Table of Contents
VOLUME XXI.4 July + August 2014
- Demo Hour
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What are you reading?
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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?
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PneUI
Lining Yao
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
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Feedback
INTR Staff
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…
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SIGCHI local chapters in 2014
Tuomo Kujala
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…
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Community calendar July-October 2014
INTR Staff
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
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Let’s resist the temptation to solve problems
Nynke Tromp
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…
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Running an entrepreneurial pilot to identify value
Jon Kolko
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
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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
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Tangible augmented reality for air traffic control
Jean-Luc Vinot, Catherine Letondal, Rémi Lesbordes, Stéphane Chatty, Stéphane Conversy, Christophe Hurter
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…
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Building belonging
Carl DiSalvo, Melissa Gregg, Thomas Lodato
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…
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Social media and college access
Nicole Ellison, D. Wohn, Michael Brown
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,…
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Social awareness in HCI
Cecília Baranauskas
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…
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Applying user-centered design to research work
Jean Scholtz, Oriana Love, William Pike, Joseph Bruce, Dee Kim, Arthur McBain
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
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From critical design to critical infrastructure: Lessons from Turkopticon
Lilly Irani, Six Silberman
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…
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Undesigning interaction
James Pierce
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,…
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Toward optimal menu design
Gilles Bailly, Antti Oulasvirta
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.…
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Supporting media bricoleurs
Scott Carter, Matthew Cooper, Laurent Denoue, John Doherty, Vikash Rugoobur
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…
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Collaboration with distributed teams
Charles Yiu
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
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Maker paper
Eli Blevis
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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