I have noticed a dark pattern among papers that align themselves with critical or humanistic approaches to HCI. I myself have been guilty of contributing to that pattern (though I am trying to reform). But I still see it all the time as a peer reviewer and also as a Ph.D. supervisor. And since I spend so…
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…
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…
As readers of this blog are well aware, HCI is at an interesting cross-roads. The history of the discipline is fundamentally scientific, with primary inputs from psychology and computer science. The future of the discipline appears minimally to include cultural, with the rise of affective, entertainment, domestic, social, and other culturally dense forms of computing.…
This morning I finally got around to watching the much vaunted Second Skin trailer about MMORPGs. I feel that the framing of the whole thing is wrong. Though virtual worlds have objective dimensions (the code, the UI, the subscribers, the paratext–by which I mean forums, blogs, guild sites, etc.), “virtual world” is also an intellectual…
I just received a CFP for a special issue on “enculturating HCI.” Now, “enculturating” is a rather strange word, which I will talk more about below, but for now let me at least say what it seems to mean in this CFP: “making HCI cultural.” Here is the intro: We are living in a globalized…
In dialog surrounding the reviews of a recent paper a colleague and I submitted, one of the reviewers, resisting our call for a greater emphasis on criticism in interaction design on the grounds that psychology already does it, asked the following question: How can you prevent the “anything-goes-subjectivism” when the judgments are not objective? This…
… that Sadie cannot be trusted to be free during the day when I am working on campus thanks for eating my pillow, dog
Interaction Culture 