CHI Paper Featured in MIT’s Technology Review

Well this is fun: Shaowen and my CHI 2011 paper, “‘Pleasure is Your Birthright’: Digitally Enabled Designer Sex Toys as a Case of Third-Wave HCI,” was featured in MIT’s Technology Review blog. Technology Review claims two million readers around the world, so with any luck, we’ve reached a lot of people.

The paper itself reports on an interview study we did in 2009-10 with a dozen or so CEO-designers of high-end sex toys. Among other things, we stressed that taboos surrounding sex can hurt the HCI (human-computer interaction) community’s research agenda, especially in the areas of embodied interaction and experience design (two trends that bring us products like the iPad, Microsoft Kinect, video games, and so on). Digitally enabled sex toy designers have learned a lot about how to design interactions for tactile pleasure. They’ve also learned some ways to avoid harming consumers, both physically and emotionally. HCI has much to learn from them. Conversely, HCI has much to teach them, in terms of rigorous user studies and interaction design prototyping and evaluation methodologies. We all should be talking!

Special acknowledgement to Cory Silverberg for helping Shaowen and me get connected to the right people, persuading them to talk to us, and for helping us ask these designers the right questions.