July - August 2016 | ACM Interactions

VOLUME XXIII.4 July - August 2016

view all

Demo Hour
- Demo hour
  
  Cindy Kao, Paul Johns, Asta Roseway, Mary Czerwinski, Lahiru Priyadarshana, Victoria Porter, Juan Carrascal, Aaron Visser, Roel Vertegaal, Sarah Homewood, Gillian Smith, April Grow, Chenxi Liu, Lea Albaugh, Jennifer Mankoff, Jim McCann
  
  1. Tattio Tattio is a fabrication process that draws from current body-decoration processes (e.g., jewelry-like metallic temporary tattoos) for the creation of on-skin technology. The fabrication process generates functional components such as NFC tags, circuitry, and thermochromic tattoos, while maintaining the aesthetics and user experience of existing metallic temporary…
top
What are you reading?
- What are you reading?
  
  Laura Devendorf
  
  Vibrant Matter: The Political Ecology of Things By Jane Bennett (2010) Vibrant Matter is one of those books that I read and reread and pull something new from each time. Bennett argues that non-human stuff—from a pile of trash in the street to bacteria in our gut—is vibrant, alive,…
top
Blog@IX
- Extremes of user experience and design thinking
  
  Aaron Marcus
  
  The characteristics that differentiate us human beings, and at the same time unite us across different regions of the world, is a matter that fascinates me. Recently, I took a half-hour journey to a nearby Austin, Texas, hot-rod show to entertain my grandchildren. On the way, to keep the…
top
How was it made?
- Scope+
  
  Yu-Hsuan Huang, Tzu-Chieh Yu, Pei-Hsuan Tsai, Yu-Xiang Wang, Wan-ling Yang, Hao-Yu Chang, Yu-Kai Chiu, Tsai Yu-Ju, Ming Ouhyoung
  
  Describe what you made. Scope+ is a pioneer prototype of an augmented reality (AR) microscope for surgical training and education purposes. Briefly describe the process of how this was made. First, we had to build hardware similar to a surgical microscope that was suitable for AR applications. We modified…
top
Departments
- Welcome
  
  Ron Wakkary, Erik Stolterman
  
  Investigating the future of digital play has become a central concern for HCI and interaction design researchers and practitioners. This interest is reflected in the creation of new conference venues like CHI PLAY (https://chiplay.acm.org). An interweaving of play within HCI research not only sheds light on aspects of games…
- Feedback
  
  INTR Staff
  
  Research Contributions in Human-Computer Interaction By Jacob Wobbrock and Julie Kientz May–June 2016 DOI: 10.1145/2907069 Great analysis and insight. Here is a point to ponder for the CHI committee members (and the rest of the community). The authors state that "if empirical findings are uninteresting or unimportant ... then…
- Community calendar
  
  INTR Staff
  
  July EuroHaptics 2016 (London, UK) Conference Dates: July 4–7, 2016 http://www.eurohaptics2016.org/ HCI 2016 – 30th British Human Computer Interaction Conference (Bournemouth, UK) Conference Dates: July 11–15, 2016 http://hci2016.bcs.org/ UMAP 2016 – 24th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (Halifax, Canada) Conference Dates: July 13–17, 2016 http://www.um.org/umap2016/ DICTAP 2016…
top
Columns
- Probe to learn, probe to design
  
  Steven Dow
  
  Probes provide a powerful way of exploring a space. Bill Gaver and his colleagues gave people in elderly communities small packages of beautiful maps, cameras, and postcards that could be mailed back with intimate fragments of life [1]. They probed for glimpses of local culture to inspire their design…
- Empathizing with the smart and invisible—algorithms!
  
  Uday Gajendar
  
  Human-computer interaction, as implied in the phrasing, involves approaches for exploring, enabling, or optimizing the relationship between people and computational systems. There is a negotiation of intent between users and systems via discrete combinations of controls with fairly constrained yet recognizable behaviors: buttons, tabs, switches, dials, text fields, icons,…
top
Day in the Lab
- Connected everyday lab
  
  Elisa Giaccardi, Marco Rozendaal
  
  How do you describe your lab to visitors? The Connected Everyday Lab explores how to facilitate thoughtful design in a world where people, artifacts, and technology increasingly merge. The group researches the social opportunities and ethical implications of emerging technological paradigms such as the Internet of Things, social robotics,…
top
Forums
- Architects of information
  
