No abstract

Previous work in the CHI community has identified and explored gaps between theory and practice in HCI research [2]. The recently formed SIGCHI Community on Research-Practice Interaction aims to help bridge the gap between research and practice, by for example supporting practitioner-friendly dissemination of results, and serving as a conduit for feedback from practitioners to researchers. This SIG is an opportunity for interested CHI attendees to meet members of the SIGCHI RPI community, and engage in discussions on RPI issues including the CHI format, dissemination of results, and supporting practice-based research.

This special interest group probes potential problems between HCI researchers and the practitioners who are consumers of research, to explore the extent of the problems and propose possible solutions. It will start with the results of the CHI 2010 workshop on the same topic, articulating factors that may render some of the research literature inaccessible or irrelevant to practitioners. When should HCI researchers be concerned about the relevance of their work to practitioners? How should practitioners communicate their needs for research? Participants will discuss these topics and others that both groups can use to help bridge the gap between research and practice in HCI.

This paper reports findings from a study of meditation videos posted on YouTube. It reports on both the features they offer and the kinds of comments posted. The mostviewed one hundred videos referenced faith-based traditions, "new age" spirituality, and entirely secular meditation practices. A convenience sample of comments was taken as a snapshot of responses. Comments were sorted into three main groups: remarks about the video, reports of subjective experience and responses to other comments. The paper presents examples and discussion of the comments and relates them to Seligman's theory of well-being, in particular the difference between pleasure and gratification. It argues that although the value of "found data" is limited, these data indicate some of the ways that YouTube is being used to create gratifying and meaningful as well as pleasurable experiences.

Engineering processes and methodologies used in building tomorrow's systems must place a greater emphasis on designing usable systems that meet the needs of the systems' users and their tasks. This paper identifies the need for defining human factors and human-computer interaction (HCI) engineering activities that contribute to the design, development, and evaluation of usable and useful interactive systems, and presents a rationale for integrating these activities with software engineering and incorporating them into the system life cycle.