Ammar Halabi

Participate, collaborate, and decide: defining design problems in a Syrian community

This paper discusses an exploratory approach for identifying potential ICT design problems in a local community through collaboration with its members. We are currently participating in the activities of a volunteer community in Syria, where members appropriate Facebook and other online tools to collaborate and organize. In such context, conducting participatory design is not straightforward and needs to be problematized. For instance, what is the desired outcome of participation? Who participates in what? And what are the suitable tools? Here we focus on the value of participation in defining relevant design problems in collaboration with the community. We present our research process where we adopt an ethnographic approach guided by the works of sociologists Howard Becker, Juliet Corbin, and Anselm Strauss. We finally describe how this approach also allows us to move from participant observation towards participatory design.

Arrange-A-Space: tabletop interfaces and gender collaboration

Collaborative technologies, such as shared tabletop interfaces, are becoming increasingly pervasive. Meanwhile, social dynamics have long been a major area of inquiry in HCI and CSCW. With a few notable exceptions, little has been done that addresses the roles gender identities play in shaping collaborative work. In this paper, we make the case for a deeper consideration of gender in our field through a study that investigates issues surrounding gendered collaboration around a tabletop interface. We report our findings and conclude with recommendations for future work in this area.

A hybrid approach for indexing and retrieval of archaeological textual information

This paper focuses on the problem of archaeological textual information retrieval, covering various field-related topics, and investigating different issues related to special characteristics of Arabic. The suggested hybrid retrieval approach employs various clustering and classification methods that enhances both retrieval and presentation, and infers further information from the results returned by a primary retrieval engine, which, in turn, uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) as a primary retrieval method. In addition, a stemmer for Arabic words was designed and implemented to facilitate the indexing process and to enhance the quality of retrieval. The performance of our module was measured by carrying out experiments using standard datasets, where the system showed promising results with many possibilities for future research and further development.

Waves and forms: constructing the cultural in design

While research in HCI on dealing with cultural issues when designing ICTs tended to adopt fixed and taxonomic views, recent theoretical perspectives closer to the social sciences have called for attending to the contingent, fluid, and dynamic aspects of the notion of culture. In this article, we contribute to translating these perspectives into an approach for informing design. We focus on abandoning prior conceptions of culture to allow the discovery of cultural differences through inductive field research while engaging with the target community. This allows a view on cultural difference that is generative for design: it is unique to each case, and it also remains close to the concerns of community members. We base our approach on Basile Zimmermann’s (2015) waves and forms framework, and we illustrate it through our engagement and design with VOCI, a local voluntary community of tech-savvy university students in Syria between 2011 and 2015.