[cross posted from my CACM blog]
Yesterday was the most important day of my work calendar. We awarded degrees to 50 computer science students, thus fulfilling one of our main purposes as academics. I had the pleasure of telling some of the top students their marks in person. I’ve been doing this job for a good few years now, but I still can’t quite get used to the buzz I get when students hear that they have succeeded. Their faces are pictures of incredulity, joy, but mostly relief that they made it. I am proud to have played a small part in their learning journeys.
We often interview students as part of our selection process into the first year, at the start of their journey. That can be extremely revealing. It’s quite a daunting situation for some teenagers to find themselves in a room with an unknown adult and try to talk their way into a university course. From time to time, though, the young person’s sheer passion for computer science shines out through the shyness. One chap this year was carefully cultivating an air of teenage boredom until we stared talking about computer games development, when he revealed his awe and reverence of his game development heroes (who no doubt were bored teenagers themselves once). Another candidate, the first member of his family to apply to university, spoke fondly of how he put his first computer together with his granddad when he was eight years old. School students at our Turing birthday party last year were delighted to talk to our students about their programming projects, as they said their teachers didn’t understand what they were working on. I strongly remember one of our current PhD students almost dancing with excitement when he got to talk with one of the professors about Open GL. He had been teaching himself for years but now he had someone else to talk to about his favourite topic. He had come home.
As academics, our role is to teach the foundations of computer science while fuelling - rather than dampening - this passionate geekery. We try to fan the flames of geekery in those who have never had the good fortune to experience it before. It’s hard for us to do this, and even harder for the students to keep motivated throughout the long journey to graduation. To get a CS degree at my university, you need to pass 32 different courses, picking up 480 credits on the way. On each of these 32 courses, there are possible ways to slip up: course work whose spec you cannot fathom, compilers which hate you, unit tests which spontaneously fail just before the deadline, exams in which your mind goes inexplicably blank. Many students also have the hurdles of young adulthood to deal with too – a potential mixture of financial hardship, leaving home, relationship break ups, bereavement, or mental health difficulties.
In spite of all this, the students get through it. They learn where to put their semicolons. They grasp how Quick Sort works. They sort out their matrices and master the halting problem. They fall in love with APIs and engrave comms protocols on their hearts. They learn how to write, how to present their ideas, how to think. This is a privilege to witness. Academics really do have the best job.
[edited after a lunch argument with a friend]
Our workshop on Motherhood and HCI at the CHI 2013 conference seems to have angered some feminists. I wouldn't have predicted this, but then I don't devote much time to studying feminist theory. We didn't get any negative comments from men that I'm aware of. Maybe they were fearfully gathered in the corner of the men's toilets, worrying about being marginalised by powerful women.
[EDIT: I just recalled a criticism of the general area of Motherhood and HCI which emerged from a pre CHI event from a man. This memory was provoked at the weekend by a male doctor friend who was criticising a mum in a cafe for cuddling a very new baby while reading her phone. "Look at the perfect example of mother baby bonding", he said in his doctorly way. "The baby thinks her mum is wrapped up in cuddling her, but she's actually ignoring her". The comment from the male HCI academic was similar: "Isn't it a bit sad that all these new mums are using technology instead of spending time with their babies?" The baby in the cafe WAS ASLEEP! Newborns do that. A lot. They also feed for hours at a time. Mummy is meant to sit there enjoying the platonic ideal of motherhood and do nothing else? Mummy is meant to soley devote her cognitice capacity to watching a mini-person sleep? I realise this argument is presented as a bit of a straw man, but I find it too irritating to spell out that yes, of course, parents should attend to their children but there is a balance to be found between the well being of the mother and the needs of the child.]
The workshop was highly productive in terms of mapping out an emerging reseach area and it was also very helpful to hear about the participants' experiences as mothers, daughters, midwives, obsetricians and designers (and also from the two fathers and one baby who joined us).
