217,612 research outputs found
What Makes A Good CHI Design Paper
What We Mean By ‘Real Design Papers’
In the last issue, we suggested that the ‘perfect CHI design paper’ is a myth, not just because it is all but impossible to achieve but because there are so many ways to pursue and report design research. In this article, we suggest that there are a few ingredients that seem to be present in all, or at least nearly all, submissions that the subcommittee considered successful enough to accept for this year’s CHI. Each of these are key factors in delivering design practice as design research. We hope that describing them here will help replace the imaginary ‘perfect CHI design paper’ as a guide both for authors and – equally importantly – for reviewers trying to identify valuable contributions to CHI
A Load of Cobbler’s Children: Beyond the Model Designing Processor
HCI has developed rich understandings of people at work and at play with technology: most people that is, except designers, who remain locked in the information processing paradigm of first wave HCI. Design methods are validated as if they were computer programs, expected to produce the same results on a range of architectures and hardware. Unfortunately, designers are people, and thus interfere substantially (generally to good effects) with the ‘code’ of design methods. We need to rethink the evaluation and design of design and evaluation methods in HCI. A logocentric proposal based on resource function vocabularies is presented
Data, Data Everywhere, and Still Too Hard to Link: Insights from User Interactions with Diabetes Apps
For those with chronic conditions, such as Type 1 diabetes, smartphone apps offer the promise of an affordable, convenient, and personalized disease management tool. How- ever, despite significant academic research and commercial development in this area, diabetes apps still show low adoption rates and underwhelming clinical outcomes. Through user-interaction sessions with 16 people with Type 1 diabetes, we provide evidence that commonly used interfaces for diabetes self-management apps, while providing certain benefits, can fail to explicitly address the cognitive and emotional requirements of users. From analysis of these sessions with eight such user interface designs, we report on user requirements, as well as interface benefits, limitations, and then discuss the implications of these findings. Finally, with the goal of improving these apps, we identify 3 questions for designers, and review for each in turn: current shortcomings, relevant approaches, exposed challenges, and potential solutions
In pursuit of rigour and accountability in participatory design
The field of Participatory Design (PD) has greatly diversified and we see a broad spectrum of approaches and methodologies emerging. However, to foster its role in designing future interactive technologies, a discussion about accountability and rigour across this spectrum is needed. Rejecting the traditional, positivistic framework, we take inspiration from related fields such as Design Research and Action Research to develop interpretations of these concepts that are rooted in PD׳s own belief system. We argue that unlike in other fields, accountability and rigour are nuanced concepts that are delivered through debate, critique and reflection. A key prerequisite for having such debates is the availability of a language that allows designers, researchers and practitioners to construct solid arguments about the appropriateness of their stances, choices and judgements.
To this end, we propose a “tool-to-think-with” that provides such a language by guiding designers, researchers and practitioners through a process of systematic reflection and critical analysis. The tool proposes four lenses to critically reflect on the nature of a PD effort: epistemology, values, stakeholders and outcomes. In a subsequent step, the coherence between the revealed features is analysed and shows whether they pull the project in the same direction or work against each other. Regardless of the flavour of PD, we argue that this coherence of features indicates the level of internal rigour of PD work and that the process of reflection and analysis provides the language to argue for it. We envision our tool to be useful at all stages of PD work: in the planning phase, as part of a reflective practice during the work, and as a means to construct knowledge and advance the field after the fact. We ground our theoretical discussions in a specific PD experience, the ECHOES project, to motivate the tool and to illustrate its workings
FM radio: family interplay with sonic mementos
Digital mementos are increasingly problematic, as people acquire large amounts of digital belongings that are hard to access and often forgotten. Based on fieldwork with 10 families, we designed a new type of embodied digital memento, the FM Radio. It allows families to access and play sonic mementos of their previous holidays. We describe our underlying design motivation where recordings are presented as a series of channels on an old fashioned radio. User feedback suggests that the device met our design goals: being playful and intriguing, easy to use and social. It facilitated family interaction, and allowed ready access to mementos, thus sharing many of the properties of physical mementos that we intended to trigger
Attendee-Sourcing: Exploring The Design Space of Community-Informed Conference Scheduling
Constructing a good conference schedule for a large multi-track conference
needs to take into account the preferences and constraints of organizers,
authors, and attendees. Creating a schedule which has fewer conflicts for
authors and attendees, and thematically coherent sessions is a challenging
task.
Cobi introduced an alternative approach to conference scheduling by engaging
the community to play an active role in the planning process. The current Cobi
pipeline consists of committee-sourcing and author-sourcing to plan a
conference schedule. We further explore the design space of community-sourcing
by introducing attendee-sourcing -- a process that collects input from
conference attendees and encodes them as preferences and constraints for
creating sessions and schedule. For CHI 2014, a large multi-track conference in
human-computer interaction with more than 3,000 attendees and 1,000 authors, we
collected attendees' preferences by making available all the accepted papers at
the conference on a paper recommendation tool we built called Confer, for a
period of 45 days before announcing the conference program (sessions and
schedule). We compare the preferences marked on Confer with the preferences
collected from Cobi's author-sourcing approach. We show that attendee-sourcing
can provide insights beyond what can be discovered by author-sourcing. For CHI
2014, the results show value in the method and attendees' participation. It
produces data that provides more alternatives in scheduling and complements
data collected from other methods for creating coherent sessions and reducing
conflicts.Comment: HCOMP 201
Methodological development
Book description: Human-Computer Interaction draws on the fields of computer science, psychology, cognitive science, and organisational and social sciences in order to understand how people use and experience interactive technology. Until now, researchers have been forced to return to the individual subjects to learn about research methods and how to adapt them to the particular challenges of HCI. This is the first book to provide a single resource through which a range of commonly used research methods in HCI are introduced. Chapters are authored by internationally leading HCI researchers who use examples from their own work to illustrate how the methods apply in an HCI context. Each chapter also contains key references to help researchers find out more about each method as it has been used in HCI. Topics covered include experimental design, use of eyetracking, qualitative research methods, cognitive modelling, how to develop new methodologies and writing up your research
Transfer Scenarios: Grounding Innovation with Marginal Practices
Transfer scenarios is a method developed to support the
design of innovative interactive technology. Such a method
should help the designer to come up with inventive ideas,
and at the same time provide grounding in real human
needs. In transfer scenarios, we use marginal practices to
encourage a changed mindset throughout the design
process. A marginal practice consists of individuals who
share an activity that they find meaningful. We regard these
individuals not as end-users, but as valuable input in the
design process. We applied this method when designing
novel applications for autonomous embodied agents, e.g.
robots. Owners of unusual pets, such as snakes and spiders,
were interviewed - not with the intention to design robot
pets, but to determine underlying needs and interests of
their practice. The results were then used to design a set of
applications for more general users, including a dynamic
living-room wall and a set of communicating hobby robots
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