HCI for Peace
Preventing, De-Escalating and
Recovering from Conflict

CHI 2012 Workshop, May 5, 2012, Austin, Texas
The increasing ubiquity of computing devices, coupled with recent empirical studies on the factors affecting conflict at a collective and individual level provide a novel opportunity for HCI researchers to study the design of information systems to prevent, de-escalate and recover from conflict.

This workshop is the next logical step after a paper presenting a research agenda on the role of HCI with respect to peace and a panel on the same topic at CHI 2011, together a special interest group held at INTERACT 2011. In spite of the increasing interest in the topic and sporadic research efforts through the years, there has yet to be an opportunity for members of our community to join for a focused and extended set of presentations and discussions in order to build a new community within HCI. This workshop will provide us with this opportunity.

We plan for a one-day workshop with 15 to 20 participants. At the workshop we will prioritize discussion while giving participants an opportunity to present on specific projects and ideas. We plan to begin the day with an introduction to the field, covering related research in HCI and relevant research from other fields. This will be followed by short presentations from all participants, from which we will extract key themes to discuss during the rest of the day.

For participant presentations, we plan to provide 5 minutes for each presentation. At the same time, we will provide all participants with sticky notes, so they can write down individual items for discussion as they listen to presentations. During breaks, the organizers will cluster the items on the sticky notes into areas of discussion. Further discussions, moderated by the organizers, will thus center on the areas that emerged during the presentations. At the end of the day, we will discuss plans for future activities and research.

We will encourage attendees to broadcast the most interesting bits of our discussions through social media outlets in order to increase the impact and visibility of the workshop.

We plan to expand the reach of the workshop through publications based on the submissions to and the discussions during the workshop. A likely venue for a summary of the workshop is interactions magazine. In addition, depending on the strength and depth of the position statements, we may put together a special issue of a journal.