Position Paper on Design in HCI Education

In this position paper I address issues with the integration of design, an intuitive and craft based discipline, into the scientific based disciplines of computer science and behavioural science that traditionally make up HCI education. These issues include (i) clearly defining and communicating the purpose for design in HCI education, (ii) measuring the value of interdisciplinary classes, and (iii) the role and value of qualitative evaluation for students who come from a quantitative background. While no solutions for these issues are presented, I do indicate some directions for advancement

The Persectives Browser: Exploratory Data Analysis for Everyone

Web search engines have gained tremendous audiences for information retrieval from unstructured documents. The number of structured and semi-structured documents available on the web is also huge, and collections of these are more amenable to data mining. Yet there has been no similar explosion of interest in this kind of exploration. Finding patterns in databases of political contributions, pollution and environmental data, or hospital and school performance would surely interest many citizens. The Perspectives Browser is intended to support this kind of exploration for users with little or no training in statistics or programming. Given an “advanced search” type query, it visualizes dependencies on the query of up to 30 variables. In preliminary studies, participants found interesting three-variable dependencies in an art collection. We concentrate on image databases because the content can be concisely summarized, but the dependency visualization applies to any hierarchically organized nominal or ordinal variables

The Role of Design Artifacts in Design Theory Construction

As a discipline evolves, intellectual issues come into focus, and the outcomes of systematic inquiry grow in importance. The discipline of design is facing such a time, as scholars, researchers, and practitioners are devoting attention to creating categories for design practice and design research, articulating methods and processes, and in some cases, building new design theories. The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is also experiencing an evolutionary broadening in scope that creates the need for design research. Many designers working in the HCI research community have expressed an increased interest in research through design; a research approach that employs methods and processes from design practice. However, without an agreed upon form of practice, evaluation, and outcome, it is hard to consistently develop design theory from research through design outcomes. In this paper, we begin to identify specific outcomes of research through design that form the basis for theory production. We present the research through design process and two different approaches of research through design (philosophical and grounded) that can lead to formation of design theory. We identify that extensible, systemic approaches to research through design are the most promising ones for developing design theory, and illustrate with examples

The Role of Products in Consumer-Celebrity Relationships

Celebrities, designed and packaged to elicit an emotional reaction from consumers, appear to be indistinguishable from products. However, their role as characters in narrative creates a very different type of emotional attachment than products enjoy. By both being and being in narrative content, celebrities allow consumers to vicariously experience many new lives, and it is this fantasy connection that makes the consumercelebrity attachment both strong and long lasting. In this paper we explore how celebrities effect consumers, and we detail how celebrity products support activities that create and grow consumer-celebrity relationships. In addition, we offer some insight into how understanding these activities can both lead to better design of celebrity products and lead to design of future products that form a similar level of attachment with consumers

Research Through Design as a Method for Interaction Design Research in HCI

For years the HCI community has struggled to integrate design in research and practice. While design has gained a strong foothold in practice, it has had much less impact on the HCI research community. In this paper we propose a new model for interaction design research within HCI. Following a research through design approach, designers produce novel integrations of HCI research in an attempt to make the right thing: a product that transforms the world from its current state to a preferred state. This model allows interaction designers to make research contributions based on their strength in addressing under-constrained problems. To formalize this model, we provide a set of four lenses for evaluating the research contribution and a set of three examples to illustrate the benefits of this type of research.</p

Celebrity Recommender

This paper presents both a rationale and a pilot study for using celebrities to present computer generated content recommendations. The rationale explores how people's parasocial relationships with celebrities influence decision-making. The pilot study examines if celebrity presentation of recommendations influences subjects' qualitative assessment of a recommender. Statistical tests on a small sample indicate that the use of a celebrity did not significantly enhance users’ perceptions of a recommender. However, the results suggest that influence between same-sex and cross-sex matches of subjects and celebrities should be further explored

Personalization: Improving Ease-of-Use, Trust and Accuracy of a TV Show Recommender

The plethora of content available to TV viewers has become overwhelming creating a need to help the viewers to find the programs that are the most interesting for them to watch. Towards this end we are developing a personalization system that recommends TV shows to users based on the knowledge of their preferences. For a quicker adoption of the personalization system by users, there is a need for the system to be easy to use, provide recommendations with high accuracy and build trust in the recommendations delivered. The user interface and recommender engine work hand in hand in order to provide all three items. In this paper we describe our system and show how it addresses each of the three issues mentioned

Discovering and Extracting Knowledge in the Design Project

Over the last twenty years, the rapid adoption of the graphical user interface followed by the emergence of the World Wide Web has created an increasing demand for interaction designers and interaction design research. Knowledge generated by interaction designers is needed not only by other designers, but also by researchers and practitioners from other disciplines. This evolution has generated increasing pressure for more refined models of design research and design research dissemination. To address this problem, we first explore the evolution of design documentation, detailing how it has evolved to meet the changing needs of designers. Then we present an opportunity map detailing where design projects produce knowledge. The map reveals areas for creating and communicating knowledge that is specific to interaction design, yet generalizable to a larger community that participates in interaction design

Interface Design of Video Scout: A Selection, Recording, and Segmentation System for TVs

Video Scout is a prototype retrieval application that allows Personal Video Recorders to actually watch the TV programs they record. By analyzing the visual, audio, and transcript data, Scout can segment and index TV programs, finding and recording specific video clips that match requests in users’ profiles. For example: if users request information on Philips, Scout will watch news programs and capture any stories it finds on Philips. The Scout interface offers a familiar TV environment where users can interact with whole TV programs and video clips organized by topic. Scout also provides users with tools for managing their profiles. This paper captures the Video Scout interface design process, from concept sketches to user testing to final prototype design

Fabric-Circle-Slider: Prototype Exploring the Interaction Aesthetic of Contextual Integration

Traditionally designers have explored the aesthetics of interaction through the relationship between the product form and the activity people use it for. However, in the increasing complexity of interconnected and multi-activity devices in the home, aesthetics have been sacrificed in a move to increase usability. In this paper we present an emerging theory that interaction designs that take a contextual integration approach can draw interaction aesthetics from the context instead of the activity in order to address the increased complexity. In addition, we present a conceptual interaction widget, called the fabric-circleslider that draws its interaction aesthetic from a lounge chair—the context of use—and supports interaction with many devices