Table of Contents

VOLUME XXIII.2 March + April 2016

  • Demo Hour
    • Demo hour

      Harshit Agrawal, Udayan Umapathi, Robert Kovacs, Johannes Frohnhofen, Hsiang-Ting Chen, Stefanie Mueller, Patrick Baudisch, Calvin Rubens, Sean Braley, Antonio Gomes, Daniel Goc, Xujing Zhang, Juan Carrascal, Roel Vertegaal, Yu-Hsuan Huang, Tzu-Chieh Yu, Pei-Hsuan Tsai, Yu-Xiang Wang, Wan-ling Yang, Hao-Yu Chang, Yu-Kai Chiu, Tsai Yu-Ju, Ming Ouhyoung, Munehiko Sato, Rohan Puri, Alex Olwal, Deepak Chandra, Ivan Poupyrev, Ramesh Raskar

      1. Protopiper Protopiper is a computer-aided handheld fabrication device that allows users to sketch room-sized objects at actual scale. The key idea behind Protopiper is its main building material: It uses adhesive tape formed into tubes rather than extruded plastic or photopolymer lines. Since the resulting tubes are hollow,…

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

      Camille Moussette

      What are you reading?

      Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity By Colin McGinn (2015) How did we get from apelike creatures to modern humans with evolved rational thought, language, and culture? Colin McGinn adopts an atypical evolutionary philosophy perspective on the crucial role of the hand in human evolution. His journey…

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  • Blog@IX
    • Go west

      Deborah Tatar

      Go west

      As a professor, I now get to witness young people aspiring to "go west." They know the familiar trope "Go west, young man" ascribed to the 19th-century publisher Horace Greeley. They inherit the idea of manifest destiny, even when the term itself was buried in a single paragraph in…

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  • How was it made?
    • I-Eng

      I-Eng

      Describe what you made. I-Eng is an interactive toy set designed to teach new languages to young children. A plush doll speaks sentences related to nearby tagged objects and, depending on the context, can ask a child for other related objects. Through interaction with these tangible objects, an unscripted…

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  • Day in the Lab
    • SecondLab, PUC-Rio

      Hugo Fuks, Marcio Cunha, Bruno Chagas, Fernando Ismério, Bruno Pontes

      How do you describe your lab to visitors? SecondLab is a branch of the Software Engineering Lab at PUC-Rio (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro) for prototyping assistive technology solutions based on software and novel hardware. Some of the research topics currently being investigated include the Internet of…

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  • Special topic: 40 years of critical computing: the Decennial Aarhus Conference series
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  • Forums
    • Adaptive architecture

      Holger Schnädelbach

      Adaptive architecture

      The concerns of architecture, pervasive computing, and interaction design have been overlapping for quite some time. This forum provides a welcome outlet to discuss the impacts of interactive technologies becoming embedded into our surroundings and the use of interactive technologies to reinvent the built environment, as forum editor Mikael…

    • What’s special about aging

      Ann Light, Sonja Pedell, Toni Robertson, Jenny Waycott, Jeanette Bell, Jeannette Durick, Tuck Leong

      What’s special about aging

      Aging is the most natural thing in the world. It underpins our understanding of life and how we measure time. We start effortlessly in our earliest youth, making adjustments in how we live as our circumstances and capabilities change. And we continue realigning as we grow older, making change…

    • The future of HCI education: A flexible, global, living curriculum

      Elizabeth Churchill, Anne Bowser, Jennifer Preece

      The future of HCI education: A flexible, global, living curriculum

      Educational curricula in human-computer interaction (HCI) need to be broad and nimble. To address the first requirement—breadth—HCI focuses on people and technology to drive human-centered technology innovation. HCI students and scholars learn about basic human characteristics and develop the necessary skills to study people's activities with and around technologies.…

    • A University-NGO partnership to sustain assistive technology projects

      Fabio Calefato, Filippo Lanubile, Roberto De Nicolò, Fabrizio Lippolis

      A University-NGO partnership to sustain assistive technology projects

      Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are often plagued by a dearth of human and financial resources. IT Without Borders (ISF, from the Italian Informatici Senza Frontiere) is an Italian NGO that considers IT to be an asset of primary necessity and an essential prerequisite for economic and social development. Founded in…

    • Design ideal: Performing a dialogue between theorizing and designing

      Naveen Bagalkot, Tomas Sokoler

      Design ideal: Performing a dialogue between theorizing and designing

      Increasingly, researchers engage with design as a means of inquiry to understand and theorize about real-world situations in a nuanced and generative manner. Doing so involves negotiating a tension between two opposing objectives. On the one hand, design is inherently concerned with addressing the problem through shaping a unique…

