Thursday, May 12, 2016

CHI 2016 good stuff

Hi! I am heading home from CHI 2016 right now. A, I'm tired, B, it was fun, C, I finally gave a talk at a conference.

Here's some things I liked. ("et al"s implied.)

Atlas of Me, Yea-Seul Kim: puts distances and areas in terms you can understand.

Folk theories of social feeds, Motahhare Eslami: really collect and understand the numerous folk theories people have of why some things get shown on their news feed and some things don't.

Geography and importance of localness in geotagged social media, Isaac Johnson: how much of geotagged Twitter comes from locals? Depends how you count, but about 75%.

Evaluating the IoT Through Craft, Jessa Lingel: "Internet of Things" often trades off control, agency, autonomy, and privacy for convenience. This would be really distressing for a craftsperson. Some good stories about how

PowerShake, Paul Worgan: transfer some battery from my smartphone to yours. Surprisingly, there are human challenges around it (people wouldn't transfer energy to strangers, for example).

Journeys and Notes, Justin Cranshaw: "check in" to your commute, not to a place. Build community around the "non-places". I tried this, and never really connected with anyone else, but I really wanted it to be great; he was pretty candid about the start-up issues necessary (and sorta unfulfilled) here, but also had some things they learned too.

From Research Prototype to Research Product, Will Odom: see, I want to do this kind of research a lot. Build things, see how people react and use them, learn from it. It's not about making a prototype better next time. I think this is what a lot of people do and then they say "it's a technology probe" even though it doesn't really do what the Technology Probe original authors were on about. So instead of trying to wedge it into the "technology probe" space, we can call it a "research product."

Ritual Machines, David Kirk: in the same vein as Research Products. Example of learning things about designing objects by designing a couple of bespoke things for some families who travel for work sometimes.

The art exhibition opening right near the convention center: super cool interactive stuff!
Voltaire Coffee Shop and Vero's Coffee Bar - two great shops within 2 blocks of the convention center
Getting a year older and knowing more and more people every CHI - this continues to be fun

2 comments:

  1. Cool man! Powershake sounds interesting. And definitely the prototype to product is where it's at. What was your talk about?

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    1. Two of em, actually! One of them, tried to interrupt people in different ways (popups, etc) while they're doing a thing, see how they like/dislike each one. Other one, printed out old emails and mailed them as postcards, in order to figure out why people see email archives as worthless but postcards/photos as valuable.

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