Table of Contents

VOLUME XXIV.1 January - February 2017

  • WELCOME
    • WELCOME: Time to move on

      Ron Wakkary, Erik Stolterman

      Contemporary technology is changing our everyday environments. HCI is no longer only about the individual working in isolation with a computer at a desk. Our homes, workplaces, and public spaces are becoming interactive. Still, it seems as if the "power" to be part of the design of this new…

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  • Demo Hour
    • Demo hour

      Ippei Suzuki, Shuntarou Yoshimitsu, Keisuke Kawahara, Nobutaka Ito, Atushi Shinoda, Akira Ishii, Takatoshi Yoshida, Yoichi Ochiai, Wataru Yamada, Manabe Hiroyuki, Inrak Choi, Elliot Hawkes, David Christensen, Christopher Ploch, Sean Follmer, Oliver Glauser, Benedek Vartok, Wan-Chun Ma, Daniele Panozzo, Alec Jacobson, Otmar Hilliges, Olga Sorkine-Hornung

      1. Gushed Diffusers: Fast-moving, Floating, and Lightweight Midair Display Conventional aerial imaging systems are slow because they require a large, heavy setup. We use aerosol distribution from off-the-shelf spray as a fog screen that resists the wind and has high portability. As application examples, we present wearable applications and…

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  • What are you reading?
    • What are you reading?

      Daniel Fallman

      What are you reading?

      What happened to the Internet of Things? Just a couple of years ago, it was all the rage. IoT experts were highly sought after in the job market; conferences and workshops were being held in its honor; and whole research centers and institutes were formed and reformed to carry…

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  • Blog@IX
    • The map is the territory: A review of Stack

      David Fore

      The map is the territory: A review of Stack

      From that phantom vibration to that reflex to grab your own rear, you are responding to the call of The Stack ... From the virtual caliphate of ISIS to the first Sino-Google War of 2009 to the perpetually pending Marketplace Fairness Act, The Stack gives birth to new sovereignties…

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  • How was it made?
    • Feral screens

      Cally Gatehouse

      Feral screens

      Describe what you made. Feral Screens is an ongoing research through design project that seeks to critically examine urban digital screens and to explore alternative ways of using digital technology to mediate public life. A feral animal is a domesticated species that lives in the wild, often on the…

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  • Departments
    • Community calendar

      INTR Staff

      Community calendar

      February ICAART 2017 - 9th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (Porto, Portugal) Conference Dates: February 24–26, 2017 http://www.icaart.org/ CSCW 2017 - 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (Portland, Oregon, USA) Conference Dates: February 25–March 1, 2017 https://cscw.acm.org/2017/ VISIGRAPP 2017 - 12th International Joint…

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  • Columns
    • A user, an interface, or none

      Uri Kartoun

      A user, an interface, or none

      Google and Microsoft are known primarily for three major services: search, map navigation, and email. One fundamental requirement of a high-quality software service is responsiveness. Google and Microsoft excel in providing fast responses across their services, making the user experience strikingly attractive. User interface (UI) advances obviously make software…

    • On high-def Diderot and the cost of climate change

      Jonathan Bean

      On high-def Diderot and the cost of climate change

      I am not the only one who has found comfort in the Retina display, for the sharper display grants the farsighted a few more hours of screen time before headache sets in. Apple, which trademarked the term to describe displays with pixels that are too small to be distinguished…

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  • Day in the Lab
    • Mind Music Machine Lab, Michigan Tech

      Steven Landry

      How do you describe your lab to visitors? The Mind Music Machine (tri-M) Lab is an interdisciplinary research group based in cognitive science, human factors, and computer science at Michigan Tech. The mind is our ultimate research theme; music is our language and methodology; machinery is our research tool…

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  • Forums
    • Furious futures and apocalyptic design fictions

      Theresa Tanenbaum, Marcel Pufal, Karen Tanenbaum

      Furious futures and apocalyptic design fictions

      Immortan Joe surveys the wretched crowd from his vantage point above the desolate wasteland. Behind him, cool, clean water pools around the enormous pumps that operate at his command. He stands in the opening of a sandstone mouth, with skeletal teeth as parapets. On the two directly in front…

    • Strategic UX: The value of making the problem bigger

      David Siegel

      Strategic UX: The value of making the problem bigger

      As usability and user research have matured, the emphasis has shifted from championing the concept of user-centeredness to making it happen on a daily basis. For many UX researchers, this can mean functioning tactically, like QA technicians. Even researchers who do foundational user research, which we tend to consider…

    • Common pitfalls in customer journey maps

      Michael Thompson

      Common pitfalls in customer journey maps

      We've all seen them. Colleagues taking turns tapping Post-its of different colors onto the walls of meeting rooms, standing back pensively, then grouping and regrouping them in seemingly arbitrary ways. Over time, those Post-its evolve into tidy little rows and broad columns. Later, they take on a more even…

