Navigating a New Direction in HCI Education: Challenges of Teaching More-Than-Human Perspectives

This paper follows up on the challenges we encountered when we initially began teaching more-than-human perspectives in human-computer interaction (HCI) and technology design. Since then, we have developed a collection of teaching activities and conducted pilots with nearly 800 students, exploring how these perspectives can be taught in various settings. Although we think that our teaching activities address some of the initial challenges, several challenges are still open, and new ones have emerged such as the gap between what we are teaching and the industry, and the feelings of hopelessness that students may feel when confronted with the notion that technology may not fix all problems. These challenges can be used as an entry point for discussions and the identification of possible and impossible future paths for teaching more-than-human design.