For now, I want to focus on the criticisms to get the arguments clearer in my head. There were two main areas of contention which I came across.
1. Criticism of the unintended implication that only women who are mothers can perform a nurturing role. Something in the call for papers for the workshop seems to have given this impression although exactly what eludes me. To be clear: I believe that people who are not biological mothers can and do nurture others. But being a literal minded computer scientist, I did initially baulk at the statement "You don't have to have a vagina to be a mother". This is a question of semantics. The OED defines the noun "mother" as "a woman in relation to a child or children to whom she has given birth" (definition 1). This clean cut definition does leave out adoptive mothers or step mothers, who obviously can have a nurturing role. "Mothering" as a verb is potentially more useful here (definition 2), defined thus "bring up (a child) with care and affection: the art of mothering. look after (someone) kindly and protectively, sometimes excessively so: she mothered her husband, insisting he should take cod liver oil in the winter". So from this point of view, dads (or anyone else) can mother people, regardless of their vagina-less state. It's maybe also worth noting that the object of the nurture is a child in the first definition, but is more generally a person in the second definition. So, as mentioned at the workshop, the mothering of students could potentially be included, but the mothering of cats would be out. Maybe the workshop should have been entitled "Mothering and HCI" to encompass this broader notion.
2. Criticism of the focus on mothers rather than parents, the (again unintended) implication being that it is only women's work. At the ACM Women's Breakfast, Kia Hook took a swipe at the workshop without really explaining what her problem with it is. But in response to a follow up email from me, she wrote:
"What I started from was the position that a feminist position that singles out women as having other traits and abilities than men is a problematic position. Your workshop of course makes sense when it comes to the biological aspects of becoming a mother (pregnancy and breastfeeding is, for the most part, a female only experience). But monitoring sleep? Monitoring need for food? If we write this off as only being for women - what have we done to fathers? What have we done to the possibility of sharing maternity/paternity leave? The word for this in Swedish is "särartsfeminism" - in english it might be "specificity feminism"? To me, deeply problematic! CHI has had a range of papers on "mother's work", "soccer moms" etc. In essence telling fathers that this is not their work, their duty, their fun, their life. Problematic if we want to share responsibilities, share the work-life-balance, and move forwards with our equality strive. "
It is not the first time I have had this sort of comment from a person from Sweden, that world leader in gender equality . Here parental rather than maternity leave is enshrined in law: both parents may share the leave although in fact only 25% of it is actually taken by men. In the UK, men are entitled to two weeks paternity leave, and women one year of maternity leave. This may change to a more equal arrangement by 2015 but I am not holding my breath. Being a pragmatic computer scientist, I say we should help the users who are actually performing the tasks here and now. And the evidence base is that more women perform nurturing and domestic work than men. An Australian study found that children add (an alarming) thirty five hours of domestic chores a week to a couple’s household [1]. In childless couples in the UK, 62% of domestic chores are done by women; for couples with a child, this rises to 75% [2]. Furthermore, there is evidence that mothers and fathers have different expectations about fathers’ roles in parenting. A study in the US found that mothers have higher expectations of support from the father in housework and emotional support. Men have lower expectations of themselves in terms of emotional support and baby care. [3].
Focus on blood, milk and tears
I can't remember which workshop participant used this evocative phrase, but "blood, milk and tears" covers the challenging biological aspects of being a mother (definition 1 above) rather nicely. Let's not write off the biological aspects so glibly. In the political correctness of including more people with a wider definition of mothering, or telling fathers that nurturing is their joint responsbility, let's not forget the millions of women who mop up their blood, milk and tears every day. Let's design technology which assists in small ways, by helping mothers monitor the changes in their bodies, or find information or share experiences when they need to. Let's consult with mothers about the design of the technology they use, and invent new consultation methodologies to suit this user group if necessary.
