Table of Contents
VOLUME XXII.4 July - August 2015
- Demo Hour
-
How was it made?
-
The weight of numbers
Hsin-Hao Chen
Describe what you made. The Weight of Numbers is an interactive installation. It transforms and sends messages via its mechanical parts. Using a computer keyboard and a small LCD panel, participants first type a short message. After pressing Enter, the message is sent via steel balls to a monitor…
-
-
Departments
-
Feedback
INTR Staff
Beyond interaction By Peter-Paul Verbeek May–June 2015 DOI: 10.1145/2751314 Thanks for this great article in Interactions. As technologies get more complex, it is more difficult to see in what sense they are extensions of our human organs. Let us take the Internet as an example. In a way, it…
-
Community calendar
INTR Staff
July UMAP 2015 – 23rd Conference on User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization (Dublin, Ireland) Conference Dates: June 29–July 3, 2015 http://umap2015.com/ EVA London 2015 – Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (London, UK) Conference Dates: July 7–9, 2015 http://www.eva-london.org/ SOUPS 2015 – Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (Ottawa, Canada)…
-
-
Columns
-
The ethos of context-aware computing
Sorin Pintilie
Context is a word we use a lot in our community. But we don't really talk about it. We occasionally churn out nuggets of wisdom like "context matters" or even "context is king," but it's surprising how little we talk about what context actually is and how to design…
-
Transitional UX
Uday Gajendar
Recently while describing some bold "next-gen" concepts with my prototyper, he suddenly blurted out in exasperation, "Please stop saying next-gen! Everybody is saying next-gen!" I paused for a second, taken aback by this unexpected outburst by my typically reticent coworker, and then started laughing. Indeed, he was correct. There…
-
Learning the long, hard slog of product
Jon Kolko
Students love blue-sky design. They envision beautiful new products and services, and delight in conceiving high-level visualizations of great ideas. They produce a sketch, several high-fidelity comps, and a stunning narrative of a vision of the future. The vision is believable, and as it's presented, observers offer warm encouragement:…
-
- Day in the Lab
-
Forums
-
Microworld and mesoscale
Molly Steenson
At the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, Google CEO Eric Schmidt offered up his vision for the disappearing Internet: "Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in…
-
Digital civics
Patrick Olivier, Peter Wright
.jpg)
We work at Culture Lab, Newcastle University's cross-faculty digital technology research center. Newcastle is a flourishing research-focused university; our motto is "Excellence with a purpose" and our vice-chancellor urges us to ask ourselves not what are we good at, but what are we good for? This connects with our…
-
Creating kairos
Thomas Erickson
If you are like me, you will have experienced this: the moment when the witty quip, the telling anecdote, the irrefutable argument leaps into your mind ... but just too late. The conversation has moved on. Ten seconds ago your quip would have been timely, eliciting smiles and nods…
-
Foondi workshops
Juliet Wanyiri
Foondi Workshops are a platform for problem setting, designing, and prototyping entrepreneurial-based ventures. Based in East Africa, Foondi uses collaborative design workshops to spur innovation and foster skill sharing among participants. Our vision is to nurture a group of young innovators in Africa who are working on building solutions…
-
Big city, big data
Kathi Kitner, Thea de Wet
In the early part of this millennium, the term big data was beginning to be bandied about among those in technology-related disciplines. The term was spoken with a bit of awe, a bit of cockiness, and always a breathlessness about what incredible potential big data held for making our…
-
A personal perspective on research through design
Cristiano Storni
What is research through design (RtD)? In my understanding, and not necessarily from the available literature, the first thing to say is that RtD is in the business of knowledge, not design. Of course design plays an essential part, but only in so far as it is instrumental to…
-
-
Community square
-
HCI summer school in Tallinn
David Lamas, Panayiotis Zaphiris, Effie Law, Tuomo Kujala
"Fun and foundational. It was a great experience. Made a lot of good friends. All the program committee members were very, very helpful." "We learned a lot about research in HCI. Very good university facilities." "Good selection of topics." "Very well-organized team, friendly, helpful, and supportive in every possible…
-
-
Features
-
The practice of selfies
Angelica Svelander, Mikael Wiberg
Selfies—commonly understood as those shallow pictures taken with no preparation, no thought behind them, no careful editing, no thoughtful posing, and no other purpose than showing off one's look. But is this really an accurate description of the practice of selfies? Here we elaborate on this practice and its…
-
Connecting devices for collaborative interactions
Tero Jokela, Ming Chong, Andrés Lucero, Hans Gellersen
In our article in the March–April 2013 issue of Interactions, we discussed mobile collocated interactions and how groups of users can spontaneously combine their mobile devices to engage in rich shared activities and experiences [1]. Examples of such situations include sharing photographs and videos within a group of friends…
-
Brains, computers, and drones: Think and control!
Nataliya Kosmyna, Franck Tarpin-Bernard, Bertrand Rivet
Imagine you could control the world with your thoughts. Sounds appealing, doesn't it? There is a technology that can capture your brain activity and issue commands to computer systems, such as robots, prosthetics, and games. Indeed, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been around since the 1970s, and have improved with…
-
Sustaining user engagement with behavior-change tools
Evangelos Karapanos
Technologies for behavior change have immense potential. Consider, for instance, the case of physical-activity trackers. Our healthcare systems are facing unprecedented challenges. Western lifestyles, now spreading throughout the world, have had a direct impact on the increase of chronic diseases, which today account for nearly 40 percent of mortality…
-
Locating the ‘big hole’ in HCI research
Stuart Reeves
In a recent Interactions article, "The Big Hole in HCI Research," [1] Vassilis Kostakos argued that HCI lacks persistent "motor themes," based on a co-word analysis [2] of keywords sections from the past 20 years of CHI papers [3]. HCI as a discipline, it is argued, "simply roll[s] from…
-
-
Visual thinking gallery
-
CHI 2015 best dance performance
Eli Blevis
Contributor: Eli Blevis Genre: Event record, souvenir Korean folk dancers perform at CHI 2015 in Seoul. ©2015 ACM1072-5220/15/07$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…
-
