Workshops

The AfriCHI 2025 Workshop track invites proposals that are creative, inclusive, interactive, and at the forefront of enhancing and creating transformative impact in Africa through HCI and innovative approaches. These workshops will create a platform to engage participants with shared interests through interactive discussions, learnings, experiences, and activities centered on the theme “Re-centering African Wisdom in HCI.”. 

The track seeks to foster collaboration and explore topics in HCI that reflect African perspectives and involve hands-on activities that integrate local wisdom into HCI-led solutions. Workshops should further generate ideas that will give the African HCI community new, organized ways of doing and thinking about the HCI or suggest promising directions for future work.

Track Objectives:

• Facilitate creative thinking, sharing, learning, and idea creation, and promote interactive discussions and collaboration between participants, researchers, students, academics, and institutions.
• Create a platform for participants to gain in-depth HCI and research knowledge that is beneficial to the African HCI community and for career development.
• Learn from, about, and methods to integrate local wisdom into HCI-led solutions.
• Exchange experiences and future visions for HCI that reflect African perspectives.

What makes 2025 AfriCHI unique - explain the theme

Track Focal Topics

We invite diverse and creative workshop proposals from researchers, organizations, industry, academia, and communities that explore relevant and emergent topics that include, but are not limited to:

• The intersection of HCI and Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Emerging technologies in HCI
• Human-centered AI that prioritizes societal impact in African contexts
• Proposal from UX/designing industries in Africa
• User experience design and evaluation
• Approaches to search for and what to include in funding proposals.
• Career development and growth in Africa
• Industry and academic collaborations
• Targeted workshops for specific African communities/countries
• HCI education
• Ethical and inclusive design practices within the African context
• HCI and design for environmental sustainability and/or agriculture in Africa
• The ethics and protocols of designing with African communities,
• Digital transformation and citizenship for Africa
• Augmented and virtual reality experiences
• Cultural variations in interaction design and technologies

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Submission

Workshop submissions should be written in English and include no more than 2500 words. References do not count towards the word limit.

Submissions should use the official conference template and include:

• Names of organizers, affiliations, backgrounds, and expertise in HCI
• Provide a strong rationale for the workshop and indicate the issues being addressed
• Workshop title and objectives
•  Proposed format, methods, or techniques used to structure the workshop
• Plans to Publish Proceedings
• Please indicate how attendees are going to engage with in-person attendees.
• Duration of the workshop: Full-day or half-day
• How attendees will contribute
• Relevance to HCI and/or conference theme
• Importance of running the workshop at AfriCHI
• Minimum and maximum number of participants and plans for recruitment, including dates for workshop submissions (check conference dates)
• Activities that will take place to engage attendees.
• Planned outcomes/outputs of the session (e.g., journal publication, research proposal, future collaborations, exhibition)
• Post-workshop plans

Prepare a 250-word participation call that will be posted on the conference site to recruit participants for your workshop. This should include the goals of the workshop Requirements for participants’ submissions (e.g., topics to address, page length, format), submission details (as indicated above), a link to the workshop website, and any specific equipment and set-up required for the workshop.

Submissions should not be anonymous and should include all author names, affiliations, and contact information. Accepted workshop proposals will be published in AfriCHI Proceedings published by the ACM International Conference series.

Please consult the AfriCHI 2025 submission guidelines and formatting document for more submission information.

Presentation at the Conference

All workshops will be conducted in person. Purely online or hybrid formats will not be permitted. One author from every accepted workshop proposal must register for and attend the conference to present their workshop.

Review Process

Proposals will be reviewed by the conference chairs based on quality, engagement, and applicability to the conference using the following criteria:

• Relevance of the workshop topic to HCI and the conference theme
• The interactivity of the format
• Potential to draw a variety of participants
• Potential for the workshop to offer new insights
• Potential for workshops to promote participant growth and development.
• Whether there is a clear structure and plan to facilitate creative and interactive engagement
• Addition to the African HCI community

As Workshop Chairs, we will make the final decision and select a carefully curated list of workshops (and whether they will be full-day or half-day) that reflect- the needs and desires of the community. 

Positionality Statement

Workshop authors are recommended to submit a positionality statement elaborating on their relationship to the research, their location, and how their identity and background influence their work and workshop approach when working within African contexts. Authors should address how their positionality interacts with African scholarship, local communities, or African values, and the implications of these dynamics for the research outcomes.

Upon Acceptance

Upon acceptance, authors will have to follow instructions to prepare a final version and camera-ready submission before or on the 15th of July, 2025. Please note that we might propose modifications or suggest that workshops be combined where appropriate. The camera-ready versions will be uploaded to the conference submission system following the ACM camera-ready standards. Accepted workshop proposals will be published in the ACM Digital Library as part of the AfriCHI Conference Proceedings.  

Important dates

All times are in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone.

• 2nd March 2025 – Submission deadline
• 5th April 2025 – Notification to authors (Accept or Reject)
• 15th July 2025 – Camera-ready deadline for accepted submissions.

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Workshop Co-chairs

• Marly Muudeni Samuel (Glasgow School of Art)
• Olutoyin Olaitan (Walter Sisulu University)
• Rosetha Kays (Namibia University of Science and Technology)

Contact: Workshops@africhi2025.org

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