Program/Schedule

Digital accessibility is fundamental to creating inclusive user experiences, yet it remains inconsistently integrated into undergraduate User Experience (UX) education. Many UX professionals have limited practice with accessibility, in part due to gaps in their formal education. This study examines how accessibility is incorporated into undergraduate UX programs by analyzing course descriptions and syllabi from three universities in the United States: University of Michigan Ann-Arbor, Purdue University, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Findings reveal that accessibility is rarely a core focus in UX curricula. While some courses reference accessibility, it is often implied rather than explicitly stated, and a syllabi review indicates inconsistent coverage. Accessibility is treated as a specialized topic, leaving students with limited exposure. This study thus highlights the need for greater integration of accessibility in UX education, emphasizing the importance of preparing future designers to create inclusive digital experiences.

Capstone courses in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) serve as critical platforms for bridging theoretical learning and practical application, providing students with essential skills for professional practice. In this paper, we present our pedagogical experiences integrating diary studies into the HCI capstone course, in which 35 senior undergraduates collaborated in teams on HCI-focused projects. 6 graduate students participated in mentorship and advisory roles, leveraging their advanced knowledge and research skills to guide the undergraduate teams. Two-week diary studies were designed and employed as an early-semester assignment to address disparities in knowledge, skills, communication, and interests within team collaboration. We explored the benefits of this approach through detailed post-diary interviews and self-reports from the participating undergraduates and graduate mentors. Our preliminary findings suggest that the diary study assignment effectively facilitated communication, understanding, and collaboration among diverse student groups. These results indicate the potential applicability of diary studies in similar educational settings and offer valuable insights for the design and implementation of human-computer interaction education in interdisciplinary contexts.

Human-centered design (HCD) is a foundational component of HCI education. This paper investigates how students conceptualize HCD after completing their first course on the subject by analyzing their visual representations of HCD. Using quantitative visual content analysis and metaphor analysis, this study examines the formal and expressive qualities of 106 student drawings and the conceptual metaphors they employ. The results show a diversity of visualization approaches, with flow charts predominating and 86% demonstrating user-centeredness. Many of the drawings employed rich and diverse metaphors, including design as constructing a building, design as a journey, and design as a series of mountains to climb, offering insight into novice designers’ mental models. The paper contributes a reusable learning activity, insights into students’ conceptualizations of HCD, and a novel metaphor bank to support HCI education and design reflection. These findings inform pedagogical strategies for fostering deeper engagement with HCD.

This `teachable moment’ paper introduces the premortem technique as a reflective and forward-looking pedagogical strategy for HCI education. A premortem invites students to imagine that their project has already failed and then work backward to identify the reasons for that failure—flipping the common “will this work?” framing into “what went wrong?” Originally developed in decision science as a way to surface hidden risks and counteract groupthink, the premortem has gained traction in business and organizational planning, yet remains underexplored in design pedagogy and HCI education. Drawing from our own teaching practice, we describe how we have adapted premortem exercises for the design classroom, typically as a structured reflection during an ongoing student project. Anecdotal observations suggest the activity helps students articulate risks, recognize blind spots, and improve the quality of their planning and collaboration. Students have described the premortem as both engaging and useful, particularly in surfacing challenges they might otherwise have overlooked. We conclude by outlining several ways HCI educators might incorporate premortems into their courses—as individual reflection, group discussion, or part of iterative design critiques—and suggest how the technique complements existing studio practices. In sharing this experience, we hope to encourage further exploration of premortem as a low-overhead but high-impact method for helping students anticipate failure and develop better design outcomes.

Interactive technologies increasingly permeate our everyday lives, and the impact of the design professionals (e.g. UX, Product, and Interaction designers) responsible for their design and implementation has never been more apparent. This is reflected in higher education, where HCI and design programs now train professional designers alongside researchers and scholars. However, preparing students for such a complex, interdisciplinary profession is a challenging task. This paper investigates conceptions of design practice in current and future design professionals. We share findings from 21 semi-structured interviews with students, educators, and professionals. Our analysis reveals three conceptions of design practice: Artifact-Centered, Human-Centered, and Cross-Functional. These conceptions constitute increasingly refined understandings of designers’ role, goals, values, and competency in design practice. We discuss the conceptions as analytical tools that elevate the perspectives of designers and help researchers identify key learning and developmental moments. We conclude with recommendations for research supporting HCI and design education.

HCI careers are increasingly global, requiring knowledge of business practices and cultural values across multiple countries. However, the particular challenges of building cross-cultural professional competencies is not well understood. To address this important area of career preparation, in this unsolved challenge, we describe the outcomes of two round table discussions among students, staff, and faculty. Through these discussions, we reflected upon our experiences with professional competencies in HCI, including hurdles and successes that international students face in the U.S. We constructed four themes that captured these experiences: 1) expectations from students about the program and job market, 2) the job market market being hostile, 3) anxiety driving professional interactions, and 4) motivations for participation driving interactions with faculty and staff. We conclude by addressing the critical need for support at all levels to prepare students for professional success. We invite further discourse on integrating cultural competency into HCI education and preparing all students for success in a multicultural job market.

