March - April 2024 | ACM Interactions

VOLUME XXXI.2 March - April 2024

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WELCOME
- Infrastructures for Interactions
  
  Elizabeth F. Churchill, Mikael Wiberg
  
  Welcome to the March—April issue of Interactions. As we move solidly into 2024, we have been considering how civic infrastructures, currently and in the future, will affect our experiences with technology, our experiences with services we take for granted, and how we relate to one another. This issue centers…
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What are you reading?
- What Are You Reading? Melissa Gregg
  
  Melissa Gregg
  
  I recently organized a series of events focusing on the ecological impacts of AI, so my reading has been centered on this agenda. I've been wanting to better understand the hardware layer upon which all software depends, which is not something many writers seem interested in or equipped to…
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Exhibit X
- The MEMO Project Inscription App: Fostering Community Engagement on Biodiversity Loss
  
  Kieran Woodward, Thomas Johnson, Bradley Patrick, Michael Gibbs, Amna Anwar, Eiman Kanjo, Jenny Wüstenberg
  
  The devastating effects of climate change and human activity on the planet's biodiversity have led to a mass extinction event, which is when species vanish much faster than they are replaced. This is defined as about 75 percent of the world's species being lost in a short period of…
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Columns
- Creative Engagement
  
  Jon Kolko
  
  In a creative context, creative engagement—both external, in a consultancy, and internal, where a client is a stakeholder—comes in two forms: low-touch and high-touch. Low-touch creativity is characterized by designers making things and then showing what they made; communication between the design team and the client is short and…
- Energy Civics
  
  Jonathan Bean
  
  In a scene in the Netflix adaptation of the graphic novel Bodies, a talking refrigerator signals a shift to a near and ostensibly better future. "You have garlic, carrot batons, and one jar of hummus. Temperature loss and energy waste increasing with the duration of your decision," a cool,…
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Making/breaking
- Augmenting Media Experiences with Affective Haptics
  
  Simone Ooms, Thomas Röggla, Pablo Cesar, Abdallah El Ali
  
  Within our Distributed and Interactive Systems research group, we focus on affective haptics, where we design and develop systems that can enhance human emotional states through the sense of touch [1]. Such artificial haptic sensations can potentially augment and enhance our mind, body, and (virtual) social connections. In three…
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Forums
- Pro-Labor Design Under Capitalism
  
  Christine T. Wolf, Lynn S. Dombrowski
  
  Designing is useful—not only in finding simple, elegant solutions to practical problems but also in the higher potential it holds for emancipation and relief from the status quo [1]. But good design is hard. Human-computer interaction is a field settling into middle age, yet many of us still work…
- From Pixels to Play: Opportunities and Challenges of a Diverse and Democratized Games Industry
  
  Sebastian Long, Alena Denisova, Pejman Mirza-Babaei
  
  In the past decade, smaller video game development teams have defied the odds to create novel and commercially successful games without the financial and technical support of larger parent companies, publishers, or benefactors. These fiercely independent studios sustain total creative control over their own outputs, building their own unique…
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Features
- Customer Experience in Telecom Service Design: Time to Up the ANT
  
  Ruth Neubauer
  
  This past year, I was surprised to find myself having a really bad customer experience with my mobile Internet provider. As a customer, I always try to draw lessons from the experiences I have, as they inspire and inform my own design work. On this occasion, I found such…
- What Does ‘Failure’ Mean in Civic Tech? We Need Continued Conversations About Discontinuation
  
  Andrea Hamm, Yuya Shibuya, Teresa Cerratto Pargman, Roy Bendor, Christoph Raetzsch, Mennatullah Hendawy, Rainer Rehak, Gwen Klerks, Ben Schouten, Nicolai Brodersen Hansen
  
  Civic tech, also referred to as digital civics in HCI, designates efforts to use technology to bring together citizens, bring governments closer to citizens, or improve public service infrastructure. Such sociotechnical encounters are meant to address public needs and increase interactions and information flows between citizens and/or authorities. In…
- Imagining Sustainable Futures: Expanding the Discussion on Sustainable HCI
  
  Eleonora Mencarini, Valentina Nisi, Christina Bremer, Chiara Leonardi, Nuno Jardim Nunes, Jen Liu, Robert Soden
  
  For the past 15 years, in light of biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, droughts, floods, and threats to humans' and nonhumans' health, life, and activities, HCI researchers have been reflecting on the role their work can play in reducing the impact of climate change. Recently, the discourse on climate change…
- The Telepresence of Furniture in Extended Reality
  
  Ian Gonsher
  
  The Covid-19 pandemic has produced many lasting social and cultural changes. Among these changes is the increased role telepresence plays in mediating interpersonal relationships. Lockdowns served as real-time social experiments, validating at scale the notion that physical proximity is not always absolutely necessary for meaningful encounters. This normalization of…
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Cover story
- Civic Probes: A Method That Embeds Questions of Civic Infrastructure and Participation
  
  Ian G. Johnson, Vasilis Vlachokyriakos
  
  Many civic technologies within HCI, despite having various ambitions and purposes, fail in similar and predictable ways. In this article, we posit that the fundamental pathologies that have held back or obstructed digital civics studies are inherent in the way participatory and grassroots approaches are adopted by digital civics…
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Calendar
- Calendar
  
  INTR Staff
  
  March CHIIR '24: ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (Sheffield, UK) March 10–14, 2024 https://chiir2024.github.io/ HRI '24: 19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (Boulder, CO, USA) March 11–15, 2024 https://humanrobotinteraction.org/2024/ IUI '24: 29th Annual Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (ACM IUI) (Greenville, SC,…
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Exit
- Realizing the Future
  
  Arnold Lund
  
  Contributor: Arnold Lund, [email protected] Curator/Editor: Elizabeth Churchill The "Edmonds Monorail Concept Sketch" was discovered in the Edmonds Historical Museum archives while creating Edmonds Then and Now: 1876 to 2023, a historical photo essay book. In 1910, an early Elon Musk—like figure named W. H. Boyes came to the little…
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