Table of Contents
VOLUME XXIII.2 March + April 2016
- Demo Hour
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What are you reading?
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What are you reading?
Camille Moussette
Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity By Colin McGinn (2015) How did we get from apelike creatures to modern humans with evolved rational thought, language, and culture? Colin McGinn adopts an atypical evolutionary philosophy perspective on the crucial role of the hand in human evolution. His journey…
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Blog@IX
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Go west
Deborah Tatar
As a professor, I now get to witness young people aspiring to "go west." They know the familiar trope "Go west, young man" ascribed to the 19th-century publisher Horace Greeley. They inherit the idea of manifest destiny, even when the term itself was buried in a single paragraph in…
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How was it made?
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I-Eng
Describe what you made. I-Eng is an interactive toy set designed to teach new languages to young children. A plush doll speaks sentences related to nearby tagged objects and, depending on the context, can ask a child for other related objects. Through interaction with these tangible objects, an unscripted…
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- Day in the Lab
- Special topic: 40 years of critical computing: the Decennial Aarhus Conference series
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Forums
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Adaptive architecture
Holger Schnädelbach
The concerns of architecture, pervasive computing, and interaction design have been overlapping for quite some time. This forum provides a welcome outlet to discuss the impacts of interactive technologies becoming embedded into our surroundings and the use of interactive technologies to reinvent the built environment, as forum editor Mikael…
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What’s special about aging
Ann Light, Sonja Pedell, Toni Robertson, Jenny Waycott, Jeanette Bell, Jeannette Durick, Tuck Leong
Aging is the most natural thing in the world. It underpins our understanding of life and how we measure time. We start effortlessly in our earliest youth, making adjustments in how we live as our circumstances and capabilities change. And we continue realigning as we grow older, making change…
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The future of HCI education: A flexible, global, living curriculum
Elizabeth Churchill, Anne Bowser, Jennifer Preece
Educational curricula in human-computer interaction (HCI) need to be broad and nimble. To address the first requirement—breadth—HCI focuses on people and technology to drive human-centered technology innovation. HCI students and scholars learn about basic human characteristics and develop the necessary skills to study people's activities with and around technologies.…
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A University-NGO partnership to sustain assistive technology projects
Fabio Calefato, Filippo Lanubile, Roberto De Nicolò, Fabrizio Lippolis
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are often plagued by a dearth of human and financial resources. IT Without Borders (ISF, from the Italian Informatici Senza Frontiere) is an Italian NGO that considers IT to be an asset of primary necessity and an essential prerequisite for economic and social development. Founded in…
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Design ideal: Performing a dialogue between theorizing and designing
Naveen Bagalkot, Tomas Sokoler
Increasingly, researchers engage with design as a means of inquiry to understand and theorize about real-world situations in a nuanced and generative manner. Doing so involves negotiating a tension between two opposing objectives. On the one hand, design is inherently concerned with addressing the problem through shaping a unique…
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A usability test is not an interview
Morten Hertzum
Usability tests are conducted to gauge users' experience with a system, preferably before it is released for real use, and thereby find any problems that prevent users from completing their tasks, slow them down, or otherwise degrade their user experience. Such tests are important to successful systems development, yet…
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Community square
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SIGCHI’s Iran chapter
Kaveh Bazargan, Tuomo Kujala
As the founding chair of the SIGCHI's Iran chapter and assistant professor in HCI in the Department of Information Technology Management at Shahid Beheshti (National) University (of Iran) (SBU) in Tehran, I am honored to write this short contribution. ACM's former chief executive officer John White officially chartered SIGCHI's…
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Features
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Do androids dream of electric steeds? The allure of horse-computer interaction
Steve North
Chaucer's "horse of brass" perfectly illustrates how humans tend to see a property in nature that we admire and immediately want to control it. In this case, the horse's "free will" is seen as an obstacle between the animal's fast-paced athleticism and our desire to master it. The implied…
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Encounters with HCI pioneers: A personal photo journal
Ben Shneiderman
