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Ch. Frauenberger:
"Critical Realist HCI";
Talk: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San Jose, US; 2016-05-07 - 2016-05-12; in: "Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems", ACM New York, New York (2016), ISBN: 978-1-4503-4082-3; 341 - 351.

Against the backdrop of the current debate about HCI's relationship with science and its ways to produce and argue for knowledge, this paper seeks to develop a novel philosophical foundation that rests on the central ideas put forward in critical realism. While it affords many of the features of the post-modern theories that shaped modern HCI, critical realism avoids the danger of slipping into extreme relativism, in which knowledge construction becomes arbitrary and isolated in its context. Moreover, critical realism is inherently multi-faceted and provides a basis on which scientific enquiries of very different natures can be treated complementary rather than as competing with each other. This allows us to develop a non-reductionist view on interaction with technology that accommodates and potentially reconciles the variety of approaches, practices and stances that we see in current HCI.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2851581.2892569

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_252179.pdf

Project Head Christopher Frauenberger:
OutsideTheBox