October is an exciting month for the Makeability Lab with 11 papers, posters, & demos at UIST, ASSETS, & VIS! 🎉🥳 Congrats to all Makeability Lab students and collaborators—including the nearly dozen ugrad co-authors who participated. Special shoutout to Jae Lee for the Best Paper Inclusion Award at UIST'24, Arnavi Chheda for a Best Paper Nomination for at ASSETS'24, and Chu Li's AltGeoVis paper at VIS'24—our lab's first ever VIS paper. More here: https://makeabilitylab.cs.washington.edu/

@andresmh @axz woah. Did you hire actors for this?! And the lighting, cinematography, everything—looks so professional!

@andresmh also, I’d love to add some social computing examples if you have any that you recommend. Also CC’ing @axz

@andresmh oh my, a bit of a sore subject for me as I desperately want to make one but somehow never find the time.

I did rapidly throw this together for our CHI'19 paper (but I wouldn't call it exemplary 😂): https://youtu.be/F3voLirScmY?si=-CWoO1FDByVA3s2Y

And also UMD made this very nice showcase video: https://youtu.be/_GBLqZDXB_0?si=MfZjvsKtwPAjePtl

But yes, now that we are in 23 cities across 8 countries, it's time to make a new one ;-)

@andresmh @parastoo @hci wonderful! That was my goal—to make a broadly useful resource to the community (and not just one for my lab). Thanks for sharing. 🙏🏽

📅 The UrbanAccess'24 deadline is now extended to Sept 27th. Submit those UrbanAccess+AI thought pieces, position papers, works-in-progress, demos, and more!

https://hci.social/@jonfroehlich/112967524794099192

As we work on those #CHI2025 videos (deadline: Sept 19), here is a set of inspirational videos 🎥 curated by my lab. Would love more examples, especially for other HCI research contribution types. Send them my way!

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-Pn10VnlFd-9J8ampzJb3aWN5ro_tsoHnpxICGtQehw/

Now that the #CHI2025 deadline is over, it's time to work on your UrbanAccess2024 submissions 🙌🏽. Deadline Sept 20 11:59PM AOE. https://accessiblecities.github.io/UrbanAccess2024/

Interaction design is a largely visual discipline. So too then are HCI papers. We need to craft and tell visual stories. As we near the CHI deadline, here's a set of exemplary figures curated by my lab. Hope it helps inspire! Feel free to contribute some examples. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ibu-lsRcEp-2fDpVvTfsdvzYo2ipjOOKkE46mk8_2NU/

And don't forget to alt text your images! See: https://www.sigaccess.org/welcome-to-sigaccess/resources/describing-figures/

📢 Do you work on Urban + AI topics? How will AI impact the design of equitable & accessible cities, transit systems, and mapping tools? Submit to the 4th Annual Workshop on "The Future of Urban Accessibility: The Role of AI". Join us! Deadline Sept 20th. CFP here: https://accessiblecities.github.io/UrbanAccess2024/

@scientiffic @andresmh I think that sounds great! Let us know how it goes.

@andresmh @scientiffic I’ve had students use Wikis, Instructables, Observable Notebooks, and have also considered Arduino Project Hub and Hack-a-Day pages. Obviously choice is influenced based on your teaching goal, content/topic, and students’ skillset. I honestly liked Instructables best for gaining an external audience and making impact beyond academic silos but haven’t used it in years. I think NYU’s ITP PhysComp course uses “build blogs”, which are done in Medium or other platforms.

Let's make maps better for people with differing mobility levels! 🗺️

We just launched our most ambitious Project Sidewalk study yet. We need 100+ participants who use mobility devices such as manual wheelchairs 👩🏽‍🦽, motorized wheelchairs 🧑🏽‍🦼, walkers, scooters, etc. for an online survey. You'll look at images of sidewalk barriers and respond based on your own lived experience and mobility level.

Fill out our screener here: https://tinyurl.com/sidewalk-survey

@michaelmillerjr glad you found it helpful! As faculty, there are so many things we must learn that we were never trained for (but this makes our lives interesting too!)

To ensure my letters best reflect a candidate and their strengths, I do ask them to follow a process (which I originally derived from Professors Scott Klemmer and Hal Daumé III if memory serves).

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YiiDsfpiolpXjUTj8xWrQwQQUzqrfqT9bocOpaYDrtI/edit#heading=h.xlq8ok813min

And this helps. But yes, curious about how others handle this.

The fastest letters are for ugrads -> MS. Through practice, I found that I can typically write these letters in ~2 hours (including reviewing the applicants materials) + ~1 additional hour for filling out all the online forms. The slowest are for PhDs -> tenure-track positions. These require careful analysis of a candidate’s work and a thoughtful articulation of their contributions and potential as a researcher and professor. (Tenure letters are another matter).

Writing letters is fundamental to academia but is often invisible labor on top of already overstretched schedules. Still, I gain deep satisfaction in helping others, and I've certainly benefited from letters. So, I do my best to help.

This autumn, I was asked to write nearly 35 letters and accepted 20 (7 for tenure-track faculty applications). I estimate this took me an additional ~90-100 hours of work.

I'm curious how other profs handle these requests & this extra work.

This year, we have redesigned our MHCI+D Prototyping Studio course to use AI as a "design partner"—inviting students to experimentally employ AI throughout the course from ideation to sketching to implementation. If you're also incorporating AI into your HCI/d class, I'd love to exchange notes.

In Prototyping Studio, students fill out a weekly journal about how they use AI and reflect on perceived benefits, limitations, and dangers:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MKLMa3q7RZNBSC2E14-vaZL43GpPnKMqP06lBBuAZsw/

More here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pZ_TDdVbfQ_2sFPijOIOmAT5OrnVNDNLZOTUy7eqOUA/

@clemens Thanks. I'm tethering to my phone 5G Internet now to be able to upload these letters...

Interestingly, I can access these sites from my phone with 5G (not campus WiFi). Hmm...