In September, my colleague Kira Oberschmidt and I went to Switzerland together to attend the "Mensch und Computer" (MuC) conference. I was very excited to go to a MuC conference again - this was the first conference I ever went to, and I haven't been for a long time. I was curious to see if I would run into people I knew from back then. This conference series started in 2001 and, according to its website, is the largest conference series on human-computer interaction in Europe. It usually takes place in Germany (and most sessions are also held in German), but this year it took place in beautiful Switzerland, right next to Lake Zurich.
Kira and I both participated in a workshop on participatory and socially responsible technology development. The purpose of the workshop was to discuss the extent to which user participation leads to socially responsible technology development. Since we always try to involve people as much as possible in our projects, we submitted a position paper from two projects (Pharaon and RE-SAMPLE) in which we reflected on our experiences with participatory design and action research.
The workshop was very inspiring, as we met other researchers that also face similar challenges like we do (e.g., involving lots of people in our work that are also representative of the target group as a whole). During the conference, we were lucky with the weather, so we could enjoy the beautiful view while listening to presentations. That also made up for the 11-13 hour train ride 😊.
