Picturing Human-Computer Interaction Design

The idea of privileging visual materials in archival contributions in HCI has achieved a certain traction over the past near decade. This has been a major focus of my own work, and the work of several others. I believe that HCI is a design-oriented discipline. As such, it is incumbent on the field to accept scholarly forms of communication that have foundations in design. Visual acumen is a foundation of design.

This traction takes two forms. One form is pictorials. Pictorials are nowadays a form of archival—double blind peer reviewed—contribution at ACM conferences, beginning with ACM Design Interactive Systems (DIS) since 2014, and now including ACM Creativity & Cognition (C&C) since 2017, as well as ACM Tangible and Embedded Interactions (TEI) beginning in 2020. Another form is traditional papers which push at the boundaries by including and privileging more visual materials than usual. These have appeared at ACM Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) in addition to these other venues.

I will present one of each of these two forms, each taking 17 minutes of the talk as they were originally presented in their respective venues. The first is a pictorial paper co-authored with Shunying An Blevis and Bonnie Nardi, titled “All the Tea in China.” This pictorial was first presented at C&C 2019. The second is a single-authored traditional paper with visual emphasis, titled “Seeing What Is and What Can Be: On Sustainability, Respect for Work, and Design for Respect.” This paper was first presented at CHI 2018.

The presentations themselves are somewhat performative and designed to be accessible to a wide audience. Both are especially related to visualizing the interactions between computing technologies and sustainability.

About the Speaker

Eli Blevis is Professor of Informatics in Human-Computer Interaction Design (HCI/d) at the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering (SICE) at Indiana University, Bloomington. Since 2012, he has served during summers as a Visiting Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design. His primary area of research, and the one for which he is best known, is sustainable interaction design. His research also engages visual thinking—especially photographic foundations of HCI, and design theory—especially transdisciplinary design.

Prof. Blevis holds a Ph.D. awarded in 1990 from the School of Computing (Department of Computing & Information Sciences at the time) of Queen’s University. His PhD Advisors are Prof. Janice Glasgow and Prof. Michael Jenkins.

Website: https://eli.informatics.indiana.edu/