Conference Grants: Eric Rawn at CHI 23
We are pleased to support our students sharing their work at the premiere conferences in their field. Eric Rawn presented my paper “Understanding Version Control as Material Interaction with Quickpose” at the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) CHI (Conference on Computer-Human Interaction) in Hamburg, Germany. From Eric:
I presented my paper “Understanding Version Control as Material Interaction with Quickpose” at the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) CHI (Conference on Computer-Human Interaction) in Hamburg, Germany. This is the largest annual meeting and premiere venue of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Researchers, with this year’s meeting exceeding 4000 participants. The conference brings together HCI researchers from across many disciplines, specializations, and locations. Among many, one standout paper was Rua Mae Williams et al’s work on “Counterventions”, presented in the Social Justice Methodologies session. Their work critiqued clinical/interventionist approaches in HCI research, and presented new ideas for how HCI researchers might work alongside their participant communities to challenge power and knowledge inequities rather than work to assimilate them. The conference presented a wonderful diversity of methodologies and concerns, which spurned lovely intersections and new conversations. I presented my work in a session entitled “Creative Applications”, which brought together research enabling new kinds of creative expression with computers.
My paper summarized about two years of work on a creative version control tool called Quickpose, which we built for the creative coding platform Processing. Our goal was to understand what it might mean to build software tools which support users treating their programs as a material in the sense an artist or designer might use the word. We distilled a broad conversation in anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, design studies, art practice, and elsewhere to make some basic claims about what designing for what we termed material interaction might mean, and built Quickpose as a probe to understand our questions more deeply (while raising others). We ran a six-week study with expert Processing users to see how Quickpose changed their creative process. We had a lot of exciting findings on how we might study artist-programmers’ practices on a moment-to-moment, decision-to-decision scale, which we hope will be the start of further research in this area. For the paper and more information, please see