Until we reach the wonderful era of gender equality, I say we should focus considerable design effort on women, on mothers and on mothering. If technology can make some of the more mundane tasks just a little easier, or some of the challenging experiences slightly more bearable then it will have been worth it.
References
[1] Craig, L., & Bittman, M. (2005). The effects of children on adults' time-use: Analysis of the incremental time costs of children in Australia. Social Policy Research Centre. Retrieved on 8/1/13 from http://education.arts.unsw.edu.au/media/File/DP143.pdf
[2] Schober, P. (2013). Gender equality and outsourcing of domestic work, childbearing, and relationship stability among British couples. Journal of Family Issues.34(1). 25-52.
[3] Fox, G. L., Bruce, C., & CombsâOrme, T. (2000). Parenting Expectations and Concerns of Fathers and Mothers of Newborn Infants. Family relations. 49(2). 123-131
[cross posted from CACM blog]
As the twittersphere erupted over Donglegate last week, I was attending a workshop on career development for women in IT. There is a striking contrast between the collegiate, supportive environment of the workshop and the howling hounds of fury which were unleashed by the crazily escalating interactions between participants at a developer conference. In short (because I don’t want to get lynched online myself), a female conference attendee tweeted photographs of male audience members who she said were telling off colour jokes. A storm of vicious discussion blew up online, and two of those involved lost their jobs. I bring up this news story because one of the main barriers to women in IT which workshop attendees identified was the aggressive behaviour of male colleagues either in person or online. Behaviour doesn’t have to be explicitly offensive to make colleagues feel uncomfortable; there are many ways to exclude people in a workplace. Further, although this was a gathering of women, the sort of behaviours were discussed were likely to make lots of people miserable, regardless of their gender. We decided to nickname some of the behaviour which makes us feel uncomfortable as "nerdy strutting", and our ensuing laughter at the phrase helped us to feel better about it.
What is nerdy strutting? Garvin-Doxas and Barker (2004) refer to "strutting" as a style of interaction where people show off their knowledge by asking questions carefully designed to demonstrate that they know a lot about the topic, and quite possibly that they know more than everyone else around them. The problem with this in a learning situation is that students who lack confidence assume that they are the only person who doesn’t understand, and quickly feel even more demoralised. An example might be of a student interrupting the lecturer with a fake question of the sort "But wouldn't it be better to use a function to do X?" I say fake question, because the strutter knows the answer already but is merely trying to show that they know this advanced concept which has not yet been covered. Or if another student gives an answer, a strutter might say "But wouldn't it be more elegant to do X?" Garvin-Doxas and Barker studied computer science classrooms, and found that often female students were put off by male strutters. A related off putting behaviour, identified by a workshop participant, was the sort of answer you see on discussion forums where an answer tears apart the question, castigating the foolishness of a naive solution attempt.
I have noticed some fascinating behaviour among ultra nerdy students at seminars where they are so anxious to illustrate their technical worth to the speaker that they emit giggles, snorts and chortles of derision at the mention of seemingly arbitrary technologies. It is a weird phenomenon. Somebody outside the charmed circle might be baffled as to why the very words "Prolog" or "Visual Basic" or even "Internet Explorer" evoke such mirth. "It was awful", says the speaker, "he was trying to deploy his Rails app with Apache httpd running Ruby using Fast CGI". If you don’t happen to know what Fast CGI is, you’re going to wonder why people around you are creasing up. You'll feel excluded. (I don’t know, by the way, and I don’t care. I asked a genuine geek to provide me with an example to use for this article.)
You might be wondering why it’s a problem if people feel excluded by nerdy strutting. If so, the Computer Weekly’s Women in Technology report, may change your mind. It reports that only 1 in 7 people in the tech industry (in the UK) are women, and that a masculine culture is identified as problematic by both male and female participants. Fixing strutting, therefore, may be part of the solution to a male dominated industry. Further, it might also make work places more pleasant and productive for all employees. So what can we do to address it?
