Tuesday, February 15, 2011

HCI for Peace: A Call for Constructive Action

A preview of our CHI 2011 paper is now available here: http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~hourcade/hciforpeace.pdf. Here is the abstract for the paper:
Peace is an important value for the human-computer interaction research community, yet it has not resulted in the development of a research sub-community or even a research agenda. In this paper we seek to address this void by first motivating the need for computing research on promoting peace and preventing war. We then review evidence on the factors that affect the likelihood that armed conflict will occur, as well as the aspects involved when individuals make moral decisions on whether or not to support a war. Based on this review, we propose a research agenda, citing research examples from the human-computer interaction literature and discussing new ideas.