Blogs

Mikael Wiberg

Mikael Wiberg is a full professor in informatics at Umeå University, Sweden. Wiberg's main work is within the areas of interactivity, mobility, materiality, and architecture. He is a co-editor in chief of ACM Interactions, and his most recently published book is The Materiality of Interaction: Notes on the Materials of Interaction Design (MIT Press, 2018). [email protected]



Tangible XAI

Posted: Tue, February 15, 2022 - 4:11:15

Computational systems are becoming increasingly smart and automated. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems perceive things in the world, produce content, make decisions for and about us, and serve as emotional companions. From music recommendations to higher-stakes scenarios such as policy decisions, drone-based warfare, and automated driving directions, automated systems affect us all. But researchers and other experts are asking, How well…

On physical and social distancing: Reflections on moving just about everything online amid Covid-19

Posted: Mon, May 18, 2020 - 10:55:04

On March 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the spread of Covid-19 constituted a pandemic. They stated that that the virus was not just a threat to public health, but also a crisis that would affect every sector of public life: “All countries must strike a fine balance between protecting health, minimizing economic and social disruption, and respecting…

Material interaction design

Posted: Tue, April 10, 2018 - 11:28:01

In his book Designing Interactions (2006), Bill Moggridge focuses on how to design interactions with digital technologies. That makes sense if you think about interaction design as the practice of designing interactions. However, interactions cannot be fully designed, determined, restrained to a particular form, or fully predicted in the same way that a service can never be fully designed. At…

Multiple scales interaction design

Posted: Mon, November 02, 2015 - 11:54:10

”Attention to details” has always been a key concern for interaction design. With our attention to details we ensure that we as interaction designers think carefully about every little detail of how the user might interact with and through the digital technologies we design. As interaction designers, we share this belief that every tiny detail matters for the overall experience.Although…

Scripted interaction

Posted: Mon, October 05, 2015 - 10:51:06

"Interaction design" is a label for a field of research and for a practice. When we design interactive tools and gadgets we do interaction design. But what is it that we´re designing? And is this practice changing? Let me reflect on this a little bit. Inter-action design If we take this notion of interaction and we split it up into…

Conceptual precision in interaction design research

Posted: Wed, October 01, 2014 - 11:13:28

Interaction design research is to a large extent design driven. We do research through design. A design can be seen as a particular instantiation of a design idea. Accordingly, interaction design research is also about the development of ideas. However, there is no one-to-one relation between design ideas and design instantiations. A design idea can be expressed through a wide…

Interaction design for the Internet of Things

Posted: Fri, April 11, 2014 - 3:19:02

The Internet of Things (IoT) seems to be the next big thing, no pun intended! Embedded computing in everyday objects brings with it the potential of integrating physical things into acts of computing, in loops of human-computer interactions. IoT makes things networked and accessible over the Internet. And vice versa—these physical objects not only become input modalities to the Internet…

Implicit interaction design

Posted: Wed, February 19, 2014 - 10:41:19

I guess it’s not an understatement to say that 99.9% of all interaction design projects still end up as screen-based solutions in one form or another. Most of these solutions are also still built around the desktop computer as a model for how we should interact with computers. This model assumes that we interact with a computer via a screen…

A note on ‘compositional design thinking’

Posted: Tue, October 29, 2013 - 12:17:17

Design thinking is growing as an explicit approach to interaction design. By acknowledging the thoughtful aspects of making, our community simultaneously acknowledges how design is both about doing/making and about thinking/reflecting. This is, however, not something new to our community. Donald Schön made this point two decades ago in his book The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. In…

An “intellectual turn” at CHI´13?—Paris and the philosophy of interaction

Posted: Mon, April 15, 2013 - 10:51:56

CHI´13 is just around the corner now. In a couple of weeks from now the global CHI community is coming together, not primarily to meet the Spring in Paris, but to meet up, hang out, and continue discussions on where HCI is going and how to push HCI design and research forward. Arguments will be made, results will be presented,…