Best Paper Award at DIS 2018
Our work titled Towards Materials for Computational Heirlooms: Blockchains and Wristwatches has won a Best Paper Award at the 2018 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS).
The ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) is the premier international arena where designers and computer scientists meet to debate and shape the future of interactive systems design and practice. The DIS conference addresses design as an integrated activity spanning technical, social, cognitive, organisational, and cultural factors. It brings together professional designers, ethnographers, systems engineers, usability engineers, psychologists, design managers, product managers, academics and anyone involved in the design of interactive systems. DIS is owned by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). In the past, DIS has been held in Ann Arbor (1995), Amsterdam (1997), New York (2000), London (2002), Boston (2004), State College (2006), Cape Town (2008), Aarhus (2010), Newcastle (2012), Vancouver (2014), Brisbane (2016), and Edinburgh (2017). DIS is held annually. For more on DIS, please see: sigchi.org/conferences/conference-history/dis/
Mehmet Aydın Baytaş, Aykut Coşkun, Asim Evren Yantaç, and Morten Fjeld. 2018. Towards Materials for Computational Heirlooms: Blockchains and Wristwatches. In Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 703-717. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196778
Abstract:
This paper explores the contrasting notions of "permanance and disposability," "the digital and the physical," and "symbolism and function" in the context of interaction design. Drawing from diverse streams of knowledge, we describe a novel design direction for enduring computational heirlooms based on the marriage of decentralized, trustless software and durable mobile hardware. To justify this concept, we review prior research; attempt to redefine the notion of "material;" propose blockchain-based software as a particular digital material to serve as a substrate for computational heirlooms; and argue for the use of mobile artifacts, informed in terms of their materials and formgiving practices by mechanical wristwatches, as its physical embodiment and functional counterpart. This integration is meant to enable mobile and ubiquitous interactive systems for the storing, experiencing, and exchanging value throughout multiple human lifetimes; showcasing the feats of computational sciences and crafts; and enabling novel user experiences.