Ajit G. Pillai

Excited to share our DIS'24 preprint!🎉 Together with @ajplai and @richmondywong, we developed "Ethics Pathways," a design activity that helps reflect on the nuanced engagement with infrastructure and processes to action ethics within institutions. arxiv.org/abs/2405.16654v1

I am happy to share that I will be presenting our #CHI2024 case study paper in person at the CHI conference on Thursday, May 16th, and am looking forward to discussing it with the attendees. You can read the full paper here: doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3637…

#CHI2024 How can we develop interactive technologies that effectively address group conflicts stemming from religious, faith-based, ideological, political, and related sentiments? How can we navigate the complex ethical tensions involved in designing solutions that are both inclusive and just, yet also resonate with the values of conflicting groups to gain their trust and acceptance of these systems or policies? Our paper titled “Cohabitant: The Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Virtual Reality Application for Interfaith Learning and Empathy Building” provides some insights into these questions. In this mixed-methods study, we integrate theories from psychology, peacebuilding, and intergroup coexistence with a participatory design workshop to build and evaluate a VR tool aimed at reducing prejudices among faith-based groups by promoting interfaith learning and empathy. We then conduct statistical and qualitative analysis with the Christian, Hindu, and Muslim communities in Canada to examine the usability of the tool and understand the broader implications of our findings for creating similar systems for addressing group conflicts. If topics such as online and societal harm/safety, group coexistence, faith, religion, VR, education, empathy, and justice interest you, I would love to discuss them with you at CHI 2024. Grateful to @_ayadreem, @AshaZavin, @bingjian_huang, Selin Okman, Dina Sabie, Hasan Shahid Ferdous, @rsoden_, and @ishtiaqueSIA, for their collaboration. Last summer was fun!