This post documents a process I have used for ‘anonymising’ video (FSVO ‘anonymous’). Compatibility things: macOS Sierra, VLC 2.2.6, ffmpeg 3.4 (installed via homebrew, and compiled --with-libass flag) 1. Open your video in VLC. 2. In VLC, Preferences menu option, Show All button, then go to Stream Output, Sout Stream…

Testing is a totemic feature of the technological era. Digital things in particular, with their ever increasing complexity, have exacerbated and accelerated the need to test. A great example of this has been the growth and widespread adoption of usability testing — sometimes called user testing (cf. https://twitter.com/mulegirl/status/1107082527578058752). Over 30+…

Takeaway: This is a short story about how our team — myself, Martin Porcheron, and Joel Fischer — disseminated our research on voice interfaces to UX and design practitioners through a varied campaign spanning over a year and a half to the present. Context It began with a technology field trial…

(This piece is adapted from a talk I gave at the Interaction18 conference in Lyon, Feb 2018. A video recording of the talk can also be viewed on Vimeo.) Takeaway: We — including Martin Porcheron and his PhD supervisors, Joel and Sarah — have been doing empirical studies of voice…

On 22nd of June 2017, the UK’s Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) results were released. While this immediately led to celebratory noises from the various ‘winners’, the prominent ‘losers’ tended to call into question the validity of the ranking as unreflective of actual teaching quality. I want to talk about this…

There’s a significant and rich body of research on video games, spanning various disciplines. It addresses a wide range of aspects of video gaming, encompassing studies of video gaming cultures, the economics of video games, player motivations, creativity and video gaming, and many more things besides. But little of this…

“Can you come up with a (concrete) design problem in interface design that can NOT be formulated as a search problem?” This was a question posed to me recently by Antti Oulasvirta. It relates to his talk, “Can Computers Design?”, which he gave at the IXDA conference Interaction ’16 (slides). …

What do we mean when we talk about ‘interaction’ in human-computer interaction or interaction design? What drives calls to go “beyond interaction”, or consider what might be “after interaction”? Does ‘interaction’ conceptually no longer articulate the right kinds of ideas when we talk about our (HCI) research? Does it have…

Research on social media is popular. What does not seem to be so popular is finding ways to closely examine people’s actual, real-time use of social media, or in other words, how they use it moment-by-moment. …