doc.hci - Designing Meaningful Human-Technology Relations

How interwoven are people with technology? Five doctoral students are investigating this question as part of the doctoral programme *doc.hci: Designing Meaningful Human Technology Relations* funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF. As a joint undertaking of Paris Lodron University Salzburg and FH Salzburg, this doctoral programme combines basic and applied research in the scientific discipline of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). It includes a specific training programme and is embedded in an international network. The students will investigate five use cases (mobility, health, education, work, play), how people and technologies relate to each other, what it means to be or have an (artificial) intelligence, and what these interactions could look like in the future. The doctoral students will deal with current uses of technologies, question them, reinterpret them and finally also design them in order to gain insights for new forms of interaction. In the use case of work, for example, they will explore the challenges that arise when people work from home. What technologies make up the workplace? What role does the environment play, also the one that is missing because colleagues are not available or a certain infrastructure would be necessary? How are the boundaries between private and professional life drawn? The design of new technologies and forms of interaction is used to explore how technology and people influence each other. Another example is the use case of games. The aim here is to find out what shared play in public space means. What influence does the environment, being in public, have? What new qualities can be brought into this context through the meaningful combination of digital and physical play? The examination of the respective themes has an overarching significance. The growing awareness in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that people and technologies are inextricably intertwined requires a reformulation of theoretical and methodological foundations to advance research and design. The individual findings of the doctoral students will be put in relation with each other in order to draw conclusions for these foundations. Further cross-cutting themes arise from an ethical claim, namely that of conducting a discourse in research and development on the consequences of technologies and responsibility or those who are responsible. For the doctoral students, this means that questions of sustainability and diversity are central to their research work. Over the course of 4 years, the students will deal with the respective topics and questions, conduct studies, develop design concepts and implement prototypes. In addition, they will be supervised by teams consisting of researchers from PLUS and FHS. The doctoral programme is rounded off by a large number of courses and seminar weeks specially designed for the doctoral students.