Table of Contents
VOLUME XXV.1 January + February 2018
- WELCOME
- Demo Hour
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What are you reading?
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Anirudha Joshi
Anirudha Joshi
I work in the area known as HCI for development (HCI4D), or what we interpret in our lab as "interaction design for Indian needs." Much of our work stays inspired and challenged by a few landmark books. In We Are Like That Only Rama Bijapurkar deals with the complex…
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Blog@IX
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Women’s health @ CHI
Madeline Balaam, Lone Hansen
At CHI 2017 we ran a workshop to reimagine how technology intersects with women's health. We brought together designers, engineers, programmers, and experts in women's health over two days in an attempt to radically re-engineer the ways in which women receive healthcare. We made use of the excellent public…
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How was it made?
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iSoft
Sang Yoon, Guiming Chen, Ke Huo, Yunbo Zhang, Karthik Ramani
Describe what you made. iSoft is a single-volume soft sensor that provides muti-modal sensing, including real-time continuous-contact and stretching sensing. With the help of a low-cost compression-molding process and a customization software toolkit, we enable users to design and fabricate their own sensors. The flexible and stretchable nature of…
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Columns
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Let’s strengthen the HCI community by taking a gap year!
Jonathan Lazar
If we could have just one wish for the HCI/IxD/UX community, what would it be? My wish is that we all could take a deep breath, spend a year working or studying outside HCI in a related field, and then come back and apply what we learned to understanding…
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Data, design, and ethnography
Elizabeth Churchill
For years, ethnographically inspired research has been conducted to help us understand how technologies are adopted (or not) and adapted in everyday life. While some of this research has societal and technology-governance implications, most of it is more specifically scoped, in service of technology design writ small and large,…
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Relating to the internet of things
Jonathan Bean
In a piece published last year in this magazine, Charles Hannon made a compelling case for careful thinking about how the words used by AI interfaces such as Siri and Alexa signal inferior status [1]. The way we—or our AI interfaces—use pronouns and other parts of speech is an…
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Special topic
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Special Topic: Taking Action in a Changing World
Ann Light, Christopher Frauenberger, Jennifer Preece, Paul Strohmeier, Maria Ferrario
Taking Action in a Changing World In the last hours of CHI 2017, a group of researchers from universities and businesses across the northern hemisphere sat down together to consider "Taking Action in a Changing World" [1]. The title of the special interest group (SIG) is significant; it speaks…
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Crafting a place for attending to the things of design at CHI
William Odom, Tom Jenkins, Kristina Andersen, Bill Gaver, James Pierce, Anna Vallgårda, Andrew Boucher, David Chatting, Janne van Kollenburg, Kevin Lefeuvre
Over the past two years, we have organized workshops at the CHI conference that have focused on the "Things of Design Research" [1,2]. The goal of these workshops is simple: to explore and develop a venue at CHI for research through design (RtD) practitioners to materially share their work…
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- Day in the Lab
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Forums
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Gender equity in technologies
Nithya Sambasivan, Garen Checkley, Nova Ahmed, Amna Batool
Not long ago, Nutan, a high school graduate in rural Uttar Pradesh, India, purchased a smartphone with her savings. She used the phone to watch how-to videos on eyebrow threading, facials, and hairstyles, and music videos by her favorite star, Ranbir Kapoor. Nutan now owns a beauty salon, building…
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Rethinking assumptions in the design of health and wellness tracking tools
Sean Munson
Today's interactions with technology leave digital traces that are a potential font of insights into our lives. Emails contain receipts of our social and business transactions. Phones record our locations, estimate our physical activity, and infer how we traveled between different places. Wearables collect increasingly reliable and detailed data…
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Launching problem space research in the frenzy of software production
Indi Young, Kunyi Mangalam
"First we need to understand the problem." You hear this phrase more often these days in the applied realm of software development. Because of design thinking and lean UX, there is more awareness of the value of understanding the problem space. However, outside of design teams, no matter if…
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Radar sensing in human-computer interaction
Hui-Shyong Yeo, Aaron Quigley
The exploration of novel sensing technologies to facilitate new interaction modalities remains an active research topic in human-computer interaction. Across the breadth of HCI conferences, we can see the development of new forms of interaction underpinned by the appropriation or adaptation of sensing techniques based on the measurement of…
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Solutions for environment, economy, and democracy (SEED)
W. Bennett, Alan Borning, Deric Gruen
The quality of life of growing numbers of people on the planet is threatened by a set of systemic problems: dependence on fossil fuels, pressures for unrealistic levels of economic growth, inequitable distribution of wealth and income, the excesses and hidden costs of consumerism, and the undue influence of…
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Community square
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Empowering the HCI community
Loren Terveen
One of the major commitments of the current SIGCHI Executive Committee is to sustain and grow the HCI community. My previous columns have addressed many initiatives designed to serve this goal: global development and community integration (January–February 2016); ensuring our publications are widely available (May–June 2016); supporting our sponsored…
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Features
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Special Topic: Taking Action in a Changing World
Ann Light, Christopher Frauenberger, Jennifer Preece, Paul Strohmeier, Maria Ferrario
Taking Action in a Changing World In the last hours of CHI 2017, a group of researchers from universities and businesses across the northern hemisphere sat down together to consider "Taking Action in a Changing World" [1]. The title of the special interest group (SIG) is significant; it speaks…
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Glimpses of the future: Designing fictions for mixed-reality performances
Asreen Rostami, Chiara Rossitto, Donald McMillan, Jocelyn Spence, Robyn Taylor, Jonathan Hook, Julie Williamson, Louise Barkhuus
Mixed-reality performances (MRPs) are complex and hybrid artistic experiences that incorporate combinations of live and interactive performance, in which audience and performers interact with technology and digital media in real and virtual worlds [1]. Within the HCI community, performances by Blast Theory and Brendan Walker are examples of technological…
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Cover story
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Exploring design trade-offs for quality of life in human-centered design
Gerhard Fischer
To understand, foster, nurture, and support Quality of Life (QoL) is one of the most challenging design problems of the digital age. QoL is a broad concept without a precise, generally accepted definition. It is not out in the world to be discovered, but rather is an objective achieved…
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Calendar
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Calendar
INTR Staff
January Group '18: 2018 ACM Conference on Supporting Groupwork (Sanibel Island, Florida, USA) Conference Dates: January 7–10, 2018 http://group.acm.org March HRI '18: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (Chicago, USA) Conference Dates: March 5–8, 2018 http://humanrobotinteraction.org/2018/ IUI '18: 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (Tokyo, Japan) Conference…
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Exit
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How to buy ice cream from the red army with a smartphone
Eli Blevis
Contributor: Eli Blevis Curator/Editor: Rachel Clarke Genre: Interactivity in situ, humor, street photography, photographic narrative sequence The sign on the trolley reads "ice cream." The customer and seller wave their smartphones together to make the transaction via smartphone app (WeChat). The seller is wearing a Red Army uniform. In…
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