Garvin-Doxas, K. and Barker, L. J. 2004. Communication in computer science classrooms: understanding defensive climates as a means of creating supportive behaviors. J. Educ. Resour. Comput. 4, 1 (Mar. 2004), 2. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1060071.1060073
[edited after doing another review!]
You may have read my last post and concluded that a) I am on some kind of crazy power trip b) I have just served on a Programme Committee as an associate chair or c) that it is Friday afternoon. All three are true, and as I have been doing nothing but reviewing and marking all week, I feel like writing instead of reading. Here are my thoughts on how to get a paper accepted in IDC which I hope might be useful to authors for future year. [IDC notifications and reviews will be out on Monday and this post does not contain spoilers!]
Interaction Design and Children is a conference series entering its second decade, a fact which makes me feel old as I attended the first one as a post doc. As the years have gone by, the conference has become increasingly popular and standards have improved. This year we moved to a system where Associate Chairs are responsible for checking review quality and writing meta reviews. This is another step towards being all grown up and scientifically mature. This year 28 papers were accepted (some with shepherding), which is about 30% acceptance rate. (For comparison, CHI 2012 had an acceptance rate of 22% in 2012, but started out 20 years ago with 45%.) Having reviewed papers almost every year for IDC, papers co-chaired in 2007 and acted as AC this year for 10 papers I feel like I have a handle on what is expected. Here are some thoughts to help new authors planning a submission in the future.
I'm sure there are many more tips which other IDC bods could suggest, but that seems enough to be going on with for now.
Authors: I am the meta reviewer. I see into your soul. I scrutinise your literature review. I inspect your evidence. I evaluate your claims. I consider your conclusions.
Reviewers: I am the meta reviewer: I see into your soul. I judge your accuracy. I evaluate your expertise. I doubt your motives. I witness your inexperience.
Programme Commitee: We are the meta reviewers. We save souls. We guard standards. We argue, defend and justify. We shepherd papers for the good of the community. We are time starved, weary eyed but truimphant. Science has been served once again.
Call for Participation: DESIGNING FOR AND WITH CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS IN MULTIPLE SETTINGS IDC 2013 Workshop New York, USA https://designspecialneeds.wordpress.com/
IMPORTANT DATES: – Submission by: 18/03/13 – Notification of Acceptance: 19/04/13 – Workshop: full day
Interaction design (ID) methodologies are being increasingly used in the design and development of novel technologies for children with special needs in a multitude of educational, clinical and social settings. Combining the ubiquity of digital technologies with the depth of empirical knowledge we have gained in recent years, surrounding the etiology of many psychological, physical, and emotional difficulties affecting children, places ID research in a unique position of impact. However, designing within this area remains complicated for a myriad of reasons. Any child requiring assistance due to a physical, psychological or learning difficulty can be defined as having special needs. Yet, this umbrella term, under which a huge assortment of diagnoses and difficulties can be grouped, is not used consistently across the literature. Consistently defining special needs, whilst remaining mindful of the intricacies and complexities of the term itself, will establish a community wide language that bridges the gap between HCI, clinical and education literature. Additionally, the methodological and ethical issues that arise when working with these groups, and within different research contexts, are multifaceted when we consider the vast and complex needs of the children that we come into contact with. Previous examples of HCI involving children with special needs has included, children with; autism, cerebral palsy, severe motor impairment, vision and auditory impairments, and physical disabilities. The aim of this workshop is to synthesize this work, through the interaction of a diverse community. We aim to explore experiences around designing for- and with- children with special needs in different settings to identify terminological and methodological implications that occur in this domain. Additionally we hope to identify potential avenues for future research in this area. This full day workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers, designers and practitioners who are currently working to design technologies for and with children with special needs within multiple settings in the field of interaction design, education or health care, or are interested in the topic. We invite the submission of 2-4 page position papers in ACM Extended Abstract format (http://chi2013.acm.org/authors/format/) offering perspectives on topics including (but not limited to): • Reflections on the ethical and practical challenges of working in special needs contexts • design concepts or developments of technologies designed for or with children with special needs • user or case studies of how interaction designs have been appropriated to support design methodologies in the context of working with children with special needs • Guidelines, implications or lessons learned for engaging users in the design process or evaluation of special needs supporting designs Submissions should be sent to r.mcnaney@ncl.ac.uk by the 18th March 2013. Workshop submissions will be reviewed by the program committee and workshop organizers. Accepted position papers will be made available on the workshop website. We will ask participants to read specific position papers prior to the workshop. Please also note that all workshop participants must register for both the workshop and for at least one day of the main IDC 2013 conference. The reason for this policy is that workshops are supposed to be a part of the IDC conference, not separate events that happen to be in the same location at the same time. The intention is that people will be attending the conference as well. Please email Róisín McNaney (r.mcnaney@ncl.ac.uk), Madeline Balaam (madelin.balaam@ncl.ac.uk) or any of the workshop organisers if you have any questions about the workshop.
