Table of Contents

VOLUME XXI.4 July + August 2014

  • Demo Hour
    • Demo hour

      1. Back to Light My current body of work, Back to Light, expands upon a classic grade-school science project, the potato battery. By inserting a galvanized nail into one side of a potato and a copper wire into the other side a small electrical current is generated. The utter…

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  • What are you reading?
    • Eva Deckers

      Eva Deckers

      Eva Deckers

      In September 2013, after successfully defending my Ph.D. dissertation, "Perceptive Qualities in Systems of Interactive Products," I moved from the academic environment of the Eindhoven University of Technology to Philips Design. At Philips I work in the Design Research and Innovation group, where I am mainly involved in design…

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  • How was it made?
    • PneUI

      Lining Yao

      PneUI

      Describe what you made. Our project is called PneUI. It includes a series of pneumatic (inflatable) artifacts and interfaces. They are transformable and responsive objects, such as a lamp that can wrap its own body when pulled, a transformable iPad cover that inflates bubbles when players of racing games…

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  • Departments
    • Feedback

      INTR Staff

      Feedback

      User Stories Don't Help Users: Introducing Persona Stories By William Hudson November – December 2013, DOI: 10.1145/2517668 Your article offers lots of food for thought in this short piece. The biggest problem I see with much of this "UX practices squeezed into Lean/Agile build methodologies" is simply that they…

    • SIGCHI local chapters in 2014

      Tuomo Kujala

      SIGCHI local chapters in 2014

      Interest and need for HCI all over the world, especially in the vast developing world, has been growing recently. Local communities affiliated with SIGCHI—the SIGCHI local chapters—gather together HCI students, academics, and practitioners from their specific regions. In 2014, SIGCHI has 40 local chapters in 24 countries on six…

    • Community calendar July-October 2014

      INTR Staff

      Community calendar July-October 2014

      July 2014 UMAP 2014 – 22nd International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (Aalborg, Denmark) Conference Dates: July 7–11, 2014 http://www.um.org/umap2014/ EVA London 2014 – Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (London, UK) Conference Dates: July 8–10, 2014 http://www.eva-london.org SOUPS 2014 – Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (Menlo…

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  • Columns
    • Let’s resist the temptation to solve problems

      Nynke Tromp

      Let’s resist the temptation to solve problems

      In his 1971 book, Design for the Real World, Victor Papanek spelled out specific concerns he foresaw surrounding mass production and mass consumption. He described the increasing influence it would give designers, potentially exerted negatively, and he warned against the piles of junk and depletion of resources that these…

    • Running an entrepreneurial pilot to identify value

      Jon Kolko

      Running an entrepreneurial pilot to identify value

      Over the past decade, design has become more user-centered, as designers champion a process that focuses on people, and stakeholders increasingly realize the benefits of including the people they are serving throughout the process of design. This shift began with a broad acceptance of evaluative research, where designers worked…

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  • Day in the Lab
    • Wearable Senses, Department of Industrial Design, TU Eindhoven

      How do you describe your lab to visitors? Wearable Senses (WS) focuses on designing close-to-the-body interactions, specifically designs that incorporate wearable computing or smart textiles. It is a community that feels like an emerging multidisciplinary culture, where practitioners from research, education, and industry help and challenge each other on…

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  • Forums
    • Tangible augmented reality for air traffic control

      Jean-Luc Vinot, Catherine Letondal, Rémi Lesbordes, Stéphane Chatty, Stéphane Conversy, Christophe Hurter

      Tangible augmented reality for air traffic control

      The boundaries between 'the digital' and our everyday physical world are dissolving as we develop more physical ways of interacting with computing. This forum presents some of the topics discussed in the colorful multidisciplinary field of tangible and embodied interaction. —Eva Hornecker, Editor Air traffic control (ATC) guides aircraft…

    • Building belonging

      Carl DiSalvo, Melissa Gregg, Thomas Lodato

      Building belonging

      Over the past two years we have been conducting research into issue-oriented hackathons—events that draw together activists, citizens, entrepreneurs, and coders to address social conditions and their consequences. This research connects to broader trends in the fields of HCI and CSCW of examining informal design and development environments and…

    • Social media and college access

      Nicole Ellison, D. Wohn, Michael Brown

      Social media and college access

      Andy [1] is a junior in high school, living in a relatively rural part of Western Michigan. Like many teenage boys, he enjoys playing video games online through Xbox Live. Over time, he has developed friendships with a group of other players. He has never met them in person,…

    • Social awareness in HCI

      Cecília Baranauskas

      Social awareness in HCI

      Contemporary society is characterized by knowledge mediated by digital technology. From services available through everyday banking transactions to the exercise of citizenship by electing government representatives through voting machines, knowledge is made available through the technological artifacts that society creates. However, not everyone is able to reach it. Some…

    • Applying user-centered design to research work

      Jean Scholtz, Oriana Love, William Pike, Joseph Bruce, Dee Kim, Arthur McBain

      Applying user-centered design to research work

      By now almost everyone is familiar with the use of user-centered design (UCD) techniques to develop software products, but less common is the idea of using UCD techniques to shape and guide the directions of an academic research project. The SuperIdentity (SID) project is aimed at helping workers engaged…

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  • Features
    • From critical design to critical infrastructure: Lessons from Turkopticon

      Lilly Irani, Six Silberman

      From critical design to critical infrastructure: Lessons from Turkopticon

      Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) works by keeping worlds apart. AMT is a Web-based labor market that draws workers from all over the world to perform small bits of digital labor for pay—frequently for as low as a few dollars an hour. Amazon's engineers and managers designed AMT to make…

    • Undesigning interaction

      James Pierce

      Undesigning interaction

      This article has no pictures.1 I don't want to disappoint readers who are expecting glossy images, straightforward examples, or prescriptive methods. I'm not going to give any.2 Instead I want to reflect on exclusionary action as design. Typically we think of design in positive terms such as creation, introduction,…

    • Toward optimal menu design

      Gilles Bailly, Antti Oulasvirta

      Toward optimal menu design

      Menu interfaces for command selection first appeared in 1968 with the AMBIT/G system and were later popularized in the Xerox Star in 1981. Today, menus are among the most commonly used user interface types. The design of menus thus strongly affects the usability and user experience of interactive computing.…

    • Supporting media bricoleurs

      Scott Carter, Matthew Cooper, Laurent Denoue, John Doherty, Vikash Rugoobur

      Supporting media bricoleurs

      Online video is incredibly rich. A 15-minute home-improvement YouTube tutorial might include 1,500 words of narration, 100 or more significant keyframes showing a visual change from multiple perspectives, several animated objects, references to other examples, a tool list, comments from viewers, and a host of other metadata. Furthermore, video…

    • Collaboration with distributed teams

      Charles Yiu

      Collaboration with distributed teams

      Product development with distributed teams has become more popular in recent years. This is partially due to the mobility of today's workforce. It is not always possible to recruit the best talent from a company's local job market, and not everyone is open to the idea of relocation. At…

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  • Visual thinking gallery
    • Maker paper

      Eli Blevis

      Maker paper

      Genre: Documentary image, maker culture With the help of a digital printer specially modified to create paper creases and explorations in geometry- and algorithm-based design tools, artist/designer Jiangmei Wu creates intricate folded paper and light sculptures. ©2014 ACM1072-5220/14/07$15.00 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or…

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