ACM Interactions

Elizabeth Churchill is a director of user experience at Google. She has been a scholar and research manager focused on human-computer interaction for over 20 years. A Distinguished Scientist of the ACM, her current work focuses on HCI aspects of the social web and the emerging Internet of Things.

Brigitte (Gitti) Jordan: An obituary

Posted: Thu, June 23, 2016 - 3:43:25

It is with great sadness that we report on Brigitte (Gitti) Jordan’s death; Gitti died on May 24, 2016, at her home in La Honda, California, surrounded by loved ones. She was 78. While the influence of anthropology and the practice of ethnography may seem very familiar to us in the HCI and technology design world today, it was not…

CHI 2013 roundup

Posted: Thu, May 16, 2013 - 3:28:34

The 2013 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (commonly known as just CHI) took place in Paris from April 27 to May 2, 2013. Many of you are familiar with the CHI conference either through direct experience or through reading papers that are showcased there. This was a bumper year for CHI: around 3500 attendees running between16…

The new Gmail interface: better or worse?

Posted: Fri, April 26, 2013 - 7:12:13

People have been declaring the death of email for decades. It is claimed that email is only used by fuddy-duddies, a dying breed of technologically challenged, uncool dinosaurs. That would be me then. And most of my friends and colleagues. I am told that if I were hip, young, trendy, efficient … I would obviously choose to have all my…

Humanoid (robot) hacking

Posted: Thu, March 14, 2013 - 9:00:42

Psy’s Gangnam Style took the world by storm in 2012. YouTube was flooded with copycat dancers performing unlikely gyrations. Fabulously, it wasn’t just human beings getting in on the fun. Researchers Christophe Bartneck and Eduardo Sandoval at the University of Canterbury's Human Interface Technology Lab in New Zealand made a video of their Nao robots showing off their moves. Demoed…

Remembering John E. Karlin, the “father” of the standard keypad

Posted: Thu, February 14, 2013 - 11:35:07

John E. Karlin died recently on January 28th, 2013. Most people probably have not heard of him, but he was one the people who laid the groundwork for our field, for human-computer interaction as a discipline. HCI emerged from the overlapping fields of industrial and cognitive psychology, human factors, and ergonomics. While much human factors research was conducted with military…

On the question of human in HCI

Posted: Wed, January 16, 2013 - 11:43:23

WOW! I am so honored and so happy to be part of this amazing blogging lineup for interactions magazine. As some of you may know, I have been writing a somewhat whimsical column for interactions for several years, reflecting on research, design, and the emerging technoscapes that surround us everyday. While I will continue to contribute as a columnist for…