Crafting a Place for Attending to the Things of Design at CHI

Over the past two years, we have organized workshops at the CHI conference that have focused on the “Things of Design Research. The goal of these workshops is simple: to explore and develop a venue at CHI for research through design (RtD) practitioners to materially share their work with each other. RtD often centers on the making of things— artifacts, systems, services, or other knowledge in the interaction-design and human-computer interaction (CHI) research communities. Yet, over the years, we have felt that the things of design research have remained conspicuously overlooked, under-engaged with, and, for the most part, absent from the CHI conference. If RtD is to continue to develop as a research practice in the HCI community—and we want to build a community of designers doing research with and through designed objects—we need more things at CHI

Synchronous haptic experience and self-other boundaries in human computer interaction

The boundaries of the self may be manipulated to incorporate objects in the physical sense (e.g., the rubber hand illusion) and other people in the conceptual sense (e.g., the enfacement effect). Synchronous stimulation has been used to manipulate both physical and conceptual self boundaries. Although the literature offers many discussions of the metaphoric overlap between self and other, experimental study of the embodied aspects of this phenomenon has been lacking. This study consequently manipulated multimodal stimulation to test factors potentially affecting self-other overlap in a user-actor human computer interaction (HCI). As HCI progresses from information design to experience design, from inelegant artifacts to ambient intelligence, an embodied perspective can inform the interaction of technology and the body, affect, and social cognition. The independent variables in the experiment were: (1) the presence or absence of a haptic device (neck massager) on the participant; (2) the presentation of one of two videos, in which an actor expressed either energy or calmness while wearing the haptic device; and (3) the pre- and post-intervention time factor. The experiment measured the effect of these variables on the following dependent variables: (1) heart rate; (2) skin conductance; (3) energetic arousal; (4) calmness; and (5) interpersonal closeness to the actor. The results showed a main effect for time for all dependent variables. Regardless of haptic device or video content, heart rate decreased, skin conductance increased, self-reported calmness increased, self-reported energetic arousal decreased, and self-reported interpersonal closeness to the actor increased. A three-way interaction effect was evident for the measures of calmness and interpersonal closeness. The greatest reported increase in calmness occurred in the haptic-energy video condition. The greatest reported increase in interpersonal closeness also occurred in the haptic-energy video condition, an effect that was consistent with one of the study\u27s hypotheses. HCI applications that incorporate both haptic and interpersonal closeness factors would be wise to consider this effect and subject it to further testing

Demonstrating Interaction: The Case of Assistive Technology

Technology 'demos' have become a staple in technology design practice, especially for showcasing prototypes or systems. However, demonstrations are also commonplace and multifaceted phenomena in everyday life, and thus have found their way into empirical research of technology use. In spite of their presence in HCI, their methodical character as a research tool has so far received little attention in our community. We analysed 102 video-recorded demonstrations performed by visually impaired people, captured in the context of a larger ethnographic study investigating their technology use. In doing so, we exhibit core features of demonstrational work and discuss the relevance of the meta-activities occurring around and within demonstrations. We reflect on their value as an approach to doing HCI research on assistive technologies, for enabling shared understanding and letting us identify opportunities for design. Lastly, we discuss their implications as a research instrument for accessibility and HCI research more broadly