CHI Archive Paper Format

Here’s a link to the CHI 2010 page with formatting instructions, and links to templates: CHI Formatting Instructions, Archive Format

Here are links to the specific templates:
Download the Microsoft Word template
Download the LaTeX class file
Download the Apple Pages template (offsite link, for super-freaks)

Happy hair-pulling-out-ing!

Cheat sheet!

If we were to create a cheat sheet for Interaction culture, what would it look like? (all the fancy terms, with a two line simple explanation and a bull’s eye example). I propose that all of us do this as a class.

Currently struggling to understand these three terms – structuralist view, hermeneutic view, phenomenological view! What’s the difference? How do they fit with each other? Please provide comments or feel free to add your own terms (with or without explanations). Let’s cheat!

Here is a video from one of my favorite movies – Ratatouille. For those of you who have not watched it yet (please do), Remy (the protoganist) makes ratatouille (a vegetable stew). Anton Ego is this big shot food critic who is a hard ass, extremely critical, hard to please and is very skeptical about the stew. The below scene is when he tastes it and is completely floored by the taste since it reminds him of his mother making him this dish during his childhood.

Now let’s try to put on different goggles and see this video again.

Structuralist goggles – The stew was good because it had tomatoes, carrots, beans, etc, cut and cooked perfectly. What is the ingredient? How do we identify it?

Non-phenomenological hermeneutic goggles – The stew is usually prepared during summer. This is because most of the standard ingredients grow during summer. No lifeworld involved.

Phenomenological hermeneutic goggles – The stew is considered as a poor man’s dish since most of the standard ingredients are not expensive.

Non-hermeneutic phenomenological goggles – Anton Ego’s experience is the perfect example for this. Tasting this stew transports him back to his memories.

Am I right? Please correct me if I am wrong.

understanding things outside our lifeworlds

after class on Tuesday Ben and I were talking about an idea: what if a child was raised in a gravity-less world. they were never told about gravity. they never read about gravity. gravity does not exist in their life world. later in the boy’s life he is brought to Earth (with gravity enabled). what happens to the boy? Ben’s comment was “I think he will float away”.

i doubt he will float away, but how do we explain what will happen to him. or will he not even realize the effects. i remember reading somewhere that the native americans didn’t even see the ships coming because it was such a foreign object they weren’t able to process the ships were there until they were on the shore. could be a lie.

i guess my point is that we can all agree that the tiny specks on light in the sky are actually objects hurling through space at crazy speeds and are actually (for the most part) quite enormous in size. we’ve never seen that. and things like that do not exist in our life world.

does this phenomenon happen in design? i tried to think of an example of something like that that was created, but i feel like as designers we are restricted. can we actually design something that doesn’t exist in our life worlds? or are all designs somehow a continuation of something we already know and understand (like the radio -> cd player -> ipod)?

btw, i don’t know if you know this or not, but i love space…

..jaMEs

Culture as Action in Symbolic InterBlah Blah Blah Blah

Forgive the personal reflections embedded in this post, however there is substance. After the first few weeks of challenging myself to dive deep into such heady material in an attempt to understand the underpinnings of various fields of thought, the most recent Smith reading puts me in familiar territory: I read it. I understood it. I can dig it. If I spent just a little more time organizing my thoughts on all of this theory, I could write some seriously fancy-pants papers that might even get published.

But then I force myself to switch gears and remember that I am not headed into academia anytime soon. I will hopefully be in a design job in about a year, and as tempting as it may seem, I don’t want to be known as the designer that talks about Foucault and Saussure but has no clue how they apply to my job. So in the middle of this reading my brain switched from “understand the history of how micro theories of culture have come about and how they are situated in cultural studies with regards to macro theories of culture” to:

“Understand the history of blah blah blah blah…What does this mean to interaction design?”

“What The Foucault” series: Author

So I was trying to understand the works of Michel Foucault and came across one of his essays titled “What is an Author?” You can get the text here.

I think what Foucault has to say about the notion of an author is very important and is key to our class discussion about authors, architects, musicians, film directors, ciritcs and ultimately designers.

The Title:
Foucault did not make a grammatical mistake when he titled his essay as “What is an Author”. Rather it sets the tone for his entire discourse. He views the author not as a person but as an idea or a concept.

Sociology 101

So I started reading this week’s reading and found it to be “glerb”! After a few hours of crash course is sociology (I love you wikipedia), I think I understand the reading better now. I thought I should share this with the rest of you. So here we go!

