Table of Contents
VOLUME XXII.2 March + April 2015
- Demo Hour
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How was it made?
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Electric flora
Joanna Dauner, Emre Karagozler, Matthew Glisson
Describe what you made. Electric Flora is an installation that creates a space of interactivity by harvesting electrostatic energy from the human body. Our idea is to create a jungle of interactive plants that are suspended from the ceiling. When the user touches the conductive tip of the plants,…
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Departments
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Growing together with Indonesian SIGCHI
Eunice Sari, Adi Tedjasaputra, Tuomo Kujala
On May 19, 2014, the Indonesian SIGCHI chapter was born. Like all babies, this chapter was not born instantly. The idea was conceived back in early 2002, when we started our work in HCI in Indonesia. Many still considered HCI an alien concept from the West at that time.…
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Community calendar
INTR Staff
March HRI 2015 – 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (Portland, USA) Conference Dates: March 2–5, 2015 http://humanrobotinteraction.org/2015/ VISGRAPP 2015 – 10th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (Berlin, Germany) Conference Dates: March 11–14, 2015 http://www.visigrapp.org/ CSCW 2015 – 18th ACM…
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Columns
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Practical products for centenarian spies
Mark Blythe
Mark Blythe has jumped on the design fiction bandwagon and written a novel called The Centenarians. Lacking the decency to leave it in a drawer, he is shamelessly sharing the excerpt below. Annabel and Boris Bide, the 100-year-old heroes, are sitting at the desk of a Ministry official ...…
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Device multiplicity demands magical continuity
Uday Gajendar
Hello, welcome to my new column! It's my hope to add to the ever-evolving discourse on design through the reflections conveyed here. My belief is that through "some radical notions" we can reinterpret the ordinary to achieve the extraordinary, perhaps in unexpected ways, and advance design progress in the…
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Teaching confidence in process
Jon Kolko
The design process always performs. Following the broad design process always results in new ideas, grounded in both the reality of a problem space and the tacit knowledge of the designer. But there's no guarantee that the ideas are any good, and in many ways, this presents a challenge…
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Special topic
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From field to office
m. schraefel
Recently, colleagues and I proposed the term wellth to describe a focus on health as a foundation for performance rather than as a preventative for illness [1]. Wellth foregrounds the "brain-body connection": The state of the brain is mirrored in the state of the rest of the system to…
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- Day in the Lab
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Forums
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Rethinking autism and technology
Christopher Frauenberger
A common adage in autism research goes, "If you have seen one child with autism, you have seen one child with autism." Autism is a neuro-developmental disorder that is extraordinarily diverse in its manifestations. What defines the scope of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are impaired social and communication skills…
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Interaction design meets architectural thinking
Mikael Wiberg
The architecture that surrounds us defines a crucial part of our everyday lives. It shapes and defines the frames for our lives, the rooms in which we live, work, socialize, do our shopping, and spend our leisure time [1]. Architecture is the classic, established approach to the design of…
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Children as participants in design and evaluation
Janet Read
The HCI community has long advocated the use of user studies to test and evaluate interactive systems. There is much to be learned by watching users interact with systems, both as novices and as experienced users. It is generally thought that an expert inspection of a system is a…
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Reshaping the limits of design in HCI
Daniela Rosner
Perhaps more than any other area of HCI, design research faces an identity crisis. While some researchers extend human-centered design (turning cycles of observation, ideation, prototyping, and testing into design recommendations and guidelines), other researchers favor studies of design (empirical studies of design processes). Still others offer a kind…
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Features
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HCI and sports
Stina Nylander, Jakob Tholander, Florian Mueller, Joseph Marshall
Sports are an important part of many people's lives. They are rewarding and motivating, but people appreciate them for a variety of reasons: Sports are personal and social, are fun but have health benefits, and can also be both enjoyable and painful. While motivation, fun, and sociality are elements…
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From field to office
m. schraefel
Recently, colleagues and I proposed the term wellth to describe a focus on health as a foundation for performance rather than as a preventative for illness [1]. Wellth foregrounds the "brain-body connection": The state of the brain is mirrored in the state of the rest of the system to…
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Designing training games for soccer
Mads Jensen, Majken Rasmussen, Florian Mueller, Kaj Grønbæk
Advancements in wearable and ubiquitous computing have exposed the interaction design community to a new perspective on sports. As a result, increasing effort has been directed toward creating technology-enhanced systems that can improve sports experiences. So far these technologies have focused primarily on gathering data on a single user's…
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Untangling running
Paweł Woźniak, Kristina Knaving, Staffan Björk, Morten Fjeld
Since running has low entry costs and is widely available, it has become a key fitness activity included in local and national health strategies. Training programs intended to help people start running are reported in the mainstream press, attracting interest from people intrigued by the sport's health and leisure…
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Motion games in real sports environments
Raine Kajastila, Perttu Hämäläinen
The past decade has brought about interesting developments in combining video games, sports, and exercise. Motion games, also known as exergames or active video games, have become mainstream thanks to technologies like Microsoft Kinect, PlayStation Move, and Nintendo Wii. Unfortunately, commercial games are often optimized for an average customer…
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The big hole in HCI research
Vassilis Kostakos
At the 2014 CHI conference, my group published a paper that presented a bibliometric analysis of the conference itself over the past 20 years [1]. The extent to which the conference reflects the entire field of HCI is debatable, but it is acknowledged that this is the flagship conference…
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On the importance and implications of studying technology non-use
Eric Baumer, Jenna Burrell, Morgan Ames, Jed Brubaker, P. Dourish
Quit Facebook Day. Paraguayan children indifferent to their OLPC XO laptop. Digitally disconnected residents of Sub-Saharan Africa. Facebook pages of the deceased. Each of these in some way draws attention to technology non-use. While researchers have explored questions around non-use for some time [1,2], the dominant discourse in HCI…
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- Cover story
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Visual thinking gallery
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Inspiration from nature
Eli Blevis
Genre: Reflection on color, variability, and imperfection as principles of design form The beauty of natural objects manifests in natural variability and perfectly imperfect surfaces and textures. Mass-produced artifacts of digital interactivity seldom have such qualities and their manufacture generally targets uniformity of form. ©2015 ACM1072-5520/15/0300$15.00 Permission to…
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