CHI 2019 was in Glasgow this year, and although I could not get to the main conference, I attended, and got a lot from, a “pre” event and a “lite” event run around the main conference.
The PreCHI day took place at the University of Dundee, and was a chance to hear a precis of papers delivered by academics from Scottish Universities at the main confererence. This was a good day, mainly fo rme to understand the breadth of research in HCI, and the types of project, that are happening. All the talks were interesting in that respect, ranging from a comparison of comics and infographics for helping to convey factual information, through virtual reality studies, to health care, network analysis, haptics and advocacy. The highlight talk for me was “developing Accessible Services: Understanding Current Knowledge and Areas for Future Support (Crabbe, Heron, Jones, Armstrong, Reid, Wilson) where among other things a useful matrix of accessiblity needs by (time?) against (type/are?) gave me pause for thought. The accesibility areas were: cognitive, communication, visual, physical, emotional, and the temporal axis was permanent, temporary, situational. So someone holding a heavy object is situationally, physically impaired from say picking up another object. When you start looking at accessiblity in that way it reinforces the idea that all of us need accessibility. It could feed into some of the ideas for the test tools work. Accessibility of the tools and of the information the tools generate. Other presentations I should follow up in terms of work on haptics, embodiment, and advocacy when thinking about my next steps. Notes are in Polish notebook.
CHIlite was an evening of highlights from the CHI conference and open to the public. Very good evening, with inspiring presentations that show how the HCI community is seeking to make the world a better place. Talks included “Bringing the Internet to the Brazilian Amazon” (Leal), “Seekign social justice through story telling” (Ahmed) and How can apps support sustainable behaviour” (Nkwo) – so heartening to see younerg people enaged in bringing technology to their communities in a postive way. to do good. Two talks by older practitioners on how we trust IT perhaps too much were by KOnstan “What makes a good recommendation?” and Sundar “Do we trust the machines too much?” which were thoughtful caveats on tech usage. And a few of the presentations spoke about the importance of the user/customer feeding back to the developer(s) about what they needed, what they liked and disliked. A call for the user to have a greater voice in what is delivered. Hofman on “putting a £D printer in the doctor’s office” was a good example, on patients requesting what they needed from a 3-d printed artificial limb, while Trllemans talked about control of the use of our smart environments, and Dereshev asked “What it is like living with a companion robot?” and Miyashita demostrated how technology can fool us with amazing visual effects that disguise reality.
Actions: to take: get the papers that are most relevant, read and add to literature review.
Isabel Evans - consultancy stories 