About
The Centre for HCI Design (HCID) is a leading Human-Computer Interaction group in the UK. We take great pride in our outstanding research, teaching and consultancy services. Our concern is for how technologies entangle in the many and varied forms of life, and the possibilities for enlarging human capacity and creating the conditions for better ways of living together. Our prime focus is the relationship between people and innovative technologies with the aim of designing productive, engaging and equitable futures. HCID is a collective endeavour, and our work and collaborations are guided by our charter.
Our Charter
The Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design’s Charter is an ethos that we aspire towards. We strive to make a difference through our design-based research, teaching and commercial work and through our care for those whom we work with. We are motivated by the possibilities of enlarging human capacity and creating the conditions for better ways of living together with technology. Our ethos is demonstrated through our approach to studies, co-design, intervention and care.
1
To study people and settings with a commitment to understanding the fullness of the lived experience.
2
To design responsibly, and to be responsive to the capacities of those we are designing for.
3
To intervene in ways that open up possibilities and encourage diversity to thrive.
4
To care for those we work 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 improve the health, wellbeing and security of individuals, communities, and the planet. At the same time, we uphold rights to equity, fun, prosperity, fairness, justice and collective determination. Working inventively with empirical and creative design methods that are sensitive to the needs of diverse humans and non-humans, our research studies aim to enrich and deepen our understandings of those living in technology-mediated worlds.
Co-Design
Our studies are distinguished by their commitment to co-designing interactions and experiences with others, including those who may not typically be involved in design. We use methods that share power, agency and strive for transparency, accessibility, and full representation. We recognise the value of diverse perspectives and see design as a way to work critically towards preferable futures and outcomes.
Intervention
We seek to create technologies that play a role in routine and non-routine life. Our interventions address the politics inherent in designing technology, aiming to raise questions about presumed norms and to create the conditions for more to happen and difference to flourish. Design intervention is the vehicle for co-imagining alternative worlds; for a collective adventure in making worlds otherwise.
Care
Our collective investment in studies, co-design and interventions are shaped by practices of care. We seek to build an environment in which care for one another and care for our labour is not diminished or erased in our work. In caring for one another, we recognise the precarity and unevenness of our relations, but also what we are capable of in 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.