At the recent INTERACT 2013 Conference (2-6 September 2013, Cape Town, South Africa) several IFIP TC13 (Human-Computer Interaction) presented several awards (the IFIP Brian Shackel Award, the IFIP TC13 Accessibility Award, the IFIP TC13 Interaction Design for International Development (IDID) Award) and honoured five IFIP TC13 Pioneers.
IFIP Brian Shackel Award
The IFIP Brian Shackel Award recognises the most outstanding contribution that draws attention to the need for a comprehensive human-centred approach in the design and use of information technology in which the human and social implications have been taken into account.
The 2013 recipients of the IFIP Brian Shackel Award are Micheline Elias, Marie-Aude Aufaure and Anastasia Bezerianos, for their paper titled ‘Storytelling in Visual Analytics Tools for Business Intelligence’. This is a paper on a highly relevant and timely topic of human-computer interaction – storytelling. Second, it is in the field of visual analytics, an increasingly important theme combining computer science and HCI in today's world of big data. Third, the paper provides a great example of informed design.
Chair of the Brian Shackel Award committee, Tom Gross, presenting the Brian Shackel Award to Micheline Elias
IFIP TC13 Accessibility Award
The IFIP TC 13 Accessibility Award recognizes an outstanding contribution with international impact in the field of accessibility for disabled users in human-computer interaction.
The 2013 recipients of the IFIP TC13 Accessibility Award are Raghavendra Reddy Gudur, Thea Blackler, Vesna Popovic and Doug Mahar for their paper titled ‘Ageing, Technology Anxiety and Intuitive Use of Complex Interfaces’. This paper presents the outcome of a study that investigated the relationships between technology prior experience, self-efficacy, technology anxiety, complexity of interface and intuitive use in older people.
The paper addresses elderly people not only for their sensory or motor requirements but also for their cognitive limitations. Overall, the findings suggest that when the tasks are designed with consideration of the cognitive limitations of older people, the age differences are minimal for most age groups.
IFIP TC13 Interaction Design for International Development (IDID) Award
The 2013 recipients of the IFIP TC13 Interaction Design for International Development Award (given now for the first time) are Nicola J Bidwell and Masbulele Jay Siya for their paper titled ‘Situating Asynchronous Voice in Rural Africa’.
This paper forms part of a long-term research programme that is exemplary for interaction design and international development. The authors pay close attention to the detailed practices of interaction between people, and to interactions between people and technologies. The work is taking place in rural South Africa, in a primarily oral culture. The authors’ observations throw into sharp relief unconscious design assumptions that are common to interaction designers because of our shared cultural background, and they illustrate some novel design responses. These ideas can contribute to new interaction designs that are more usable, useful and accessible for people whose cultural background is primarily oral, and whose experience of digital technologies is very limited. The close, long-term relationships between professional researchers and community participants in this programme, the deep respect shown for the established communication practices in this context, and the determination to design a technology that reflects this reality make the work exemplary as a truly user-centred approach to designing for development.
IFIP TC13 Pioneers
An IFIP TC Pioneer is one who, through active participation in IFIP Technical Committees or related IFIP groups, has made outstanding contributions to the educational, theoretical, technical, commercial or professional aspects of analysis, design, construction, evaluation and use of interactive systems.
The 2013 IFIP TC13 Pioneers are:
Joëlle Coutaz, France: Professor Emeritus at University of Grenoble; Past vice-chair of IFIP WG 2.7 on User Interface Engineering; Member of the CHI Academy; Pioneering work on multimodal interaction and software architecture modeling for interactive systems; Developer of the PAC model.
John Karat, USA: Senior Researcher at IBM Research (semi-retired); Past Chair of TC13; Active in several working groups, particularly WG13.1 and WG13.2; Important connection with industry and academia, and very active in international development; Research on design collaboration, speech-based systems, and early electronic medical record systems; Co-recipient of the first Brian Shackel Award.
Gitte Lindgaard, Australia: Adjunct Professor at Carleton University; Past TC13 Secretary; Past head of the Human Factors Division at Telstra Research Laboratories in Australia; First North American Chair in user-centred design at Carleton University; Groundbreaking work on the multimedia presentation of information for human-human communication and the aesthetic and emotional appeal of the interactive experience.
Zhengjie Liu, China: Founder and Director of Sino European Usability Center (SEUC); Professor at School of Information Science & Technology of Dalian Maritime University (DMU); Co-founder of ACM SIGCHI China; Active as Chinese TC13 representative and in many of the working groups; A pioneer in bringing China and the rest of the HCI world closer together; Research on usability/user experience and user-centered design.
Gerrit van der Veer, The Netherlands: Professor Emeritus at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Current President of ACM SIGCHI; Working to make ACM more international and seeking good collaboration between IFIP and ACM; A long standing representative of Netherlands in IFIP TC13; Active researcher and contributor at working groups particularly in cognitive ergonomics and HCI education.