  Nick Dalton, Holger Schnädelbach, Tasos Varoudis, Mikael Wiberg
  
  Recently there have been a number of commercial announcements about virtual and augmented reality technologies. These announcements present a familiar vision of HCI's future being one of spatially immersed information. While this might seem compelling, it is neither the first nor the largest vision of computing that sees space…
- How to survive creating an intergenerational co-design group
  
  Jason Yip, Lindsey Arnold, Alysse Gallo, Kung Lee, Caroline Pitt, Kiley Sobel, Sijin Chen
  
  Participatory design (PD) with children is not a new method within design research; it has been used with children of all ages (e.g., [1]), abilities (e.g., [2]), and contexts (e.g., [3]) to create new designs for children. A lot of great designs, from Nick.com's Do Not Touch Button to…
- Extensions from the ‘field’
  
  Sarah Fox, Daniela Rosner
  
  It was the spring of 2014, and we were in the midst of a multi-sited ethnography of feminist hackerspaces in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. Community organizers had recently begun developing these spaces as collective workshops oriented toward different ways of knowing technology. Weaving circles sat alongside soldering stations;…
- Educating for HCI at scale
  
  Daniel Rosenberg
  
  The artifacts of interaction design permeate our daily lives as both consumers and professional users. From mobile apps to digital entertainment to social media, along with enterprise cloud applications and medical solutions, we experience the results of HCI in practice daily. The best of these solutions delight and engage…
- On the design of the humanities
  
  Bonnie Mak, Julia Pollack
  
  The work of the humanities can be difficult to discern. To the uninitiated, its product may seem like a featureless and opaque wall of text. But understanding the humanities means recognizing that words are its chief tools, activities, and output. Whereas bench scientists might conduct experiments in a laboratory,…
- Affordances: Bringing them out of the woods
  
  Leonardo Burlamaqui, Andy Dong
  
  Thanks to a number of articles on affordances in this magazine, chapters in textbooks on interaction design, and online interaction design resources, almost every interaction designer is aware of the concept of affordance. Yet, despite widespread awareness of affordance by designers, the concept has yet to translate into widespread…
top
Community square
- European chapter initiative: More HCI speakers in ACM’s DSP
  
  Gavin Doherty, Tuomo Kujala
  
  One of the initiatives taken by ACM Europe in the past few years has been to make contact with chapters and act on their feedback (through a chapter-leaders committee). Two European chapters workshops have been held, with a third scheduled for Prague this August, and a fourth set for…
top
Features
- Bringing research articles to life with animated figures
  
  Tovi Grossman, Fanny Chevalier, Rubaiat Kazi
  
  A picture is worth a thousand words. Scientists have long recognized this idea, and have been including charts, drawings, and photographs in their research articles even before the availability of desktop computers and document-editing software. Similarly, we would argue that a video or animation can, in some cases, be…
- Nine questions for HCI researchers in the making
  
  Susanne Bødker, Kasper Hornbaek, Antti Oulasvirta, Stuart Reeves
  
  Let's be honest: It's hard to start a career in HCI research. Working out what path to take is daunting. Our community is ever growing and ever diversifying. Interactive technologies change quickly and good research can be rapidly forgotten. At some point you might ask yourself: What should I…
- Getting the measure of behavior … is seeing believing?
  
  Carol Hall, Amanda Roshier
  
  In this article we consider the challenges involved in measuring and interpreting animal behavior. Specifically, we focus on trying to understand an animal's responses to a new system, which might be a new computer-based system the animal interacts with or a new management system (such as housing, feeding, etc.),…
- Toward characterization of playful ACI
  
  Hanna Wirman, Anna Zamansky
  
  You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. —Richard Lindgard Beyond individual cases and uncontrolled settings, animals (by which we mean non-human animals) have been interacting with human technology since at least the 1930s, when Skinner's behavioral experiments required…
top
Special topic: Frameworks for ACI: animals as stakeholders in the design process
top
Cover story
- Connecting through play
  
  Katherine Isbister
  
  Many complain that we are mesmerized and divided by technologies as they saturate our world. That we are becoming disembodied, fragmented, distracted from the present moment and from one another [1,2,3]. Take smartphones. It's true that people frequently use them to be social with non-present others during perceived lulls…
top
Visual thinking gallery
- DIY maker electronic supplies concession market in Shenzhen
  
  Eli Blevis
  
  Contributor: Eli Blevis Curator/Editor: Eli Blevis Genre: Maker culture, DIY culture, China A concession market in Shenzhen, a cornerstone of maker culture in China, sells all manner of electronic parts for small-scale production. For a discussion of these trends, please see: Lindtner, S., Greenspan, A., and Li, D. Designed…
top