By Irene Ye Yuan on
(Guest written by Jan Cao, cross-posted from Jan’s website)
Now that you are (almost) vaccinated, do you remember this time last year when you had been stuck at home for two months and was aching for some human interaction? How long have you been fantasizing your next game night? Did you wonder, how other board-game enthusiasts coped with COVID-19?
(more…)By Sabirat Rubya on
Can you think of someone familiar who has been affected by alcoholism in some way? For many of you probably the answer is yes, since about 6% of US adults ages 18 and older suffers from Alcohol Use Disorder. For many of these affected people, the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) program has been providing a venue where they can get social support. They can share any problems they experience along the way as well as get inspired from other individuals who have built a successful recovery. Many people continue going to the meetings even though they have been sober for many years.
(more…)By Haiwei Ma on
Many of us have used social media to ask questions, but there are times when we are hesitant to do so. For example, when we are dealing with personal struggles that we don’t want others to know, we may end up searching online for help and advice, because we are not willing to ask questions that disclose our weaknesses and harm our social image that has been curated online. This psychological burden that prevents us from posting questions to social networks is called “social cost”. In addition to the concerns of harming social image, people are not willing to ask for help if it incurs obligation to reciprocate, discloses personal information, or bothers others. The great potential of social media in exchanging knowledge and support cannot be fully tapped if we do not reduce such social cost.
By Irene Ye Yuan on
With the rapid changes of technologies and the increasing number of technology toys in the market (e.g., Osmo, Luka), one may wonder: what are the popular choices of technology platforms when researchers are designing for children? What has changed in these design choices as children become familiar with a variety of technologies at much younger ages recently, as opposed to 10 years ago?
(more…)By Mo Houtti on
My first day as a PhD student in HCI is coming up pretty soon, so I’m being a good doobie and reading a bunch of papers in the field. A quick bit of background: I spent the first year of my CS PhD doing computational biology research in a microbiome informatics lab. I got tired of all the “Mo is a poop scientist” jokes (most of our data come from stool samples), so I decided to pursue a respectable career as an HCI researcher instead. TBH though, working with poop data was pretty cool, and I’ve had the wonderful opportunity of being exposed to papers in a field with entirely different standards and conventions, at least one of which could (and should) be adopted by papers in HCI.
(more…)