By Whose Design?: Digital Comics and User-Centred Research

Comics Panel Session Summary (Ernesto Priego chairing)

To showcase the study of digital comics within an HCI environment and what this research can contribute to HCI and HCID, for example,

– New use of HCI/HCID methods in the creation of comics content and the communication that drives that creation
– An understanding and evidence base of user interactions during the content creation process through and with platforms, social media, etc.

This understanding focuses on the “opportunities” as well as “challenges” for users in the wider digital ecosystem, offering designers an insight into ‘digitality’ or living in a digital culture through digital comics content, platform, and communication processes.

“Engrossed in this World I’ve Built around Me”: The Digitality of Digital Comics Linda Berube (10 min)
HCI has much to contribute to the study of digital comics, for example the use of such methods as Interactive Think-Aloud (ITA) and rapid ethnography. These methods, this HCI approach contributes to “a digital sociology of comics”, a holistic and user-centred analysis.
In turn, a digital sociology of comics contributes to HCI studies not only by providing a new evidence base for participatory design and application of methods but also an understanding of users who ‘design’ their own environments/interactivity through personalized user ecosystems. These ecosystems are not just content based (although the creative aspect is a strong focus for the research) but communication based.
In this presentation, I will review the above findings from my doctoral research, Digital Comics Ecosystems: Investigating creation, publishing, consumption, and communication practices where digital comics are the gateway to the lived experience of interactive platforms that make up the digital ecosystem.

Webtoons: Form and Meaning in Digital ComicsFrancesca Benatti (10 min)
How much do digital platforms shape reading? If forms do “effect meaning” (McKenzie 1999), how are comics changed by being written and published within digital, especially mobile platforms?
This presentation will discuss the findings of the Innovations in Digital Comics book, its analysis of the webtoon as the first natively digital, mobile optimised comics format, and its effects on the comics communications circuit. The presentation will focus on the need to move from large-scale quantitative analysis to a more qualitative, “thick” data approach.

Q and A chaired by Ernesto Priego (10 min)

About the speaker:

Dr Ernesto Priego is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design, and a co-director of the Data, Policy and Society MSc at City St George’s, University of London, and editor and founder of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship. As a researcher he has explored the role of comics as narrative, conceptual and speculative design tools and applies user-centred, participatory co-design methods to the creation of comics within public health or social interest domains. Ernesto led the “Parables of Care. Responses to Dementia Care” project (2017-2021), which explored the potential of comics to enhance the impact of dementia care research. Ernesto’s profile pic by Francisco de la Mora (2023).