DUB Seminar (Winter 2022)

Design, Use, Build Seminar (HCID 590 A)

Instructor: Benjamin Mako Hill / makohill@uw.edu

Office Hours: By appointment (I'm usually available via chat during "business hours.") You can view out my calendar and/or put yourself on it. If you schedule a meeting, we'll meet in the Jitsi room (makooffice) you'll get a link to through the scheduling app.

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

Important Links:

• We will use Canvas for announcements
• 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 one class stretched out across the year. This means that although the core of the class—the seminar itself—will remain the same, the learning goals will shift a little each quarter. It also means that the assignments and activities may change so that they we can all build upon what we have learned.

Winter 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. This quarter will be focused on developing a point of view in regards to the same types of content. This is really more a shift in emphasis than the introduction of something entirely new. You all did a bit of the latter last quarter. We will continue to do a bit of the former this quarter as well.

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 develop and communicate an informed POV about the material covered in the seminar.

Class Schedule

Seminars

The DUB seminar will be hosted from 12-1pm on Wednesdays and (for this quarter at least) 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 signup for the DUB mailing list to get the Zoom link for the seminar each week.

1. Wednesday January 12: Kathryn E. Ringland (University of California Santa Cruz)
2. Wednesday January 19: Ben Shapiro (University of Colorado)
3. Wednesday January 26: Sheena Erete (DePaul University)
4. Wednesday February 2: Aylin Caliskan (UW Information School)
5. Wednesday February 9: Marisol Wong-Villacres (Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL))
6. Wednesday February 16: Kashyap Todi (Facebook Reality Labs)
7. Wednesday February 23: Sayamindu Dasgupta (UW Human Centered Design & Engineering)

We're skipping March 2nd because (a) nothing has been scheduled during that period and (b) this will coincide with IxDA during which MHCI+D is not going to be having classes.

You'll also notice that there will be small group mixers on both January 5 and March 9. Although you're not required to attend these, I encourage you to attend these because they are low key, lots of fun, and provide great opportunities to connect with folks working on related stuff at UW. 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. Tuesday, February 1th from 3:30–5pm (in person in Alumni House classroom)
2. Tuesday, February 15th from 3:30–5pm (in person in Alumni House classroom)
3. Tuesday, March 1th from 3:30–5pm (in person in Alumni House classroom)

Assignments

For each week that we have a DUB seminar, all of the assignments are build around a set of one-on-one pair discussions with another member of your cohort. To help these conversations happen, I'll be randomly pairing folks up with one of their classmates. I'll be posting a list of the pairings for the week on Slack on Wednesday afternoon after each seminar.

Your assignment involves the following three things:

1. Formulate three questions for other members of your cohort based on the talk. [Individual Deliverable]
2. Share your questions, and talk through one or more of them, with your conversation partner for the week.
3. Report back to the group on Slack. [Pair Deliverable]

You are welcome to structure your pair conversation in whatever way makes sense. It can be an in-person discussion, a chat over coffee or lunch, or a short video call in Slack or Zoom. It can also be an asynchronous text chat in a set of private messages on Slack. Do whatever works for you!

I'm imagining that you will spend about half an hour talking through things in a synchronous discussion or some equivalent amount of idea development in a text chat over hours or even days.

Questions DUE Thursday at 9pm [Individual Deliverable]

Your individual deliverables are the three questions that you will pose to your partner. They will be due in the appropriate Canvas discussion where others can see them the day after each talk. This will be similar to what we did in the Autumn quarter, but without the sketch noting and without the need to frame questions for three different audiences.

Reports from Pair Discussion DUE Sunday at 5pm [Group Deliverable]

Each group will have two deliverables which will be due at time that due at 5pm on the Sunday after each seminar:

1. A short summary of your conversation (shoot for about 200 words).
2. Nominate one question (either you brought to the session or one developed up in your conversation) for the facilitated conversation in the full group discussion. Ideally this will be a question that you and your partner believe will provide an illuminating discussion and/or elicit productive disagreement from your classmates.

Each week, one member of each pair should do one of these things and the other member should do the other. You're welcome to divide this up however you like but do make sure that everybody does some of each over the quarter.

Please complete both of these assignments in Slack in the following way:

1. When posting summaries, please just post this as a normal message into Slack (i.e., start a new thread). Of course, be sure to both indicate that this is a reportback and mention the name of your conversation partner!
2. For questions, let's try to keep these together under a single thread in Slack. I'll try to pin a message for these questions each week but go ahead and start the thread if I haven't gotten to it first and I'll pin it when I see it.

There is one final assignment:

3. In the period between #2 above is done/due and before 5pm on the Monday before we have our facilitated group discussion, look through the group discussion questions threads in the weeks since our last full group dicussion and nominate any question you are interested in for further discusssion. Thumbs-up (:+1:) reactions are a totally fine way to do this!

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 Questions: 20%
• Weekly Pair Discussions: 50%
• Facilitated group discussion: 30%

Administrative Notes

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 the, 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.

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. In particular, I've drawn from the syllabus created by Scott Ichikawa's Autumn 2020 syllabus for HCID 590 .