Johanna Brewer

Storied spaces: Cultural accounts of mobility, technology, and environmental knowing

When we think of mobility in technical terms, we think of topics such as bandwidth, resource management, location, and wireless networks. When we think of mobility in social or cultural terms, a different set of topics come into view: pilgrimage and religious practice, globalization and economic disparities, migration and cultural identity, daily commutes and the suburbanization of cities. In this paper, we examine the links between these two aspects of mobility. Drawing on non-technological examples of cultural encounters with space, we argue that mobile information technologies do not just operate in space, but they are tools that serve to structure the spaces through which they move. We use recent projects to illustrate how three concerns with mobility and space-legibility, literacy, and legitimacy-open up new avenues for design exploration and analysis.

Underground Aesthetics: Rethinking Urban Computing

An ethnographic study and a design proposal for a situated music-exchange application suggest how explicitly foregrounding the experiential qualities of urban life can help rethink urban computing design. In this article, through reflection on the ethnographic study results and the undersound design, how an aesthetic account of urban life might be the basis of designs that support not only an individual but also a collective experience of the city is explored.

Sexual interactions: why we should talk about sex in HCI

Within the CHI community there is growing interest in moving beyond cognition and expanding into the social, emotional, and bodily aspects of the human-computer experience. Sexuality Sex lies at the intersection of these concerns, and indeed outside of HCI, has become a central topic for anthropology, behavioral sciences, and other areas of intellectual inquiry. Examining sex and themes related to it has benefited these disciplines and we intend to understand how it can contribute to HCI.There is a tendency to desexualize technology, despite the presence of sex and sexuality in a variety of interactions, including the use of the internet for viewing pornography, building online communities, and facilitating intimacy. By rendering these interactions sexless, we risk gaining only a marginal understanding of technologys role in day-to-day life.

A handle on what's going on: combining tangible interfaces and ambient displays for collaborative groups

While tangible interfaces open up new possibilities for input and interaction, they are also interesting because of the ways in which they occupy the physical world just as we do. We have been working at the intersection of three research areas - tangible interfaces, ambient displays, and collaboration awareness. Our system, Nimio, uses engaging physical objects as both input devices (capturing aspects of individual activity) and output devices (expressing aspects of group activity). We present our design and experiences, focusing in particular on the tension between legibility and ambiguity and its relevance in collaborative settings.

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.

Aesthetic journeys

Researchers and designers are increasingly creating technologies intended to support urban mobility. However, the question of what mobility is remains largely under-examined. In this paper we will use the notion of aesthetic journeys to reconsider the relationship between urban spaces, people and technologies. Fieldwork on the Orange County bus system and in the London Underground leads to a discussion of how we might begin to design for multiple mobilities.

Information as a cultural category

One of the questions that invariably comes up when discussing ambient intelligence is the thorny problem of just what the term might mean. It’s catchy and provocative, but attempts to define it tend to be unsatisfying. Sometimes, of course, a slogan of this sort can productively inspire without necessarily being crisply defined, and so it is with “ambient intelligence.” However, it is still worth taking the question of meaning seriously. Our concern here is not simply with the meanings of the words around which we define our work, but with what kinds of meanings they might have, with where those meanings come from, and with their consequences.

Indy R&D: doing HCI research off the beaten path

This panel discusses independent research and development in HCI. We focus on possible models for Indy R&D operations, supporting infrastructures, practical methods, and taking advantage of academic skills in the transition. Panel participants have experience in several different models of funding, conducting, and disseminating results from independent research. We will provide the audience with practical tips to help them decide if Indy R&D is right for them, and if so, help them do it.

frēstyl: simplifying the process of promoting and discovering local live music

In this paper, we present a new service for web and iPhone for promoting and discovering live music, frēstyl. We will show how frēstyl addresses and attempts to solve the problem that emerging musicians, local promoters and small/medium venues face when publicizing their events, both on a local and global level, and the problem that music fans face when trying to gather a complete but not overwhelming understanding of local and global live music events.