What will be published at CHI 25 years from now?

Visions of the future profoundly influence current research. From the inspirational role of science fiction, to narratives about development and progress, to utopian as well as dystopian predictions about the impacts of technology on society, the tomorrows toward which we work, consciously or unconsciously, significantly shape what counts as an important contribution in today’s research. However, despite their importance, relatively limited discussion occurs about the details of what such futures might entail.

This call offers an opportunity to speculate about what those potential futures might hold. Submissions are invited of abstracts for fictional papers that might appear, will appear, should appear, or perhaps should not appear in the proceedings of the 2039 ACM CHI Conference. What will have changed? What will remain the same? Visionary calls, critical reflections, and prophetic warnings are all encouraged. Abstracts are welcome both from regular CHI attendees and from those at the periphery of the community and beyond. A selection of these abstracts will be curated into a submission to the CHI Conference’s alt.chi track.

Abstracts should be ~150 words long, provide a title for the fictional future paper, and may optionally include an image as well as authors’ affiliations. Abstracts will be selected for inclusion based on their ability to represent a diversity of guiding research visions, their excitatory or provocative potential, the space allotted by the CHI extended abstracts format, and the likelihood of engendering conversations about the future of HCI.

Abstracts should be submitted via email to Eric P. S. Baumer (ericpsb cornell edu) with “[CHI 2039]” in the subject line.

Important Dates:
Abstract Submission Deadline – December 8, 2013
Curatorial Decision Notification – December 16, 2013
Collection Submitted to alt.chi – December 20, 2013

See further details and dates on the alt.chi track.

My co-authors and I recently had a paper accepted to a special issue of the journal Human-Computer Interaction on Design Thinking. It describes our lab’s use of various visual approaches to HCI design, as well as both the potential and the challenges posed to HCI by such visual approaches. I’ll post a pre-print copy soon, but for now here’s the partial citation and abstract.

Snyder, J., Baumer, E.P.S., Voida, S., Adams, P., Halpern, M., Choudhury, T., and Gay, G. (to appear). Making Things Visible: Opportunities and Tensions in Visual Approaches for Design Research. Human-Computer Interaction.

Visual approaches for conducting research during the design process often give voice to people and ideas that might otherwise remain obscured. Recent and increasing interest in visual research techniques has coincided with technological advances such as camera phones and visually oriented mobile applications. As a result of this close association between digital technologies and image-based research techniques, there are multiple opportunities and challenges within HCI design practice to employ these strategies to improve user experiences. This paper provides an overview of current visual approaches to research highlighting the role technology has played in facilitating and inspiring these techniques. A series of case studies are presented that provide a basis for understanding a breadth of visual approaches in HCI design practices, as well as serve as a point of entry to a critical and reflective discussion about the use of these approaches in different circumstances. Based on these reflections, three value statements are offered as a means to encourage the use of these visual approaches more broadly and critically in HCI design studies.

Update (2013-12-13): Our article is now available here.

I’m really excited that I’ll have two papers being presented this week at CHI.

The first is a study exploring both the prevalence of, and motivations for, not using Facebook.

Baumer, E.P.S., Adams, P., Khovanskya, V., Liao, T., Smith, M.E., Sosik, V.S., Williams, K. (2013). Limiting, Leaving, and (re)Lapsing: A Survey of Facebook Non-use Practices and Experiences. in ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). (Paris, France).

The second represents a portion of an honors thesis I supervised.

Khovanskaya, V., Baumer, E.P.S., Cosley, D., Voida, S., and Gay, G.K. (2013). “Everybody Knows What You’re Doing”: A Critical Design Approach to Personal Informatics. in ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). (Paris, France).

While you’ll find my papers in Paris this week, you won’t find me. For personal reasons, I decided not to attend CHI this year, so both of these will be presented by my fantastic co-authors. For those who are interested, I’ve written a short blurb about this decision, which was difficult to say the least.

I’d still love to hear from anyone who’s interested in chatting about either of these papers–feel free to drop me a note.

I’m running a field study with a tool our group has built. If you or anyone you know might be interested, please drop me an email.

Are you a political junkie? Addicted to the news? Is your browser’s homepage the New York Times or Wall Street Journal? Or maybe it’s the National Review Online or the Huffington Post? Ever wanted a deeper look at what’s being said between the lines?

Or does the news bother you? Does politics turn you off? Do you find yourself ignoring any kind of discussion of political issues or news coverage? Do you feel like there’s a level of depth that is lacking in most political discussions?

If you fit either of these descriptions, this study is for you. We’ve developed an online tool that helps you understand political news and discussions by visualizing patterns of language in them. We’re currently looking for people who want to try out the tool and wouldn’t mind talking with us about it. Plus, you’ll be entered in a drawing for a $200 Amazon gift card.

If you’re interested, please contact Eric Baumer: ericpsb [at] cornell [dot] edu

Last month, I presented a paper at CHI titled When the Implication Is Not to Design (Technology). This paper was intended primarily to facilitate a conversation, so my co-author and I are organizing a discussion on the sustainable-chi mailing list. We’d like to invite you to join the discussion. Below is a copy of the post starting the discussion.

Last month at CHI, there was a paper by myself and Six Silberman titled When the Implication Is Not to Design (Technology). The basic premise is that there are some situations where a technological intervention may not be the most appropriate. The paper provides specific ways of articulating when this may be the case, as well as practical recommendations for applying this perspective. Copies are available at http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1978942.1979275 or http://ericbaumer.com/publications/impl9-rev.pdf.

We would like to take this opportunity to solicit comments and critiques. This paper was intended first and foremost to be part of a conversation, and we believe that some of that conversation should happen here on the sustainable-chi list. We hope that members of the general HCI community will join us in this discussion.

~Eric and Six