An interactive session for Doors Open 2025, hosted by SACHI & the IDEA Network 

On 1 May 2025, we hosted a small but energised session in the Jack Cole building as part of the School of Computer Science’s Doors Open programme. Our aim? To invite people into a conversation we believe needs to be more public, more grounded, and more collaborative: how can universities and communities work together to shape a more ethical digital future? 

This session, Co-Designing Ethical Digital Futures: The University–Community Gateway, was co-organised by Abd Alsattar Ardati, researchers from SACHI (our Human-Computer Interaction group here at St Andrews) and the IDEA Network, a cross-university initiative working on community-led research and open knowledge. 

Together, we welcomed participants into a relaxed and interactive 45-minute workshop built around one simple premise: the technologies shaping our lives should reflect the values, needs, and voices of the people most impacted by them. 

Why we did this 

Digital transformation isn’t just about tools and platforms, it’s about power, participation, and who gets to shape the future. With Scotland’s Ethical Digital Nation vision now in motion, and research across our university increasingly engaged with questions of inclusion, AI fairness, and civic trust, we felt this was the right time to bring these discussions into the open, with communities at the centre. 

We wanted to have a session that people could participate in and be active in trying out a powerful design process. Specifically, the session focused on co-design, a method grounded in listening, participation, and collective imagination. It’s about designing with, not for. 

What we did

We started with a short talk about the evolving role of universities in society, from traditional centres of learning to more civic, collaborative institutions. We shared a few examples of how SACHI and the IDEA Network are exploring questions around digital accessibility, inclusion, and how communities can help shape the systems they interact with every day. 

Then we moved into group activities. Participants chose a community they cared about, young people, people in later life, rural communities, disabled people, newcomers to the UK, and more. Within those groups, they explored one of four themes: 

• Digital Challenges 

• Aspirations & Hopes 

• Community Roles & Skills 

• The Role of Universities 

Each table had a simple prompt card, coloured markers, and a big piece of paper to map their ideas. No pressure to produce perfect solutions; just space to think together, share perspectives, and imagine something better. 

What came up 

What struck us most was how quickly the room filled with energy, honesty, and curiosity. People named real, lived issues: confusing online services, lack of representation in digital design, barriers to accessing support, or simply not feeling heard by institutions. 

But they also shared hope, about what digital systems could do if they were designed differently. From inclusive education tools to community-owned tech platforms, the notes and reflections at the end captured a mix of practical insight and ambitious imagination. 

We’re still going through the ideas shared (some of which we hope to write up more formally), but one thing is clear: when you invite people in, not just to speak, but to shape, you get a richer, more grounded vision of what ethical tech could be. 

Where next? 

This session is part of a wider effort across SACHI and the IDEA Network to open up conversations about technology, power, and participation; and to make co-design a more normal part of how we do research and innovation. 

We’re grateful to everyone who showed up, listened, spoke, drew, and reflected with us. And especially to the SACHI volunteers who helped make it happen with such care and generosity. 

If you’re curious about this work, want to get involved, or just want to keep in touch, we’d love to hear from you. 

IDEA Network: ideanetwork@st-andrews.ac.uk
SACHI: sachi@st-andrews.ac.uk 

Let’s keep making spaces for public imagination, ethical questions, and community-led futures. 

We are so thrilled to announce and congratulate Miriam Sturdee on the publication of her fantastic book on ‘Sketching in Human Computer Interaction: A Practical Guide to Sketching Theory and Application‘, which I believe came out today.

We are so lucky to have such range of skills and perspectives in our group and its fantastic to see that Miriam’s expertise is going to be reaching a wider audience  – well done!!! It’s a fantastic achievement.

We cannot wait to read it and share with all our students!

We are thrilled to be welcoming so many new faces to the SACHI group, namely:

Sachin Yadav, who is focusing on uncovering how technology has an increasingly pervasive impact on our relationship, and ability to engage, with work; particularly in online labour markets and the broader gig economy.

Jess McGowan, who is starting a PhD with SACHI and myself around the idea of TTRPG UX.

Tom Metcalfe, who is researching how sustainable tangible embodied interactions can be inspired by and connected to place.

Tilcia Woodville-Price, who has joined us to do a PhD in health data visualisation, in collaboration with the School of Medicine.

Paul Cox, who is focusing on topics related to Web privacy with a keen interest in studying user perceptions of privacy as the browse the Web.

Title: The Great Shrinking Lake 

MSc HCI Project 2023-2024 by Xiaojun Huang 

This project aims to explore how interactive data physicalization can guide the public in understanding current climate change issues in an engaging and enjoyable way, and bridge the temporal and spatial gaps of specific climate change issues, ultimately raising public awareness and encouraging participation in climate change issues. 