We were pleased to get so many submissions and such a diverse range of topics. Some are early stage design ideas, some are about existing prototypes, some are analyses of off the self motherhood apps, others are personal reflections on technology and motherhood. The authors are mostly, but not all, women which I think will make a nice change at a computing conference. Here is the text of my position paper, which argues why we should consider mothers (rather than the more general term "parents") as a specific target demographic. Not that I have anything against fathers. I have one myself.
This position paper argues that more research effort in HCI should be directed at understanding the needs of mothers as a distinct technology user group.
There are many reasons why mothers are deserving of HCI research attention. As mothers comprise a huge demographic group, we should not ignore the needs of these users, particularly as mothers are politically influential [9] and are powerful consumers [10]. Expectant and new mothers endure taxing and rapid emotional and biological changes during which technology could offer some support through monitoring and recording of the changes. New mothers experience a spectrum of emotional challenges, not all positive: exhaustion, loneliness, fear, guilt and resentment [5]. They are particularly vulnerable to depression [1].Technology could have a role to play in helping women find emotional support from health care professionals and other mothers. There is a huge learning curve associated with the practical tasks of child care [1]; technology could be used to assist healthcare professionals in parental education.
Fathers play an equally important role in raising children, but it is a distinct (although overlapping) role. Being a mother is not the same as being a father.
Mothers, particularly in the very earliest stages of their children’s lives, have unique experiences and biological needs. Women’s bodies carry a burden which men’s do not. They must contend with the pain and inconvenience of menstrual cycles; weather the discomfort, hormonal changes, fatigue and the invasion of privacy required by medical care during pregnancy; carry the literal weight of the growing baby; endure the agony of child birth; and (possibly) nurture a baby through their breast milk. These biological challenges are accompanied by a range of emotional and social pressures, which may overlap with those of fathers, but are quite distinct.
Some might wish fathers’ behaviours and expectations around child care to be the same as mothers’. However, this is not the case in many parts of the world. An Australian study found that children add (an alarming) thirty five hours of domestic chores a week to a couple’s household [3]. In childless couples in the UK, 62% of domestic chores are done by women; for couples with a child, this rises to 75% [4]. Furthermore, there is evidence that mothers and fathers have different expectations about fathers’ roles in parenting. A study in the US found that mothers have higher expectations of support from the father in housework and emotional support. Men have lower expectations of themselves in terms of emotional support and baby care. [6].
Based on personal experience, I believe that the most fruitful area of research will initially be in supporting women as they undergo physical changes associated with bearing children, and as they learn how to care for an infant. There is a dearth of formal HCI research, but a plethora of homespun smart phone apps in this area. Applications in these areas can be simple non-threatening tools for providing information and enabling users to record changes in their own or their baby’s bodies. Given the sensitivity of the domain, and some controversy in the role of technological interventions in delivery itself [1], I believe that we should take great care in developing new technology which would alter women’s experience of motherhood. We may need to develop new design and consultation methodologies for working with new mothers to overcome practical difficulties associated with consulting chronically sleep deprived users who are holding miniature users! But our direction is clear: we should listen to mothers, and respect their needs in the design of technology products for them.
