Table of Contents
VOLUME XXI.1 January - February 2014
- Demo Hour
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What are you reading?
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Christopher Le Dantec
Christopher Le Dantec
'Raw Data' Is an Oxymoron By Lisa Gitelman I am currently involved in a project called Cycle Atlanta where cyclists in the city are recording their rides in order to provide city planners with better data for use in developing new cycling facilities. One of the interesting questions that…
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How was it made?
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How was it made? Thermobooth
Describe what you made. The Thermobooth features a new shutter release system in which skin contact between two people triggers a set of processes that result in a glorious, lo-fi, instant thermal-printed picture. Yes, it takes a picture when you touch each other! We are opening a stage for…
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Departments
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Improving over time…
Ron Wakkary, Erik Stolterman
Interactions magazine is celebrating: We are 20 years old! The first issue was published in January 1994. Beginning as a quarterly and then moving to a bimonthly publication schedule in 1996 means 116 issues in total! That's more than 1,900 articles over the years. As editors-in-chief, we are also…
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Redesigning Interactions
Luke Hayman
Luke Hayman, the award-winning graphic designer whose work has transformed such titles as Time, The Atlantic, Consumer Reports, Cosmo, Travel + Leisure, New York, Folio, and even Communications of the ACM, was presented with a formidable task: Revitalize the look and presentation of a well-established 20-year-old magazine written by…
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New vision by design
Scott Delman
As you have no doubt already noticed from the cover of this issue and the introductions from Editors-in-Chief Ron Wakkary and Erik Stolterman, and our designer at Pentagram, Luke Hayman, you are now reading a very new Interactions magazine indeed. Less than a year ago, Ron and Erik approached…
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To whom are we talking?
Gerrit van der Veer
As the major worldwide professional organization in the domain of human-computer interaction, SIGCHI has a diverse audience and a large portfolio of questions and messages. Our main goal is to support the international community of HCI experts in its professional life. Consequently, the foremost activities of our organization consist…
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Community Calendar
INTR Staff
January VISIGRAPP 2014 - 9th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (Lisbon, Portugal) Conference Dates: January 58, 2014 http://www.visigrapp.org/ PhyCS 2014 - International Conference on Physiological Computing Systems (Lisbon, Portugal) Conference Dates: January 79, 2014 http://www.phycs.org/ APCCM 2013 - 10th Asian-Pacific Conference…
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Columns
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What’s in a word?
Lone Hansen
My smarter students have figured it out: If in class they casually include the words natural or objective in a sentence that also includes research and/or technology and if they manage to look as if they mean it, the following five minutes will be action-packed. I will begin a…
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The currencies of paper currency
Elizabeth Churchill
Currency is a medium of exchange, a unit of account that is portable, durable, divisible, and fungible. But it's more than that. It is also part of a nation's identity. Take the U.S.'s paper currency, the "greenback," for example. The greenback is recognized worldwide. It is symbolic, iconicstanding for,…
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Making: Movement or brand?
Daniela Rosner, Jonathan Bean
At the most recent Consumer Culture Theory conference in June 2013, a session on making was packed with marketing professorsmany anthropologists or sociologists by trainingand their Ph.D. students. Most of the presentations followed the typical format of papers and PowerPoint, but the last one felt more like a show-and-tell,…
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- Day in the Lab
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Forums
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Persuasive technology for sustainable workplaces
Dan Lockton, Luke Nicholson, Rebecca Cain, David Harrison
In persuasive technology and the wider field of behavior changein academia, industry, and government policysustainability is a major focus. The usual aim is to design systems that influence users' actions to reduce environmental impact, for example, reducing CO2 emissions through energy use and transport choices. This can be about…
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The place we call home
The Album People [1] is a London-based service specializing in digital archiving and the preservation of domestic memories. My partner, Alicia Weekes, and I founded it in the hope of helping people build a bridge between their pre-digital and post-digital memories. Our main objectives are to encourage centralization of…
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Managing health with mobile technology
Predrag Klasnja, Wanda Pratt
Nearly two-thirds of all U.S. adults now have smartphonespowerful personal computers that are always with their owners, are continuously connected to the Internet, are capable of running sophisticated applications, can know where their owners are and what they are doing, and can connect to a wide range of other…
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Sharing data while protecting privacy in citizen science
Anne Bowser, Andrea Wiggins, Lea Shanley, Jennifer Preece, Sandra Henderson
Imagine finding a flower you haven't seen before, or watching the first swallows arrive in your garden each spring. How would you record and share this data with those who can advance science or shape public policy? Every day, millions of "citizen scientists" participate in research to support real-world…
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Introducing the business of UX
Daniel Rosenberg
Welcome to The Business of UX, a new forum launching this issue in conjunction with the design update of Interactions magazine itself. This forum will focus on UX leadership challenges in the product and service design industries. While the forum is not intended to be industry specific, it will…
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Features
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Are you sure your software is gender-neutral?
Gayna Williams
Women account for 50 percent of people on payroll [1] and account for even greater purchasing power. Some products (all too often pink) are deliberately built for a female audience, and some are built for a male audience. However, many products are intended to be gender-neutral. Here, I address…
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Designing people
As HCI progresses from information design to experience design, from inelegant artifacts to ambient intelligence, we must strive to understand the interaction of technology with the body, affect, and social cognition. A major current task of experience design is to identify the relevant parameters for particular types of experiences,…
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Special topic: Designing for and with vulnerable people
John Vines, Róisín McNaney, Stephen Lindsay, Jayne Wallace, John McCarthy
HCI has started to explore the positive roles that technology can play in improving the lives of people facing cognitive, emotional, physical, and socioeconomic challenges. Despite this encompassing a large percentage of the population, an overarching characteristic that people facing such challenges likely share is that society considers them…
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Stories from my thanatosensitive design process
Michael Massimi
The death of a loved one is a difficult experience we all face in our lives. Those who have experienced such loss are often referred to as bereaved, and are faced with many challenges: transitioning to new societal roles, handling financial matters, arranging services, and so on. Griefthe complex…
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Fieldwork with vulnerable populations
Cosmin Munteanu, Heather Molyneaux, Susan O'Donnell
For many HCI researchers, validating their experiment or study protocols from an ethics point of view is a routine operation, an essential step when planning their research. While this formal process varies by country, the underlying principles are universal. For a large amount of HCI researchcontrolled lab-based usability evaluations…
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Engaging homeless young people in HCI research
Jill Woelfer
As HCI researchers, what do we mean when we describe a group of people as vulnerable? And, furthermore, how should we proceed? In an effort to make progress on these questions, here I discuss vulnerability, susceptibility, and more than six years of research with homeless young people. Vulnerability has…
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- Cover story
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Visual thinking gallery
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Ultrabark lapdog bag
Eli Blevis
©2014 ACM1072-5220/14/01$15.00 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation…
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