technology

Community Data & Water Quality

design, design research, HCI, hci research, Human-Computer Interaction, research, science, Uncategorized

Most of my blog entries are announcements of publications or generic thought pieces about topics of interest. One thing I’d like to do differently going forward is keeping track of current research projects here at Penn State University’s Center for Human-Computer Interaction (C4HCI) as way of providing some insight and value to folks outside of my network; especially members of community organizations, local government, and industry.

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Community Data & Water Quality. A current project underway here at C4HCI has to do with water quality data as a kind of community data around which different stakeholders could organize and act. There are already several groups in State College collecting and analyzing water quality data, and our working assumption is that this data could be made accessible and interpretable to a wider group of residents.

In my view, and in an ideal case, the outcome of such would be a more data literate citizenry confident and capable to engage with local government around water quality (and other) policy and decision-making.

Tonight we held the first meeting of what we hope will be a series of conversations and workshops with folks who work for and with different water quality collection groups in Centre County, including: ClearWater Conservancy, PaSEC, WRMP, and Trout Unlimited. The goal of the meeting was to share our vision for a possible project built around water quality data and to engage in a meaningful conversation about what a collaboration between our groups could look like. The meeting was great. Our group learned a lot about the kinds of data these different organizations collect and about some of the barriers to sharing/using the data that we had not yet considered. We even identified a possible opportunity for supporting (one of) their efforts to build out an online resource for community members to learn more about water quality issues.

Looking forward to more!

Writing/Thinking

design, design research, HCI, hci research, Human-Computer Interaction, SIGCHI, theory-practice gap, Uncategorized

This year was a good one for CHI rebuttal writing. I say that not knowing whether our rebuttal swayed any of the reviewers one way or another. But we took a different approach for this year’s CHI reviews than we have in year’s past. This year, we made changes to our paper as we wrote the rebuttal. Changing the paper became a way to think through the viability and possibility of each critique, and the rebuttal became (primarily) a record of changes already made to the submission. It may not be an approach for everyone, but I totally recommend trying it to see whether and how it works. And, I’d be curious to hear from others who take this approach when writing rebuttals (with short turnaround times) about how it has worked!

Lumio

art, design, Interaction Design, Uncategorized

My wife (and daughter) gifted me a Lumio last week. I love it. It’s beautiful and fun. It sits on my desk next to my laptop and I find myself reaching for it several times a day. Each time I open it up, I pay attention to different details: the quality of the light filtering through the paper, the sound the paper makes as it expands and contracts, the feeling of the wooden cover on my fingers, the flexibility of the spine. Sometimes I turn off my desk lamp and I just sit for a little while enjoying the light.

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Conferences

design, design research, Uncategorized

I look forward to the day when more conferences in my fields of interest offer alternative forms of presentation. I recently received an email from the IASDR conference, which will be held later this year in Cincinnati. Part of the email states that:

“To allow all world citizens to participate in the IASDR2017 conference, every effort will be made to accommodate alternative forms of presentation such as recorded video or real-time online video conferencing.”

I was really pleased when I read this, and my hope is that others will make similar efforts. No one should miss out on the opportunity to present research because of backwards policy..