Interactions - March/April 2015

And, in most cases, the result is not satisfactory. So, fluency in English is the skill that we miss most, especially when approaching a CHI deadline.

What is the one thing you see as most important about what you do there?

Attempting many things and experiencing many failures. One student tried six different ideas before an idea finally resulted in a paper. Too often we feel that we should be more efficient; however, we also believe that a university laboratory should be an environment that can embrace failure for creative challenges. Investing time to elaborate on crude ideas and sharing the experience of failure are the most privileged things we do.

(This is what our advisor tells us, and we all want to graduate early.)

http://hcil.kaist.ac.kr

known to have a relatively high power-distance index, but we tend to forget this around a meal.

What is a unique feature of your lab?

We like making things, software or hardware. We sometimes make things just because we feel like making them—without a clear purpose. Some of these things eventually lead to a paper, but more often they fail to find a good use and become a mere display in the lab. This is why we like venues such as the UIST Student Competition and the SIGGRAPH Emerging Tech exhibition. This is in fact a tradition of our lab that we cherish. During interviews with a new student, the first thing that our adviser asks is, “Do you like to make things?”

What is one feature of your lab you could not do without?

A feature that makes us stand out
from other CS labs is a workshop for
prototyping. The workshop is small
but has everything needed for making
and trimming prototypes: a 3D printer,
a laser cutter, a CNC machine, an
electronics workbench, and many
other small tools. The workshop has
accumulated many leftovers from
numerous past prototyping activities,
including various electronic parts and
mechanical debris in various shapes,
and has been optimized for our specific
prototyping needs.

What is one feature of your lab that you want and do not have?

As most any university lab would answer, we would love to have more space for our prototyping activities and experiments. A more specific wish, as a lab in Korea, would be the ability to freely express our thoughts in English. Most of us have difficulty thinking in English, so we often write the outline of our papers in Korean and then translate it into English.