Authors:
Ron Wakkary, Erik Stolterman
We are pleased to have Malcolm McCullough grace the pages of interactions for our cover story this issue. His work has explored the intersections of people, technology, and interaction in one form or another for some time. The insightfulness of his books Digital Ground (2004) and Abstracting Craft (1996) presaged many issues that we continue to wrestle with in dealing with the complexities and challenges of making and working with digital materials. With a background in architecture, McCullough has grounded his ideas in the confounding actualities of place. This position affords a view that is a critical counterbalance to disembodied and dislocated understandings of interactive technology and its effects.
McCullough's article, "On Attention to Surroundings," is based on his forthcoming book Ambient CommonsAttention in the Age of Embodied Information (MIT Press). As a theorist who pays attention to the bigger questions, McCullough rethinks ambient and embodied information, bringing attention to the role of designing technology to help us tune in to vital places like our civic spaces and commons. His article aims to reshape our notions of attention. He understands our current plethora of information as an embodied media that we inhabit as much as if not more than simply perceive or process mentally. No doubt this raises issues of multitasking, context, and cognitive capacity. Yet McCullough asks us to consider newer notions, such as the idea that ambient information puts us in an age of superabundance, in which the workings of attention may be shifting. The issue for us, he argues, is less a matter of overloading than of overconsumption. The role that attention plays is so vital that the author sees the need to consider the responsibility of attentiveness and attention practices.
In another form of attention, we are pleased to announce that our recently launched interactions website was awarded the Interactive Media Awards' Outstanding Achievement Award for 2012 (www.interactivemediaawards.com). Congratulations to Mineral Studios (www.mineralstudios.com), the agency that designed our site, and the tireless work of Diane Crawford, John Stanik, Scott Delman, and Chris Guccio of ACM!
We are also happy to report that the number of submissions to interactions has been steadily increasingkeeping us very busy! We invite you to continue to submit feature articles, Demo Hours, Blogposts, Day in the Lab profiles, and Visual Thinking Backpage Gallery pieces to us. You can find instructions on how to submit at interactions.acm.org/submissions. We also welcome new ideas to improve the magazine as well as your feedback on its content.
Lastly, we want to thank Leah Maestri, who has been the editor of Demo Hour and for almost two years served as our assistant. Thank you for your invaluable contributions to the magazine!
Ron Wakkary and Erik Stolterman
[email protected]
©2012 ACM 1072-5220/12/11 $15.00
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