The first week started with running through the seven great challenges as presented in the international journal of human-computer interaction. I was tasked with reading through the seventh task on social organization and democracy, of which you can find my highlighted sections here.

As for the in-class discussion afterwards, I took the role of facilitating a conversation and trying to involve everyone on the table, while another person in the team took notes as we discussed. Facilitating the discussion proved to be difficult as most people at the table sat silently by not interested in giving their point of view on the matter. Hence, we ended up being three to four people keeping traction in the conversation. After having discussed for a while, we chose one team member to present our discussions. The gist of what we discussed was to focus on a broader scope when creating technologies in the future that encompasses Glocal (global + local) thinking and how the product can affect people other than the user. Moreover, we looked at how technology can manage resources and its impact; how technology should be more inclusive, active technology co-design with users; and technology to give equal voice to everybody, with an example of cryptocurrencies.

Although I understand that for the discussion it would be helpful to place us in groups with those who had read the same chapter, I did not feel like I learned anything from listening to the presentation of the other groups. Moreover, I had a hard time hearing what was presented. Without reading the other chapters, I would not even know what they were about from the presentations held. Moreover, I don't understand why we had this exercise in the first place as we didn't use the challenges when generating ideas the next day.