Table of Contents
VOLUME XXIII.3 May + June 2016
- Demo Hour
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What are you reading?
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What are you reading?
Nicola Bidwell
Black Skin, White Masks By Frantz Fanon (1952) "A feeling of inferiority?" asks Frantz Fanon, in his essay "The Fact of Blackness." "No," he says, "a feeling of nonexistence." Recently, South African students protesting for #Rhodes Must Fall joined a succession of liberation movements referencing Fanon over the past…
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Blog@IX
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The wicked problem of making SIGCHI accessible
Jennifer Mankoff
About 15 percent of people worldwide have a disability [1] and the likelihood of experiencing disability naturally increases with age. SIGCHI can attract new members, and make current members feel welcome, by making its events and resources more inclusive to those with disabilities. This in turn will enrich SIGCHI,…
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How was it made?
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BitDrones
Antonio Gomes, Calvin Rubens, Sean Braley, Roel Vertegaal
Describe what you made. BitDrones is a toolbox for building interactive real-reality 3D displays using nano-quadcopters as self-levitating building blocks. Our system is a first step toward modular tangible interfaces that are capable of physically representing 3D data on the fly, without the need of additional structural support. BitDrones…
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Departments
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Welcome: The significance of making
Ron Wakkary, Erik Stolterman
A fascinating trend in HCI is the growing interest in making, which has recently influenced most educational programs in interaction design and HCI. Making is now an established element in these programs, where students work with materials to shape and develop physical products while also exploring and tinkering with…
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Community calendar
INTR Staff
May CHI 2016 – ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, USA) Conference Dates: May 7–12, 2016 http://chi2016.acm.org/ UXPA 2016 (Seattle, USA) Conference Dates: May 31–June 3, 2016 http://uxpa2016.org/ June DIS 2016 – ACM Conference on Design Interactive Systems (Brisbane, Australia) Conference Dates: June 4–8,…
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Columns
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Experience uber alles?
Jonathan Bean
I used Uber for the first time this past winter. I was in Montreal, visiting a colleague; it was cold and wet, and we were running a bit late for an appointment. Up until that point, I had been a self-styled conscientious objector to this particular manifestation of the…
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The interaction design public intellectual
Cameron Tonkinwise
Design (non-architectural) and computer science became disciplines in the university system around the same time, and in some respects HCI tries to be their bridge. However, I sometimes think it would be useful to admit that design and computer science have very different epistemologies, if not ontologies. HCI's efforts…
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- Day in the Lab
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Forums
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Expanding design possibilities for life with dementia
Amy Hwang, Khai Truong, Alex Mihailidis
Dementia—a syndrome most commonly caused by Alzheimer's disease—is widely understood as progressive memory loss and functional decline in older adults. Still without a cure, dementia conjures images of loss, deterioration, and dependency on caregivers—usually family members—until care needs warrant institutionalization. Persons with dementia need increasing care, and caregivers need…
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Objects with intent: A new paradigm for interaction design
Marco Rozendaal
Imagine products we are familiar with, such as lamps, jackets, and toys. Now imagine they are given a purpose: The lamp wants you to have a good night's sleep; the jacket encourages you to calm down; and toys wish for you to be active. I call these artifacts Objects…
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Product strategy
Indi Young
Assumptions are pernicious. They are particularly dangerous when they become engrained in your product or service design decisions. You don't realize when you're working under their influence, and it's impossible to recognize the situation unless you're used to asking questions ... a lot of questions ... naive questions ...…
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Eyewear computers for human-computer interaction
Andreas Bulling, Kai Kunze
Head-worn displays and eye trackers, augmented and virtual reality glasses, egocentric cameras, and other "smart eyewear" have recently emerged as a research platform in fields such as ubiquitous computing, computer vision, and cognitive and social science. While earlier generations of devices were too bulky to be worn regularly, recent…
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A sustainable HCI knowledge base in progress
Bran Knowles, Maria Håkansson
It is easy to feel discouraged when doing sustainable HCI (SHCI) research. What have we as a community accomplished? Well, we have done what we set out to do in early musings about the role of HCI in sustainability. We have devised clever solutions for increasing energy efficiency, only…
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Community square
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Accessing ACM/SIGCHI publications: Open enough?
Loren Terveen
Reaching a global community. This sounds good! Let's think a bit more about what it means for SIGCHI. Distinctive parts of our identity are that we are interdisciplinary and international. SIGCHI sponsors more than 20 conferences, with well over a thousand papers published each year. Are they reaching all…
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Features
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Gender and status in voice user interfaces
Charles Hannon
"I didn't understand the question that I heard." This is the somewhat awkward response I get when Alexa, the AI personality of the Amazon Echo, doesn't understand me. She could say, "I didn't understand your question," but as my assistant, she has been programmed to signal her lower status…
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Research contributions in human-computer interaction
Jacob Wobbrock, Julie Kientz
All scholarly fields strive to contribute new knowledge. In the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), this new knowledge increasingly comes in rich forms like videos and demos, but the archival research paper remains the most widely used and accepted capture and delivery mechanism for research knowledge. The knowledge contribution…
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Deep cover HCI: The ethics of covert research
Julie Williamson, Daniel Sundén
In a time when many research questions lead us to evaluate "in the wild," it seems like the next logical step to increase the realism of these evaluations. Studies done without any interference or visible presence from an experimenter could give us an incredibly realistic view of how our…
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New fundamentals for CSCW research: From distance to politics
Pernille Bjørn
Fifteen years ago a famous paper by Gary and Judith Olson taught us that distance matters in collaborative settings [1]. Back then, the technologies supporting collaboration between geographically distributed employees within organizations were still a rather new phenomenon, and technologies were measured by their ability to mimic collocation, which…
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Cybersecurity needs you!
Jeremiah Still
Cybersecurity systems are complex. Given the diversity of stakeholders and the variety of system uses, it is unlikely that some magic bullet will eradicate our security concerns. The successful security of our cyber-physical systems depends on corporations and government agencies working together to identify threats, possible future weaknesses, and…
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- Cover story
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Visual thinking gallery
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Red, white, and blue in black and white
Eli Blevis
Contributor: Eli Blevis Curator/Editor: Eli Blevis Genre: Design for social good, unusual combinations of materials, social status of materials rwb330 (rwb330.hk), a not-for-profit store, displays a purse modeled after a luxury brand, but made of inexpensive woven plastic commonly used in Hong Kong and China by the many people…
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