Prof. Sean Siqueira (PPGI – UNIRIO) co-taught a course with Prof. Huatong Sun (University of Washington, Tacoma, USA) at the 28th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI International 2026).
Course Title: Empowering with Critical Design from Global South Experiences
This course introduced strategies and techniques to create culturally meaningful and empowering designs to bridge cultural differences in a globalized world at a divisive time.
It taught participants to a) reconsider some commonly held design beliefs and routine design practices through a lens of cultural differences, and b) develop a deep understanding of critical design and speculative design with design research from the Global South.
In this interactive course, a new critical design framework of discursive affordances (Sun &Hart-Davidson, 2014; Sun, 2020) was used to trace the interconnectedness of grand narratives (such as ideologies and cultural institutions) and everyday interactions, and to uncover design and innovation opportunities. Discursive affordances stress affordances as dialogic discursive relations. It connects critical design considerations for empowerment, such as identity and values, agency and structure, ideology and power (and sovereignty) on a macrosocial level, with design implementations for efficiency and effectiveness on the micro level in everyday life. Therefore, it connects macro-HCI with micro-HCI (Schneiderman, 2011).
In the same vein of Actor-Network Theory and a new wave of relational approach of design theories (e.g., Kimbell, 2012; Sun & Hart-Davidson, 2014; Sun, 2020, 2022; Escobar, Osterweil & Sharma, 2024), discursive affordances enacts, demonstrates, and performs a network of relationships between human and non-human elements, entangled in ideological clashes and geopolitical competitions.
Taught by two researchers from the Global South, case studies from their research provided an understanding of cultural differences portrayed in this globally divided time. Cultural differences emerge from the various categorical identifications such as ethnicity, race, age, class, religion, gender, sexuality, and ability and manifest as ways of life. They provide design challenges because they are often regarded as a deficit or a threat to harmonious communication for understanding. Based on instructors’ longstanding work in cross-cultural and global design, critical and speculative design with a Global South perspective (Sun & Hart-Davidson, 2014; Sun, 2012, 2020; Loutfi et al., 2025, 2024; Nascimento et al., 2023), this course showed that cultural differences are dynamic, relational, emergent, and contingent, and often framed in a global power hierarchy, driven by transnational corporate interests and stuck in the murky ground of ideological clashes and geopolitical tensions.
The course demonstrated ways of engaging cultural differences and turning communication deficits into generative design resources for “togetherness-in-difference.” It aimed to help participants combat social inequality embedded in our digital technological platforms, catalyze agency within our sociocultural structure for healing, and stimulate social changes.
