Crafting a place for attending to the things of design at CHI
William Odom, Tom Jenkins, Kristina Andersen, William W. Gaver, James Pierce, Anna Vallgårda, Andy Boucher, David J. Chatting, Janne van Kollenburg, Kevin Lefeuvre · interactions · 2017
Over the past two years, we have organized workshops at the CHI conference that have focused on the “Things of Design Research. The goal of these workshops is simple: to explore and develop a venue at CHI for research through design (RtD) practitioners to materially share their work with each other. RtD often centers on the making of things— artifacts, systems, services, or other knowledge in the interaction-design and human-computer interaction (CHI) research communities. Yet, over the years, we have felt that the things of design research have remained conspicuously overlooked, under-engaged with, and, for the most part, absent from the CHI conference. If RtD is to continue to develop as a research practice in the HCI community—and we want to build a community of designers doing research with and through designed objects—we need more things at CHI.