Elizabeth A. Buie

Nexer Digital Ltd, Cambridge, UK

In 2010 Genevieve Bell named spirituality as one of the three “most underexplored areas of HCI research” [2] . Two and a half years later, I began a PhD programme to make a contribution to increasing that exploration. I started by analysing the gap between HCI research and iOS App Store offerings, then speculating with my supervisor about some chal...

Despite the vast number of people who use technology as a part of their spiritual practice, there is little research on the subject in studies of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI). Although HCI takes the idea of user experience very seriously, the field gives almost no consideration to experiences with technology that might be described as spiritual...

Despite the vast number of people who use technology as a part of their spiritual and transcendental practice, there is little research on the subject of digital transcendence in studies of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). This monograph reviews the work that HCI has produced in this area but also draws on related research in psychology, philosoph...

Some life experiences can generate profound and long-lasting shifts in core beliefs and attitudes, including subjective transformation. These experiences can change what individuals know and value, their perspective on the world and life, evolving them as a grown person. For these characteristics, transformative experiences are gaining increasing a...

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in HCI research on the use of technology in spiritual practices and environments. Some of these works cover spiritual/transcendent experiences associated with these contexts, but strikingly few of them describe in any way the experiences they studied or aimed to support, let alone give definitions of the t...

Participatory design is in essence very malleable as any design technique could lend itself to it, as long as users and stakeholders are involved. Design fictions however, have more often been used as either a vehicle for critical designs, or as a sheer design tool, created by designers for designers as a means to drive ideation. In the 2010s howev...

This thesis presents a study of transcendent experiences (TXs) — experiences of connection with something greater than oneself — focusing on what they are, how artefacts support them, and how design can contribute to that support. People often find such experiences transformative, and artefacts do support them — but the literature rarely addresses...

This late-breaking work describes the design and application of a game to facilitate techno-spiritual design. In it I report the results of 24 interviews with people of diverse spiritual perspectives and three “Transcendhance” design game workshops involving 12 participants; I describe design fictions arising from these activities; and I discuss is...

This paper reflects on the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI) with techno-spirituality and science fiction (SF). The paper considers science fiction treatments of spirituality, religion and "the numinous"- A mysterious presence that evokes fascination, awe and sometimes dread-as stimulus for exploring techno-spiritual design through "...

People use interactive technology in many ways to support spirituality. HCI, however, has little design knowledge to support "techno-spiritual" experiences and practices. This project considers the "human spirit" as the part of us that feels a deep connection with something larger than ourselves and that seeks meaning and purpose in life. This qual...

The scope of HCI has broadened considerably in the last decade to include concerns with experience, emotion and aesthetics. A small but growing body of work studies the role of digital technology in supporting religious and spiritual practices and experiences. Addressing such sensitive topics presents many challenges, both in understanding the prac...

This paper reports findings from a study of meditation videos posted on YouTube. It reports on both the features they offer and the kinds of comments posted. The most-viewed one hundred videos referenced faith-based traditions, "new age" spirituality, and entirely secular meditation practices. A convenience sample of comments was taken as a snapsho...

The iTunes App Store contains over six thousand apps related to spirituality and religion. The ACM digital library, however, contains only 98 works that address this topic from an HCI perspective. Despite high-profile calls for research in the area, the HCI community has produced only 19 research papers focused on the topic, almost half of which ar...

Previous work in the CHI community has identified and explored gaps between theory and practice in HCI research [2]. The recently formed SIGCHI Community on Research-Practice Interaction aims to help bridge the gap between research and practice, by for example supporting practitioner-friendly dissemination of results, and serving as a conduit for f...

This workshop aims to identify and improve current strategies and practices for transferring knowledge from qualitative user studies to become inspiration for an experience-centered design process. The message (e.g., qualitative user study results) can be skewed when passed on from one phase to another in the design and development process. Moreove...

Bookstores abound with offerings on “usability” and “user experience” (2352 and 293 search results, respectively, on Amazon.com as of this writing). The number doubles for “government contracting” (4275 results) and jumps by almost 50 times for “government systems” (106,957 — again, as of this writing). This book, however, is unique. Although a sea...

