Shad Gross

Structures, forms, and stuff: the materiality and medium of interaction

Though information is popularly, and often academically, understood to be immaterial, nonetheless, we only encounter it in material forms, in books, on laptops, in our brains, in spoken language, and so forth. In the past decade, HCI has increasingly focused on the material dimensions of interacting with computational devices and information. This paper explores three major strands of this research—tangible user interfaces, theories of computational materiality, and craft-oriented approaches to HCI. We argue that each of these offers a formulation of the materiality of interaction: as physical, as metaphysical, or as tradition communicating. We situate these three formulations in relation to debates on the nature of media, from philosophical aesthetics (the ontology of art, in particular), media studies, and visual cultural studies. We argue that the formulations of materiality, information, and meaning from HCI and those from the humanities have deeper underlying similarities than may be expected and that exploring these similarities have two significant benefits. Such an analysis can benefit these differing threads in different ways, taking their current theories and adding to them. It also serves as a basis to import philosophical art concepts in a robust way into HCI, that is, not simply as prepackaged ideas to be applied to HCI, but rather as ideas always already enmeshed in productive and living debates that HCI is now poised to enter—to the benefit of both HCI and the humanities.

Documenting the Research Through Design Process

Documentation of Research through Design (RtD) processes is essential for capturing and translating design knowledge into broader academic knowledge. Moreover, it can support both design and research objectives internally in RtD projects, as well as external concerns such as project management, knowledge dissemination, and education. In spite of this, RtD documentation has received little sustained attention in prior work. Building on what prior work there is as well as an in-depth analysis of two markedly different cases, we present a framework for planning and evaluating RtD documentation. The framework addresses three core concerns: the medium of documentation, the performativity of documentation, and providing equal support for both research and design.

Flow of Competence in UX Design Practice

UX and design culture are beginning to dominate corporate priorities, but despite the current hype there is often a disconnect between the organizational efficiencies desired by executives and the knowledge of how UX can or should address these issues. This exploratory study addresses this space by reframing the concept of competence in UX to include the flow of competence between individual designers and the companies in which they work. Our reframing resulted in a preliminary schema based on interviews conducted with six design practitioners, which allows this flow to be traced in a performative way on the part of individuals and groups over time. We then trace this flow of individual and organizational competence through three case studies of UX adoption. Opportunities for use of this preliminary schema as a generative, rhetorical tool for HCI researchers to further interrogate UX adoption are considered, including accounting for factors that affect adoption.

Touch style: creativity in tangible experience design

Creativity is an important part of any design process. However, as interaction design becomes more focused on experiential elements, new, tangible, materials for interfaces of the number and complexity of creative decisions required to design an interface has increased. This paper takes the concept of style, from art theory, and applies it to the experiential design of tangible interfaces as a means to understand how creativity is constrained, organized, and interpreted in the design and use of these novel interactions.

Glitch, please: datamoshing as a medium-specific application of digital material

Digital material, the computation and information that makes digital devices function, can be ethereal and difficult to conceptualize in terms of its material properties. In terms of experience design, this can make it difficult to tap into the expressive capabilities of this unique medium. We investigate the properties of computational material by looking at glitches, errors in functioning, through the lens of medium-specificity. As a specific type of glitch art, we look at datamoshing - a technique where the compression of digital video is altered for creative purposes. By examining the ways that the digital material is revealed by datamoshing, we seek insight into the unique expressive capabilities of digital devices.

A tribute to Mad skill: expert amateur visuality and world of Warcraft Machinima

In this paper, we look at the prominent World of Warcraft machinima community as an expert amateur online com-munity and present a multi-part study of a canon of the most successful works (i.e., machinima videos) produced by this community. By focusing our study on its roughly 300 most successful examples, the determination of which we explain in the paper, we are able to highlight the evolv-ing visual practices, tools, and aesthetic sensibilities of the community. Chiefly, our study identifies how creativity support tools and visual practices are inextricably linked and mutually support the in-kind development of the other. For WoW machinima and its producers, the affordance of creativity tools and the cultivation of visual skill synced at key moments and in powerful ways to support the rapid growth, experimentation, and refinement of amateur exper-tise at the individual and community levels.

Materializing digital inequalities: the digital artifacts of the marginalized in Brazil

As a predominantly social phenomenon, many examinations around issues caused by digital inequalities appropriately focus on the policies, attitudes, and other cultural elements that pertain to the adoption, use, and proliferation of digital technology. As a compliment to these analyses, this paper will examine the materiality as a component of the digital inequalities in Brazils urban poor areas, known as favelas. We specifically look at the material aspects of the digital artifacts used in LAN Houses and state-supported Telecenters located inside the favelas in the city of Vitoria, Brazil. This study is driven by qualitative exploration -- using critical ethnographic methods such as observation and interviews -- designed to focus on the perspective of the local users of LAN Houses and Telecenters. We apply critical ethnography to give voices to the locals and allow them to understand the material issues and conflicts on their terms. Through examples from keyboard layout to power unit supplies, we will describe how the materiality of digital artifacts contributes to digital inequalities and how unique social conventions are formed in this context. Shedding light on peoples experiences with such materials broadens our view of different ways that technology and internet is used, and perhaps thereby do a better job of developing appropriate technologies for these people.

Persuasive Anxiety: Designing and Deploying Material and Formal Explorations of Personal Tracking Devices

Self-tracking refers to the use of computational sensing devices that track data about user behavior to provide self-knowledge. Self-tracking devices are often designed to function transparently, with minimal user awareness of the tracking process. Although effective from an information-processing perspective, this invisibility can also background issues of materiality and user experience. Further, research on self-tracking has shown that devices are often abandoned, can cause user anxiety, and reflect hegemonic social norms. Self-tracking is an emerging technology and skilled cultural practice, but its central issues—the space of design possibility, the nature of user needs/experiences, and sociopolitical implications—remain unclear. We present Persuasive Anxiety, a project informed by research through design, critical design, and design deployment studies. We report on the design and longitudinal deployment of three designs—Candy Camera, Melody Bot, and Fractured View—to spark critical dialogue about self-tracking. The project helped reveal some the relationships between self-tracking and destructive social norms, as well as how they might be mitigated; the emergence of self-tracking as a performative cultural skill; and the possibility of bringing digital content authoring tools/research into a closer dialogue with self-tracking to give self-trackers greater agency over this cultural practice.

Machinima production tools: a vernacular history of a creative medium

In recent years, HCI has shown a rising interest in the creative practices associated with massive online communities, including crafters, hackers, DIY, and other expert amateurs. One strategy for researching creativity at this scale is through an analysis of a communitys outputs, including its creative works, custom created tools, and emergent practices. In this paper, we offer one such case study, a historical account of World of Warcraft (WoW) machinima (i.e., videos produced inside of video games), which shows how the aesthetic needs and requirements of video making community coevolved with the community-made creativity support tools in use at the time. We view this process as inhabiting different layers and practices of appropriation, and through an analysis of them, we trace the ways that support for emerging stylistic conventions become built into creativity support tools over time.

Bifurcating the User

Within the design of technology, the notion of the user, and user-centered design, has become a guiding principal for creating successful products. However, the concept of “user” is a non-trivial notion. HCI has historically viewed “the user” as an abstract concept, that is to say, it has been a reductive definition. As the field has become increasingly transdisciplinary the definition of “the user” has evolved overtime to reflect more breadth and depth. However, this is not always the case within industry practice. In this paper we present a situation and case study where, in industry, the reductive notion of the user posed distinct impediments to progress, how we were able to identify those and blend academic thinking into an industry approach to more success than either alone.