27 The Why of CHI 2005

1a April 15th, 2005 by Kevin f Cheng :: 7 9 36 8 Comments

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Last week, Tom and I attended CHI in Portland. Aside from the paper presentations I mentioned last week, CHI also features Interactive Exhibits, Panels, a debate and some special interest group meetings. This format is pretty much consistent with the previous CHIs. Worth noting, and somewhat tangentially related to our comic this week, is that CHI2006 will actually be divided into communities, one of which is Education. The others include Design, Reseearch, Usability, Engineering and Management. This new format should give more focus in each area to perhaps facilitate more interesting discussions and submissions. We shall see.

Tomorrow, I’ll be writing about one of the highlights of CHI, Bill Buxton’s Lincoln Laboratories panel. In the meantime, go check out http://www.chi2006.org. There was a lot of discussion on some mailing lists about the vlaue of CHI to practitioners and why people did and did not go to the conference. I’d love to hear one, some or all of:

why you did or did not go to CHI2005
whether you think CHI2006’s format changes will help improve the conference for you personally
if you attended CHI2005, what the hi and lo-lights of the conference were for you

Stay tuned for more coverage from us.

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32 CHI Interview: Michel Waisvisz

14 April 18th, 2005 by 4 Tom d Chi :: 7 9 3a Comment »

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At CHI I had a chance to interview Michel Waisvisz, this year’s closing plenary speaker. He is based in Amsterdam and has spent his life creating novel electronic instruments as well as expressive electronic augmentations to traditional insutrments.

During the plenary, he performed an improvised electronic piece after explaining his “hands” interface. This interface uses a few “traditional” controller inputs like buttons in combination with more novel pressure sensors, ultrasonic rangers, accelerometers, resampling microphone, and mercury switches. These speak through MIDI to the Lisa-X sound manipulation engine.

Adobe Buys Macromedia : Had this come a couple of weeks earlier, I'd have believed it to be an April Fool's hoax. I always liked the boundaries Macromedia pushed that Adobe sometimes seemed hesitant to. They were a nice complement to each other. We'll see how this shakes out. - 2 Comments

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OK/Cancel is a comic strip collaboration co-written and co-illustrated by Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi. Our subject matter focuses on interfaces, good and bad and the people behind the industry of building interfaces - usability specialists, interaction designers, human-computer interaction (HCI) experts, industrial designers, etc. (Who Links Here) ?