Blogs



Morning greetings in a Bangladeshi way: Walking, greeting, and technology

Posted: Tue, February 05, 2019 - 10:27:01

Some colleagues and I once had a big debate about whether technology separates us or connects us. At one point, someone argued that people do not even greet each other these days in Dhaka city. I was not ready to give it up—I wanted to look into it myself. I had two motivations: the first one was to find out…

Automatizing the power grid

Posted: Tue, January 29, 2019 - 3:16:36

In this day and age, relations between humans and machines have become rather fraught. A growing number of anxieties crystallize around the use of robots and automation in various industries, not to mention our homes. Things were quite different in the late 19th century, when the introduction of the first machines were expected to relieve people from toiling away for…

Making the child-computer interaction field grow up?

Posted: Fri, October 05, 2018 - 2:49:57

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 for the field was the establishment of the annual conference series…

SketchBlog #1: The rise and rise of the sketchnote

Posted: Tue, August 14, 2018 - 10:36:38

This blog post was co-authored by: Miriam Sturdee, postdoctoral fellow in sketching and visualization, University of Calgary,[email protected] Makayla Lewis, research fellow, Brunel University London, [email protected] Nicolai Marquardt, senior lecturer in physical computing, University College London, [email protected] If you’ve been to an HCI conference, workshop, or event recently, chances are you may have seen people sketchnoting—either as part of the main…

Being an HCI researcher working with refugees

Posted: Thu, August 09, 2018 - 9:47:44

In our July–August 2018 Interactions article, “HCI and Refugees: Experiences and Reflections,” my co-authors and I really wanted to document all the discussions we have been having about what it means to be HCI researchers working intimately with refugee communities. In the article, we aimed to bring forth challenges experienced while conducting fieldwork and how our research is influenced by…

‘What people see’ versus ‘what people do’: Some thoughts on the cover story on visualizations

Posted: Mon, August 06, 2018 - 11:24:53

I read with a lot of interest the latest cover story on data visualizations by Danielle Albers Szafir, particularly since I recently gave an introductory seminar on this topic to Ph.D. students attending the Bioinformatics Summer School at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). The cover story made some very good points that I'll refer to it in the next version…

Values tensions in academia: An exploration within the HCI community

Posted: Mon, June 25, 2018 - 11:31:49

Wish you were here - by @_JPhelps February and March 2018 saw the largest ever industrial action in the U.K.’s higher-education sector. While the cause of the strike was changes to the USS pension scheme, the picket lines were sites for conversations about many other issues within academia. Whether it was dissatisfaction with the corporatization of universities, the precarious working…

Science fiction in HCI – a nuanced view

Posted: Wed, March 28, 2018 - 4:09:16

Note: This blog post is a critical response and extension to the March/April Interactions Special Topic article on science fiction for innovation in HCI, written by Daniel M. Russell and Svetlana Yaros. I was pleased to read the most recent Interactions Special Topic on science fiction and HCI—the motivation for my first IX blog post. In the following, I provide…

My users taught me to read with my ears

Posted: Fri, February 16, 2018 - 12:02:48

This blog started as a response to the column What Are You Reading? in Interactions. While I have a number of books I wanted to discuss, the topic made me reflect on how I read. My reading mechanisms have evolved from working with blind people. I continue to read novels mostly with my eyes—but for research papers, I use my…

What we mean by interactive form

Posted: Tue, November 28, 2017 - 11:31:55

The following blog post is nothing more and nothing less than an email conversation between Mattias Arvola, Jeffrey Bardzell, Stefan Holmlid, and Jonas Löwgren about the concept of interactive form, which incidentally is the name of a course given at Linköping University. If you do teach a course, it might be good to understand the meaning of the course name.…