#SociallyAcceptableCHI

This workshop is intended to foster critical re-thinking of social aspects in the adoption of novel, interactive technologies, which is often embraced by “social acceptance” and “social acceptability”. While these terms have been frequently used in the field of HCI, they have only been sparsely defined, and there are no agreed-upon metrics to measure their effects (yet).
However, we believe that in the context of emerging technologies and their dissemination into all facets of public and personal life there is a need to discuss how social acceptability issues shall be dealt with in HCI research: does an interaction or a technology have to be specifically designed for social acceptance, or will acceptance come naturally over time if the interface is accepted by ‘everyone else’? Should tech companies hire “Social Acceptance Advocates”? What about engaging in technology-driven research resulting in products that might not become socially acceptable in a lifetime?
We speculate that social acceptability might not be a simple, binary decision between “acceptable” and “unacceptable”, but that decisions are also contextual, may be temporary, and influenced through media coverage or greater societal changes. For this reason, we believe it is high time to re-think and reconsider the notion of social acceptability in CHI in an interdisciplinary workshop with researchers and practitioners from academia and industry.

Workshop Date and Location

Saturday, April 21st, 2018
CHI 2018 conference rooms at Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Montréal, Canada.

Workshop Program

Workshop Series

• #SociallyAcceptableCHI 2018 at CHI 2018, Montréal, Canada.
• #SociallyAcceptableHCI 2019 at INTERACT 2019, Paphos, Cyprus.

Workshop Goals and Activities

•    We will explore how “social acceptance” and “social acceptability” are understood, encountered, and used in the CHI community and beyond.
•    We will discuss solution strategies for mitigating risks of social non-acceptance of new HCI technologies and artifacts.
•    Questions to be discussed during the workshop include, for example:
  • Which emerging technologies and their characteristics are particularly challenging with regard to social acceptability?
  • How can we develop/design for social acceptability?
  • What role does social acceptability play in the overall perception of system quality or user experience?
  • Which factors affect the social acceptability? What role do new interaction techniques play?
  • How would disappearing computers (c.f. Ubiquitous Computing visions) affect acceptance?
  • What are the needs to design for social acceptability; or is it something that is naturally achieved over time once a market gets used to the technology?
•    We will gather method suggestions for how the social acceptability of an interactive system can be measured and evaluated in a comprehensive way.
•    We discuss what types of social acceptability research (if any) would be the most useful for those trying to design/develop for social acceptability.

Background

In 1994 Nielsen named social acceptability as essential part of system acceptability [1]. Despite this, HCI research in the past decades mainly focused on creating and improving what Nielsen embraced as practical acceptability, including e.g., usability, and utility. Also, early observations, e.g., Hosokawa’s Walkman Effect [2] were purely descriptive and did not aim to design for social acceptability. Technology acceptance research (e.g., Davis’ Technology Acceptance Model, TAM [3]) has been extended to incorporate social factors (e.g., by Malhotra et al., in 1999), but research and resulting models were influenced through the technology positivism of that time; Potential non-acceptance of (interactive) technologies was not considered, however, has been taken up more recently in various areas of HCI:

• Social acceptability of “performing” interactions in front of others has been investigated for mobile, gestural and on-body interfaces (Ahlström et al., Montero et al., Profita et al., Rico et al.), speech interfaces (Efthymiou and Halvey), and public displays (Peltonen et al.).
• Social acceptability of technology usage has been inverstigated for various contexts and situations (Koelle et al.) or by particular user groups, e.g., for accessability (Profia et al.) or in medical use cases (Ziefle and Rocker).
• Ethical and social implications of particular classes of technologies, were looked at e.g., for wearables (Kelly and Gilbert), smart glasses (Koelle et al.), drones (Lidynia et al.), lifelogging cameras (Koelle et al.) and CCTV (Nguyen et al.), as well as discussed for ubiquitous computing in general [4].
• A further string of research e.g., at the University of Twente (Netherlands), covers intelligent personal assistants and human-robot-interaction.

What does social acceptance mean with respect to modern HCI?
How to design for social acceptability and how to evaluate it?
Where has research in the CHI community succeeded or failed in designing for social acceptability?

The concepts of technology acceptance and social acceptability are central in the long development of human-centric understanding of interactive technology. However, considering the variety of modern ICT, the early definitions and theories related to the social and societal aspects of technology acceptance seem outdated and narrow. We invite academics and practitioners to discuss how social acceptance and acceptability are understood nowadays. In this workshop at CHI 2018, we will discuss how to re-conceptualize the relevant concepts and outline new research agendas for this unsung topic.

Important dates

Submission deadline: Jan 27th, 2018 Feb 3rd, 2018 (extended deadline)
Notifications: Feb 22nd, 2018
Camera-ready Versions: Mar 15th, 2018

Submission via Easy Chair

• Position Papers: 2 pages in SIGCHI Extended Abstracts format to be presented as posters, or
• Full Papers: 4 pages in SIGCHI Extended Abstracts to be presented as oral presentation.

• Experiences, case studies, and lessons learned from designing socially (not) acceptable interactive systems.
• Methodological contributions: conceptualizations, evaluation measures, design considerations, etc.
• Design/system contributions: interactive systems that provide socially acceptable qualities, provocative designs or breaching experiments.
• User Studies about social aspects of technology acceptance.

The workshop participants will be selected based on the submissions’ relevance to the workshop topic and their potential to engender insightful discussion at the workshop.
Please note that at least one author of each accepted position paper must attend the workshop. All workshop participants must register for both the workshop and for at least one day of the conference.

Questions? Contact us at socialacceptabilityworkshop@uol.de