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XXV.3 May-June 2018
Page: 5
Digital Citation

Coasts to coasts, Mumbai to Chicago


Authors:
Gilbert Cockton, Simone Barbosa

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As editors in chief, we aim to provide general readers with a broad range of content that extends awareness of the past and global present of interaction design (IxD) and HCI. In this issue, Jon Kolko's cover story looks to design's long past to identify qualities and practices that get lost in contemporary accounts of design thinking. Our Special Topic looks to the recent past of INTERACT 2017 in Mumbai and its Field Trips track, while our Next Billion forum addresses issues affecting low-resource communities in the affluent new world in Chicago. South of the U.S., Demo Hour brings us projects from the 2017 SIGGRAPH Art Gallery, "Technological Speculations from Latin America." Also from Latin America, PUC-Rio's Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza soaks Abracadabra's magic wand in Brazil's distinct semiotic engineering tradition to cast a pragmatic spell on computing.

Ideas can and do come from anywhere. Our Health Matters forum looks to reframe co-design practices through the lens of art therapy. In Blog@IX, Mario Romero shares his experience of reading using assistive technology for visual impairment. Our Business of UX forum looks through the lens of job listings at the shifting sands of customer experience (CX).


Jon Kolko's cover story looks to design's long past to identify qualities and practices that get lost in contemporary accounts of design thinking.


Looking at HCI and IxD through the lenses of history, geography, professional practices, and individual differences exposes both challenges and opportunities. The latter can feel out of reach and the former overwhelming, but our Sustainability in (Inter)Action forum advocates hope for dealing with the complexities of bringing about better environmental futures through design agency.

We welcome Roy Bendor as the new editor of our sustainability forum and thank Lisa Nathan for her excellent service over the past four years. We also fully welcome Anne Spaa as our new editorial assistant and thank Rachel Clarke for her excellent proactive and competent support for our first seven issues of Interactions as editors in chief.

Perspectives from the past and present of interaction design and its spreading peripheries add to what is already a rich HCI scene. Established areas such as e-health are represented in this issue by a Community Square report on a SIGCHI Summer School, as well as the perils of predictive modeling in Jonathan Bean's Consuming Tech column. Two U.S. universities from the dawn of HCI update us on their research in Day in the Lab (Michigan, crisis management) and How Was It Made? (Colorado, papercraft).

This august roll call is further extended by two SIGCHI Academy members: ACM Fellow Paul Dourish and ACM Distinguished Scientist Elizabeth Churchill. Paul gives us a glimpse into what he is reading. Elizabeth discusses the prevalence of impostor syndrome among high-achieving professionals and offers advice on becoming a smoother operator that resonates with the articles in this issue. We need to be hopeful but realistic, appropriately celebrating others and ourselves in a world of ever expanding and morphing knowledge that constantly makes us novices anew. We need to choose where to (not) aim our efforts and what to (not) take seriously. We hope that this and future issues of Interactions can help you to navigate the complex and diverse intersections of HCI and IxD. When and where do you want to learn today?

Gilbert Cockton and Simone Barbosa [email protected]

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The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2018 ACM, Inc.

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