UW libraries bookmarklet or (b) use the Husky OnNet VPN with the “All Internet Traffic” option selected.

Option (a) (the bookmarklet) is a little unusual but it's very easy and it involve adding "button" to your web browser that will "unlock" just about any paywall article you go to. I use it many times every day.

Teaching and learning in a pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic will impact this course in various ways, some of them obvious and tangible and others harder to pin down. On the obvious and tangible front, we have things like a mix of remote, synchronous, and asynchronous instruction. These will reshape our collective "classroom" experience in major ways.

On the "harder to pin down" side, many of us may experience elevated levels of exhaustion, stress, uncertainty and distraction. We may need to provide unexpected support to family, friends, or others in our communities. I have personally experienced all of these things at various times over the pandemic and I expect that some of you have too. It is a difficult time.

I believe it is important to acknowledge these realities of the situation and create the space to discuss and process them in the context of our class throughout the quarter. As your instructor and colleague, I commit to do my best to approach the course in an adaptive, generous, and empathetic way. I will try to be transparent and direct with you throughout—both with respect to the course material as well as the pandemic and the university's evolving response to it. I ask that you try to extend a similar attitude towards everyone in the course. When you have questions, feedback, or concerns, please try to share them in an appropriate way. If you require accommodations of any kind at any time (directly related to the pandemic or not), please contact the teaching team.

This text is borrowed and adapted from Aaron Shaw's statistics course.

Your Presence in Class

As detailed in my detailed page on assessment, your participation in discussion is an important way that I will assess learning. Obviously, you must be in class in order to participate. If you need to miss the seminar itself, contact me and we can make sure you get a copy of a video. In the event of an absence, you are responsible for obtaining notes, handouts, assignments, etc.

Religious Accommodations

Washington state law requires that UW develop a policy for accommodation of student absences or significant hardship due to reasons of faith or conscience, or for organized religious activities. The UW’s policy, including more information about how to request an accommodation, is available at Religious Accommodations Policy. Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks of this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form.

Student Conduct

The University of Washington Student Conduct Code (WAC 478-121) defines prohibited academic and behavioral conduct and describes how the University holds students accountable as they pursue their academic goals. Allegations of misconduct by students may be referred to the appropriate campus office for investigation and resolution. More information can be found online at https://www.washington.edu/studentconduct/ Safety

Call SafeCampus at 206-685-7233 anytime–no matter where you work or study–to anonymously discuss safety and well-being concerns for yourself or others. SafeCampus’s team of caring professionals will provide individualized support, while discussing short- and long-term solutions and connecting you with additional resources when requested.

Academic Dishonesty

This includes: cheating on assignments, plagiarizing (misrepresenting work by another author as your own, paraphrasing or quoting sources without acknowledging the original author, or using information from the internet without proper citation), and submitting the same or similar paper to meet the requirements of more than one course without instructor approval. Academic dishonesty in any part of this course is grounds for failure and further disciplinary action. The first incident of plagiarism will result in the student’s receiving a zero on the plagiarized assignment. The second incident of plagiarism will result in the student’s receiving a zero in the class.

Disability Resources

If you have already established accommodations with Disability Resources for Students (DRS), please communicate your approved accommodations to UW at your earliest convenience so we can discuss your needs in this course.

If you have not yet established services through DRS, but have a temporary health condition or permanent disability that requires accommodations (conditions include but not limited to; mental health, attention-related, learning, vision, hearing, physical or health impacts), you are welcome to contact DRS at 206-543-8924 or uwdrs@uw.edu or disability.uw.edu. DRS offers resources and coordinates reasonable accommodations for students with disabilities and/or temporary health conditions. Reasonable accommodations are established through an interactive process between you, your instructor(s) and DRS. It is the policy and practice of the University of Washington to create inclusive and accessible learning environments consistent with federal and state law.

Mental Health

Your mental health is important. If you are feeling distressed, anxious, depressed, or in any way struggling with your emotional and psychological wellness, please know that you are not alone. Many of us have endured or are currently facing profoundly difficult times.

Resources are available for you:

• UW 24/7 Help Line 1.866.775.0608
• https://wellbeing.uw.edu/topic/mental-health/
• https://www.crisistextline.org/

Other Student Support

Any student who has difficulty affording groceries or accessing sufficient food to eat every day, or who lacks a safe and stable place to live, and believes this may affect their performance in the course, is urged to contact the graduate program advisor for support. Furthermore, please notify the professors if you are comfortable in doing so. This will enable us to provide any resources that we may possess (adapted from Sara Goldrick-Rab). Please also note the student food pantry, Any Hungry Husky at the ECC.

Credit and Notes

Much of the design of this class and some text on the syllabus are drawn from previous version of the course taught at UW, especially the version taught by Benjamin Mako Hill. He also notes that he drew from the syllabus created by Scott Ichikawa's Autumn 2020 syllabus for HCID 590 .