Interactions

Should usability testers be certified?

Posted: Wed, April 03, 2019 - 11:01:26

Should usability testers be certified? Yes. Or rather: YES! Let me ask two counter questions: Would you trust a doctor who was not certified? Would you want to fly with a pilot who was not properly certified? Just like me, you hopefully want usability work, especially usability testing, to be taken seriously by your stakeholders, in particular your development team…

CSCW Research @ Latin America

Posted: Thu, March 28, 2019 - 2:20:17

After participating in SIGCHI Across Borders events, we proposed and ran a workshop in CSCW 2018 to (i) identify where CSCW and social computing research was being conducted in and about Latin America (LatAm), (ii) characterize its common themes and methods, and (iii) envision a shared agenda that could make LatAm-centered CSCW research more visible and impactful to the international…

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…

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…

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…

Reflecting on the design-culture connection in HCI and HCI4D apropos of Interact 2017 field trips

Posted: Tue, May 01, 2018 - 12:15:45

Note: This blog post was co-authored by Nimmi Rangaswamy, associate professor at the Kohli Centre on Intelligent Systems, Indian Institute of Information Technology, IIIT, Hyderabad. She brings an anthropological lens in understanding the impacts of AI research and praxis. She is also adjunct professor at the Indian institute of Technology, IIT, Hyderabad where she teaches courses at the intersections of…

Leveraging Afrofuturism in human-centered design: A way forward

Posted: Wed, April 04, 2018 - 10:29:27

Foresee: Process dictates product. To design for equity, we must design equitably.The practice of equitable design requires that we are mindful how we achieve equity.Inclusive design practices raise the voices of the marginalized, strengthen relationships across differences, shift positions, and recharge our democracy. — equityXDesign It is the aim of my March + April 2018 Interactions article “Afrofuturism, Inclusion, and…

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…

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.…

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…