Blogs

  • The Receptionist

    Deborah Tatar Posted: Wed, July 06, 2016 - 2:47:55

    My mother is dying. She had a rare gastric cancer in her pyloric valve. The amazing doctors at UCSF took out 70% of her stomach and a bunch of lymph…

  • Brigitte (Gitti) Jordan: An obituary

    Elizabeth Churchill Posted: Thu, June 23, 2016 - 3:43:25

    It is with great sadness that we report on Brigitte (Gitti) Jordan’s death; Gitti died on May 24, 2016, at her home in La Honda, California, surrounded by loved ones.…

  • Technology and liberty

    Jonathan Grudin Posted: Tue, May 03, 2016 - 10:22:39

    The absence of plastic microbeads in the soap led to a shower spent reflecting on how technologies can constrain liberties, such as those of microbead producers and consumers who are…

  • Oh, the places I will go

    Posted: Fri, April 29, 2016 - 1:26:09

    Over the decades conferences, symposia, webinars, and summits all have formed critical portions of my professional development. I learned about controlled vocabularies and usability testing and the viscosity of information…

  • Violent groups, social psychology, and computing

    Juan Hourcade Posted: Mon, April 25, 2016 - 2:55:08

    About two years ago, I participated in the first Build Peace conference, a meeting of practitioners and researchers from a wide range of backgrounds with a common interest in using…

  • Collateral damage

    Jonathan Grudin Posted: Tue, April 05, 2016 - 1:06:30

    Researchers are rewarded for publishing, but this time, my heart wasn’t in it.It was 2006. IBM software let an employer specify an interval—two months, six months, a year—after which an…

  • Extremes of user experience and design thinking: Beards and mustaches

    Aaron Marcus Posted: Fri, March 25, 2016 - 11:04:27

    The characteristics that differentiate us human beings, and at the same time unite people from different regions of the world is a matter that fascinates me. Recently, I had a…

  • Designing the cognitive future, part IX: High-level impacts

    Juan Hourcade Posted: Tue, March 22, 2016 - 10:27:21

    In previous blog posts I have been writing about how interactive technologies are changing or may change our cognitive processes. In this post I reflect on the high-level impact of…

  • Critiquing scholarly positions

    Jeffrey Bardzell Posted: Tue, March 15, 2016 - 12:13:32

    If I am right that HCI and neighboring fields will increasingly rely on the essay as a means of scholarly contribution and debate in the future, then it follows that…

  • Technological determinism

    Jonathan Grudin Posted: Wed, March 09, 2016 - 12:21:43

    Swords and arrows were doomed as weapons of war by the invention of a musket that anyone could load, point, and shoot. A well-trained archer was more accurate, but equipping…