Table of Contents
VOLUME XXI.2 March + April 2014
- Demo Hour
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What are you reading?
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Will Odom
William Odom
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep By Jonathan Crary (2013) Illuminated screens are nearly everywhere we go. We walk around in a blur of seamless, rapid digital interactions and transactions. The boundaries between work and home and other contexts are increasingly muddled. Philosopher Jonathan Crary speculates on…
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How was it made?
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Cell
Eunjin Kim, Romy Achituv
Describe what you made. Cell is a pneumatically controlled, body augmenting, interactive and kinetic wearable/installation that transforms in response to the user's breath. It is composed of a large number of translucent PVC balloons, each containing a yolk-like, ping-pong-ball-size, yellow nucleus. The balloons inflate in small clusters, becoming more…
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Departments
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WELCOME: Distant matters
Ron Wakkary, Erik Stolterman
The authors of our cover story, Judith Olson and Gary Olson, discuss how over the past 20 years HCI researchers have conducted research on distance work. In that time, we have learned that with the right technologies and social practices, distance will matter, as the authors state, but "it…
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Feedback
INTR Staff
Introducing the Business of UX By Daniel Rosenberg, January – February 2014, DOI: 10.1145/2542115 I have been a UX designer for 24 years and I can't tell you how excited I am about your new forum! The field is in great need of surfacing and promoting this issue, within…
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CHI Poland—-a network of local chapters
Aga Szostek, Tuomo Kujala
In CHI Poland, we believe in empowering people while giving them the freedom to do things their own way. When we started the chapter in November 2010, our group was small and primarily located in Warsaw. Our first event hosted 30 attendees. Our main goal was to establish a…
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Community calendar
March HRI 2014 – 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (Bielefeld, Germany) Conference Dates: March 3–6, 2014 http://humanrobotinteraction.org/2014/ ICAART 2014 – 6th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (Angers, France) Conference Dates: March 6–8, 2014 http://www.icaart.org/ IA 2014 – 15th Information Architecture Summit: The Path Ahead (San…
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In memory of Gary Marsden
Matt Jones, Yvonne Rogers
Gary Marsden, professor of computer science at the University of Cape Town, pioneer and passionate advocate of HCI for development and community builder, died suddenly of a heart attack on December 27, 2013, at the age of 43. Disciplinary divisions, bureaucratic firewalls, pomp, and pretension—all were anathema to his…
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Columns
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Interaction design research and the future
Mikael Wiberg
In 1971 Alan Kay stated "the best way to predict the future is to invent it." For the classical sciences, prediction has always been a cornerstone and an evaluation criteria for any proposed theory. In short, a good theory should not only be helpful for describing aspects of the…
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Efficiency: Time and time again?
Rogério de Paula
Why do we design technology? What are the core values that underlie our design decisions? These questions have always fascinated me, not only because they are important practical considerations in any design pursuit, but also because they speak to the underlying morals, cultural values, and politics that influence how…
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Learning entrepreneurial hustle
Jon Kolko
Since we accept students from a variety of backgrounds at Austin Center for Design, we don't assume they will all share a common set of skills; instead, we teach our students some broad fundamentals (like sketching, presenting, and storytelling) during their first quarter. We also try to teach them…
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- Day in the Lab
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Forums
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Beyond video games for social change
Michael Horn
Games are cultural artifacts that not only reflect the values of the people who create them, but also subtly reinforce or challenge the values of people who play them [1,2]. This dynamic interplay between designers and players is an important part of what makes games so appealing as a…
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Reframing design culture and aging
Özge Subasi, Lone Malmborg, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Britt Östlund
The tax office announces a new online tax-reporting system that integrates various accounts. They argue it saves time and money for everyone. However, the new service replaces a whole set of everyday practices and does not necessarily make it easier for everyone, especially not Emma. Emma, a retired florist,…
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Computer supported collective action
Aaron Shaw, Haoqi Zhang, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Sean Munson, Benjamin Hill, Elizabeth Gerber, Peter Kinnaird, Patrick Minder
Social computing systems play an increasingly important role in helping individuals take collective action—that is, action taken by multiple people in pursuit of the same goal or collective good [1]. Successful computer supported collective action (CSCA) connects crowds and communities of participants, lowers the cost of communication and deliberation,…
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Collaboratively designing assistive technology
Shaun Kane, Amy Hurst, Erin Buehler, Patrick Carrington, Michele Williams
A major goal of assistive technology research is to develop technological solutions that solve problems faced by people with disabilities. Building healthy collaborations between academic researchers and individuals with disabilities is key to achieving this goal. Many assistive technologies are abandoned by their users, and evidence suggests that users…
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Questioning assumptions: UX research that really matters
Susan Dray
"How can we make ourselves indispensable in the development process?" a young user experience (UX) researcher asked me during a class break. It's a question I get quite a lot when I teach. Most of us want to know that we are having a positive impact on the products…
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Features
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LaserOrigami: Laser-cutting 3D objects
Stefanie Mueller, Bastian Kruck, Patrick Baudisch
Personal fabrication tools, such as 3D printers, milling machines, and laser cutters, allow users to create one-off physical objects. In the field of human-computer interaction, these tools are mainly used to prototype casings, mounts, and other parts for interactive prototypes. A key requirement of rapid prototyping is speed, as…
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Design for America: Organizing for civic innovation
Elizabeth Gerber
When we think about civic innovation, we tend to focus on the technology that improves our communities: maps for reporting violence, microblogging for flood victims, and online tutoring for reading. But these innovations do not just appear. They are the products of people who work day to day to…
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Simplifying payments in emerging markets
Lucia Terrenghi, Benedict Davies, Ethan Eismann
Cash-based economies present systemic problems for emerging market nations wishing to advance the levels of prosperity and opportunity for their citizens. These problems range from a lack of regulation and accountability (making it easy for corruption to flourish) to the cost of securely manufacturing, storing, transporting, and exchanging money.…
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Teaching design for development in computer science
Edwin Blake, Meryl Glaser, Adinda Freudenthal
If Amartya Sen [1] is right to view poverty as capability deprivation, then empowering marginalized communities through information and communications technology (ICT) can play a big role in poverty alleviation. Unfortunately, ICT for development (ICT4D) projects have a notoriously high failure rate. As Richard Heeks says in his blog,…
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Supporting the uninitiated in user-centered design
Maria Ralph, Petra Björndal
More and more companies are starting to embrace user-centered design (UCD). This is encouraging for user experience (UX) professionals; however, it does provide its fair share of challenges. These challenges are especially evident when UX professionals cannot actively participate in all projects within a company but need to provide…
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- Cover story
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Visual thinking gallery
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DIY repair
Eli Blevis
Genre: Breakdown, work arounds, energy A quick Google search yields sound advice about what to do if your AC adapter/charger stops working. ©2014 ACM1072-5220/14/0300$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…
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