Interactions

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,…

From stereoscopes to holograms: The latest interaction design platform

Posted: Tue, January 10, 2017 - 10:38:04

Shortly before the widespread availability of photographs in the first third of the 19th century, stereoscopes appeared. We’ve been flirting with portable, on-demand three-dimensionality in experience ever since. From Sir Charles Wheatstone’s invention in 1838 of a dual display to approximate binocular depth perception through the ViewMaster fad of the 1960s, people have been captivated by the promise of a…

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 and personas and information visualization and so much more from attending two- or three-day events—and even local evening presentations from peers and leaders alike, all centered on this thing of…

Thoughts on the SIGCHI Accessibility Report

Posted: Wed, December 30, 2015 - 10:43:54

This post is based around the SIGCHI Community Accessibility Report, posted on behalf of the SIGCHI Accessibility Community. Find us at https://www.facebook.com/groups/SIGCHIaccess/ and http://www.sigchi.org/communities/access; contact us at [email protected]. About 15% of people worldwide have a disability [1] and the likelihood of experiencing disability naturally increases with age. SIGCHI can attract new members, and make current members feel welcome, by making…

A matter of semantics…

Posted: Tue, April 28, 2015 - 12:07:54

In 2005, I wrote a blog post entitled, “Is ‘user’ the best word?” followed a year later by “Words (and definitions) matter; however…” The debate about the words we use in our field and their meaning has continued since that time, with many of the old arguments being resurrected. For example, regarding the beleaguered term user: Jack Dorsey dropped its…

Destroying the box: Experience architecture inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright

Posted: Mon, January 05, 2015 - 11:58:06

"When we said we wanted a house at Bear Creek," client Lillian Kaufmann said to Frank Lloyd Wright, "we didn't imagine you would build it ON the creek!" To which Wright replied, "In time you'd grow tired of the sight of creek...but you'll never grow tired of the sound." And he was right. Fallingwater stands as the most recognized house…