Introduction to the special issue on interaction beyond the desktop

After coming back from CHI2012 in Austin I found my paper copy of the April 2012 issue of IEEE Computer magazine in my letter box. This is our special issue on interaction beyond the desktop. Having the physical copy is always nice (it is because I probably grew up with paper magazines ;-).

This guest editors’ introduction [1] is an experiment as we include photos from all papers on the theme. The rational is, that probably most people will not have the paper copy in their hand. When having the digital version the overview of the papers is harder to manage, that is why we think including the photos helps to make readers curious to look at the papers in the issue. Please let us know if you think this is a good idea…

[1] Albrecht Schmidt and Elizabeth Churchill. Interaction Beyond the Keyboard. IEEE Computer, April 2012, pp. 21–24. (PDF). Link to the article in Computing Now.

Comprehensive and modern German book on HCI by Bernhard Preim and Raimund Dachselt

After having read an electronics preprint some weeks ago Bernhard and Raimund showed me the first printed version of their book "Interaktive Systeme 1: Grundlagen, Graphical User Interfaces, Informationsvisualisierung, Mobile Interaktion" (amazon, springer). The new edition brings a comprehensive overview of human computer interaction with many illustrations and examples. It is perfectly suited for teaching.

Congratulation to finishing it! I am always amazed how people manage to create these books without locking themselves away from the world for a year…

Ephemeral User Interfaces - nothing lasts forever and somethings even shorter

Robustness and durability are typical qualities that we aim for when building interactive prototypes and systems. Tanja and Axel explored what user experience we can create when we deliberately design something in a way that is ephemeral (=not lasting, there is a good German word "vergänglich"). Ephemeral User Interfaces are user interface elements and technologies that are designed to be engaging but fragile [1]. In the prototype that we showed at TEI 2010 in Cambridge the user can interact with soap bubbles to control a computer. Axel has some additional photos on his web page.


There is a short video of the installation on the technology review blog: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24729

[1] Sylvester, A., Döring, T., and Schmidt, A. 2010. Liquids, smoke, and soap bubbles: reflections on materials for ephemeral user interfaces. In Proceedings of the Fourth international Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied interaction(Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, January 24 - 27, 2010). TEI '10. ACM, New York, NY, 269-270. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1709886.1709941