beck ux

You Can Always Start Designing

Over the past few days, I have heard a few students and colleagues say a variation of the following: I don’t know enough to start designing yet. I want to challenge this idea. I don’t think that there is some threshold of knowledge that must be passed before one can start designing. You can always…
Image-based Reference Management

Here are some true statements. (1) Some of my colleagues share paper copies of interesting, relevant research with me. (2) I find new literature on devices that aren’t mine. (3) Manual entry of new literature is sort of a pain on a mobile device. I want to be able to quickly add relevant literature to…
Designing Authorship

One of the coolest things about the PLOS paper I was reading this morning — citation at the end of this post — is the way it distinguishes the different author contributions: Sort of like the credits at the end of film/television shows, no? This is a model that other venues ought to adopt.…
From Bibliographies to Iconographies

Research through Design (RtD) can be influenced by written text (academic papers) and visual content (images of designs, photos, paintings). So, why not account for the latter in reference lists? Communicating RtD publications could mix bibliographies with iconographies, which would give image-based influences their due credit. Some sketch-proposals (made w/Adobe Sketch on an iPad) for…
Theory Practice Workshop

Today was the deadline for CHI2019 workshop submissions. We submitted a proposal to host a workshop about the theory-practice discourse in HCI, and, as part of the writing process, we ginned up a website (here) and a Mendeley group (here) for communicating and sharing resources both amongst participants and with the public. Fingers crossed for…
Adobe Spark

This is my first time experimenting with Adobe Spark, and I foresee making lots of one-minute explainer videos for my spring semester human-centered design course.
Towards Good Collaboration

This is a list of rules for collaboration from an expert on what doesn’t work: Be compassionate. If you’re in a design critique, for example, then you ought to be both critical and encouraging. Good critique should be encouraging. If you’re making someone less excited to work on their project then you’re doing it wrong.…
Industry-Academic Engagement

For the past few years I’ve been interested in what I have observed, even in my short career, to be a growing influence of industry in academia. If they’re not already the norm, then at least industry-academic collaborations are becoming more common. I don’t think this is necessarily a good thing but it’s also not…
Theory-Practice Gap

Watch this video of a talk I gave at CHI2018 on the theory-practice gap:
DRS2018 Best Paper Award

Download/read the paper here.