Section: New Results

Research Methods

Participants : Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Anastasia Bezerianos, Jérémie Garcia, Stéphane Huot, Ilaria Liccardi, Wendy Mackay [correspondant] .

Conducting empirical research is a fundamental part of InSitu's research activities, including observation of users in field and laboratory settings to discover problems faced by users, controlled laboratory experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the technologies we develop, longitudinal field studies to determine how our technologies work in the real world, and participatory design, to explore design possibilities with users throughout the design process.

However, we not only use research methods, we also investigate and develop them. As organizers of the CHI'13 conference in Paris, which had record-breaking numbers of submissions (over 2000) and participants (3500), we instituted a number of innovations in both the process of creating the program and presenting information to conference participants. In collaboration with researchers at MIT, we introduced an “author-sourcing” process (with an 87% participation rate) for collecting affinity data. We then developed a collaborative, interactive, visualization system on the WILD wall display, combined with the Cobi interactive constraint-solving system, that enabled us to resolve all presenter conflicts and successfully place all 500+ papers and events in relevant sessions ([35] , [26] ). We also replaced the “CHI Madness” series of 25-second presentations with “Video Previews”, in which each research paper, course, panel or other event has a 30-second video preview. These are now available on the CHI'13 website, the ACM/CHI YouTube channel and in the ACM Digital Library, before the paywall. We also developed and field-tested the Interactive Schedule on large, interactive displays, which allowed conference attendees to both view upcoming Video Previews and use their mobile phones to search for particular content and create customized playlists [29] . We also developed two interactive table-top applications that were presented at CHI'13 Interactivity, that allowed attendees to visualize and explore conference events as well as to create customized video playlists.

The RepliCHI workshop at CHI'13, co-organized by Wendy Mackay, examined issues with respect to encouraging replication of controlled experiments, and introduced the RepliCHI award to top research articles that offer strong empirical contributions that include replication. She also organized a session called Interacting with CHI in which participants explained the technologies and processes they developed to support the CHI conference design and execution.

In the context of our work with Interactive Paper to support music composition, we developed Paper Tonnetz, a paper-based interface to composing melodies and chords based on musical patterns expressed in Euler's Tonnetz, and demonstrated it at CHI'13 Interactivity ([22] ). We also explored how to create an interactive event for the “Fête de la Science”, called “Design Me a Sound Landscape”, in which participants can create their own ways of expressing a landscape and add natural sounds, such as wind, rain, moving water, that another participant can experience as they move on an interactive floor. Finally, we explored the drawing process, with the Drawing Assistant ([25] ) in which users receive guidance and feedback as they learn to draw from photographs.