Government agencies no longer select contractors solely on price, for the most part. However, as previous chapters have shown, government systems continue to suffer widely from poor usability and give citizens and public servants a less-than-pleasant user experience (UX). Why does poor usability persist in government systems? In our view, the main...

Increasingly products need to be 'cool', 'wow', fun, rather than merely being 'functional' in order to appeal to consumers. Product innovation then turns into not only working out how to apply technologies to realize some useful product function, but also in how to create an appealing and alluring experience. The core question one would like to see...

At CHI2011 we organized a SIG session asking the question "What theoretical roots do we build on, if any, in UX research?" Overall, 122 single items from about 70 participants were collected, which corroborates the relevance of and interest in this topic. Whilst the theoretical foundations for UX research are not yet established, those responses ca...

Interaction design is an area within the larger field of human-computer interaction (HCI) that stresses user experience as central to the process of designing, creating, and evaluating interactive systems. In this half-day workshop, participants will explore how techniques and theories used in interaction design could be employed to increase and de...

This SIG will discuss the ongoing work of the UX Community in SIGCHI and will talk about what the Community can do for UX practitioners and UX researchers. We will discuss the new "practitioner's takeaways" instituted for CHI 2011, discuss an idea for an "idea market" session at upcoming CHI conferences, and explore other ideas for making the SIGCH...

As the importance of user experience (UX) has grown, so too have attempts to define, delimit, categorize and theorize about it. In particular, there have been emerging lines of tension in User Experience that parallel the tensions in the larger field of HCI research, particularly between approaches that emphasize the need for representations and un...

This workshop explores whether problems exist between HCI researchers and the practitioners who are consumers of research - and, if so, will endeavor to identify the dimensions of the problems and propose possible solutions. On the one hand, the workshop aims to articulate factors that may render the research literature inaccessible or irrelevant t...

This special interest group probes potential problems between HCI researchers and the practitioners who are consumers of research, to explore the extent of the problems and propose possible solutions. It will start with the results of the CHI 2010 workshop on the same topic, articulating factors that may render some of the research literature inacc...

Your editor of Whiteboard, E. Buie,Had a notion that sounded like hooey:"Some poems I'll solicitFrom colleagues complicit---On design, interaction, and GUI!"

When you say something is intuitive, do you mean that absolutely everybody understands it right away? If you say a program is logical, what help is that to a user? Does user-friendly mean anything these days? (Did it ever?)

This article reviews progress in the development of standards and guidelines for human–computer interaction, including those developed within international and US standards bodies. Guidance for incorporating software ergonomics standards and guidelines into software design and development processes is discussed. Several different techniques that ha...

In this paper we discuss the issue currently plaguing the HCI community about its relationship with software engineering and how to integrate the two. We encourage both disciplines to take a larger view, and we present system engineering as a structure for achieving such an integration.

An abstract is not available.

This article reports one visual designer's impressions of the CHI '95 conference, held in Denver, Colorado, from May 7 to 11, 1995. For the readers of this column who are regular conference attendees, I hope to provide glimpses of elements you may have ...

As currently defined and practiced, the systems engineering process (SEP) overlooks the design of human-system interaction (HSI) as a systems engineering activity. Integrating HSI engineering into the SEP would promote the cost-effective development of highly usable, reliable systems and products. This paper shows that the integration effort must i...

Engineering processes and methodologies used in building tomorrow's systems must place a greater emphasis on designing usable systems that meet the needs of the systems' users and their tasks. This paper identifies the need for defining human factors and human-computer interaction (HCI) engineering activities that contribute to the design, developm...

Governments spend huge resources on custom computer systems, developed by contractors to government specifications under government monitoring. HCI development faces challenges from this environment's constraints and the HCI community's virtual neglect.

We present an approach to control information flow in object-oriented systems. The decision of whether an informatin flow is permitted or denied depends on both the authorizations specified on the objects and the process by which information is obtained ...

At the first meeting of the Interest Group on Individual Differences, held at CHI'85 (and reported in the July 1985 issue of the Bulletin), many attendees stated that they came to find out what was meant by "individual differences." Others had noticed differences among their users and were looking for guidelines to assist them in designing user-sys...