Table of Contents
VOLUME XXVI.2 March - April 2019
- WELCOME
- Demo Hour
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What are you reading?
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What are you reading? Phoebe Sengers
Phoebe Sengers
What role can technology designers play to support the needs of rural communities? While there is significant attention in HCI to urban computing, there is little literature in HCI that addresses how technologies play out in or could be designed for specifically rural spaces. Recently, my reading is ranging…
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Blog@IX
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Making the child-computer interaction field grow up
Olof Torgersson, Tilde Bekker, Wolmet Barendregt, Eva Eriksson, Christopher Frauenberger
Child-computer interaction (CCI) as a specialized field within human-computer interaction (HCI) has developed gradually, from the early works of Seymour Papert and Mitchel Resnick at MIT to the more recent and substantial work by key people such as Allison Druin, Yvonne Rogers, and Mike Scaife. However, a major milestone…
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How was it made?
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How was it made? Rain season
Ai-Hsuan Chou
Describe what you made. Rain Season is made up of three pieces. The Dynamics of Rain is inspired by flower petals swinging in the rain. I imagined that the petals become intoxicated when moistened by rain. The rain takes the swinging flower petals as a sign of welcome. The…
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Columns
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Design researchers need a shared program, not a divorce
Jeffrey Bardzell
In a 2017 paper, Jodi Forlizzi, Ilpo Koskinen, Paul Hekkert, and John Zimmerman called for a "divorce" between "pragmatic" and "critical" threads of "constructive design research," or CDR [1]. As a provocation, it did what it was supposed to: It got a lot of people talking. And while it…
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Toward a playbook for UX leaders
Uday Gajendar
While applying for a UX manager position recently, I was asked to send in my portfolio along with the usual résumé/CV. It's a rather perfunctory request, but that's exactly it. It's like some bodily reflex by the hiring staff, performed dozens of time daily, without thought. I was about…
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Day in the Lab
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Mixed Reality Laboratory, University of Nottingham
Steve Benford, Jocelyn Spence, Pat Brundell, Teresa Castle-Green, Lewis Hyland, Murray Goulden
How do you describe your lab to visitors? Two of our researchers described it as "a place where lots of weird and wonderful stuff randomly appears in the name of research. Most of the time I have no idea why," and "like the band Gong—the people may come and…
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Forums
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Walking in smart cities
Hamed Alavi, Farzaneh Bahrami
Walking is the collaboration and confluence of body, mind, and place. It has been repeatedly acknowledged as the composing instrument of the city, generating social and urban life; as the most democratic and accessible physical activity; and as a cultural and aesthetic practice, a vital antidepressant, a heart saver,…
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Not-equal: Democratizing research in digital innovation for social justice
Clara Crivellaro, Lizzie Coles-Kemp, Alan Dix, Ann Light
Digital technology has given rise to extensive socioeconomic transformation and emerging technologies are set to further transform the service economy and public services. Careful design and deployment are needed for this transformation to benefit the many rather than the few. If harnessed to the wrong economic, political, and social…
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Digital civics goes abroad
Colin Gray, Austin Toombs, Marlo Owczarzak, Christopher Watkins
In the past decade, HCI scholars have increasingly adopted framings of design activity that do not rely upon the pairing of users to designers. Historical approaches such as participatory design and co-design have become more acceptable and mainstream; some have even suggested that user-centered design as we know it…
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Grand challenges in accessible maps
Jon Froehlich, Anke Brock, Anat Caspi, João Guerreiro, Kotaro Hara, Reuben Kirkham, Johannes Schöning, Benjamin Tannert
Digital maps such as Google Maps, Yelp, and Waze represent an incredible HCI success—they have transformed the way people navigate and access information about the world. However, there is a twofold problem limiting who can use these systems and how they benefit. First, these platforms focus almost exclusively on…
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The map is not the territory: Empathy in design
David Siegel, Susan Dray
Design empathy is an approach that draws upon people's real-world experiences to address modern challenges. When companies allow a deep emotional understanding of people's needs to inspire them—and transform their work, their teams, and even their organization at large—they unlock the creative capacity for innovation. —Katja Battarbee, Jane Fulton…
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Mental landscapes: Externalizing mental models through metaphors
Delanie Ricketts, Dan Lockton
In HCI, we usually encounter metaphors through interface design—the desktops, windows, tablets, clouds, folders, and feeds of everyday interaction. Designers use metaphors strategically to help users understand new ways of interacting, but they can also be used to generate new ideas for products or services [1,2,3]; considering different metaphors…
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Community square
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The Scottish HCI community
Eunice Sari, Martin Halvey, Gilbert Cockton, Mary Foster
For many people, the first things that Scotland brings to mind are its mountain wilderness, glacial valleys, and lochs, which make it a preferred holiday destination. Scotland will soon become the center of attention for HCI and UX researchers and practitioners from all over the world: Its largest city,…
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Features
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Design education can change the world
Kristian Simsarian
It's a beautiful day in September 2016, the first day of our new senior Interaction Design Thesis class in San Francisco. An intense discussion moves around the room, each student sharing their aspirations for the year. Our whiteboard shows two overlapping circles labeled "What's important to you?" and "What's…
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Disability interaction (DIX): A manifesto
Catherine Holloway
Disability has often spurred designers to create novel technologies that have later become universal; for example, both the typewriter and the commercial email client originated from a need to communicate by blind and deaf people. The design constraints imposed by disability have pushed ingenuity to thrive within the design…
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Intersectional computing
Neha Kumar, Naveena Karusala
Intersectionality is increasingly finding its way into conversations around equity, diversity, and social justice within human-computer interaction (HCI), where we recognize that it is a relatively new concept in these conversations [1] and that more and novel methods for engaging with intersectionally diverse groups are needed [2]. HCI research…
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Asperger’s syndrome, autism, and camouflaging: Reduced empathy revisited
William Hudson
It's been nearly 10 years since I presented my short paper "Reduced Empathizing Skills Increase Challenges for User-Centered Design" at the CHI and British HCI conferences in 2009 [1]. The paper focused on the tendency of male IT workers who report their role as predominantly technical to have a…
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Making the blockchain civic
Chris Elsden, Inte Gloerich, Anne Spaa, John Vines, Martijn de Waal
To what extent can the application of blockchain technologies be employed toward civic empowerment, organizing local civic and circular economies, reinstating trust in civic institutions, or, perhaps, creating entirely new types of institutions? Insights In May 2018, researchers from the Amsterdam University of Applied Science's Faculty of Digital…
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Cover story
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ProbeTools: Unconventional cameras and audio devices for user research
Interaction Research Studio
ProbeTools are fully self-contained digital devices robust enough to be used in the field. Each one offers a unique and engaging way for people to tell you about themselves and their everyday lives. At the outset of a study, you configure the devices and lend them to participants to…
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Calendar
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Calendar
INTR Staff
March ARABWIC: 6th Annual International Conference on Arab Women in Computing (Rabat, Maroc) Conference Dates: March 7–9, 2019 http://arabwicconference.ma/ FABLEARN 2019 (New York City, USA) Conference Dates: March 9–10, 2019 https://nyc2019.fablearn.org/ CHIIR '19: ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (Glasgow, UK) Conference Dates: March 10–14, 2019…
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Exit
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The cauldron
Cally Gatehouse
Contributor: Cally Gatehouse [email protected] Curator/Editor: Anne Spaa Genre: Research through design Photographs cut into the process of designing. Here I am trying to capture the part that I find hardest to put into words: a design in the process of coming together. ©2019 ACM1072-5520/19/03$15.00 Permission to make digital…
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