Ben Shneiderman: Pioneer of direct manipulation Pioneers in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) are memorable for their extraordinary research, astonishing designs, energetic lectures, passionate discussions, and personal warmth. As a community we have had as much impact as the chip designers in enabling 7+ billion people to benefit…
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The value of casting
Jaakko Lehikoinen, Sami Vihavainen, Ville Tuominen, Andy Sarfas
The grand challenge of any business is to offer a compelling value proposition and to ensure that the associated experiences are met when the end user interacts with the product or service. For example, if you purchase a ticket to fly from the U.K. to the U.S. with Virgin…
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The user reconfigured: On subjectivities of information
Jeffrey Bardzell
Interaction design researchers are increasingly focusing on the changing roles of the user. By this we do not mean how technologies have changed people. Instead, we refer here to how interaction designers have deployed "the user" as a kind of rhetorical or discursive construct. In an earlier paper [1],…
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A short guide to material speculation: Actual artifacts for critical inquiry
Ron Wakkary, William Odom, Sabrina Hauser, Garnet Hertz, Henry Lin
Design has long borrowed from fiction in techniques like scenarios, personas, and enactments. Speculative inquiries in design like futuring, forecasting, and envisionments have also deeply incorporated practices of fiction. More recently, design fiction has emerged as a uniquely productive approach to speculative inquiries [1]. Given this, we see an…
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Community calendar
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Community calendar
INTR Staff
March Interaction 16 (Helsinki, Finland) Conference Dates: March 2–4, 2016 http://interaction16.ixda.org/ IUI 2016 – ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (Sonoma, CA, USA) Conference Dates: March 7–10, 2016 http://iui.acm.org/2016/ HRI 2016 – 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (Christchurch, New Zealand) Conference Dates: March 7–10, 2016 http://humanrobotinteraction.org/2016/…
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Department
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Feedback
INTR Staff
BLOG/Mikael Wiberg: Multiple Scales Interaction Design http://interactions.acm.org/blog/view/multiple-scales-interaction-design UX and architecture have always been comparable in many ways. I very much agree with this observation. I don't think it's a new phase, but one that is getting more recognition. The devil may be in the details, but a designer must…
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- Cover story
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Visual thinking gallery
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Rooftop garden + fish pond, Jing’an district, Shanghai
Eli Blevis, Bonnie Nardi
Contributors: Eli Blevis and Bonnie Nardi Curator/Editor: Eli Blevis Genre: Urban HCI, food, sustainability A fish pond is visible in the top-left corner of the rooftop garden pictured. ©2016 ACM1072-5520/16/03$15.00 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom…
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Special topic: 40 years of critical computing: the Decennial Aarhus Conference series
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40 Years of the Aarhus Conference Series: Introduction
Olav Bertelsen, Kim Halskov, Shaowen Bardzell
Human-computer interaction and interaction design conferences are usually either annual or biannual—but there are exceptions. A prominent one is the Aarhus Conference, which has a unique interdisciplinary research profile and is held every 10 years in Aarhus, Denmark. Throughout its 40-year history, the Decennial Aarhus Conference series has pursued…
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OCTO or how the net was won
Baruch Gottlieb, Dmytri Kleiner
This paper was originally part of a keynote at Critical Alternatives 2015, accompanied by some documentation of artworks through which we attempted to materialize many of the considerations below. The OCTO P7C-1 premiered at the transmediale festival in 2013 and featured an extended Telekommunisten crew, including chief engineer Jeff…
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Democracy beyond projects: How users may achieve lasting influence on IT systems
Morten Kyng
For several decades, users have been recognized as valuable resources in HCI design, contributing to better, more interesting results. However, user involvement does not a priori lead to more user influence in terms of either user empowerment or democracy [1]. "Better results" may mean "better for all," but usually…
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The user reconfigured: On subjectivities of information
Jeffrey Bardzell
Interaction design researchers are increasingly focusing on the changing roles of the user. By this we do not mean how technologies have changed people. Instead, we refer here to how interaction designers have deployed "the user" as a kind of rhetorical or discursive construct. In an earlier paper [1],…
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A short guide to material speculation: Actual artifacts for critical inquiry
Ron Wakkary, William Odom, Sabrina Hauser, Garnet Hertz, Henry Lin
Design has long borrowed from fiction in techniques like scenarios, personas, and enactments. Speculative inquiries in design like futuring, forecasting, and envisionments have also deeply incorporated practices of fiction. More recently, design fiction has emerged as a uniquely productive approach to speculative inquiries [1]. Given this, we see an…
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