January - February 2022 | ACM Interactions

VOLUME XXIX.1 January - February 2022

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WELCOME
- Climate care
  
  Mikael Wiberg, Alex Taylor, Daniela Rosner
  
  An issue on climate needs no introduction. Shockingly, it feels like a platitude to say that we are in the midst of a climate crisis that necessitates profound changes to the ways all of us, globally, live. Nevertheless, it is time to act. Given the challenges we are facing…
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What are you reading?
- What are you reading? Aalok Khandekar
  
  Aalok Khandekar
  
  Over the past year, I have been studying how cities and governments in India are responding to the increasing incidence of heatwaves (a phenomenon now also underscored by the recently released IPCC report [1]), a topic I know also occupies some in the HCI and CSCW communities. Over the…
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Blog@IX
- Where is the transparency of the new ACM violations database?
  
  Angelika Strohmayer
  
  After a summer of discussions and action about racism in our community in 2020 (e.g., [1]), the spring of 2021 raised further concerns about harassment and oppression. Long before this eventful year, however, I and many others have had both private and somewhat public conversations about the need to…
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Exhibit X
- Secrets of soil
  
  Henry Driver
  
  Secrets of Soil is an interactive experience into the hidden world of soil. Your journey will take you to a microscopic world to witness the essential life forms that live there. See how bacteria and plants speak to each other, glide through vast fungal webs, and unearth the secret…
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Columns
- Black radical design: Bringing a vital legacy of visual culture to technology worlds
  
  Edna Bonhomme
  
  Many know about the Black Panther Party's iconic fashion—the berets that rested on their illustrious Afros or their well-fitted Black attire that created unity on their marches. But few have looked closely at the Black Panthers' political iconography, which anchored their radical politics to their understanding about land, colonialism,…
- Be like a hummingbird: Three opportunities to do the best we can for this planet we call home
  
  Daria Loi
  
  According to the National Centers for Environmental Information [1], August 2020 was, in the Northern Hemisphere where I live, the second-hottest August on record in 141 years. Not only that, the Northern Hemisphere had its warmest summer and the entire globe experienced its third-hottest three-month season. Fast forward one…
- No desire to care
  
  Gopinaath Kannabiran
  
  I know exercise is good for me. I have a gym membership. But I don't feel like exercising. I should call my mom. I have a phone. But I don't feel like talking to anyone. I understand the need to reduce plastic use. I can cook. But sometimes I…
- Analyzing online programming communities to enhance visualization languages
  
  Leilani Battle
  
  Hello and welcome to my new column! I am an assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. I love to study how people interpret and manipulate visualizations to make sense of large, complex datasets. In this column, I…
- How to understand your climate uncertainty
  
  Lace Padilla
  
  According to a new report by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [1], every region on Earth is already affected by human-driven climate change. Due to the numerous and varied nature of climate change impacts, some regions, such as the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard of the U.S.,…
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Making/breaking
- Explorations in narrative biosensing
  
  Gabrielle Benabdallah, Blair Subbaraman
  
  Commercial biosensors can measure a host of physiological processes, including heart rate, blood oxygen levels, activity, cycles of sleep—even emotions. They promise self-improvement by providing clear metrics and recommendations that can lead to better health, performance, and self-care practices. Yet, and perhaps especially when it comes to the body,…
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Forums
- Black Twitter is gold: Why this online community is worthy of study and how to do so respectfully
  
  Shamika Klassen
  
  Black people have been a part of cyberspace since the AfroNet and bulletin-board-network communities in the early 1990s [1]. Initially, Internet studies of Black people online were mainly focused on deficit models, in which Black people's lack of access to computers or the Internet were the main components of…
- Coloniality, reproduction, and the climate crisis, or: How do we survive when the land is crumbling
  
  Luiza de Oliveira Martins
  
  In 2014, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a generous endowment of over 20 million dollars to a startup called Microchips Biotech [1]. The money was meant to support the research and development of the startup's flagship product: a wireless, smart birth-control implant that could be turned on…
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Space
- Farm Lab: Ten years of participatory design research with Spitalfields city farm
  
  Phil Nichols, Sara Heitlinger
  
  For more than 10 years, Spitalfields City Farm (https://www.spitalfieldscityfarm.org/), an urban farm in Inner East London, has been the site of participatory design collaborations with design researcher Sara Heitlinger. Here, Heitlinger and Spitalfields manager Phil Nichols exchange views on the farm's work and the ongoing collaboration in the context…
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Features
- How to get to the end of the world
  
  Jen Liu
  
  To reach the End of the World, you turn down a side street near the fancy wine bar and past the newly built condos. There is a set of train tracks to cross, and you stop to help someone carry their cart over the railroad ties. You're now in…
- Reimagining environmental data
  
  Robert Soden
  
  When we think about climate change, so often we think with and through data. Statistics such as parts per million of atmospheric CO2, thresholds of global average temperature, and annual tons of greenhouse gas emissions form our understanding of potential futures. Numbers ranging from meters of sea-level rise, to…
- Open forest: Walking with forests, stories, data, and other creatures
  
