Invisible Yet Necessary

A workshop at CHI 2006 in Montreal that matches my research topics. Submission deadline of position papers has been extended to Jan 16th.

IT@Home: Unraveling Complexities of Networked Devices in the Home
CHI 2006 Workshop

Call for Participation

The home is becoming a complex and hard to manage collection of
computers and digital lifestyle devices. The work to setup and
maintain a network of digital living devices in the home is similar
to the work of IT professionals. Indeed the growing complexity of
interconnected digital devices results in more and more time spent
solving problems with those devices and their configurations, an
important part of computer use that we call “IT@Home”. The workshop
will be structured to consider four areas of focus:

• Perspectives – How should we consider IT@Home? What theories
  apply to IT@Home?
• Problem Framing – What are critical problems in IT@Home?
• Empirical Study – Case studies and examples of effectively
  studying home IT.
• Design – What are some critical design issues for IT@Home?

Contributions to these conceptual areas that are illustrated through
data and case studies will be valued by researchers, designers,
product teams and market analysts through the coming years.

Individuals interested in participating in this full-day workshop
should submit a position paper on IT@Home that addresses one of the
four areas listed above. Position papers should be limited to 4
pages. Submissions in PDF or Word should be sent to David McDonald
dwmc at u.washington.edu by Monday, January 16, 2006. Notifications of
acceptance to the workshop will be made in early February 2006.

For more information on the workshop please visit:
IT@Home: Unraveling Complexities of Networked Devices in the Home
CHI 2006 Workshop

San Francisco in Jell-O is a project from Liz Hickok, a artist and designer from the Bay Area

San Francisco – Alamo Square

See also San Francisco City hall, Bay Bridge, Telegraph Hill, The City.

More

Sunday’s story in the New York Times Meet the Life Hackers talks about interruption in the workplace and how information technology tools are now fighting for our attention.

Information is no longer a scarce resource – attention is. David Rose, a Cambridge, Mass.-based expert on computer interfaces, likes to point out that 20 years ago, an office worker had only two types of communication technology: a phone, which required an instant answer, and postal mail, which took days. “Now we have dozens of possibilities between those poles,” Rose says. How fast are you supposed to reply to an e-mail message? Or an instant message? Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it – at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself. Our software tools were essentially designed to compete with one another for our attention, like needy toddlers.

It talks particularly of the issues surroundings notification systems and ambient displays, that I have planned to include in my design.
It features research from Victor M. Gonzalez and Gloria Mark who presented their work at ECSCW in Paris. Mary Czerwinski, a Microsoft researcher, also worked on the subject to help the NASA with managing interruptions on astronauts conducting experiment.

She also collaborated with the HIP group at Microsoft Research that presented on Thursday at Oregon State Univ for a colloquim I had to attend for my Human Computer Interaction class. While their presentation was aimed at helping programmers with learning how to deal with large amounts of code and come to speed quickly on office practice, it could as well been re-used in other environments like general information workers.

Here is a call for submission for a new journal to be launched at the end of this year. It deals with several areas that my thesis’ research covers so I am considering submitting a paper.

The Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) announces the launch of a new publication in the fourth quarter of 2005, the Journal of Usability Studies.
This publication will be a peer-reviewed, on-line journal dedicated to promoting and enhancing the practice, research, ethics, and education of usability engineering.

More

I will present a poster at the ECSCW’05: the 9th European Conference on
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in Paris (Sept 19-22).

The title of the poster is “Requirements for design of collaborative applications and systems”. I will try to post a copy here soon.