This paper presents observations and reflections from integrating elements of systems thinking into an introductory graduate-level HCI course. The course covers HCI methods for identifying user needs, analyzing user study data to translate those needs to design, iterative development, and user evaluation. In previous semesters, I observed that students typically maintained a narrow focus on individual users without considering broader social contexts in which their designs were situated. To address this, I introduced a two-week-long module that incorporated ideas and practices from systems thinking. This additional module introduced students to concepts and practices of systems thinking and provided them an opportunity to engage with larger structural contexts while analyzing their data. I present analysis of student reflections and artifacts, along with my own, to demonstrate the positive impact of incorporating systems thinking in introductory HCI education. I also discuss some of the challenges that arose. The findings suggest that even a brief introduction to systems thinking can support students to engage with broader contexts surrounding their design.

In this Teachable Moment article, we demonstrate how Austin Toombs uses a whiteboard drawing of an amoeba with chaotic borders to help students understand the role of sketching and prototyping as tools for thinking, rather than as polished representations of finalized ideas. Many HCI graduate students come from disciplines where exploratory thinking through sketching or other approaches was not emphasized. As a result, they often misinterpret requests for sketches and prototypes as calls for high-fidelity mock-ups rather than as invitations to create provisional artifacts. The amoeba metaphor provides a visual and conceptual scaffold to illustrate how iterative sketching and prototyping help students navigate and refine uncertain design spaces. We present classroom examples, student reflections, and insights into how this approach encourages greater comfort with ambiguity. Paul Parsons, Colin Gray, Jennifer El-Shamy, and Anastasia Ostrowski, who also teach students how to engage with uncertainty, describe how they would adapt this technique for their own classrooms and share additional metaphors they use to support students’ tolerance for ambiguity. By sharing this approach, we hope to contribute to broader conversations about fostering flexible, exploratory mindsets in HCI education.

This paper addresses the challenge of discussing HCI readings in class that are somehow problematic. Specifically, we describe the motivation for changing Licklider’s influential 1960 article, Man-Computer Symbiosis to Human-Computer Symbiosis, removing all gender-specific language from it, and using that version in the classroom. We then generalize this discussion to other forms of problems – for example, when articles contain outdated technology or ideas that have fallen into disregard or controversy. This research offers HCI educators concrete teaching suggestions for handling problematic readings.

Replication studies in HCI have mixed reception: they have been promoted as a way to build transparency and validity in research, but have also been devalued against novelty-based design work. Given the field’s ambivalence, little attention has been paid to the student experience and potential learning opportunities from replicating prior research. To open up this conversation for the EduCHI community, this paper presents a collaborative autoethnography of 15 students who have participated in an undergraduate research opportunity centered around replicating bespoke design research artifacts from published literature. Three meta-authors reflect on our peers and our own motivations to participate in a research experience, our perceptions of the work and the process of replicating an artifact, and how this replication experience influenced our idea of what ‘research’ is. We synthesize our reflections and lessons learned to offer insight on accessible, authentic design research experiences with significant learning outcomes.

The practices of technology design and translation are both socially and culturally situated activities, requiring creative problem-solving and deep understandings of how artifacts fit the constraints set by various stakeholders and contexts. However, especially in HCI courses within computing departments and translation courses in language learning contexts, students are often taught to conform to pre-existing norms and frameworks of rote mechanics due to time and resource constraints on the class. Within these contexts, the question that HCI and translation educators now face is: How can we teach our students to become critical, ethical, creative, and reflective practitioners in their respective fields? We believe that co-analyzing the fields of design education and translation can provide actionable insights into HCI and translation pedagogy. In this provocation paper, we present a narrative dialogue around the intersections of design and translation to explore how each of them might inform the other in educating more critical practitioners. We aim to inspire future work in critical HCI education and creative translation education, enabling a future where our students are better equipped with the tools necessary to take responsibility for their creative decisions.

This paper follows up on the challenges we encountered when we initially began teaching more-than-human perspectives in human-computer interaction (HCI) and technology design. Since then, we have developed a collection of teaching activities and conducted pilots with nearly 800 students, exploring how these perspectives can be taught in various settings. Although we think that our teaching activities address some of the initial challenges, several challenges are still open, and new ones have emerged such as the gap between what we are teaching and the industry, and the feelings of hopelessness that students may feel when confronted with the notion that technology may not fix all problems. These challenges can be used as an entry point for discussions and the identification of possible and impossible future paths for teaching more-than-human design.

