The Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design (HCID) is a collective endeavour. Between us—through our design-based research, teaching and commercial work—we strive to make a difference. Paying attention to the ways technologies intermingle with life, we are spurred on by the possibilities of enlarging human capacity and creating the conditions for better ways of living together.

A Working

Charter

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To study people and settings with a commitment to understanding the fullness of the lived experience.
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To design responsibly, and to be responsive to the capacities of those we are designing for.
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To intervene in ways that open up the possibilities and that invite a flourishing of difference.
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To care for those we work for and with, in full recognition of the tensions that come with being careful and caring.

Studies

Looking outwards, to the worlds we engage with and study, our commitment is to improving people’s health, welfare, and security, and, at the same time, upholding rights to equity, fun, prosperity, fairness, justice and collective determination. Working inventively with empirical and human-centred design methods, our scholarly practices aim to enrich and deepen our understandings of those living in technology-mediated worlds.

Design

Our studies are distinguished by their commitment to designing interactions and experiences that enable transparency, accessibility, and full representation. Guiding the design research we do are participatory and co-design methods that redistribute the authority and power of who designs for whom, and who decides the technology-mediated worlds that are possible. This is an additive project, where design becomes a way to bring more people and more ideas to the table.

Intervention

Co-designing interactions and experiences, we seek to intervene in the role technologies play in routine life. Our interventions address the politics inherent in designing technology, aiming to raise questions of presumed norms, and to create the conditions for more to happen and difference to flourish. Design intervention becomes the vehicle for co-imagining alternative worlds, for a collective adventure in making worlds otherwise.

Care

Among ourselves, our collective investment in studies, design and intervention are shaped by practices of care. We seek to build an environment in which a care for one another and the care for our labour isn’t diminished or erased in our work. Asking seriously “how do we work together?” demands an awareness of the precarity and unevenness of our relations, but also what more we are capable of. Our aim is to be responsive to and responsible for our practices of care, holding open the possibilities for working well together, and being alive to and affected by our collective world-making work.


Together, our Centre’s studies, design research, and interventionist orientation, and our collective practices of care, set the stage for a transformative experiment. We believe in the modest but still generative capacities of technology to make worlds more liveable - to enable greater capacities, to make possible human and nonhuman flourishing, to sow the seeds of plurality, to multiply and amplify voices, and so on — but we are steadfast in the commitments needed to learn again (and again) what that better is and how to get there.