I took advantage of the long transit time to write up my thoughts about several of the talks I saw this past week at CHI. Posted on my blog is the full CHI 2015 conference report.

The current (March/April 2015) issue of interactions has an article on technology non-use I wrote with Jenna Burrell, Morgan Ames, Jed Brubaker, and Paul Dourish. This is also the crew with whom I co-organized a workshop on non-use at CHI last year. The interactions article in part summarizes and synthesizes themes from that workshop. It also in many ways presages the special issue of First Monday we’re right in the midst of co-editing.

So, while you’re waiting for the special issue to come out, go take a look at the interactions piece.

I’m pleased and excited to announce that I’ve had two submissions, one paper and one note, accepted to CHI. Titles and abstracts below.

Continue reading →

Month after next, I’ll be presenting a paper at DIS that reviews the use of reflection in interactive systems design. Mostly, the focus is on systems designed to support reflection (as in reflective thought). Here’s the abstract:

Designers have demonstrated an increased interest in designing for reflection. However, that work currently occurs under a variety of diverse auspices. To help organize and investigate this literature, this paper present a review of research on systems designed to support reflection. Key findings include that most work in this area does not actually define the concept of reflection. We also find that most evaluations do not focus on reflection per se rather but on some other outcome arguably linked to reflection. Our review also describes the relationship between reflection and persuasion evidenced implicitly by both rhetorical motivations for and implementation details of system design. After discussing the significance of our findings, we conclude with a series of recommendations for improving research on and design for reflection.

See the publications page for a preprint.

Our field study of Reflext has now gone to press in the Journal of Information Technology and Politics, in as much as “press” is an appropriate term for primarily digital publishing. Here’s the abstract:

Vast amounts of political coverage are generated daily online. Some tools have been developed to help keep track of what is being said, but fewer efforts focus on how things are being said, i.e., how issues are framed. This article presents a study of Reflext, an interactive visualization tool that leverages computational linguistic analysis to support reflection on the framing of political issues. This system was deployed in a field study, during which the tool was used by regular readers of political news coverage during the 2012 U.S. election campaign. The results describe the tool’s support for a variety of activities related to frame reflection, how users integrated tool use with their existing reading practices, and broader issues in how participants interpreted the computational analysis and visualization. These findings contribute to our understanding of how algorithmically based interactive systems might mediate both the practical experiences of and situated interpretation of framing in political content.

See the full article.

Along with several fantastic people, I’ll be co-organizing a workshop on technology use at CHI. Here’s an excerpt from the CfP:

Most research in human-centered/social computing focuses on when and how people use technology. We argue that examining non-use – when and how people do not use technology – is an equally informative line of inquiry. This workshop will consider the theories, methods, foundational texts, and central research questions in the study of non-use. In addition to a special issue proposal, we expect the research thread brought to the fore in this workshop will speak to foundational questions of use and the user in HCI.

For more details see http://nonuse.jedbrubaker.com/

We’re especially interested in involving participants from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, so please help us circulate this call broadly.