  Andrea Cabrera, Markéta Dolejšová, Jaz Choi, Cristina Ampatzidou
  
  Forests are often thought of as archetypical pristine, natural environments that provide a place of refuge, myths, and sacredness, and a way of understanding oneself and others. As complex ecosystems, forests are vital sites for production and preservation of life, food provision, habitat, recreation, sensorial and aesthetic enjoyment, and…
- HCI curricula for sustainable innovation: The humanitarian focus at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham
  
  Maneesha Ramesh, Alexander Muir, Krishna Nandanan, Rao Bhavani, Renjith Mohan
  
  We are an international, multicultural team of educators who draw on more than 25 years' combined experience in training students and professionals in HCI. Our firm belief is that South Asia is a trailblazer in how to conduct human-centered research and design for humanitarian technology. The unique combination of…
- Material meets the city: A materials experience perspective on urban interaction design
  
  Linda Hirsch, Eleni Economidou, Irina Paraschivoiu, Tanja Döring
  
  There are many aspects that shape our urban built environment, including human activity, spatial compositions, and materiality. Materials and their affordances and experiences play a particular role in this context, influencing what we perceive and how we interact [1]. In this article, we reflect on the place-material relationship by…
- Blurryism: Messing with dualisms through design
  
  Matthew Lee-Smith
  
  The posthuman movement, a broad term that can be seen as including topics such as posthumanism, post-anthropocentrism, transhumanism, new materialism, and object-orientated ontology, is going from strength to strength. A glance at the Google Books Ngram Viewer graph of the term posthuman shows a sharp positive trend from the…
- Guerrilla visualization
  
  Swaroop Panda, Shatarupa Roy
  
  Visualizations have pervaded many areas of digital life, such as social media platforms, where graphs, charts, infographics, and other visualizations are used for communicating information, presenting and defending arguments, offering greetings and pleasantries, and multiple other purposes. Often these purposes include not-so-benign activities such as misleading people, sneering, and…
- Design and deep entanglements
  
  Jörgen Rahm-Skågeby, Lina Rahm
  
  In 2014, professor of environmental history Jared Farmer created an amateur art piece, what he calls a technofossil, using a BlackBerry Curve 8300, a smartphone released in 2007. Very aptly, Farmer notes that: Technofossil art piece by Jared Farmer. [O]n the surface, my art piece satirizes the relationship—verbal and…
- Nonlinear design thinking: The limitations of awareness in the search for climate care
  
  Shunying Blevis, Eli Blevis
  
  The "A causes B" way of thinking is one-dimensional and linear whereas reality is multi-dimensional and non-linear. One has only to think of one's own life to see how absurd it is to think everything can be explained as a simple linear process of cause and effect. — James…
- The German research community within ACM SIGCHI 2010–2020
  
  Johannes Schöning
  
  The global human-computer interaction (HCI) research community strives for more diversity. This aspiration includes both the diversity of HCI scholars and the diversity of HCI study participants and potential users. Recent work about the HCI research landscape shows a tentatively positive trend toward increased diversity [1,2]. However, these works…
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Dialogues: climate care
- Ecologies of subversion—Troubling interaction design for climate care
  
  Ann Light
  
  I have a history with subverting. In earlier research, I studied the design of guerilla tactics with activists. For theory, I drew on queering and troubling as creative deviation and, in doing so, pointed to the benefits for both identity and technology development. I did not anticipate how this…
- How to get to the end of the world
  
  Jen Liu
  
  To reach the End of the World, you turn down a side street near the fancy wine bar and past the newly built condos. There is a set of train tracks to cross, and you stop to help someone carry their cart over the railroad ties. You're now in…
- Reimagining environmental data
  
  Robert Soden
  
  When we think about climate change, so often we think with and through data. Statistics such as parts per million of atmospheric CO2, thresholds of global average temperature, and annual tons of greenhouse gas emissions form our understanding of potential futures. Numbers ranging from meters of sea-level rise, to…
- Open forest: Walking with forests, stories, data, and other creatures
  
  Andrea Cabrera, Markéta Dolejšová, Jaz Choi, Cristina Ampatzidou
  
  Forests are often thought of as archetypical pristine, natural environments that provide a place of refuge, myths, and sacredness, and a way of understanding oneself and others. As complex ecosystems, forests are vital sites for production and preservation of life, food provision, habitat, recreation, sensorial and aesthetic enjoyment, and…
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Calendar
- Calendar
  
  INTR Staff
  
  January GROUP '22: 2022 ACM International Conference on Supporting Groupwork (virtual) January 23–26, 2022 https://group.acm.org/conferences/group22/ February TEI '22: 16th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (Daejeon, Republic of Korea and virtual) February 13–16, 2022 https://tei.acm.org/2022/ March HRI '22: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (virtual)…
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Exit
- On communicating planet-size facts
  
  Andrew Yang
  
  Contributor: Andrew S. Yang Curator/Editor: Nia Easley Visualizing data in ways that not only assist interpretation for experts, but also enhance communication to a general audience is no simple task. Show Your Stripes (SYS; https://showyourstripes.info/) is a project by climate scientist Ed Hawkins aimed at bringing broader awareness to…
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