Interactions

After the iron horse: Covid-19 responses in education

Posted: Wed, May 27, 2020 - 10:25:09

Research from the distant past regains relevance! From 1998 to 2000 and 2017 to 2020, I focused on higher education. Suddenly, some of the early work is again relevant. I’ll describe it here, along with some thoughts arising from conversations with educators, administrators, and my daughters. Forced by Covid-19 into functioning remotely, the education field quite sensibly seized upon familiar…

A crash course in online learning

Posted: Fri, May 22, 2020 - 5:58:53

As in many countries, when New Zealand went into lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in late March, tertiary education providers had to suddenly move from face-to-face teaching to online learning. Although providers already offered some online courses and had considered the need to expand online learning, the requirement for an immediate about face while a trimester was in…

Design-led innovation: Lessons from the Scientific Revolution

Posted: Thu, May 21, 2020 - 2:58:42

In recent years, design has established itself as a strategic business asset that helps organizations innovate and grow. From first being associated with aesthetics, design has become a measure for user centricity and an engine for creating meaningful experiences and improved business performance. An increasing number of organizations recognize the value of design and seek to interweave design capabilities into…

Evaluating immersive experiences during Covid-19 and beyond

Posted: Tue, May 19, 2020 - 4:52:13

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted life as we once knew it. The safety and well-being of people are paramount, and there is no exception for the human-computer interaction (HCI) field. Most universities and research labs have closed non-critical research labs. With that closure and the student populations having left campus, in-person user studies have been suspended for the foreseeable future.…

This is not the new normal: Studying during a pandemic

Posted: Wed, May 13, 2020 - 2:31:59

table, th, td { padding: 10px; border: 1px solid black; border-collapse: collapse; } Illustration by Renée Sophie Singer. Austria began its lockdown on March 10, 2020. Just three days later, the government issued stay-at-home orders, quarantined entire villages, decreed non-emergency medical procedures to be moved to a later date, and closed all but essential shops, as well as hospitals, retirement…

Notes on running an online academic conference, or how we got zoombombed and lived to tell the tale

Posted: Tue, May 12, 2020 - 10:11:09

Due to the coronavirus, the biggest conference in our research field (the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) was canceled in April, just a few weeks before it was scheduled to be held in Hawaii. As the Nordics have a strong research community in this area, it was logical to put together an online event for local…

Designs on solidarity

Posted: Fri, May 08, 2020 - 10:47:48

If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together. — Lilla Watson Over the past weeks we find ourselves pausing before signing off on email messages. We used to include a habitual "How are you?" or "I hope…

The emerging need for touchless interaction technologies

Posted: Wed, May 06, 2020 - 1:47:42

With the spread of Covid-19, the world of interaction technology research has completely changed: The pandemic has created a higher demand for technologies that allow us to avoid touching devices. Before the pandemic, the world had a harder time understanding the importance of touchless technology, and even then it was not imagined in this context. The gesture-based technologies and hand…

‘Together, we dance alone’: Building a collective toolkit for creatives in a pandemic

Posted: Tue, May 05, 2020 - 11:04:21

It seems to me that, if we can talk about such a thing as the tasks of resilience, then today these tasks will share that quality of taking responsibility: not an impossible, meaningless responsibility for the world in general, but one that is specific and practical, and may be different for each of us. — Dougald Hine, 2012 As the…

Design thinking around Covid-19: Focusing on the garment workers of Bangladesh

Posted: Tue, April 28, 2020 - 9:57:47

What’s going to happen to these garment workers? It was a question from my young colleagues Rahat and Kimia. We were working with garment workers in Bangladesh, where the garment sector is one of the leading economic sectors, with around 4 million workers involved in over 5,800 factories [1]. But it was more than work. During our qualitative studies in…