This project focuses on the changes in the Great Salt Lake in Utahn, U.S. from 1990 to 2022. The prototype visualizes the lake contours and the flights passing over the lake area over the years. These data are visualized on transparent acrylic layers through laser cutting. It utilized a series of lighting effects and interactive elements to enhance the users understanding and engagement with the data. Observing the changes in these two data over time can also help users gain insights into the relationship between human activities and the environment. 

Inspired by an article from NASA https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150187/the-great-shrinking-lake 

Supervised by Dr. Loraine Clarke 

https://sachi.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/  

Congratulations to Tomas Vancisin presenting his research ‘Provenance in Information Visualization and Digital Humanities’.

Sign up for our workshop Exploring the value and significance of bringing a craft ethos to debates around the IoT/connected things

Call for Participation

Join us for a one day workshop to explore how a craft practice and ethos can help us to respond to privacy, trust, bias and the Internet of Things.

“How healthy is the internet?”  As more and more things become internet-connected (i.e. become part of the IoT) questions of trust, privacy, security, data ownership, data bias, and the commercial abuse of data, become ever more pressing. This reflects a recognition of a wider problem with the internet alongside the rapid developments in machine learning (i.e. AI) and how it is being unreflectively ‘put to work’ in an ever-increasing range of applications. This workshop will explore these tensions and concerns through the lens of craft, both as a practice and a conceptual ethos.

This studio will use embroidery as a craft-oriented communal/social practice activity to scaffold a discussion framed by our craft ethos characteristics, involving notions of; subjectivity, bespokeness, localism, embodiment, provenance, authenticity, and care-full-ness. Embroidery is an appropriate craft-oriented method which we believe encourages flavors of conversation that are distinct from other forms of participatory workshops. Whilst these activities will likely enable mindful stitching, we are more pointedly using this method as a dialogical activity where the acts of communal stitching will enable us to direct conversation to certain aspects of craft characteristics beyond the literal objects participants are making. Through this embodied making activity, you will create a bespoke embroidered badge based on a set of provocations and take a deep dive into the issues with IoT we have highlighted.

Through making together in small groups, supported by experienced researchers working in the field, we hope to provide an environment for rich discussion and material speculation on alternative visions of ‘healthier’ connected futures. The studio will use the embroidered outcomes as well as a range of predesigned props and design resources to not only discuss entanglements of living well in a digital culture, but also to help us collectively and individually envision stories/scenarios which encapsulates vision/s of an alternative, healthier, digitally connected future. At the conclusion of the workshop we will explore the possibility of setting up a special interest group that takes our thinking forward into the future.

More information and Sign up here

Come and join our group! We are currently advertising for a new staff member to join our HCI group at the School of Computer Science.

Supporting the expansion and development of the SAHCI group, topics of interest include but are not limited to: tangible computing, digital fabrication, ubiquitous computing, information visualization, human-centered artificial intelligence, augmented reality, novel software and hardware interactions, and critical HCI. Expertise in the field of HCI and technical expertise in the creation of hardware and or software interactions is of particular interest.

For more details: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CRS296/lecturer-senior-lecturer-reader-in-human-computer-interaction-ac7180gb

Closing Date: 17th August 2022

Please share far and wide

The paper is open access: Representational transformations: Using maps to write essays.

Summary of the paper and its findings

We built a tool to study how writers move between map and text to write essays. The main takeaway is that important cognitive work happens in the transformation process between map and text representations.

There are lots of existing tools for building representations to support complex cognitive tasks – e.g. argument maps, text, notes, slides, sketches, and so on. But tool support for the transformations *between* representations is much more neglected – and we think it’s crucial!

We built Write Reason, a tool which combines a text editor and a mapping interface. You can drag parts of the map into the text, and parts of the text into the map, and it helps you keep them in sync.

We then studied how 20 students used Write Reason to write essays. You can interactively explore the maps and essays built by participants. We identified key properties of transformations: change in representation type, cardinality, and explicitness. And we found that most used an all-at-once batch translation, while a few used bit-by-bit interleaving. 

We think understanding transformations is crucial for building the next generation of multi-representational tools. How can we better support multi-transformation pipelines like these? Can automation unlock more complex + powerful workflows, which would be tedious to do manually?

Our findings revealed and falsified some of the key implicit assumptions that we baked into the design of Write Reason. We hope that these reflections will help other designers and researchers start one step ahead of us and avoid these mistakes!

Project page. Paper (open access).

Thrilled to see Iain and Guilherme graduating this week. Congratulations on your well-deserved success Dr. Carneiro & Dr. Carson!