Enculturating human–computer interaction

This special issue of AI and Society is based on a workshop held in conjunction with Intelligent User Interfaces 2008 and brings together selected papers from this workshop as well as additional work on cultural aspects of human– computer interaction. The idea for this workshop was born from discussions in the German–Japanese project CUBE-G (CUlture-adaptive BEhavior Generation), which focuses on the challenge of integrating cultural heuristics into the interactive behavior of multimodal systems. Although cultural usability is a well-established field, deeper levels of intelligent multimodal interfaces lack sophisticated models of culturally influenced interaction. That is amazing insofar as our social and cultural background (our identity) influences how we behave and how we interpret behavior. Thus, it seems for instance inevitable for a persuasive system to adhere to the persuasive strategies that are predominant in the user’s culture. What are the main challenges for integrating cultural aspects in the human–computer interaction? First of all, we have to cope with the problem that culture is an ill-defined domain (Blanchard and Mizoguchi 2008) meaning that it is easy to argue with culture in an everyday conversation, but it is hard to pinpoint down the constituents of culture and its effect on interaction. Moreover, culture is a multilevel concept incorporating such diverse notions as national culture, work culture, music culture and many others, which each might specify situated and contextual heuristics for an interaction. To be able to enculturate human– computer interaction, parameterizable models of cultural interactions are necessary to prevent building unique versions for each culture in which a system is going to be deployed. In addition, different layers of phenomena exist that are influenced by culture like the verbal and non-verbal behavior, appearance, proxemics, learning strategies and many more. Data on cultural heuristics are sparse and often the structure of the available data on a specific phenomenon is inconsistent over different cultures due to an asynchronic data collection. The workshop brought together researchers focusing on bits and pieces of these problems allowing us to outline the challenges that lie ahead of us more clearly. Ideally, this will trigger the rise of a new research community working on cultural aspects of interactive systems beyond aspects of usability. The promising results from the first workshop led to a follow-up event, a parallel session on Enculturating HCI that will take place at HCI International 2009. M. Rehm (&) E. Andre Faculty of Applied Informatics, Augsburg University, Universitatsstr. 6a, 86159 Augsburg, Germany e-mail: rehm@informatik.uni-augsburg.de