Table of Contents
VOLUME XVIII.4 July + August 2011
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Welcome
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WELCOME The view from within
Ron Wakkary, Erik Stolterman
If you're like us, you are both recovering and feeling recharged from CHI 2011! And also, like us, you're in the midst of digesting and sifting through all of the talks, discussions, and encounters you experienced in and around the Vancouver Convention Center over those six days in May.…
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Demo Hour
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Demo hour
Ray Yun, Mark Gross, Dan Newton, Mark Marshall, Andrew Stevenson, Christopher Perez, Roel Vertegaal, Ayumi Kawakami, Koji Tsukada, Keisuke Kambara, Itiro Siio
RayMatic: An Emotionally Expressive Meter with a Human Face Can interfaces that use facial expressions and gestures make human-computer communication more friendly and engaging? RayMatic, an emotionally expressive meter, looks like a framed photograph. Whereas traditional meters display numbers or graphs statically, the person in RayMatic's frame (Ray) responds…
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Blogpost
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The times they are a-changin’
Mats Hellman, Huaqi Hao
Getting attractive consumer products to market quickly and at a reasonable price has become as important, or even more important, than offering more features and functions. Today, new companies are rising from emerging markets and taking market share from older, more established manufacturers and known brands. Companies like Nokia…
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Departments
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Feedback
INTR Staff
Reflecting on 'Change' I really enjoyed Phoebe Sengers' interactions article about the pace of life ("What I Learned on Change Islands," March + April 2011). It resonated with my own experience very powerfully, as I'm sure it struck a nerve with many. In particular, the article made me think…
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Community calendar 2011
INTR Staff
July 2011: 2nd International Symposium on Culture, Creativity, and Interaction Design (Newcastle, UK) Conference date: July 4-5, 2011 http://ccid2.wordpress.com/ HCI 2011: Health, Wealth, and Happiness—The 25th BCS Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (Newcastle, UK) Conference date: July 4-8, 2011 Link: http://www.hci2011.co.uk/ PLM11: IFIP WG5.1 8th International Conference on Product Lifecycle…
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Columns
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Elevator pitch
Steve Portigal, Julie Norvaisas
It seems like only yesterday that the VCR and its flashing 12:00 was the go-to whipping boy for the interaction field. "Gosh almighty," the lament would rise. "What does it say about us if we can't even make a usable digital clock, one that won't blinkingly admonish us for…
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The conflicting rhetoric of design education
Jon Kolko
As design has categorically emerged as a necessity for companies and cultures facing massive change, design education has come under increasing scrutiny. What do these designers—who, if you believe the rhetoric, are capable of driving massive innovation, concocting magical experiences, and changing the fundamental rules of the game of…
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Day in the Lab
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CAVI
Kim Halskov
How would you describe your lab? The Centre for Advanced Visualization and Interaction (CAVI) is an interdisciplinary lab for the arts and sciences at Aarhus University in Denmark. We have a small core staff of two software engineers, an interaction designer, a 3-D graphics designer, an electrical engineer, a…
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Forums
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The multidimensional role of social media in healthcare
Dana Lewis
Can a hashtag change healthcare? In our world, it can. Gone are the days of healthcare being 10 years behind the technological curve. Today, individuals and organizations are meeting up online and using these tools to make a difference in healthcare. In some cases, like "e-Patient Dave" deBronkart's, the…
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Mobilizing for community building and everyday innovation
Sissel Olander, Tau Lenskjold, Signe Yndigegn, Maria Foverskov
"When my daughter goes shopping, she sometimes takes a picture [with her smartphone] as she tries on clothes and sends it to me to ask for my opinion," Daniella tells us during a workshop with senior citizens. After a while, Mogens, another senior citizen, returns to Daniella's story. "I…
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African ICTD research (or the lack thereof)
Shikoh Gitau, Paul Plantinga, Kathleen Diga, David Hutchful
As young practitioners and scholars, we are members of a wider community interested in HCI for development (HCI4D) and, more generally, ICT for development (ICTD). Our focus is popularly understood as the use of "digital technology to deliver specific development goals" [1]. We believe the best people to design…
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What the disability community can teach us about interactive crowdsourcing
Jeffrey Bigham, Richard Ladner
"Can you tell me what this says?" You might be faced with this question in any number of contexts: Maybe you've gone to lunch with a blind friend who is deciding what to order off of the menu. Maybe you've volunteered to help read mail or the local newspaper…
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A professional empiricist manifesto
David Siegel, Susan Dray
This inaugural installment of the forum on evaluation and usability is naturally a time for us, as its editors, to let readers know what to expect here and to inspire contributions by defining the forum's scope. We see this as a timely opportunity to reexamine the core value that…
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Move to design/design to move
Danielle Wilde, Thecla Schiphorst, Sietske Klooster
Being in our bodies is so natural that it can slip out of our awareness. Yet the simple act of paying attention to our movement reconnects us with the body. In our technology-centered world, moving to design and designing to move restore the concept of design as bodily activity.…
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Features
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Engagement through mixed modalities
Christian Dindler, Ole Iversen, Peter Gall Krogh
In 2010 we were commissioned to design an installation for an archaeology-museum exhibition in Denmark. The exhibit, targeted particularly toward a younger audience, would have to explore the life and death of an 18-year-old prosperous female bog body (a Bronze Age mummified corpse), whose life and early death is…
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Hand waving and the real work of design
Elizabeth Goodman
It's the second week of a six-week website redesign at a San Francisco design consultancy. The visiting researcher asks the senior interaction designer about his work. He responds, "Oh, I'm not doing any real work on the project anymore. I'm just showing up at client meetings and hand waving."…
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Consumer toy or corporate tool
Megan Geyer, Frances Felske
Edward Kennedy. Star Trek. The Eiffel Tower. Snowboarding. What do these have in common? All were elements in the first iPad commercial. Here's what you didn't see: A stock-trading app, a data spreadsheet, or Web conferencing. When the iPad was first released, its marketing was geared largely toward consumers.…
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Interaction design gone wild
Yvonne Rogers
The last big rhetoric that took HCI by storm was "beyond the desktop." Everyone used it to preface their lectures, keynotes, research proposals, and visions of the future. There was a real buzz about how we were moving into a new research paradigm, developing and deploying pervasive technologies for…
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Rethinking education in a changing world
Paloma Díaz, Elisa Giaccardi, Ignacio Aedo
Our relationship with computing is changing so rapidly and producing such a profound impact on our social and professional lives that many in the educational community are questioning how to prepare a new generation of students to address the challenges of this world under rapid transformation. What are the…
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Animal-computer interaction
Clara Mancini
Animals [1] have been involved in machine interactions for many decades. Skinner's famous operant conditioning chamber, used in behavioral experiments since the early 1930s [2], provided output devices, such as lights or sounds, and input devices, such as levers or buttons, and would dispense food or water, if, for…
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Cover story
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Reimagining HCI
Liam Bannon
Some years ago, HCI researcher Panu Korhonen of Nokia outlined to me how HCI is changing, as follows: In the early days the Nokia HCI people were told "Please evaluate our user interface, and make it easy to use." That gave way to "Please help us design this user…
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