This paper presents a curated collection of fictional abstracts for papers that could appear in the proceedings of the 2039 CHI Conference. It provides an opportunity to consider the various visions guiding work in HCI, the futures toward which we (believe we) are working, and how research in the field might relate with broader social, political, and cultural changes over the next quarter century.

Our fictional abstract was among the 15 works that were selected from 33 submissions.

BORROWING ANCIENT CLUES FOR TODAY’S MORPHING MEDIA

Since the invention of image recording, our thinking on visual content creation has been conditioned mostly by flat surfaces. Alternative studies conducted to break this conditioning remained as experiments for lack of technology. However, today’s media surfaces are able to assume any kind of shape, to “record without a camera” and “reflect like a mirror” what they see, and to offer every kind of interaction. This allows us to regain the previously lost possibility to create handmade visual content by engraving literally on media surfaces themselves, as was the case with craftsmanship methods in ancient times. In order to achieve this, though, we need to thoroughly understand the creative processes in those ages and learn from them. This article, by re-reading non-flat content creation from ancient times, investigates what kind of clues we should collect for current morphing media content.

Publication
 Paper
 Proceedings

Images

The figures below illustrate the historical sources of inspiration that could guide the design of morphing material interfaces. The video sketch depicts potential interactions to create hand-made content with/on such materials.

Reference
Eric P.S. Baumer, June Ahn, Mei Bie, Elizabeth M. Bonsignore, Ahmet Börütecene, Oğuz Turan Buruk, Tamara Clegg, Allison Druin, Florian Echtler, Dan Gruen, Mona Leigh Guha, Chelsea Hordatt, Antonio Krüger, Shachar Maidenbaum, Meethu Malu, Brenna McNally, Michael Muller, Leyla Norooz, Juliet Norton, Oguzhan Ozcan, Donald J. Patterson, Andreas Riener, Steven I. Ross, Karen Rust, Johannes Schöning, M. Six Silberman, Bill Tomlinson, and Jason Yip. 2014. CHI 2039: speculative research visions. In CHI ’14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 761-770. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2559206.2578864