January + February 2016 | ACM Interactions

VOLUME XXIII.1 January + February 2016

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Demo Hour
- Demo hour
  
  Hayeon Jeong, Daniel Saakes, Geehyuk Lee, Augusto Esteves, Eduardo Velloso, Andreas Bulling, Katsutoshi Masai, Yuta Sugiura, Masa Ogata, Kai Kunze, Masahiko Inami, Maki Sugimoto, Anura Rathnayake, Tilak Dias
  
  1. I-Eng: A Toy for Second-Language Learning I-Eng is an interactive toy set that aims to teach new languages to young children between the ages of three and five. The toy consists of a talking plush doll that interacts with tagged objects. The doll speaks sentences related to nearby…
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What are you reading?
- What are you reading?
  
  Lauren Ruiz
  
  When I first joined Cooper and heard about its "Cook Blub," I was a little confused as to what that actually was. I quickly learned it was a unique name for their book club—a place where employees could nominate a book to read and discuss over lunch. Here I'll…
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Blog@IX
- The rise of incompetence
  
  Jonathan Grudin
  
  All public employees should be demoted to their immediately lower level, as they have been promoted until turning incompetent. — José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) In a hierarchy, individuals tend to rise to their levels of incompetence. — Laurence Peter (1919–1990) We should be enjoying a golden age of…
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How was it made?
- Lichtsuchende
  
  Dave Murray-Rust, Rocio von Jungenfeld
  
  Describe what you made. We made a photo-kinetic installation composed of a variable number Lichtsuchende with which people can interact using flashlights. The Lichtsuchende are small robotic creatures that form a cybernetic society of light-seeking flowers. They are designed to track light and move and shine in response, communicating…
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Columns
- Zen and the art of website maintenance
  
  Paul Haimes
  
  Picture a Zen garden. Peaceful, serene, and meticulously maintained by monks with the kind of patience that can only be gained through the pursuit of enlightenment. A visit to a temple in the ancient town of Kamakura a few years ago left me with a tiny glimpse into the…
- Trying to see the world with new eyes
  
  Elizabeth Churchill
  
  Have you ever had that conversation where you discuss which sense you'd miss the most? Sight? Hearing? Smell? Taste? Touch? A recent design discussion brought this to mind. An array of personas generated from discussion had proven to be oddly homogeneous when it came to sensorial capacity: None were…
- It’s not that hard
  
  Jonathan Bean
  
  The myth of technological progress lies at the center of human-computer interaction. We are all invested in the idea that big problems can be solved with big solutions, big data, more algorithms, and Moore's Law. For the past two years, I've been studying the green building industry in the…
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Day in the Lab
- Imagine lab, Hanyang University
  
  Ahreum Lee, Kyoungwon Seo, Jieun Kim, Gyu Kwon, Hokyoung Ryu
  
  How do you describe your lab to visitors? Inspired by the George Bernard Shaw quote, "Imagination is the beginning of creation," Imagine Lab is a research institute that strives to explore every imagined possibility. It was established in 2012 at Hanyang University in Seoul, Korea, initially created by two…
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Forums
- Bridging communities
  
  Birgit Penzenstadler, Ankita Rauturi, Christoph Becker, Juliet Norton, Bill Tomlinson, Six Silberman, Debra Richardson
  
  March 2015, California. In the room: psychologists, information scholars, HCI researchers, software engineering academics, information systems students, and others from the diverse communities of iSchools and sustainability research, coming together to establish "a community and potential research collaborations within the iSchools network to link efforts around ICT for sustainability."…
- Taking the code for a walk
  
  Delfina van Ditmar, Dan Lockton
  
  Our lives are increasingly informed by an algorithmic paradigm. We are profiled and analyzed, our behavior translated into data and connected to larger bodies of data. But as technology begins to make autonomous decisions, it is important to question the place of humans in algorithmic logic. The logic reflected…
- From tracking to personal health
  
  Susanne Boll, Wilko Heuten, Jochen Meyer
  
  Personal health has been gaining more and more attention lately, for good reasons. Two figures in particular provide strong motivation for this shift: In 2020, 73 percent of the world's deaths will stem from noncommunicable diseases [1]. These are largely preventable [2], particularly by reducing risk factors such as…
- Biosignals in human-computer interaction
  
  Albrecht Schmidt
  
  In this article I talk about how to interface—literally—with the human body. Of particular focus here is electrical interfaces that have gained popularity in the HCI community over the past several years. Neural and muscular activities in the human body generate measurable, discriminable electrical signals. In medical diagnostics, measuring…
- Accessibility for business and pleasure
  
  Sarah Horton, David Sloan
  
  With digital accessibility, standards compliance is a fleeting illusion, like a rainbow. Insights We are accessibility consultants who engage with clients from all sectors, many of whom are focused on compliance audits and remediation of accessibility issues. We recognize the value of evaluation and repair of digital resources.…
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Community square
- HCI without borders?
  
