Table of Contents
VOLUME XX.1 January + February 2013
- Demo Hour
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Blogpost
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Targeting the Fitts Law
Harold Thimbleby
Paul Fitts wrote the classic paper in 1954 that laid the foundations for one of the most successful laws in human-computer interaction [1]. The Fitts Law tells us how long it takes to hit something, like tapping a screen button. People take longer to hit something farther away, but…
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- Departments
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Columns
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A matter of taste
Elizabeth Churchill
Kantos Kan led me to one of these gorgeous eating places where we were served entirely by mechanical apparatus. No hand touched the food from the time it entered the building in its raw state until it emerged hot and delicious upon the tables before the guests, in response…
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Taking the new neologisms offline
Jonathan Bean, Daniela Rosner
There are so many new words for what seems, on the face of it, to be a new phenomenon [1]. Images and widgets are sliding off the screen and ending up in what geographers call the cultural landscapeand what the rest of us call the real world. Facebook "Like"…
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Day in the Lab
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Instructables
Eric Wilhelm
How do you describe your lab to visitors? The Instructables lab is an open-plan, multipurpose workspace located in downtown San Francisco. We have exposed brick walls, wood floors, gorgeous natural light from skylights and windows overlooking Second Street, and a ridiculous number of tiny halogen lights in the ceiling,…
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Forums
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Participatory sensing
Scott Heggen
Picture yourself at 13 years old, being handed a mobile phone and told, "You're going to learn the scientific method." And when you're done, there will be no test. Your success will be measured in the change you create in your community and your environment. This is the next…
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Family health heritage
Sarah Reeder, Jodi Forlizzi, Steven Dow
Healthcare is moving beyond a focus on curing the sick patient toward taking a more proactive role in keeping healthy patients healthy [1]. Today patients are more aware of what constitutes a healthy lifestyle and are more likely to take notice and act when health issues arise. This shift…
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Ergonomics and U.S. public policy
Alan Hedge
Ergonomics is a widely misunderstood discipline in the U.S. Businesses treat ergonomics paradoxically, advertising it as a benefit when marketing products, yet decrying it as costly and unnecessary when it comes to designing ergonomic workplaces. Poor ergonomics has become linked to workplace injuries that can arise from frequent repetitive…
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Journal-conference interaction and the competitive exclusion principle
Jonathan Grudin
Each biological species occupies a unique ecological nicheusually. Occasionally one species invades another's niche, arriving as a stowaway on a boat, in a tourist's luggage, floating on a log, or crawling across a newly formed land bridge. What happens when two species occupy the same niche? Biologists agree: One…
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The problem with transparency is it’s not conspicuous enough
Stephen Wilcox
This article proposes a model of transparency, the idea that a good tool "disappears" in the hands of skilled users. It then proposes a model of design as the management of a dynamic transparency. In use, we often want a tool to be transparent, but other times, in the…
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Lost icons, Paris 2012
Eli Blevis
Image Contributors: Eli Blevis Genre: Documentary observation and reflection An icon denoting a long-obsolete circular mechanical phone dial adorns a phone booth replete with push-button pay phonesanother obsolete technology. The icon is somehow comforting, nostalgic, and curiously familiar despite its reference to vintage technology. Icons are a large part…
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Features
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Building the future with envisioning
Stuart Reeves
HCI and related interaction design fields often explore the challenges of future technologies. This future orientation is intrinsic to ubiquitous computing. Conceived during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and developed initially through the work of Xerox PARC's Computer Sciences Lab (CSL), ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) set out a compelling…
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Annotated portfolios and other forms of intermediate-level knowledge
Jonas Löwgren
In a recent issue of this magazine, Bill Gaver and John Bowers address the role of design practice in academic research and provide a concrete suggestion: "We propose the notion of annotated portfolios as a way to communicate design research. In part, we do this to provide an alternative…
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Food for thought
Jaz Choi, Rob Comber, Conor Linehan
With increasing demands on our time, everyday behaviors such as food purchasing, preparation, and consumption have become habitual and unconscious. Indeed, modern food values are focused on convenience and effortlessness, overshadowing other values such as environmental sustainability, health, and pleasure. The rethinking of how we approach everyday food behaviors…
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You are what you tweet
Natalie Dixon
Every day is a living torment. Nobody understands my suffering. The only thing keeping me going is the pancakes I have for breakfast. Twitter user Food is a deeply emotional, political, and commercial subject. In recent years its story has been increasingly told, scrutinized, and debated. Arguably we have…
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Crowd saucing
Conor Linehan, Tom Leeman, Christopher Borrowdale, Shaun Lawson
The World Health Organization suggests that worldwide rates of obesity have more than doubled since 1980 [1]. Rising rates of obesity present a massive public health problem, as excess weight can lead to a number of debilitating conditions, including cancer, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. The majority…
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Ecofriends
Jakob Tholander, Mattias Jacobsson
As practitioners and researchers in interaction design, we often find that many of the online practices we design for resemble those that existed several hundred years ago, before industrialization. For instance, the collaborative knowledge gathering we today associate with Wikipedia and the like existed in the more basic form…
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- Cover story