    • A usability test is not an interview

      Morten Hertzum

      A usability test is not an interview

      Usability tests are conducted to gauge users' experience with a system, preferably before it is released for real use, and thereby find any problems that prevent users from completing their tasks, slow them down, or otherwise degrade their user experience. Such tests are important to successful systems development, yet…

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  • Community square
    • SIGCHI’s Iran chapter

      Kaveh Bazargan, Tuomo Kujala

      SIGCHI’s Iran chapter

      As the founding chair of the SIGCHI's Iran chapter and assistant professor in HCI in the Department of Information Technology Management at Shahid Beheshti (National) University (of Iran) (SBU) in Tehran, I am honored to write this short contribution. ACM's former chief executive officer John White officially chartered SIGCHI's…

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  • Features
    • Do androids dream of electric steeds? The allure of horse-computer interaction

      Steve North

      Do androids dream of electric steeds? The allure of horse-computer interaction

      Chaucer's "horse of brass" perfectly illustrates how humans tend to see a property in nature that we admire and immediately want to control it. In this case, the horse's "free will" is seen as an obstacle between the animal's fast-paced athleticism and our desire to master it. The implied…

    • Encounters with HCI pioneers: A personal photo journal

      Ben Shneiderman

      Encounters with HCI pioneers: A personal photo journal

      Ben Shneiderman: Pioneer of direct manipulation Pioneers in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) are memorable for their extraordinary research, astonishing designs, energetic lectures, passionate discussions, and personal warmth. As a community we have had as much impact as the chip designers in enabling 7+ billion people to benefit…

    • The value of casting

      Jaakko Lehikoinen, Sami Vihavainen, Ville Tuominen, Andy Sarfas

      The value of casting

      The grand challenge of any business is to offer a compelling value proposition and to ensure that the associated experiences are met when the end user interacts with the product or service. For example, if you purchase a ticket to fly from the U.K. to the U.S. with Virgin…

    • The user reconfigured: On subjectivities of information

      Jeffrey Bardzell

      The user reconfigured: On subjectivities of information

      Interaction design researchers are increasingly focusing on the changing roles of the user. By this we do not mean how technologies have changed people. Instead, we refer here to how interaction designers have deployed "the user" as a kind of rhetorical or discursive construct. In an earlier paper [1],…

    • A short guide to material speculation: Actual artifacts for critical inquiry

      Ron Wakkary, William Odom, Sabrina Hauser, Garnet Hertz, Henry Lin

      A short guide to material speculation: Actual artifacts for critical inquiry

      Design has long borrowed from fiction in techniques like scenarios, personas, and enactments. Speculative inquiries in design like futuring, forecasting, and envisionments have also deeply incorporated practices of fiction. More recently, design fiction has emerged as a uniquely productive approach to speculative inquiries [1]. Given this, we see an…

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  • Community calendar
    • Community calendar

      INTR Staff

      Community calendar

      March Interaction 16 (Helsinki, Finland) Conference Dates: March 2–4, 2016 http://interaction16.ixda.org/ IUI 2016 – ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (Sonoma, CA, USA) Conference Dates: March 7–10, 2016 http://iui.acm.org/2016/ HRI 2016 – 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (Christchurch, New Zealand) Conference Dates: March 7–10, 2016 http://humanrobotinteraction.org/2016/…

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  • Department
    • Feedback

      INTR Staff

      Feedback

      BLOG/Mikael Wiberg: Multiple Scales Interaction Design http://interactions.acm.org/blog/view/multiple-scales-interaction-design UX and architecture have always been comparable in many ways. I very much agree with this observation. I don't think it's a new phase, but one that is getting more recognition. The devil may be in the details, but a designer must…

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  • Cover story
    • Humanistic HCI

      Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell

      Insights It is unconventional, perhaps narcissistic, to speak first of ourselves. However, a value of humanistic thought is a reflexive awareness of the conditions of one's own knowing, and also a disclosure to one's audience of who is speaking. Readers should know who is telling this story, for both…

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  • Visual thinking gallery
    • Rooftop garden + fish pond, Jing’an district, Shanghai

      Eli Blevis, Bonnie Nardi

      Rooftop garden + fish pond, Jing’an district, Shanghai

      Contributors: Eli Blevis and Bonnie Nardi Curator/Editor: Eli Blevis Genre: Urban HCI, food, sustainability A fish pond is visible in the top-left corner of the rooftop garden pictured. ©2016 ACM1072-5520/16/03$15.00 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom…

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