  Loren Terveen
  
  The Association of Computing Machinery was founded in the U.S. in 1947; its Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction was formed in 1982, also in the U.S. However, for the past generation, the professional field of computing and our discipline of human-computer interaction have become increasingly international, as reflected…
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Features
- Insertables: I’ve got IT under my skin
  
  Kayla Heffernan, Frank Vetere, Shanton Chang
  
  Imagine Dylan, a bureaucrat working in a foreign embassy. Dylan approaches a security door, arms overflowing with confidential reports. Dylan leans toward the door's access sensor and is authenticated. The door is now unlocked and can be easily pushed open with one shoulder, without the need to put down…
- Future designers: A rollercoaster for the mind
  
  Dimitris Grammenos
  
  P21 is an education advocacy group that focuses on developing appropriate skills in children for 21st-century life. The organization's Framework for 21st Century Learning states that "a focus on creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration is essential to prepare students for the future" [1]. Additionally, the outcomes of several…
- Communities and Technologies
  
  Volkmar Pipek, Gabriela Avram, Fiorella De Cindio
  
  When the first Communities and Technologies (C&T) conference took place in 2003 in Amsterdam (and then biannually), the international research interest in online communities had risen to a new peak. While the roots of the discourse of that time can be traced back to various disciplines like human-computer interaction,…
- Six factors for success in community broadband initiatives
  
  Claire Wallace, Kathryn Vincent
  
  The U.K. government aims to extend "superfast" broadband connections of at least 24 mbps to 95 percent of premises by 2017 as part of its Broadband Delivery U.K. strategy (https://www.gov.uk/broadband-delivery-uk). However, this still leaves many communities with inadequate or no broadband connectivity until then, and the problem of providing…
- Situated interfaces for engaging citizens on the go
  
  Luke Hespanhol, Martin Tomitsch, Ian McArthur, Joel Fredericks, Ronald Schroeter, Marcus Foth
  
  Governments around the world engage with communities to find ways to better support the interests and concerns of communities and stakeholders, aiming to provide opportunities for more citizens to be involved in decisions that affect them. However, traditional methods of community consultation such as face-to-face meetings and online surveys…
- Walking and designing with cultural heritage volunteers
  
  Luigina Ciolfi, Daniela Petrelli
  
  Cultural heritage is a variegated field of inquiry for human-computer interaction (HCI), including both efforts to understand how digital technologies mediate human activities in heritage settings and the development of interactives to support the interpretation of heritage. Cultural heritage takes many forms and heritage settings vary greatly, from museums…
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Community calendar
- Community calendar
  
  INTR Staff
  
  February TEI 2016 – ACM International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) Conference Dates: February 14–17, 2016 http://www.tei-conf.org/16/ CBP 2016 – 5th Annual International Conference on Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology (Singapore) Conference Dates: February 22–23, 2016 http://cognitive-behavior.org/index.html ICAART 2016 – 8th International Conference on Agents…
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Cover story
- Designing for the future—but which one?
  
  Bonnie Nardi
  
  The future seems more important than ever. Rapidly accumulating changes to our environment and culture demand that we look ahead. Technology drives change, and we in human-computer interaction should attend to the future. But which future? The one we want? The one we think is coming? Here, I examine…
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Features: Special topic: Communities and technologies
- Situated interfaces for engaging citizens on the go
  
  Luke Hespanhol, Martin Tomitsch, Ian McArthur, Joel Fredericks, Ronald Schroeter, Marcus Foth
  
  Governments around the world engage with communities to find ways to better support the interests and concerns of communities and stakeholders, aiming to provide opportunities for more citizens to be involved in decisions that affect them. However, traditional methods of community consultation such as face-to-face meetings and online surveys…
- Walking and designing with cultural heritage volunteers
  
  Luigina Ciolfi, Daniela Petrelli
  
  Cultural heritage is a variegated field of inquiry for human-computer interaction (HCI), including both efforts to understand how digital technologies mediate human activities in heritage settings and the development of interactives to support the interpretation of heritage. Cultural heritage takes many forms and heritage settings vary greatly, from museums…
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Visual thinking gallery
- Future robot
  
  Eli Blevis
  
  Genre: Human-robot interaction (HRI) ©2016 ACM1072-5220/16/01$15.00 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice…
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