[1] Petch, J., & Halford, W. K. (2008). Psycho-education to enhance couples’ transition to parenthood. Clinical psychology review, 28(7), 1125–37.
[3] Craig, L., & Bittman, M. (2005). The effects of children on adults' time-use: Analysis of the incremental time costs of children in Australia. Social Policy Research Centre. Retrieved on 8/1/13 from http://education.arts.unsw.edu.au/media/File/DP143.pdf
[4] Schober, P. (2013). Gender equality and outsourcing of domestic work, childbearing, and relationship stability among British couples. Journal of Family Issues.34(1). 25-52.
[5] Barclay, L., Everitt, L., Rogan, F., Schmied, V., Wyllie, A. Becoming a Mother — an Analysis of Women’s Experience of Early Motherhood. (1997) Journal of Advanced Nursing 25, pp. 719–728.
[6] Fox, G. L., Bruce, C., & CombsâOrme, T. (2000). Parenting Expectations and Concerns of Fathers and Mothers of Newborn Infants. Family relations. 49(2). 123-131
[9] Osnes, B. (2004). Mothers Acting Up: A Political Force to be Reckoned With! Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, 6(1).
[10] Silverstein, M.J. and Sayre, K. (2009). The Female Economy. Harvard Business Review, September.
[1] Davis-Floyd, R. The Technocratic Body: American As Cultural. (1994) Social Science and Medicine 38, 8, pp. 1125 – 1140.
Wouldn't you think that making games in the class would convert kids to the joys of computing? It doesn't really. In fact, it looks like it might put them off. I wanted to have that in the conclusions of this paper, but a reviewer wouldn't let me. :-)
I'm coming round to the idea that kids are very confused about what computing actually is when they start secondary school in the UK, and that as they get an more accurate idea of which it might involve, then their attitudes drop. Not really surprising, as we can't all be computer scientists.
Anyway, read all about it for yourself in this stonkingly interesting article.
Robertson, J. (2013). The influence of a game making project on male and female learners’ attitudes to computing. Computer Science Education 13(1). Download LearnerAttitudeGameMakingProjectAccepted
My PhD student Andrew Macvean and I just got a CHI 2013 paper accepted about the fitness game work we did last summer. This is the pay off for standing around in the freezing rain watching teenagers stumble through muddy puddles. (The pay off for us, that is; the kids' reward was the joy of increased fitness.) Basically we are arguing that a) there is no point in doing one off pilot evaluations of exergames because you can't get fit for playing for a single 20 minutes b) exergames should be designed for more than light exercise and c) you can use self efficacy theory to predict how individual users will set and respond to goals. I think we put it more eloquently in the paper though.
Get the paper: Andrew Macvean and Judy Robertson.2013.Understanding Exergame Users’ Physical Activity,Motivation and Behavior Over Time.To appear in In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA Download CRC18thJanJRTwo
And here's the (now) obligatory CHI video. It turns out that we are better at writing papers than we are at making videos. Who'd have thought it?
[This is a dictionary of methodologies which I think might be useful. To me at any rate. It would be better to use a wiki but I can't quite be bothered setting one up. To be expanded as I go along].
Event history analysis: A type of statistical analysis used to longitudinal quantitative analysis in the social sciences. Tracks determinants of behaviour over time. Context: Used to analyse how relationship stability and decisions to have more children are affected by men's share in domestic work, women's employment and women's attitudes in Schober, P. (2012). Gender equality and outsourcing of domestic work, childbearing, and relationship stability among British couples. Journal of Family Issues. Retrieved from http://www.genet.ac.uk/workpapers/GeNet2010p41.pdf