3.4 The social practices of HCI academics
3.4.2 Materials: the software, hardware, products and papers used, created,
HCI academics rely on, create, assess, interact with, and influence a wide range of materials in their daily lives. Some of the materials that appear to cut across academic HCI practices include: university office spaces, HCI publications and their hosting services (e.g. journals and databases), as well as computers, phones, various software packages (e.g. Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, Google’s G Suite), existing digital services (e.g. Skype, Drop- box, mailing lists, minecraft), and mobile devices (e.g. smart phones, tablets, laptops). There are practice-specific materials, as well, including: course materials and student assignments, event-specific materials (e.g. posters or presentation slides), and project-specific materials (e.g. one-off designs, prototypes, ethics forms).
As mentioned in the previous section, a considerable amount of HCI research deals with the design, deployment, and evaluation of interactive digital technologies (i.e. the software, hardware, and products that comprise digital technologies). To be able to design and deploy software, many—but not all33—HCI academics need to be able to write code in at least one of the languages noted in the previous section (i.e. C#, C, Javascript, Python, objective C, C++, SQL, NoSQL, R, HTML, CSS, and Ruby). To write code in those languages, an HCI academic would need to have an appropriate development environment installed on their personal or workplace computer (e.g. RStudio for R) or they would need to have access to a web-based development environment and service (e.g. Node.JS for javascript). The hardware that an HCI academic chooses to work with also influences the requisite language and software development environment. Arduinos, Android phones, iPhones, and Microsoft Kinects all have their own software development environments. As such, the software and hardware materials an HCI academic chooses to work with will influence what a digital device can do and how it performs. The physical shape of a digital device depends on the
30There are explanations of why HCI uses this phrase [216], I just find it colonial, distasteful, and dated, so I refuse to use it in my own work [253].
31R7 is an early-career female academic based in North America. 32R12 is a female early-career researcher based in Europe.
33Many HCI academics who work on theory development, evaluation, and analysis do not need to write code.
3.4 The social practices of HCI academics 41
other not-necessarily-digital materials that an HCI academic chooses to incorporate into a design (e.g. a belt, the wooden box, the semi-translucent acrylic).
How and why HCI academics acquire these materials also varies. In some cases, HCI academics simply use the materials that they have readily available to them. For example, R10 mentioned using what was available around their lab due to their limited budget. Similarly, R334explained that his team consistently used the same hardware because they were the only people on the planet to have it and they wanted to “milk it” until it died. Of course, ease of access isn’t the only reason why HCI academics choose to use certain materials. Some HCI academics carefully choose and curate the materials they use because those materials convey a certain aesthetic. One of my participants, R2135, described a recent attempt to achieve a specific, desired aesthetic:
I spent, like, eight hours with a few other colleagues sanding. Just sanding. For eight hours. Just sanding down wood, with like, increasingly finer grain. Just. I mean, I wouldn’t be doing that every day, but, like, some of my days are consumed with these, like, just very nitty gritty, like, doing tests for staining. Like, using different oils to see if the stain is going to be right. Or if it’s kind of achieving that level—or like, trying to laser cut some veneer and... I mean, just these really, really, nitty gritty details that are extremely important [...] just in terms of just, like, getting a kind of prototype or a system to achieve that quality of, like, resolution. Um. That, I think, is important. At least for the kinds of work that I’m doing.
Although this carefully crafted aesthetic mattered to R21, he noted that not all HCI academics shared his interest. In fact, some HCI academics do not even share an interest in designing new products; rather, some HCI academics prefer to study how a participant uses their personal devices. In these projects, HCI academics write a piece of software and install it on a participant’s device. R2 ran a project where “people used their own phones. That was a requirement, a recruitment requirement.” Similarly, R1’s36 team ran “an observational study, so we didn’t want to mess with practice as it had settled in. [We] recruited specifically people with [certain devices] who were happy to install the app and let it run for [a period of time], and then happy to give us the logs, which showed application foreground time, and all that kind of stuff. So kind of a bit invasive, but we couldn’t see, you know, what pages and stuff [people visited].” In these types of projects, HCI academics let their participants’ existing devices dictate the design and deployment of software or hardware.
34R3 is a mid-career academic male based in Europe.
35R21 is a mid-career male academic based in North America. 36R1 is a mid-career male academic based in Europe.
42 HCI research practices