Table of Contents
VOLUME XXIV.4 July-August 2017
- WELCOME
- Demo Hour
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What are you reading?
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Ann Light
Ann Light
For an English graduate who read avidly for pleasure through school and university, I am disappointed in how little I read these days. I am tempted to claim I write more words than I read, especially if we include university administrative writing. I have reached a point where I…
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Blog@IX
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Toward affective social interaction in VR
Giulio Jacucci
I first encountered VR in the late 1990s, as a researcher looking at how it provided engineers and designers an environment for prototyping. After that I became more interested in looking at how to augment reality and our surrounding environment. However, although VR had been around for decades by…
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How was it made?
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cringeMACHINE
Andrei Smolik, Robert Cameron
Describe what you made. cringeMachine is a temporary installation composed of 20 truncated tetrahedrons that respond to the sounds around it. Our initial idea was to create a transformable sculpture made of self-similar parts that could be assembled into a variety of configurations. When you make sufficient noise around…
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Columns
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The man who had them all
Uri Kartoun
A significant portion of my time at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) was spent analyzing a cohort of 65,099 individuals diagnosed with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). During these training years as a research fellow (2013 to 2016), I, along with my colleagues at MGH and Harvard, implemented a variety…
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Teaching design online
Uday Gajendar
How would you create a design class that must be entirely online, with no in-person, in-studio interaction? It's quite the design problem in itself, isn't it? The past few years have seen a dramatic rise in the availability of online-only classes. Distance-based learning programs have thrived for quite some…
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Day in the Lab
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Information Science at CU Boulder
Casey Fiesler, William Aspray, Lecia Barker, Jed Brubaker, Laura Devendorf, Brian Keegan, Leysia Palen, Michael Paul, Danielle Szafir, Ricarose Roque, Rick Robinson, Amy Voida, Stephen Voida
What is a unique feature of your lab? The Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) is brand-new and small, so we have had the opportunity to make our space and processes highly collaborative. As such, our "lab" is an entire department! We have faculty…
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Forums
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Toward intelligent environments: Supporting reflection with smart objects in the home
Maliheh Ghajargar
The growing interest in the Internet of Things and in technological, connected, and computing-enhanced spaces such as smart homes (Figure 1), intelligent environments, and responsive environments connects interaction design more and more with architecture. Everyday spaces such as home environments are increasingly filled with computing and smart objects. This…
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Socially just design and engendering social change
Lynn Dombrowski
HCI as a discipline cares about issues of equity, fairness, and social justice, as denoted by the attention its scholarly works and evolving dialogue give to such topics. For example, within work from HCI and HCI-related disciplines such as ICT4D, community informatics, and digital civics, we can find celebratory…
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The future of user experience education
Andrea Peer
The HCI Living Curriculum Committee was born from the idea that the field is evolving too fast and is too varied to have a static, one-size-fits-all curriculum. Scholars in the field have proposed that HCI curriculum recommendations need to be current, relevant, and reflective of the multitude of HCI…
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The 3Cs for preschool children’s technology
Juan Hourcade, Luiza Pantoja, Kyle Diederich, Liam Crawford, Glenda Revelle
A toddler using a smartphone or a tablet is not an unusual sight in high-income regions. In fact, today's preschoolers are the first generation growing up with interactive computing devices that are accessible to their cognitive and motor abilities, with some starting to use them as babies [1]. Prior…
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Usability, tested?
Neha Kumar, Naveena Karusala, Aaditeshwar Seth, Biswajit Patra
As a team of HCI researchers testing the usability of a media-sharing mobile application with rural Indian users, we found our notions of usability to be challenged in unexpected ways. Our experience highlighted the need to bring a deep understanding of sociocultural contexts into conventional usability evaluations. In this…
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Exploring DIY tutorials as a way to disseminate research through design
Audrey Desjardins, Ron Wakkary, William Odom, Henry Lin, Markus Schilling
Research through design (RtD) often centers on the making of things—artifacts, systems, services, or other forms—as a means to construct new knowledge in the interaction design and human-computer interaction (HCI) research communities. While designing things plays a prominent role in conducting research, there is an ongoing discussion around how…
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Community square
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HCI out of Namibia
Anicia Peters, Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, Tuomo Kujala
In the beginning of 2016, we formed the Windhoek ACM SIGCHI chapter in Namibia. The chapter comprises academics, students, and professionals from across Namibia. Forming a local chapter was a natural step for us, especially at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST, formerly known as Polytechnic of…
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Features
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Avoiding pitfalls when using machine learning in HCI studies
Vassilis Kostakos, Mirco Musolesi
Machine learning (ML) has come of age and has revolutionized several fields in computing and beyond, including human-computer interaction (HCI). Human-subject studies have been adopting ML techniques for more than a decade, for example for activity recognition and wearable computing. There now also exists a plethora of application domains…
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Chatbots and the new world of HCI
Asbjørn Følstad, Petter Bae Brandtzaeg
A potential revolution is happening in front of our eyes. For decades, researchers and practitioners in human-computer interaction (HCI) have been improving their skills in designing for graphical user interfaces. Now things may take an unexpected turn—toward natural language user interfaces, in which interaction with digital systems happens not…
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So you want to be an AI designer?
Nina (Zhuxiaona) Wei
On March 14, 2016, at 6:40 a.m., I woke up in the cold darkness and got washed and dressed. I took an Uber to the San Francisco Caltrain station and hopped on the 7:56 train, one minute before it left. The train arrived in Mountain View at 8:49. The…
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Inspiring innovation: On low-tech in high-tech development
Zara Mirmalek
In June 2016, in the small town of Arco, Idaho, several dozen visitors set down temporary stakes to be near Mars—actually, a version of Mars, located 18 miles southwest of Arco on Route 24 in the Craters of the Moon (COTM) National Monument and Preserve. Named in the 1920s…
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Making your presentation accessible
Richard Ladner, Kyle Rector
It is extremely common to accompany a talk at a conference such as CHI, CSCW, IUI, DIS, UIST, and others with presentation visuals. But there may be people in the audience who are blind, have low vision, or who cannot see the visuals clearly. There may also be deaf…
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Cover story
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Intelligence on tap: AI as a new design material
Lars Holmquist
There has been a revolution, but it snuck up on us so gradually that you'd be forgiven if you missed it. It's called artificial intelligence, and it will have a profound impact on how we design digital products in the near future. This has been something of an unexpected…
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Visual thinking gallery
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Woman (seated) with tablet computer
Eli Blevis
Contributor: Eli Blevis Curator/Editor: Eli Blevis Genre: Photographic minimalism, truth in (digital) photography Publication: Blevis, E. Pictorial: Qualities of focus. Proc. of Creativity & Cognition 2017. ACM Press (In press). Is this deliberately out-of-focus image, recorded in the moment using a manual focus digital camera, more "truthful" than a…
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Calendar
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Calendar
INTR Staff
July HCI 2017 - 31st British Human Computer Interaction Conference (Sunderland, UK) Conference Dates: July 3–6, 2017 http://hci2017.bcs.org UMAP '17 - User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization Conference (Bratislava, Slovakia) Conference Dates: July 9–12, 2017 http://www.um.org/umap2017 SIGGRAPH '17 - 44th SIGGRAPH Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (Los Angeles,…
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