Table of Contents
VOLUME XIX.2 March + April 2012
- Demo Hour
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Blogpost
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A cry for more tech at CHI!
Kristina Höök
This is a rant. And a plea. And an ad. With this rant, plea, and ad, I hope to attract more attention to the video and interactivity submissions at CHI 2012. But that is just a means to an end. The result I hope for is to make our…
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Departments
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Feedback
INTR Staff
Usability testing EHRs Correction In Art Swanson's and Scott Lind's article, "Usability Testing EHRs," from our November + December 2011 issue, the authors refer to a proposed NIST protocol as the "Usability Evaluation Protocol (UEP)." The correct name of the protocol is the EHR Usability Protocol (EUP). A draft…
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Community calendar 2012
INTR Staff
March 2012 ICIC 2012: 4th ACM International Conference on Intercultural Collaboration (Bengaluru, India) Conference Date: March 2123, 2012 http://langrid.nict.go.jp/icic2012/ IA Summit 2012 (New Orleans, LA) Conference Date: March 2125, 2012 http://2012.iasummit.org/ April 2012 ECIR 2012: The 34th European Conference on Information Retrieval (Barcelona, Spain) Conference Date: April 15,…
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Columns
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The Omni project
Steve Portigal, Julie Norvaisas
We have recently embarked on a self-funded research and innovation project called the Omni project. Working in an agency, we find the notion of a self-funded study frightening (at least financially) but also liberating. This effort emerges from our desire to work unbounded by the very necessary constraints of…
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Changing the career outcomes of design education
Jon Kolko
There are two major decisions most design students have to make during their four years of undergraduate design school. The first Big Decision, often made after completing a freshman "foundations" year, is jokingly referred to as "Poster or Toaster?" This is the decision to choose a specialization, traditionally either…
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Working around the system
John Thomas
Image Contributor: John C. Thomas Genre: Documentary image of a work-around for poor interactivity design. At a workshop on ICT4D, everyone in the room was freezing but the thermostat was encased and could not be accessed by the "users" in the room. So, I went to the men's room,…
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Day in the Lab
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Interactive Product Design Lab (IPDL) at Georgia Tech
Jim Budd
How do you describe your lab to visitors? The Interactive Product Design Lab (IPDL) is a purpose-built lab designed to support both teaching and research by allowing students to investigate, explore, and experiment with an extensive array of new technologies. Central to this concept, the School of Industrial Design…
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Forums
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Research with a hacker ethos
Amanda Williams, Alicia Gibb, David Weekly
Let's be honest. Much of what we do as researchers in tangible interaction design is hacking. We reappropriate game controllers; we break open toys and cannibalize their parts; we bend and flex and stuff electronics into objects they were never meant to go into. We usually mention this hackery,…
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Time travelers, flying heads, and second lives
Jason Lewis
Six years ago, my collaborator, Skawennati Fragnito, and I set out to change the world. Our strategy for achieving this modest goal has been to combine our longstanding fascination with digital media technology with the desire to work with our First Nations communities to tell old stories anew and…
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Because deep down, we are not the same
Minna Kamppuri
When I was studying the use of mobile phones among university students in Tanzania, I spent many days waiting for interviewees who failed to show up, without explanation. Many other interviewers, even local ones, reported having the same problem. Later I learned that the easiest way to meet users…
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Personalized dynamic accessibility
Krzysztof Gajos, Amy Hurst, Leah Findlater
It is a cliché to point out that computers and the Internet have entered all parts of our lives. We need them at work; governments urge us to file our taxes online; students are required to use them in their classes; online businesses offer better deals than their brick-and-mortar…
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In defense of doing it the hard way
Leanna Gingras
The job of a user-research professional is undoubtedly a hard one. Understanding problems, getting the right sample of people in our labs, extracting insights from data, and evangelizing the user's needs can make for challenging work. At the same time, rewards abound in this profession: the joy of diving…
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Features
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Pico projectors
Raimund Dachselt, Jonna Häkkilä, Matt Jones, Markus Löchtefeld, Michael Rohs, Enrico Rukzio
There's something magical about light. Perhaps you can remember using a flashlight as a child to trace a space story on the bedroom ceiling, or, more exciting still, to enhance scary stories under the canvas of a camping holiday. Or, on a long, lazy summer afternoon, the school vacation…
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Transformative user experience
Markus Latzina, Joerg Beringer
The term transformative has different connotations, but it usually refers to the concept of significant, irreversible change, often considered game changing due to its ability to redefine an entire value system. Recently we have observed new technologies that are deemed to be transformative, for example, by enabling us to…
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Drawing things together
A. Telier
"Now, here is the challenge. In its long history, design practices has done a marvelous job at inventing the practical skills to draw objects, whether in architectural drawing, mechanic blueprints, scale models, or prototyping. But what has always been missing from those marvelous drawings (designs in the literal sense)…
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Crafting a delightful experience
Carmen Dukes, Katie Koch
When did you first learn about design? Our students start learning about design in ninth grade, during their first year in high school. As members of Project: Interaction, a 10-week high school after-school program in Brooklyn, New York, they are introduced to the practice of interaction design. They learn…
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Design and ethics
Leslie Becker
Designers of products and services, as well as the users of these products and services, think they know what is right. This assumption is largely tacit, which means it is also largely unexamined. Tacit implies that we have absorbed something through our daily living by observing and participating in…
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Toward mixed-media design studios
Florian Geyer, Harald Reiterer
"We are far from seeing a fully digital design studio. Unfortunately, the modern hybrid studiostraddling both digital and traditional methodscan experience new challenges along with the new tools" [1]. In many design studios, dedicated rooms with abundant display space are used for colocated design collaboration. And this is for…
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Will your household adopt your new robot?
Valérie Bauwens, Julia Fink
Domestic robots have slowly found their way into some of our homes and onto the shelves of major stores selling technical appliances. Who hasn't already seen or heard of robots that vacuum or mow the lawn? As researchers in robotics, we feel this growing commercial success is a great…
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- Cover story
