A^3's Cube

A bit of a first for me in that I'll be a co-author on a CHI submission this week. CHI is one of the largest conferences around. It's on Computer Human Interaction (or HCI as it's more usually called in the UK). Not my field particularly, but I'm broadly collaborative. This came out of a cold contact I did with a Western (Canadian as it turned out) researcher at Tokyo Tech who appeared on NHK news. They work in the deceptive design research area, analysing what deceptive design is, how it works, how to avoid it and how to help users not be affected by it. After meeting up with them for a chat about mutual areas of interest they invited me to join them in working with a new PhD student of theirs on an analysis of the theoretical basis of the deceptive design literature, to help suggest appropriate solid theoretical bases for this field which up to now has been primarily empirical in nature with a very limited theorisation. The result is a "late breaking work" submission to CHI which should be submitted in the next day or so. We plan to continue working together on developing a more in-depth examination of what the theoretical framing should be for this area. This paper is mostly about showing that the current literature lacks a good presentation of this and laying out an initial set of ideas (that was my primary input) for the future work that's needed. This is unfunded work on my side, but the workload was light and it's all grist to my CV.