Table of Contents
VOLUME XXIII.6 November-December 2016
- WELCOME
- Demo Hour
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What are you reading?
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What are you reading?
Wendy Ju
The Peripheral By William Gibson (2014) I love reading William Gibson novels, but I can't tear through them quickly, like I do regular fiction. Gibson's novels draw a rich and complicated picture of how life might be in the dark cyberpunk future, a future dense with cybernetic implants, shadowy…
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Blog@IX
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Violent groups, social psychology, and computing
Juan Hourcade
About two years ago, I participated in the first Build Peace conference [1], a meeting of practitioners and researchers from a wide range of backgrounds with a common interest in using technologies to promote peace around the world. During one session, the presenter asked members of the audience to…
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How was it made?
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IrukaTact
Aisen Chacin, Takeshi Oozu
Describe what you made. IrukaTact is a submersible haptic search glove that assists in the location of sunken objects. It is inspired by dolphin (iruka in Japanese) echolocation. The system detects the topography of flooded areas with a sonar sensor that sends haptic signals to the wearer's fingertips. These…
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Departments
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Feedback
INTR Staff
Affordances: Bringing Them Out of the Woods By Leonardo Burlamaqui and Andy Dong July–August 2016 DOI: 10.1145/2934292 I find it amusing—but also distressing—to read the imaginative things that people claim I have said, thought, or believed. So, authors Leonardo Burlamaqui and Andy Dong as well as the editors and…
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Community calendar
INTR Staff
November VRST 2016 - ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (Munich, Germany) Conference Dates: November 2–5, 2016 http://www.vrst2016.lrz.de/ ISS 2016 - ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (Niagara Falls, Canada) Conference Dates: November 6–9, 2016 http://iss2016.acm.org/ IoT 2016 - 6th International Conference on the Internet…
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Columns
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In the long tail: An animistic view on conversational interfaces
Sorin Pintilie
A bot is a robot without a body, intelligence divorced of physical form. And, Cartesian innuendos aside, the only things we know to fit that description are spirits. That's why it's so hard to talk about them. The meaning of the word simply won't stay still. A bot is…
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Let’s get a grip on virtual reality!
Uday Gajendar
Quick: How do you interrupt someone plugged into virtual reality (VR)? I was faced with this peculiar issue when meeting with a colleague working on VR. Ambling over to his desk amid an open-air setup of cubes and pods, I noticed right away that he was fully plugged in.…
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Special topic
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Introduction
Bonnie Nardi, Bill Tomlinson, Donald Patterson
Sustainable HCI Education Over the past several years, there has been a movement afoot within the academic community to develop new ways to teach sustainable HCI. These efforts have taken a step away from incremental or individualistic forms of sustainability, which focus on issues such as efficiency, persuasive technologies,…
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At odds with a worldview—Teaching limits at a technical university
Daniel Pargman, Elina Eriksson
This article takes as its starting point the staggering challenges humanity is now facing and will continue to face during the remainder of the 21st century. During the past century, our civilization has experienced an explosion in ingenuity, knowledge, and creativity, but it has also shaped the world in…
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- Day in the Lab
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Forums
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Deconstructing human-building interaction
Hamed Alavi, Elizabeth Churchill, Dave Kirk, Julien Nembrini, Denis Lalanne
Interaction design, and HCI more broadly, has a history of entwinement with reflections and concepts from architecture and urban design. At least seven encounters are notable: in the area of ubiquitous computing, where digital artifacts are physically embodied and situated within the environment; in the notion of cooperative buildings,…
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Keeping progress on the long and winding road
Evan Barba
Lately I've been having a lot of conversations about the Singularity [1]. The last time the Vinge/Kurzweil idea was a hot topic of discussion among my students, about four years ago, the prevailing mood was one of deep skepticism. This time around, though, it's a very different story. The…
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Citizen interaction design: Teaching HCI through service
Cliff Lampe
An important aspect of HCI education is training professional master's students in HCI techniques, including those central to user experience design (UXD) and interaction design (IxD). In the classroom we can teach about affinity diagrams and user stories and wireframes and more, but students oriented toward HCI as a…
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A conceptual framework for the analysis and visualization of Uruguayan internet for education
Cristóbal Cobo, Matías Mateu
Uruguay, a country of 3.4 million people, has a per capita GDP of 21,200 USD [1]. In the past decade, the Uruguayan government has made significant investments in its digital inclusion strategy. Plan Ceibal became the first nationwide ubiquitous educational computer program in the world based on the 1:1…
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Design without a future
Jentery Sayers
In the lab I direct, we prototype technologies that no longer exist or no longer function. Within the field of comparative media studies, this approach is somewhat atypical, mostly because historians and theorists usually treat media as objects of study, not materials for inquiry. Each of our prototypes corresponds…
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Community square
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Evangelizing HCI research and practice in Brazil
Elizabeth Furtado, Tayana Conte, Simone Barbosa, Paulo Melo, Cristiano Maciel, Cleidson de Souza, Tuomo Kujala
Since 2012, the Brazilian HCI community has been discussing its main challenges for the next decade [1]. One such challenge is to promote collaboration among educators, institutions, and practitioners to improve HCI education in Brazil. The rationale is that when HCI education is aligned with industry needs, HCI professionals…
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Features
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Teaching global disruption and information technology online
Bill Tomlinson, Donald Patterson, Bonnie Nardi
Computer science has always dealt with limits. Developing effective algorithms that compensate for limited memory, limited computational power, and limited bandwidth are central to the discipline. Over time technology has gradually raised these limits (e.g., Moore's Law) to such a degree that computing now competes for large-scale access to…
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Computing education for sustainability—What gives me hope?
Samuel Mann
After more than 20 years in computing, I doubted our field's desire or ability to drive change. So I changed direction. Formerly a professor in IT, I am now a professor of sustainable practice in a post-discipline department specializing in professional practice. My work centers around the notion of…
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Taking action on distraction
Michael Biskjaer, Peter Dalsgaard, Kim Halskov
Find a spartan room with a clear desk. Wear a pair of earplugs and over them noise-canceling, pink-noise-emitting headphones. Use a modified computer with no card for computer games and with the Ethernet port sealed to block Internet access. Now draw the curtains—and put on a blindfold. Then you…
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Rethinking our interactions with light
Andrés Lucero, Jon Mason, Alexander Wiethoff, Bernt Meerbeek, Henrika Pihlajaniemi, Dzmitry Aliakseyeu
We human beings have come a long way since our prehistoric ancestors gathered around a fire some 1.5 million years ago for company, protection, cooking, and warmth. Besides all its wonderful newfound benefits, fire also offered the first means to extend the day into the nighttime hours by providing…
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- Cover story
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Visual thinking gallery
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Interaction at the tip of your toes
Eli Blevis
Contributor: Rojin Vishkaie Curator/Editor: Eli Blevis Genre: Reuse, adaptation, sustainability, fashion, repurposed wearables, interactivity, maker culture Old running shoes inspire material reuse as lighting design. ©2016 ACM1072-5520/16/11$15.00 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted…
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