Recently interaction-design.org sent me a preview of an upcoming encyclopedia chapter on aesthetic interaction, entitled “Visual Aesthetics in HCI and Interaction Design,” by Noam Tractinsky. I read through his piece and the existing commentaries that were online at the time. I couldn’t help but notice that Tractinsky himself and all of the commenters all represented…
This post is continued from two earlier parts: In Part 1 I offer a broad rationale for my position In Part 2 I offer specific recommendations for ACs and reviewers In this part, I offer my own recommendations for the research community moving forward. I stress from the outset that this is a position. I…
This post follows on from my previous post, in which I outline my position on peer reviewing and my reasoning for it. In this post, I offer four observations in the form of a guide to serving as a good Associate Chair (AC). [1] A CHI paper submission typically represents 12-24 months of a research…
HCI is continuing a trend towards using conferences, rather than journals or books, as the premier venue for published work. The speed of the submission-decision cycle often means that decisions are fast and binary: one shot and you’re in or you’re out. And in this process, a very small number of people hold a lot…
Salon has an article today about a controversy that happened recently at Print magazine, when it published a critique of Apple. The original critique is here (and has some very interesting analysis beyond its basic premise): http://printmag.com/Article/An-Anatomy-of-Uncriticism And the Salon article on the dust-up is here: http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/design_critique_imprint/ One thing at stake in all this is…
Sorry I haven’t been as active on this blog of late; I’m going up for tenure soon, and blogging doesn’t seem to count for much. (Even though I have to wonder how blogs stack up to conference presentations in terms of scholarly impact.) Anyway, I recently composed a position paper that started as a rant…
My 7-part series “Interaction Criticism: How To Do It” is among the most popular hits on this site. As of now, it is also spread across 7 different posts, some of them with their own comments, all of them with their own blog clutter. As a long overdue service to readers (and also to help…
Below please find links to the paper and slides that I presented at CHI2009 in Boston on “Interaction Criticism and Aesthetics.” It was a great experience for me, and I hope this paper and these slides help us move HCI’s cultural agenda forward! Paper (ACM digital library, subscription required) http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1518701.1519063 Slides (PDF, 13 MB, no…
In my recent post on discourse analysis versus close reading, I got into a discussion in the comments on the origin of the critic’s understanding and the role of subjectivity, objectivity, and so forth. In the course of that discussion (and I’d like to thank Jeremy Hunsinger for his part of the discussion that helped…
Introduction Textual analysis is fundamental to many kinds of research, from psychology to literature, philosophy to information science. Not surprisingly, different strategies have emerged from within the various disciplines that do textual analysis, and naturally these strategies reflect the epistemologies of the disciplines from which they emerge. And as long as one stays insular to…
Interaction Culture 