Blogs



A tent, a pigeon house, and a pomegranate tree

Posted: Fri, September 29, 2017 - 10:43:03

Note:This blog post was coauthored by Danilo Giglitto, research associate, and Anne Preston, senior lecturer in technology-enhanced learning, based at the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Centre (LTEC), Kingston University, London. After the 2011 revolution, Egypt faced a challenging socioeconomic transition. Since then, the ICT sector has become one of the promising contributors to Egypt’s economic growth. In 2014, the Ministry…

Design4Arabs Workshop @DIS 2017

Posted: Mon, August 07, 2017 - 1:50:27

Note: This blog post was co-authored by Zohal Azimi, a student at SUNY Farmingdale State College studying visual communications, and Shaimaa Lazem, a researcher at the City for Scientific Research and Technology Applications, Egypt. HCI research plays an important role in designing interactive systems and development worldwide. There is an increased awareness of and interest in designing for Arabic regions…

Women’s Health @CHI

Posted: Mon, June 19, 2017 - 4:58:24

Note: This blog post was co-authored by Lone Koefoed Hansen from Aarhus University. She works with feminist design, critical computing, and participatory IT. At CHI 2017 we ran a workshop to reimagine how technology intersects with women’s health. We brought together designers, engineers, programmers, and experts in women’s health over two days in an attempt to radically re-engineer the ways…

HCI Across Borders @CHI 2017

Posted: Thu, May 25, 2017 - 5:08:49

We are living in uncertain times where some borders are more visible than others. Even in our increasingly globalized cultures, as people and goods move from one place to another, across socioeconomic strata where multiple forms of translation take place between languages and disciplines, there can still be many barriers and dead ends to communication. Yet the field of human-computer…

Robots, aesthetics, and heritage contexts

Posted: Fri, April 21, 2017 - 12:11:41

Most people today have not yet had the opportunity to interact directly with a robot in their everyday lives, except maybe with children’s toys or those charming robotic vacuum cleaners. While there are ongoing experiments with robots in healthcare, many more are employed in high-tech efficient environments such as factories. But robots have also often played a large part in…

Design research and social media

Posted: Thu, April 13, 2017 - 11:37:54

The timing of my fieldwork about learning spaces in Bahrain was during the Arab Spring of 2011. This initially created significant cultural and political difficulties, not just for me, but for many others attempting to collect data about any topic in many Arabic-speaking countries. At the same time, this created a great opportunity. People’s voices were raised in social media,…

A history of human-computer interaction

Posted: Fri, March 24, 2017 - 10:46:31

A journey ended with the publication in January of my book, From Tool to Partner: The Evolution of Human-Computer Action.The beginningRon Baecker’s 1987 Readings in Human-Computer Interaction quoted from prescient 1960s essays by Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland, Ted Nelson, and others. I wondered, “How did I work for years in HCI without hearing about…

Toward affective social interaction in VR

Posted: Mon, March 20, 2017 - 3:47:26

I first encountered VR in the late 90s, as a researcher looking at how it provided engineers and designers an environment for prototyping. After that I became more interested in looking at how to augment reality and our surrounding environment; however, I had the impression that although VR had been around for many decades by that point, there were many…

Observations on finishing a book

Posted: Tue, January 03, 2017 - 10:39:03

I’ve only posted twice to the Interactions blog in 8 months, but I’ve been writing, and frequently thought “this would be a good blog essay.” Minutes ago, I emailed in the last proof edit for a book. This post covers things I learned about writing and the English language after a brief, relevant description of the book.From Tool to Partner:…

Escape the room: A girl on a drip, a pizza slice, and a smartphone set to stun

Posted: Fri, December 23, 2016 - 9:56:39

One late autumn afternoon I found myself in an Ohio hospital room sitting with a teenage girl I'll call Orleans Jackson. She was spending her 15th birthday “getting poked full of holes,” as she put it.Rail-thin with almond eyes, Orleans had her hair in springy dreadlocks. She apologized for “being in total moonface mode,” describing the signature look of those…