CHI 2014 Workshop: Enabling Empathy in Health and Care: Design Methods and Challenges (April 2014, Toronto Canada)

Dates: 26 April – 1 May 2014
Location: Toronto, Canada
Website: http://chi2014.acm.org
Deadline for submissions: 17 Jan 2014

This one-day workshop will be held as part of the CHI 2014 annual ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing, held in Toronto, Canada  26 April – 1 May.

The role of empathy has come to prominence in HCI as the community deals with issues in medical, health and emotionally charged contexts. In such settings empathizing with others is crucial in understanding the experience of living with specific conditions or to be sensitive to the emotions of potentially vulnerable participants. HCI also becomes implicated in designing new tools and technologies that support empathic relations. This workshop aims to develop a richer conceptual and practical understanding of empathic engagement and design methods in this context to support and shape an agenda for future research.

Important Dates:
Submission by: 17 Jan. 2014
Notification of acceptance: 10 Feb. 2014
Workshop day: 26 or 27 April 2014
Workshop website: http://di.ncl.ac.uk/empathy/

We invite authors to submit 2-4 page position papers (in ACM Extended Abstract <http://chi2014.acm.org/authors/format#extendedformat> format) describing research on or experiences related to the role of empathy in HCI research in the context of health and care. This includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:

* Explorations of the meaning of empathy in HCI within the context of health and care;
* Designs and design methods that facilitate empathic engagements with participants in the context of health and care and/or enable teaching/learning how to be empathic;
* Case studies that report on empathic engagements with vulnerable people in the context of health or care;
* Descriptive and reflective accounts of how empathic engagements helped or hindered in the understanding, analysis and interpretation of the research;
* Personal accounts on the emotional experiences and coping of researchers conducting fieldwork in health or care settings.

Submissions should be sent in .pdf format to empathyhci@gmail.com.

Position papers will be reviewed by a committee of experts in the aforementioned topics according to their significance, quality of presentation, as well as their potential to stimulate discussion.

At least one author of each accepted submission must register for the workshop and at least one day of the main conference.

Workshop Organizers:
Anja Thieme, Newcastle University
John Vines, Newcastle University
Jayne Wallace, Dundee University
Rachel Clarke, Newcastle University
Petr Slovak, Vienna University of Technology
John McCarthy, University College Cork
Michael Massimi, Microsoft Research Cambridge
Andrea Grimes Parker, Northeastern University