Table of Contents
VOLUME XVIII.3 May + June 2011
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Welcome
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WELCOMEParticipation, technology and interaction design
Ron Wakkary, Erik Stolterman
As a reader of this magazine, you are probably involved in some new forms of social participatory work made possible by the Internet and interactive technology. Many of us are working to achieve some common goal by using technology that helps us conquer distance and time. It seems as…
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Demo Hour
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Demo hour
Michael Haller, Thomas Seifried, Stacey Scott, Florian Perteneder, Christian Rendl, Daisuke Sakamoto, Masahiko Inami, Pranav Mistry, Pattie Maes, Seth Hunter, David Merrill, Jeevan Kalanithi, Susanne Seitinger, Daniel Taub, Alex Taylor
CRiSTAL CRiSTAL simplifies the control of our digital devices in and around the living room. The system provides a novel experience for controlling devices in a home environment by enabling users to directly interact with those devices using multi-touch gestures on a digital tabletop. CRiSTAL consists of an interactive…
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Blogpost
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Killing off user-centered design
John Zimmerman
Over the past few years, I have heard many proclamations and complaints from IxD/HCI practitioners and researchers that make me feel we have lost our way, that we have drunk a bit too much of our own Kool-Aid. I am the user's advocate. I fight with the developers and…
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Departments
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SIGCHI
Gerrit van der Veer
ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) elects its executive committee (EC) every three years (currently: Elizabeth Churchill, Loren Terveen, Gary Olson, John Thomas, Paula Kotzé, Fred Sampson, and myself). The EC is rounded out by the editors-in-chief of interactions Magazine (Ron Wakkary and Erik Stolterman), the past…
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Community calendar 2011
INTR Staff
May 2011: Design Action, Leadership, and the Future (Brisbane, Australia) Conference date: July 22-24 Expressions of interest due: May 6 Contact: [email protected] CHI 2011: The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vancouver) Conference date: May 7-12 http://www.chi2011.org/ ISMAR 2011: The 10th IEEE International Symposium on Mixed…
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Column
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BETWEEN THE LINES The social life of marginalia
Liz Danzico
On a single day, I count 44 notes I've scribbled down while traveling between home and work. These notes are part private, part public, and all parts messy. These are everyday marginalianotes in a printed book, saves in Instapaper, lists in Simplenote, snaps in Instagram, likes in Tumblr, shares…
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Columns
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Making time
Elizabeth Churchill
"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been transformed into a monstrous verminous bug." Thus begins one of my favorite novels, The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. What is most remarkable about Gregor's awakening, in which he discovers…
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Forum
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Building outwards from sustainable HCI
Elaine Huang
This column marks the start of a new forum for interactions entitled Sustainability in (Inter)Action, which considers the application of HCI and interaction design to problems of environmental sustainability and explores the ways in which knowledge and expertise from other fields can contribute to these efforts. In recent years…
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An internet of things that do not exist
Chris Speed
What are the implications of our relationship with physical artifacts as the technical and cultural phenomenon known as the Internet of Things begins to emerge? The term, coined in 1999, is attributed to the Auto-ID research group at MIT and was explored in depth by the International Telecommunication Union…
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IT in healthcare
Elizabeth Mynatt
Healthcare is both deeply personal and staggeringly complex. It starts with individual physical bodies and stretches to include an array of technologies, physical places, caregiver networks (both formal and informal), and decision-making tasks. Each configuration of body, people, technology, places, and decisions presents compelling and timely challenges for human-centered…
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Day in the Lab
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Human-Centered Interaction Design Lab (HCIDL), KAIST, Department of Industrial Design
INTR Staff
http://hcidl.kaist.ac.kr How do you describe your lab to visitors? The Human-Centered Interaction Design Lab (HCIDL) is a leading Korean institution that focuses on planning and developing human-centered interactions using in-depth research to tackle physical, cognitive, emotional, and socio-cultural aspects of the human being. The lab is embedded in the…
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Forums
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INTERACTING WITH PUBLIC POLICYAre HCI researchers an endangered species in Brazil?
Simone Barbosa, Clarisse de Souza
Recently, Brazilian researchers have been receiving mixed signals regarding the recognition of human-computer interaction (HCI) as a relevant area of study in Brazil. On the one hand, HCI was granted considerable prestige when the Brazilian Computer Society launched its Five Grand Challenges for the decade in 2006. One of…
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TIMELINESThe DigiBarn computer museum
Bruce Damer
In 1993 ACM sponsored HCI researchers on a vist to Eastern and Central Europe. I met Bruce Damer in Prague, where he held a professorship in computer science despite not having a Ph.D. Bruce quickly impressed me as one of the most brilliantly creative people I'd ever met, a…
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Conversational alignment
A. Henderson, Jed Harris
People invent and revise their conversation midsentence. People assume they understand enough to converse and then simply jump in; all the while they monitor and correct when things appear to go astray from the purposes at hand. This article explores how this adaptive regime works, and how it meshes…
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Features
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Technology and the human lifespan
Michael Massimi
Jeanine* was a 32-year-old project manager, married and pregnant with her first child. She regularly posted Facebook updates about her pregnancy to share her excitement with friends and family, often with accompanying cell phone photos of her growing belly. After nine months of anticipation and a smooth delivery, she…
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How high can expectations go?
Pedro Campos, Miguel Campos, Joaquim Jorge
The experience is common: You and your interaction design teammates have collaboratively conceived, designed, and installed a fancy multimedia installation, following every important user-centered design principle, actively involving all stakeholders in the design process, validating every requirement and concern, and finally installing the myriad of equipments needed. And you…
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Public policy and HCI in the U.S. context
Jonathan Lazar
Although most of us working in HCI have no background in public policy, non-governmental and governmental policy decisions have a major impact on the work that we do. This is true across the globe. As researchers we are used to collaborating internationally; therefore, I know not everyone within the…
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How prototyping practices affect design results
Steven Dow
Iterate rapidly. Explore broadly. Gather feedback from multiple sources. Don't conflate ego with object. These pearls of wisdom state principles and values with which few designers disagree. Behind these mantras lie decades of human science research that can enrich our understanding of design. For the past few years, my…
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Using 3-D projection to bring a statue to life
Kim Halskov, Peter Dalsgaard
In the dungeons of Kronborg, a nearly 400-year-old Renaissance castle known from Shakespeare's Hamlet, there is a statue of Holger the Dane. Holger the Dane is a mythical figure who, according to one myth, will awaken and defend the country when an enemy from beyond the borders threatens the…
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Experimental design
Jeremiah Still
Like many who submit manuscripts to the CHI conference each year, I look forward to reading the reviewers' reflections on my submissions. This year my coauthors and I were asked to justify the validity of our highly controlled research; similar requests have been made of our recent submissions to…
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Cover story
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Understanding, fostering, and supporting cultures of participation
Gerhard Fischer
Cultures are defined in part by their media and their tools for thinking, working, learning, and collaborating. In the past, the design of most media emphasized a clear distinction between producers and consumers [1]. Television is the medium that most obviously exhibits this orientation and has contributed to the…
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