Design is a value-laden process balancing user values, business requirements, stakeholder needs, organizational policies, technical factors, and applied ethics. So, how do we teach pragmatist ethics in design classrooms, given the absence of a singular clear perspective to adopt? In this paper, we explore and present provocations for design educators on engaging students in navigating and critically assessing both manipulative and value-centered designer intentions within design. We offer five design activities to help educators integrate pragmatist ethics, fostering a range of learning outcomes: assessing user and business value trade-offs, using reverse brainstorming for unintended consequences, evaluating ethical pitfalls and business goals, and developing mitigation strategies for ethical risks while balancing business goals and user requirements. We provide provocations for design educators on the need for balancing these contradictions as an essential part to cultivating ethically aware designers while posing a range of unsolved questions: How to teach ethics’ dichotomous nature in the classroom? How does exposure to manipulative tactics impact students’ ethical decisions?

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information Communication Technology and Development (ICTD) courses often center Western perspectives and overlook African contributions and design contexts. This paper presents a case study describing the development and pilot evaluation of a design course that centers African perspectives. We achieved this by integrating technology into the class in novel ways (e.g., Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL)) and by developing a “Technologists-in-Residence” (TIR) program, which supported meaningful collaboration between students at Kenya’s Egerton University and those in the U.S. A qualitative assessment of course activities suggests that these virtual interactions, along with the implementation of a human-centered design project, deepened students’ understanding of designing technology for Africa, as demonstrated in course outcomes. This case study offers scalable and cost-effective strategies to globalize HCI education and strengthen international engagement in design pedagogy.

The growing integration of AI tools in student design projects presents an unresolved challenge in HCI education: how should AI-generated content be cited and documented? Traditional citation frameworks—grounded in credibility, retrievability, and authorship—struggle to accommodate the dynamic and ephemeral nature of AI outputs. In this paper, we examine how undergraduate students in a UX design course approached AI usage and citation when given the freedom to integrate generative tools into their design process. Through qualitative analysis of 35 team projects and reflections from 175 students, we identify varied citation practices ranging from formal attribution to indirect or absent acknowledgment. These inconsistencies reveal gaps in existing frameworks and raise questions about authorship, assessment, and pedagogical transparency. We argue for rethinking AI citation as a reflective and pedagogical practice; one that supports metacognitive engagement by prompting students to critically evaluate how and why they used AI throughout the design process. We propose alternative strategies—such as AI contribution statements and process-aware citation models that better align with the iterative and reflective nature of design education. This work invites educators to reconsider how citation practices can support meaningful student–AI collaboration.

The use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools and services has increased across all sectors in society, including human-computer interaction (HCI) education. While previous research has explored the pedagogical applications of GenAI and the challenges faced by teachers and students, there is less focus on GenAI in the context of a design education. We present findings from group interviews and a survey study conducted with interaction design bachelor students, foregrounding the attitudes and perspectives of students who are motivated to learn. We show that although students are generally aware of ethical issues surrounding GenAI, they make considered decisions on how they use it to support their learning. An insight is how the students’ pride in their own learning and accomplishment guides their use more than moralistic and disciplinary rhetoric widespread in the higher education sector. The paper concludes with thought-provoking questions to guide future steps. The insights presented may inform curriculum development and suggest future research directions on the role of AI-assisted learning in HCI education.

As generative AI (GAI) tools become more advanced and adopted in professional user experience (UX) design fields, high school educators teaching UX and design-related courses have begun tinkering with GAI tools to use in their classrooms. Through interviews with high school UX educators, we examined their experiences incorporating GAI tools when teaching interdisciplinary UX courses. Key observations we identified include: 1) interactive student-to-student engagement and student-to-GAI collaborative learning; 2) modifications in brainstorming and visualization workflows with GAI; 3) concerns and barriers with the ongoing integration of GAI tools into high school curricula. We conclude with a discussion of implications and opportunities for critical and thoughtful use of GAI in high school design pedagogy.

As artificial intelligence increasingly takes hold of popular attention, there is a growing interest in computing ethics education across American campuses. For over a decade, computer ethics has been a core intellectual foundation in the human-centered computing curriculum at [name of program and university, omitted for review]. In this paper, we reflect on that experience and offer insights into designing and evolving such a course. We describe a “teachable moment” in the pedagogical development of computer and information ethics by reflecting on the pedagogical design and assessing selected literature generated from the course over the last four years. In doing this, we set the agenda to deliberate on the challenges around teaching computer ethics and our approaches in the course design to engage with this in the emerging era of AI. Computing ethics is arguably more complex than other more established fields of ethics, as it often involves what James Moor called ‘conceptual muddles’—situations where ethical dilemmas are unclear, and technological harms can be abstract, indirect, or only emerge over time. Therefore, in our pedagogical design for this senior-level, research-based course, we explore multiple ways to immerse students in the nuanced and evolving ethical challenges of computing. Through engagement with contemporary news, academic discourse, and foundational ethical theories, students develop the skills to articulate, analyze, and address ethical problems in computing. By sharing our pedagogical approach in practice, this paper highlights a strategy that we have found helpful to support our students in exploring a wide range of relevant topics and guide them through “a journey into the conceptual muddles”. In this vein, we aim to spark conversations in our HCI and EduCHI communities on how we might scaffold learning in a rapidly growing, conceptually complex space of computer and information ethics.