Sociology

• Field of sociology divided into 3:
  - Micro-sociology: How individual forms identity and how s/he interacts with others. Study of individual.
  - Macro-sociology: Society is not just a bunch of people. It has something else. What is that “something else”? Study of society.
  - Meso-socilogy: Studying society and individual based on one particular criteria. Say for example, race or gender or income.
• Sociologists were kicking and pulling each others hair before. Now they have realized that these three schools of theories are complimentary and inseparable. So they are well behaved now.
• For our class reading, we will now focus on microsociology. It is heavily derived from phenomenology. Basic premise is how does an individual make sense of his surrounding world. Serves something as a bridge between psychology and sociology.
• Symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology are two key micro-theories amongst others.

A Scathing Critique of the “Blog” Format

Nick Cernis in Rise of the Tablog:

The blog format has devolved. Once a simple gateway to self-publishing, today the blog format is responsible for a thousand tawdry tablogs: hideous half-breeds of tabloid and blog built around odeous content, cluttered site designs, and optimised for pageviews alone. To understand how it happened, it helps to see what changed when blogging moved from a pastime to a cottage industry — the same point, for me, when writing and reading blogs stopped being fun.

Putting this into perspective for myself, I used to blog. Every day. Before it was even called blogging or before I even had a “blog”. What I had was an “online journal”, that I wrote in Adobe CodeCrapSuite 0.9 and uploaded to the spinning platters hosted somewhere in the basement of the University of Minnesota Duluth. I didn’t know, and didn’t care to know, a stitch of HTML. My URL had a tilde in it. My server logs told me I had five readers, three of whom were probably me looking at my website from different computers.

From 2001 until 2005 I wrote nearly every day about whatever the heck I wanted to write about. It was cathartic, it was rewarding, but most of all it was fun. Then, starting around 2005 or 2006 it became “blogging”, it became a chore, and it subsequently stopped being fun. I haven’t been able to find a way to consistently and rewardingly write for pleasure ever since.

As interaction designers we create tools, and these tools impart a particular worldview that we ask our users to participate in. Sometimes, these tools actually take over the activity that the user wanted to conduct in the first place, and the tool, rather than the activity, becomes the focus.

As one, as a writer not a blogger, who got left behind in the great democratization of the internet and thusly lost his muse, for me this is a deeply personal issue. Writing is lovely and I believe the blogging format tacitly insults the worth of the author, and yet blogging is today’s assumed model for publishing online.

Just had to get all that out. I’m confused and emotional and my body is going through all these changes.

The meaning of it all!

I was thinking about this game that we used play as kids back home. It’s called “Chinese Whispers”. The name may be different here, but I am sure kids here play it to. Basically they all sit in a circular arrangement. The first kid whispers a statement into the next kids ears. This passes on till it reaches a whole circle. The last kid after hearing the statement, loudly announces what he heard! Almost always it ends up completely different and totally funny than from what it actually was!! Reading all this epistemology, hermeneutics, phenomenonlogy, subjectivoity, context, culture, signifier and signified, constructed knowledge is making me feel like I live in a mondegreen universe. I am not saying this is bad. Just feeling a little discombobulated!

Meaning of it all??

PS:

• Open the picture in a new window to read the text more clearly.
• I know that I am exagerrating. But in a way this is pretty much how I feel
• The picture of Eli was to provide a context. I am NOT implying that he’s a bad critique or that he views everything through the eyes of sustainability. I chose to put his pic so that all of us can easily relate.

THAT Four Letter Word!

The other four letter word – LOVE!

Björk is one of my all time favorites. For this analysis I have chosen the video of her song “All is full of love”. The video and the technique used to produce it are obviously genius and the awards and attention it has recieved confirm it. This is what happens when two geniuses, Chris Cunnigham and Björk, meet! Enough with the extolments!! Here is the video!!!

The Caster Semenya Saga

Disclaimer: There may be certain parts of this post that may not be directly related to this class. But since this was raised in class today, I am risking it here.

Gender and Sex:
First things first. It maddens me when “respected” newspapers publish stuff like “gender tests to determine sex”. I cannot find enough expletives. As Yujia pointed out in class, gender is a social construct. How one identifies hirself (gender neutral pronoun). Gender is about identity. Sex on the other hand is about the actual biological and physical manifestation. And we all agreed that gender and sex of a person need not match.

The Sex Game:
CJ raised a point today in class. What if a transgendered person who identifies hirself as a female wants to participate in women’s sports? Then the transgendered person has an unfair advantage over the other biologically female contestants. So I deduce that the point made here is “No matter how you identify yourself, if you don’t belong to this biological category of sex, then stay away from here.”

From this point of the article onwards, I am not addressing anyone in particular from our class.