Interactions - November/December 2018

Best practices in teaching and workshop facilitation also proved to be a popular topic, bringing the group together regardless of their area of interest within HCI as a whole.

The success of the SIG, and how much was realized in the short 90 minutes, propels us to host similar events at the forthcoming CHI in Glasgow and other sponsored ACM conferences. By allowing practitioners and researchers to come together in this manner, collaborations and contacts are made and the prospect of sketching in HCI could be strengthened.

SKETCHING THE FUTURE

Sketching can be seen as a particularly human activity. In our earliest years as Homo sapiens, we made marks on cave walls to depict the world around us. That world is forever changing, but this simple method of recording our surroundings has lasting appeal.

The tools available to us may also be different, such as the advent of the tablet computer and digital stylus, but we currently remain the sole perpetrators of this form of output.

Could this be about to change?

Paul the Robot has been built to draw portraits of people as a naive artist and observer [ 8]. Advances in neural networks are training computers to recognize the styles of famous painters and reuse them in creating original artworks in the same vein. The next steps for sketching in HCI could see machines as the foci of creative and expressive practice. We might compare the sketches of a machine to those of a child learning to draw and attribute some form of humanity to the resulting images. Interactive systems can also teach us how to better wield a pen, gently shifting our lines to conform to aesthetic ideals suggested by the computational analysis of thousands of similar images or training our muscles to recognize their relationship to the mark on the page using playful interfaces. Perhaps the sketch of the future embraces other formats of the same descriptor—pieces of code, movement, algorithms.

The evolution of sketching research does not negate its roots but rather offers further avenues of inquiry, widening its reach. Sketching is one technique that transcends disciplines,

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subdisciplines, and social groups, and this potential to bring together groups within HCI should not be overlooked.

By creating working groups aimed at promoting sketching as discourse, analysis, and research practice, we can collaborate on developing sketching in practice and reap the rewards of an engaged, expressive, and interactive researcher base.

CONCLUSION

Not only do we wish to elevate sketching practice and methodologies as a focus for research, but we also call on CHI to embrace and promote all visual forms of documentation, such as the pictorial, a recent development in archival formats used by the DIS and Creativity and Cognition conferences. To actively engage with imagery in relation to technology—and not limit it to the simple outputs of machinery and computers—furthers the interdisciplinary embrace of CHI, and therefore that of ACM. Blending diverse practices and subject matter breaks us out of our comfort zones and can lead to discovery and purposeful reflection. And it could all start with a sketch. Sketching as we know it may evolve during the age of the computer, but it is here to stay.

Join the Sketching in HCI Slack
Group: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/
e/1FAIpQLSeH8UQCQX4rN0cEcJGPfi
63w6tqf NmKNR7t0wI_eRDf S_DiRQ /
viewform
To see the SketCHI narrative from
CHI2018, search #SketCHI and

#CHI2018 together on Twitter.com ( https://bit.ly/2Q5XNS2).

Endnotes

1. Cohn, N. Explaining ‘I can’t draw’: Parallels bet ween the structure and development of language and drawing. Human Development 55, 4 (2012), 167–192.

2. Lewis, M., Sturdee, M., and Marquardt, N. Applied Sketching in HCI: Hands-on Course of Sketching Techniques. Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

ACM, New York, 2018, Paper C08.

3. Greenberg, S., Carpendale, S., Marquardt, N., and Buxton, B. Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook (1st ed.).

Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, 2011.

4. Lewis, M., Perry, M., and Louvieris, P. Designing smart money on a digital ledger: Central bank issued digital

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currencies. HCI for Blockchain: A CHI 2018 Workshop on Studying, Critiquing, Designing and Envisioning Distributed Ledger Technologies. Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, 2018, Paper W28.

5. Sturdee, M., Hardy, J., Dunn, N., and Alexander, J. A public ideation of shape-changing applications. Proc. of the 2015 International Conference on Interactive Tabletops & Surfaces. ACM, New York, 2015, 219–228.

6. Sturdee, M., Alexander, J., Coulton, P., and Carpendale, S. Sketch & The Lizard King: Supporting image inclusion in HCI publishing. Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, 2018, Paper alt15.

7. Lewis, M., Sturdee, M., Marquardt, N., and Hoang, T. SketCHI: Hands-On Special Interest Group on Sketching in HCI. Extended Abstracts of the 2018

CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, 2018, Paper SIG09.

8. Tresset, P. and Fol Leymarie, F. Portrait drawing by Paul the robot. Computers & Graphics 37, 5 (2013), 348–363.

Miriam Sturdee (@AsMirry) is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary researching sketching in visualization. She obtained her Ph.D. and subsequent postdoc with Lancaster University, looking at sketching for the design and development of shape-changing interfaces. Her interests in sketching in HCI combine her M.F. A. in Illustration with her initial studies in psychology. → miriam.sturdee@ucalgary.ca

Makayla Lewis (@maccymacx) is a research fellow at Brunel University London looking at smart money and user experience. An accomplished visual thinker and sketcher, she organizes the monthly SketchnoteHangout and SketchnoteLDN, among other sketching events and courses, including ones at NordiCHI 2016 and DIS 2017. She has also provided visuals and sketchnotes for conferences such as CHI and ISS.

www.makaylalewis.co.uk

Nicolai Marquardt (@nicmarquardt) is an associate professor in physical computing at University College London. At the UCL Interaction Centre, he works on projects in the areas of ubiquitous computing, interactive surfaces, sensor-based systems, prototyping toolkits, and physical user interfaces. Together with Saul Greenberg, Sheelagh Carpendale, and Bill Buxton, he is co-author of the Sketching User Experiences Workbook (Morgan Kaufmann 2011).