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Striking papers from my read thru CHI2020’s proceedings: “Venous Materials,”

et al. Microfluidic mechanisms display colors+patterns in response to pressure. Light, flexible, cheap—with a “memory” mechanism! dam-prod.media.mit.edu/x/2020/06/01/3

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Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Aug 23, 2020

“HapBead,” Teng Han et al. Light, flexible on-skin haptic using a tiny metal bead suspended in a microfluidic channel. Test subjects were able to distinguish different test patterns produced by the device. sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/8939

“texSketch,”

et al. Multimodal interface for fluidly creating diagrams / concept maps while reading. Clever interaction extracting underlined words/phrases to glyphs via Noun Project. youtube.com/watch?v=wopP6k

“Wrex,”

et al. An approach to programming-by-example (PBE) in computational notebooks which avoids the typical “black-box” problems of PBE by generating legible, modifiable implementations of demonstrated operations: dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/1

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Aug 23, 2020

“Chameleon,” Damien Masson et al. This tool can “upgrade” dead figures/displays in static documents (e.g. PDFs) to dynamic/interactive elements. Wild approach: uses computer vision to recognize targets in static documents. youtube.com/watch?v=iMQQ-m

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

“Scout,” @mandamarie05 et al. Supports designers in iteratively exploring many alternative layouts subject to high-level constraints (“keep these together, this element’s most important, keep this order” etc). youtube.com/watch?v=FVXEVj

10:33 PM · Aug 23, 2020Twitter Web App

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More broadly, the bummer: my worries with HCI-as-field remained prevalent in this year’s 758(!) paper proceedings. Misguided fixation on empiricism; pervasive timidity in system design; muted longitudinal vision/aspiration; a field often talking to itself. Per

@michael_nielsen