The Diversity and Inclusion Lunch at the 2019 ACM C&C/DIS Conferences
This year, Stacy Branham and I had the honor to organize the inaugural ACM SIGCHI-sponsored Diversity and Inclusion Lunch at the 2019 co-located ACM Creativity and Cognition (C&C) and Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) Conferences. Over the past few years, several ACM SIGCHI-sponsored conferences, including CHI, CSCW, and TEI have held similar events to underline the importance of these values in our communities and to create space for discussion, conversation and reflection.
The C&C and DIS conferences have shown growing dedication to diversity and inclusion through their themes and keynote speaker programming. Last year’s DIS 2018 conference theme was “Diversity and Design.” This year’s DIS conference theme was “Contesting Borders and Intersections,” a theme that sought investigations that go beyond “taken-for-granted boundaries” towards the inclusion of diverse cultural and intersectional perspectives. To that end, for the first time in the 24-year history of the DIS conference series, both the opening and closing keynote speakers at DIS 2019 were women of color. Similarly, the C&C conference strives to bring together scientists, artists, and engineers to mix diverse perspectives on creativity research, an interdisciplinary strategy that it continues to be committed to. However, neither community had formally celebrated its commitment to diversity, nor solicited attendee feedback about how to improve and renew these commitments.
We planned lunch activities around three main goals. First, we wanted to celebrate and underline the importance of diversity and inclusion as values within the conference communities. Second, we wanted to use this opportunity to reflect on and evaluate the state of diversity and inclusion within the communities by creating space for conversation among participants. Finally, we aimed to develop insights that will be shared within the conference communities, as well as, with the broader SIGCHI community.
We received overwhelming interest in the lunch once we advertised it on the conferences’ websites and social media. We reached capacity within a day of announcing the event and created a waiting list that also promptly filled up. Our participants represented 12 countries and were from 41 universities and 7 companies and commercial labs. The participants stated a range of motivations for attending the event. These included an interest in community-building and meeting like-minded people, a desire to increase understanding of current practices in this area and to contribute to conversations about diversity and inclusion, and a motivation to connect one’s current diversity-oriented practice to the ongoing efforts of the broader community. Additionally, several participants were moved to participate because of their belief that diversity and inclusion can be instrumental to furthering knowledge, increasing creativity and enriching the work of the research and design communities at the conferences.
During the lunch, we asked participants to reflect on two questions: “What strategies have worked in the past to support diversity and inclusion?” and “How can we do better in the future?” We asked participants to share their thoughts with us on notes provided at the tables or if they preferred to select someone at their table to share a summary of the discussion at the conclusion of the lunch.
We synthesized feedback from the participants into a series of reflections and suggestions for the promotion of diversity and inclusion both as part of academic conferences and as part of professional practice. These reflections included:
- Sharing knowledge: Implementing diversity and inclusion can be intimidating to non-experts. Developing and sharing guidelines or best practices as “living documents” can be a valuable asset for universities, companies and other organizations. These documents can help inform organizations and individuals on what to aim for and how to move towards that aim. Interdisciplinary discussions and activities, such as the Diversity and Inclusion lunch, can contribute to the creation of these documents and help keep them updated and informed by the current state of research and practice. Examples of existing resources include guidelines for Diversity and Accessibility chairs maintained by Jen Rode’s and Jen Mankoff’s Access SIGCHI group and three inclusivity guidelines we posted on DIS/C&C websites.
- Creating space: It is important to intentionally create spaces in conferences and symposia where these topics can be discussed, underlined and celebrated. These spaces can provide a forum for exchanging ideas, getting inspired for proactive action, and connecting with other like-minded community members. They can also encourage constructive criticism and protest.
- Considering many aspects of diversity: It is important to consider “diversity” in many senses and avoid reducing its meaning or complexity. Participants offered many practical suggestions on how to support different aspects of diversity and inclusion at conferences. Examples included creating spaces for reflection, multisensory rest and prayer, providing multilingual support, providing childcare and facilities for retired participants to attend conferences, streaming sessions for free, inviting more people from the global south to events and considering the environmental footprint of conferences.
- Diversity as process: It is important to recognize striving for diversity and inclusion as a “process”, rather than a goal. In the word of one participant, “We can always do more!” Also, it is important to support bi-directional change, where both grassroots, bottom-up efforts and top-down, organizational strategies are employed. To this end, it is important to plan for actions after conversations and support both events endorsed officially, such as the Diversity and Inclusion Lunch, and unofficially, such as appointing squad leaders for self-organized lunches or discussion sessions.
The second portion of the lunch consisted of a ceremony to recognize academic papers from this year’s conferences’ programs that offer a significant contribution to diversity and inclusion. We modeled this effort after the Recognition of Contribution to Diversity and Inclusion at CSCW 2018 initiated by Niloufar Salehi and Hilda Tellioglu. We used a multi-tier selection process where the technical program chairs nominated papers which we then reviewed independently and ranked based on the three criteria of 1) whether the papers serve underrepresented or marginalized groups, 2) to what extent the ethical implications of the research are considered, and 3) whether there are possible undiscussed negative impacts of the research that would disqualify them. The following four papers received a Recognition of Contribution to Diversity and Inclusion:
Is Deafness a Disability? Designing Hearing Aid Beyond Functionality — Patrizia Marti, Annamaria Recupero
Hacking Difference in Indonesia: The Ambivalences of Designing for Alternative Futures — cindy lin kaiying, Silvia Lindtner, Stefanie Wuschitz
Involving Syrian Refugees in Design Research: Lessons Learnt from the Field — Reem Talhouk, Madeline Balaam, Austin L. Toombs, Andrew Garbett, Chaza Akik, Hala Ghattas, Vera Araujo-Soares, Balsam Ahmad, and Kyle Montague
Designing Interactive Manual Wheelchair Skills Training for Children — Kathrin Gerling, Kieran Hicks, Olivier Szymanezyk, and Conor Linehan
We hope that in the future similar events can continue to raise awareness about the importance of diversity and inclusion in our communities and wish that this report may be useful to future organizers of these initiatives. We would like to thank the DIS’19 and C&C’19 conference chairs who invited us to organize this event and provided continuous and instrumental support from the planning stages for the event to its completion. We would also like to thank the technical chairs of the conferences who helped us select papers for recognition. We also would like to thank the lunch participants for their participation and providing us with valuable feedback. Finally, we would like to thank SIGCHI for sponsoring the event and officially recognizing the importance of diversity and inclusion in our research and practice communities.
Foad Hamidi & Stacy Branham
DIS | C&C Diversity and Accessibility Co-Chairs
accessibilitychair@dis2019.acm.org, accessibility2019@cc.acm.org
