Three Articles:
The three articles begin with an investigation into the use of blockchain for the charity sector as Elsden et al describe how different design methods provide insights into the uses of a technology that at the time, was looking for a problem to solve. Plessas’ personal glossary of paranoia sets out the terms of engagement and experience in the present form of a data-driven society. The twentythree authors of third article chose to obfuscate their identity as they set out a short manifesto for how the discipline of Human Computer Interaction should address blockchain technologies. Collectively the three articles correspond with a determinism to see distributed ledger technologies solve some of the problems of our time, or perhaps a time when they were written at the end of 2017.
Searching for an OxChain: Co-designing blockchain applications for charitable giving
Chris Elsden, Kate Symons and Chris Speed, University of Edinburgh
John Vines and Anne Spaa, Northumbria University
The OxChain project is investigating the design of blockchain applications in partnership with a large and traditionally trusted institution, Oxfam. We outline some of the potential opportunities that distributed ledger technologies could offer the charity and development sector as a whole, but focus on the challenges of undertaking co-design work in the context of large institutions. We suggest the need to leverage existing trusted relationships and understand the unique value that such institutions offer.
Cloud Euphoria : A post-analysis on the networked effects of emotions
Angelo Plessas
Nowadays we live in a maze of perplexity and contradiction, treating feelings as data, like augmenting them, compress them, duplicating them and erasing them. Data like ‘happiness’ or ‘sadness’ are becoming abstractions because there is never a single moment when we can explicitly feel one or another. Let us click into these ‘files’ and explore these techno-cultural forms of communicational imperfection.
Four manifestos from ‘HCI for Blockchain’: A 2018 CHI workshop
Hashed authors
At the CHI 2018 conference in Montreal, a community of HCI researchers came together to address the emergence of blockchain, and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). These technologies present exciting, and interdisciplinary, challenges and opportunities for developing new ways for networks of people and things to transact, collaborate, organize and identify themselves. However, even now, much research and discussion remains technical or theoretical, rather than considering our interactions with applications of these technologies within our everyday lives. During this workshop, participants shared early-stage projects and then worked together to produce brief ‘manifestos’ for how the human-centred Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) community should address blockchain technologies. Each manifesto addresses a theme relevant to the projects that participants shared during the workshop, and were produced rapidly and collaboratively in an afternoon session, before being shared and reflected upon after the workshop. We reproduce these manifestos here to as a starting point for discussion, and an indication of the broad areas of interest and expertise regarding DLTs within the HCI community. In the playful and collaborative spirit of the workshop, and reflecting the cryptographic roots of blockchain technologies, the authorship of these manifestos is shared and attributed to the workshop participants through anonymous hashing using the MD5 algorithm. These hashes are *committed* by publishing the paper; authors are anonymous unless they claim their hash by publishing a random number that has been shared with them, and can be used in combination with their names to generate the hash and verify a contribution to authorship.