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HCI in Latin America

Exploring how the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field is taking shape in Latin America

2020 - Present
MIT Media Lab
USA
#HCI
︎ In progress


Motivation 

As studies in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) continue to grow worldwide, the way its scholarship and knowledge are produced continues to diversify. How these heterogeneous ways of knowing are exemplified has recently become a matter of interest within the HCI community. It is of particular interest to identify conceptual frameworks to think through tensions and alignments across mainstream ways of working in HCI research and practice. Similarly, the field is in need for detailed studies on how the practice and scholarship around HCI takes place across different geographies, especially geographies historically underrepresented in academia.

Word cloud analysis from the titles of papers published in the AMC library by Latin American HCI researchers and practitioners. Design is the main category
Word cloud analysis from the titles of papers published in the AMC library by Latin American HCI researchers and practitioners *

What we are doing

We are exploring Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar’s concept of the pluriverse as a way to mediate the tensions in the way HCI knowledge is produced in Latin American geographies compared with sites in the Global North. You can read this reflections in our article “Lessons from Latin America: embracing horizontality to reconstruct HCI as a pluriverse” in the ACM Interactions journal. We then set out to investigate how HCI is practiced through the lens of a group of academics, practitioners and industry researchers. We characterized a set of research perspectives, a set of driving forces and tensions, particularly around diasporic relations; and a set of challenges associated with structural limitations. You can read more in our paper Para Cima y Pa’Abajo: Building Bridges Between HCI Research in Latin America and in the Global North at the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Table listing regional and international conferences where HCI practitioners and respondents submit their work
Table listing regional and international conferences where HCI practitioners and respondents submit their work **


Contributions

Survey design / Participant interviews / Qualitative data analysis. I co-development of survey instrument. Interviewing of study participants, and co-led qualitative analysis of data using thematic analysis methods.

Collaborators

SIGCHI LATAM Committee, Adriana Alvarado Garcia, Carolina Fuentes, Franceli L Cibrian, Karla Badillo-Urquiola, Laura Sanely Gaytán-Lugo, Marianela Ciolfi Felice, Marisol Wong-Villacres, Mayra Donaji Barrera Machuca, Monica Perusquia-Hernandez, Oscar A Lemus, Vivian Genaro Motti.

Outputs

** Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., Wong-Villacres, M., Badillo-Urquiola, K., Barrera Machuca, M. D., Cibrian, F. L., Ciolfi Felice, M., ... & Lemus, O. A. (2023). Para Cima y Pa’Abajo: Building Bridges Between HCI Research in Latin America and in the Global North. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Wong-Villacres, M., Garcia, A. A., Badillo-Urquiola, K., Machuca, M. D. B., Felice, M. C., Gaytán-Lugo, L. S., Lemus, O. A., Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., & Perusquía-Hernández, M. (2021). Lessons from Latin America: Embracing horizontality to reconstruct HCI as a pluriverse. Interactions, 28(2), 56–63.

* Latin America in SIGCHI: “Where are we and what are we doing? SIGCHI blog.


Partners
Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar | 2023   ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