A pair of Tech on the Trail researchers made the trek to Schloss Dagstuhl for a workshop that sought to craft a grand challenges paper for the emerging area of nature HCI. There’s been a lot of work in the area over the last decade or so, including several framework papers that identified key dimensions and categorized prior work, but this workshop provided an opportunity for about 20 researchers and practitioners in the area to identify common challenges and set a course for the future of the field.
Schloss Dagstuhl specializes in this type of workshop–it’s an isolated castle in the rolling hills of Germany that includes housing, meals, and meeting spaces in a single facility. One of the organizers was the co-editor of the HCI Outdoors book, Michael Jones from BYU. He arranged invitations for Tech on the Trail lab members Scott McCrickard and Natalie Andrus. Mike and the other organizers, Floyd Mueller, Zhuying Li, and Masahiko Inami, arranged and led work sessions in which we discussed research thrusts, identified and categorized related work, demoed ongoing conceptual projects, and held writing sessions.
The core output from our efforts is a grand challenges paper that is currently under review. I’ll update this post as the paper gets closer to publication.
Technology on the Trail 