Table of Contents
VOLUME XXII.3 May - June 2015
- Demo Hour
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What are you reading?
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What are you reading?
Steve Harrison
Why Art Cannot Be Taught by James Elkins (2001) Elkins's book was conceived and marketed as a survival guide for art students, but it is actually part critical memoir and part skill development guide for understanding and taking criticism and suggestions—that is, an inspirational guide for art instruction. The…
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How was it made?
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MaD
Jules Françoise, Norbert Schnell, Riccardo Borghesi, Frédéric Bevilacqua
Describe what you made. We created two installations built around a single idea: letting people choose their own arm and hand gestures to control sound synthesis. Record your own movements; the system will learn them and map them to sounds. In the first installation, people craft specific gestures to…
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Departments
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Feedback
INTR Staff
Professional UX Credentials: Are They Worth the Paper They're Printed On? By Anna Wichansky September–October 2014 DOI: 10.1145/2656370 UX certification is a serious and hotly debated issue. Unfounded statements like "The 'gold standard' of UX professional certification is available through the Board of Certified Professional Ergonomists (BCPE)," as noted…
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Community calendar
INTR Staff
May Smart Greens 2015 – 4th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems (Lisbon, Portugal) Conference Dates: May 20–22, 2015 http://www.smartgreens.org/ CAADRIA 2015 – 20th Annual Conference on Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (Daegu, Korea) Conference Dates: May 20–23, 2015 http://www.caadria2015.org/ June TVX 2015 –…
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Columns
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On being turned inside out
Heather Wiltse
In the Pulse Room of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's "A Draft of Shadows" exhibition at Bildmuseet on the Umeå University Arts Campus, a large room is empty except for rows and rows of light bulbs hanging from the ceiling and a pair of metal rods on a stand at one end…
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Patchwork living, rubber duck debugging, and the chaos monkey
Elizabeth Churchill
"Patchwork living" is a good description of my life with technology. One of the meanings of the word patch is to repair a tear, a breach, in a material. By extension, "patching" software or firmware means to fix something that is damaged, torn, or no longer functioning as it…
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The Times New Roman lie
Jonathan Bean
This is not a paean to a typeface. This is about how Chrome OS lies. On Black Friday 2014, I bought a Chromebook. I was not alone; Amazon reported that its top three notebooks of the holiday season were all Chromebooks. I've been a Mac user since I switched…
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- Special topic
- Day in the Lab
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Forums
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Discouraging sedentary behaviors using interactive play
Regan Mandryk, Kathrin Gerling
Regular physical activity has many benefits, including to a person's physical, emotional, and cognitive well-being [1]. Although adults should achieve 150 minutes of moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity per week, only 15 percent of adults meet these guidelines in at least 10-minute bouts, and only 5 percent of adults…
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Designing for transitions to sustainable lifestyles
Adrian Clear, Kirstie O'Neill, Adrian Friday
Despite the significant risks for human and non-human life posed by the so-called Anthropocene, greenhouse-gas emissions are still rising. In such a context, how do we as citizen-consumers attempt to transition toward sustainability? The ways in which people currently practice activities such as cooking, eating, traveling, and keeping warm…
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The role of tool support in public policies and accessibility
Fabio Paternò, Antonio Schiavone
Since the late 1990s, several countries have begun to enact laws addressing computer-system accessibility for technology funded or provided by the government. One of the first countries was the U.S., where in 1998 Congress approved and the president signed into law Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, with the…
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The Carolan guitar
Steve Benford, Adrian Hazzard, Liming Xu
Turlough O'Carolan was the last of the great Irish harpers, an itinerant musician who traveled through Ireland around the turn of the 18th century, staying with and composing tunes for his many patrons. He has also been the inspiration for the Carolan Guitar, a prototype acoustic guitar whose digital…
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Blending market research and user research activities
Pallavi Kutty
As the definition of UX becomes more and more holistic, there is an increasing opportunity to merge market and user research activities into an integrated process. However, there is no one-size-fits-all answer for whether this is a good or bad practice; it depends on the individual project context and…
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Printed electronics for human-computer interaction
Jürgen Steimle
A technology revolution is happening. For a long time, electronic components were accepted as being rigid, rectangular, and somewhat bulky. As a consequence, today's computing devices are typically flat, rectangular, and have a fixed shape. But a new technology is challenging this established view. Printed electronics offers a new…
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Community square
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Thanks to our volunteers and friends
Gerrit van der Veer
It is election time for the SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC). I hope you will all vote, before May 31, for the six officers who will be leading SIGCHI for three years starting July 1. Your vote is needed and will count. Voting alone, however, is not enough to make…
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Features
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Digitizing fashion—Software for wearable devices
Oskar Juhlin
There is an ongoing trend of digital devices being used in close physical proximity to our bodies, in the same position as our clothes. It started with the success of mobile phones, continues with the emergent use of smart watches and smart eyewear, and is leading to a future…
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Fingers, thumbs, and people
Steven Hoober
Lessons Learned The ubiquity of smartphones has made many of us excited to work on mobile. But in important ways, it has also actually hindered the development of good heuristics. Principles of "natural UI" have been taken to heart, and we believe our experiences are representative of the experiences…
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Sharing the hidden treasure in pictorials
Eli Blevis, Sabrina Hauser, William Odom
The idea of images as a foundational mode of creating and articulating knowledge about interactivity has been gaining traction in HCI and interaction design. The use of photography and imagery has long been foundational in traditional schools of design. Inventories of "the best" such schools—however subjective—can be found in…
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- Community calendar
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Visual thinking gallery
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Self-portraits
Zhouxing Lu
Curator/Editor: Eli Blevis Genre: Reflections on social dynamics in design contexts and, more generally, constructed images This triptych of self-portraits reflects on (top) cultural misunderstandings and sense of self, (middle) team dynamics and hidden self, and (bottom) outward confidence and inner fears. ©2015 ACM1072-5220/15/05$15.00 Permission to make digital…
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