Table of Contents
VOLUME XVIII.5 September + October 2011
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Welcome
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WELCOME A field without borders
Ron Wakkary, Erik Stolterman
Over the past few decades, some of the most visible and radical changes within HCI and interaction design have involved a broadening of scope and a change of focus. In the early days, the individual professional working on a clearly defined task in a work environment was the unit…
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Demo Hour
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Demo hour
Anthony Otten, Daniel Schulze, Mie Sorensen, Di Mainstone, Tim Murray-Browne
Wheel Stories Wheel Stories is a working model of a Ferris wheel fairground ride, that when turned triggers a video to play. Each carriage plays a different piece of audio, along with video showing the same cycle of the ride from a different viewpoint, allowing many different perspectives for…
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Blogpost
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Claiming success, charting the future
Ben Shneiderman
The remarkable growth of HCI over the past 30 years has transformed this once nascent interdisciplinary field into an intellectually rich, worldwide phenomenon. We've grown from a small, rebellious group of researchers who struggled to gain recognition as we broke disciplinary boundaries to a large, influential community with potent…
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Departments
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Feedback
INTR Staff
Feedback for Liam Bannon It's interesting that the day after I decided to go back to school to finish my bachelor's degree and study HCI, the latest issue of interactions arrived in my inbox. I've been reading the cover story ("Reimagining HCI: Toward a More Human-Centered Perspective," July +…
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Community calendar 2011
INTR Staff
September 2011: Think Design Play: 5th International Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Conference (Utrecht, The Netherlands) Conference date: September 1417, 2011 http://www.gamesconference.org UBICOMP 2011: 13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Beijing, China) Conference date: September 1721, 2011 http://www.ubicomp.org/ubicomp2011/ Design, Development and Research (Cape Town, South Africa) Conference date: September…
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Columns
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Missing the point
Elizabeth Churchill
"Zhège," she said, pointing emphatically at the top right of her iPhone screen. She leaned farther into the gap between the passenger and driver seats of the taxi. Then, lifting her head, she pointed forward through the windshield in a direction that, I assumed, was where we were hoping…
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SIGCHI
Gerrit van der Veer
As always, this year's CHI conference was a peek into the life of our world. Over 2,700 attendees were able to choose from more accepted contributions than ever before. No, we did not lower the quality of our acceptance criteria. Yes, we did condense the presentations, giving authors shorter…
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Day in the Lab
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The Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab
Gary Watson
How do you describe your lab to visitors? The Champaign-Urbana Community (CUC) Fab Lab is an open source community of people who like to design and make things. Our principal focus is to provide a safe and fun learning environment so that students of all ages can master modern…
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Forums
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Swimming upstream in sustainable design
Azam Khan
Ballpark figures can often be quite helpful. They set the scope of a conversation so we can see its context and get a general feel for what its implications might be. For example, one could estimate that there are about 20 million designers, engineers, and architects in the world…
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When the museum goes native
Rachel Smith, Ole Iversen
The goal of museums is to transform our experience of living in the world: to heighten our sensitivities, to transform our vision, and to unveil new perspectives. Embedded in this mission is the fundamental challenge of bringing together, blending, and exploring what arises in the intersection of audiences' everyday…
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What are our responsibilities when designing sociotechnical health interventions?
Katie Siek
Maybe you heard a horrible statistic about a health-related issue and thought, "Technology could help with this." Or perhaps an event in your own life prompted you to think about how technology could improve the health and wellness of others. Whenever I have an experience that highlights a potential…
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Envisioning persuasion profiles
Maurits Kaptein, Dean Eckles, Janet Davis
Eleven-year-old Joey has resisted following his doctor's weight-loss planskipping his daily bike ride to play video games, trading his healthy lunches for soft drinks, and sneaking snacks at night. His dad, Martin, is frustrated. Joey seems frustrated, too. Concerned about some recent bullying, Martin goes online to check the…
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Kai
Jonathan Grudin
The following discussion occurred in the online Virtual Academy of Technology and Science. Kai and Randi, student and mentor, conversed as their avatars strolled through a lightly populated town. Kai: I read a great review by Jim Holt of Nicholas Carr's book on how the Internet is trashing our…
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Extending Negroponte’s model of convergence
Hugh Dubberly
In 1980, when I was a college student, I heard Nicholas Negroponte speak about the future of computing. What stood out most was his model of convergence. Negroponte presented the model in three steps. The first slide showed the publishing, broadcasting, and computing industries as separate rings; the second…
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Features
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Emotion and motion
Katherine Isbister
At the end of a day of writing, emailing, and conducting more meetings than I'd like via video-conference, my back hurts, my eyes are glazed, and I feel drained and dissociated. If I calculate hours of face time, I must admit that my computer is my closest companion. Unfortunately,…
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Reconsidering the H, the C, and the I
Peter Wright
Other people's ideas are like new clothes: You can try them on and wear them for a while. Sometimes they just don't work, so you bury them in the bottom drawer, where they are forgotten until you happen across them while rummaging for something else. Other times, they do…
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Tracing provenance
Daniela Rosner
Fifteen years ago, I was sitting in a dimly lit room, leaning over a Steinbeck (an old film-editing machine) and cutting a strip of film. Aligning the film beneath the blade, I adjusted the blade once or twice and then cut the film in between two images on the…
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Poets and blacksmiths
Joji Mori, Steve Howard, Martin Gibbs
As a global audience, we regularly witness tragic events, such as the recent earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, unfold on news websites and online social networks. In the aftermath of such tragedies, there is a need to rebuild lives and livelihoods. Memorialization provides an avenue for grieving and…
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Design-based research
Željko Obrenović
More than 20 years ago, Fred Brooks asked, "Is interface design itself an area of research, producing generalizable results?" [1]. He elaborated that a major issue that puzzles the human-computer interaction community is the tension between narrow truths proved convincingly by statistically sound experiments, and broad truths, generally applicable,…
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Digital imagery as meaning and form in HCI and design
Eli Blevis
This article introduces the notion of visual thinking in HCI and interaction design. It also serves as a call for contributors to a new regular interactions section, the Visual Thinking Backpage Gallery (see sidebar). Visual thinking is the use of imagery and other visual forms to make sense of…
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Cover story
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Gaian IxD
Brenda Laurel
I begin here. We need to find better ways to look at the Earth and understand our relationships with it. We need to change our notions of human agency within this larger context. I think these changes can be manifested through interaction designits intents, objects, processes, and methods. This…
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