    • Creating user interfaces with electrical muscle stimulation

      Stefan Schneegass, Albrecht Schmidt, Max Pfeiffer

      Creating user interfaces with electrical muscle stimulation

      Muscle movement is central to virtually everything we do, be it walking, writing, drawing, smiling, or singing. Even while we're standing still, our muscles are active, ensuring that we keep our balance. In a recent forum [1] we showed how electrical signals on the skin that reflect muscle activity…

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  • Community square
    • Sustaining our community

      Loren Terveen

      Sustaining our community

      The events and activities you know and love in the SIGCHI community—the CHI conference, the other 20-plus SIGCHI-sponsored conferences, special workshops, and so on—are all volunteer-driven. Volunteers plan, organize, and run these activities (with great help from professional staff at ACM and vendors). This means that any problems with…

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  • Features
    • Walking and wiring the land: Indigenous art practice in games

      Elizabeth LaPensée, Vicki Moulder

      Walking and wiring the land: Indigenous art practice in games

      In the following conversation, Vicki Moulder and Elizabeth LaPensée discuss the intersections of game development and LaPensée's artistic practice. LaPensée's social impact game Techno Medicine Wheel brings the digital to the land by using QR codes to encourage active engagement with traditional medicinal plants growing in urban spaces. Her…

    • Wearables to support interdependent play

      Katherine Isbister

      Wearables to support interdependent play

      How do we create wearable computing that truly augments everyday in-person social interaction? In my research group, we are using playful prototypes to tackle this question. Why are we studying games and play? Playgrounds have long been a place for social pleasures and also for working out conflicts among…

    • Educational playgrounds: How context-aware systems enable playful coached learning

      Oliver Korn, Alan Dix

      Educational playgrounds: How context-aware systems enable playful coached learning

      With edutainment and serious games, education has often been among the first domains to adopt new interaction paradigms. However, on the technology side, this domain remains conservative: Education is driven not by technology but rather by people. Thus, apart from examples like Moodle, MOOCs, and smartboards, much of HCI's…

    • Adventure and technology: An earthquake-interrupted expedition to Mt. Everest

      Florian Mueller, Sarah Pell

      Adventure and technology: An earthquake-interrupted expedition to Mt. Everest

      On March 31, 2015, Sarah Jane Pell left our lab to summit Mt. Everest. Her planning required years of physical and mental training, logistical preparation with expert advisors, and competency in using alpine equipment as well as adventure and media technology. Her goal was to climb to the summit…

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  • Cover story
    • Design through collective action / collective action through design

      Christopher Le Dantec

      We take for granted that human-computer interaction focuses on the interfaces and experiences that people have with computing. It's built into the name of the field, rooted in the human factors and engineering psychology origins of building systems well suited to our perceptual and cognitive abilities. But as a…

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  • Special topic: Intersections of craft, fabrication, and play
    • Introduction

      Theresa Tanenbaum, Gillian Smith

      Introduction

      Intersections of Craft, Fabrication, and Play There is a growing research community exploring intersecting themes of craft, computation, and fabrication. Researchers in this space come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds: from practicing artists to ethnographers to technologists. All share an interest in incorporating playfulness into their inquiry, using…

    • Making a critical playshop

      Austin Toombs, Gabriele Ferri, Shannon Grimme, Shad Gross, Michael Stallings, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell

      Making a critical playshop

      Criticality joined with making—critical making—is a provocative topic in interaction design [1,2,3]. During our three-year ethnography of a small Midwestern hackerspace [4], we observed participants who might be described as already on the edges of critical making in their own practice, though they had not heard the term. We…

    • Designing craft games

      Anne Sullivan, Gillian Smith

      Designing craft games

      Computer games and traditional handcrafts are seemingly disparate domains, but they share the common property of being inherently playful. Though the playfulness associated with games is obvious, crafting promotes a different kind of play. Hobbyists and professional crafters alike refer to experimentation with color, material, and layout choices as…

    • Augmenting reality for augmented reality

      Michael Cowling, Theresa Tanenbaum, James Birt, Karen Tanenbaum

      Augmenting reality for augmented reality

      There are two competing narratives for the future of computationally augmented spaces. On the one hand, we have the Internet of Things [1], where the narrative is one of making our environments more aware of us and of themselves, and generally making everything "smarter" through embedded computation, sensing, and…

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  • Visual thinking gallery
    • Flow

      Priscilla Ho

      Flow

      Contributor: Priscilla Ho Curator/Editor: Eli Blevis Genre: Disconnecting, maker culture, well-being, performative objects Apropos of the concept of flow, we may be happier if we spend less time online and more time face-to-face with the people who matter most to us. This interactive tea set allows people to set…

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