Transforming Grounds

The HCI research community is engaged with how people interact with digital artifacts and systems. However, looking at the present focus of HCI research, this engagement does not cover all areas of interaction. There are areas of HCI that does not really receive any attention from HCI researchers. We might distinguish between two forms of interaction, 'forced' and 'voluntary'. The voluntary form of interaction is what HCI research commonly is focused on, that is, interaction that is a result of people choosing to interact with a system for their personal reasons. Forced interaction usually takes place in workplaces where people have to use whatever system the organization is using. It is possible to see 'forced' interaction as a 'blind spot' in HCI research. Forced interaction includes, for instance, systems that people use to manage their everyday work, scheduling, tracking, of activities and processes. Administrators and others working in scheduling,...

A wonderful book was just published. Jeff Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, and Mark Blythe had the idea of creating a 'reader' on critical theory and how it relates to interaction design. They invited a  group of great people to pick a critical theory text and to write a commentary of it. I am honored to be part of this and I selected my favorite critical theory thinker Herbert Marcuse. The book is a wonderful collection of great texts and insightful commentaries. See below for a description and more info. A must read for any PhD student in HCI and interaction design. Reference: Bardzell, J., Bardzell, S., & Blythe, M. (Eds). (2018). Critical Theory and Interaction Design . MIT Press. ------------------------------ Critical Theory and Interaction Design Classic texts by thinkers from Althusser to Žižek alongside essays by leaders in interaction design and HCI show the relevance of critical theory to interaction design. Why should interaction des...

I have started to 'force' myself to read one paper each morning at work. So far so good. I post a mini comment on the page "Today's Reading" here on my blog. We'll see how many days I will be able to do this.

The consulting firm McKinsey has studied 300 companies and based on the results they argue what successful companies need to do when it comes to design. To someone who has worked with this issue for decades, the results are not surprising. But they are encouraging. A summary can found in  this article in FastCompany . The study ends with presenting four areas that increased revenue and total returns the most: "1. Tracking design’s impact as a metric just as rigorously as you would track cost and revenue. McKinsey cited one gaming company that tracked how a small usability tweak to its home page increased sales by 25%. 2. Putting users first by actually talking to them. This helps to think outside of a standard user experience. One hotel that McKinsey underlined presented visitors with souvenir rubber ducks embossed with an image of the host city–with the encouragement to collect more rubber ducks from the hotel’s other locations. The initiative improved retention 3% over ti...

As we hear more and more about 'sprints' as a way to make processes faster, and especially when it comes to design, it is good to read this text. We have a person who has gone from a true believer to a skeptic. Someone who now doubts the benefits of design sprints, but not abandoning them. The post is titled " Why I am breaking up with design sprints " by Michael, who is the Design & Strategy Director at Reason.

I have lately been aware of a growing movement around the idea that AI systems need to be able to explain their behavior and decisions to users. It is a fascinating topic, sometimes called XAI as in Explainable Artificial Intelligence. This is a question that is approached from many perspectives. There are those who are trying to develop AI systems that technically can explain their inner workings in some way that makes sense to people. In traditional systems, this is not as difficult as today with machine learning and deep learning systems. In these new AI systems, it is not clear, even to their creators, how they work and in what way they have reached their advice or decision. For instance, DARPA has an ambitious program around XAI with the clear purpose of developing technical solutions that will make AI systems able to explain themselves (https://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-intelligence). There are also those who approach the XAI from a legal point of view. Wh...

Any problem or challenge can be addressed with any approach. However, not every approach is suitable for any kind of problem. For example, humans usually approach the challenge of building a bridge with an engineering approach even though it is, of course, possible to approach it using art or religion or any other approach. Most people have an intuitive sense of when one particular approach is suitable or not even though they sometimes debate it. Today a lot of people argue that design is a suitable approach for certain challenges, usually those that require creative or innovative solutions. Design as a human approach for inquiry and change has proven to be extraordinarily powerful. This is also why so many today want to "use" the approach. Some time back, design as an approach was 'packaged' into a something called 'design thinking'. The purpose was to make the approach more approachable, easier to understand and use. And also to teach those who had no expe...