Interactions - March/April 2012

with the new digital materials being shaped in the labs in life science, chemistry, and physics.

More important, we must articulate our experiences in forms other than just academic papers. Videos and demos need to be upgraded in academic status. I am greatly impressed by ACM Computers in Entertainment’s inclusion of archival “video articles” (see Löwgren [ 3] and http://www.acm.org/pubs/cie/ cie-archive.html). A video article consists of a short text and a video, preferably complementing one another. The video aims to capture aspects of the interactions that might otherwise have been difficult to express in an academic text. Having videos peer-reviewed and then archived is really what is needed to raise their status. In turn, this will put requirements on us as a community to craft videos with the same finesse with which we craft our academic papers.

CHI should also archive its videos! A first step to increase their status was taken this year by Jeffrey Bardzell and Michael S. Bernstein, who are putting loads of work into the selection and shaping process for videos to help improve their quality.

Photograph by LambdaCZ | http:// www.flickr.com/photos/lambdacz/4876994513/

The Interactivity demos at CHI should also be peer-reviewed, archival material, articulated in some form that captures their interactive capacity. We all know that only when demos are raised in status will we start engaging more with technology and novel digital materials. They need to become a crucial part of any HCI researcher’s C.V. And going to the CHI conference should mean hearing, feeling, touching, and interacting with novel apps and exciting digital materials.

But do not misunderstand me. I don’t mean that it is enough to show off some new piece of tech.

As pointed out by Patrick Baudisch, one of the chairs of Interactivity, any such demo must be an answer to, or an exploration of, a research question. As such it needs to be cri-tiqued like any research result.

• A Peltier cooler assembly.

What Can You Do?

This is a call for taking videos and demos seriously, both at CHI 2012 and in the years to follow. Only when we get more and better quality videos and demos will we be able to argue more strongly for including them in the archival proceedings of the conference.

Furthermore, if you bring your
tech to CHI, we might get more
HCI researchers involved with the
materials and possible interactions
of the future. Instead of tagging
along behind the developments
created by others, HCI research-
ers should be part of shaping
them. We can do so only if we are
deeply involved with understand-
ing digital materials’ experien-
tial and interactive qualities.

ENDNOTES:

1. Zangouie, F., Gashti, M.A.B., Höök, K., Tijs, T., Gert-Jan de Vries, G-J., and Westerink, J. How to stay in the emotional rollercoaster: Lessons learnt from designing EmRoll. NordiCHI 2010, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2010. 2. Löwgren, J. and Stolterman, E. Thoughtful Interaction Design. MI T Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005. 3. Löwgren, J. The need for video in scientific communication. interactions 18, 1 (2011), 22-25.