In this article, we present and articulate the analytical lens of multisited design to illuminate transnational connections between sites of design, and aid in the translation of knowledge between designers and ethnographers. This position emerges from the authors' respective engagements in ethnographic research and design engagements with a slum community center in Bangkok, Thailand, and with “makers” and entrepreneurs in Shanghai and Shenzhen, China. In both cases, we found design to be a site of engagement with and interpretation of wider connections between different locales, and between local and global networks. We identify four crucial aspects of design for the purposes of this discussion: It is normative, concerned with function and the attainment of goals; it is practical, and oriented toward constraints and opportunities; it frames and defines problems concurrently with solving them; and it takes a systems approach that accounts for the broad context of the design situation. Approaching and participating in these aspects of design evolved in concert with our ethnographic fieldwork and analysis, allowing us to take design seriously without sacrificing an ethnographic commitment to nuanced description. We conclude by touching on the epistemological similarities, rather than conflicts, between ethnography and design.

While interaction designers often aim to support virtues such as health, creativity and thrift, their design efforts are also implicated in technologies that support greed, lust, and vanity. "Vice" interfaces serve as a way to interrogate critically some of the moral values that lie beneath our design efforts, while also providing an opportunity to create some wickedly fun prototypes.

Tangible interfaces are increasingly becoming commercially available products in the current generation of game controllers like the Nintendo Wii Remote, Microsoft's Kinect, and Sony's Eye. Tangible interaction researchers and designers can push the envelope of game controllers by thinking creatively about input device design. At the same time, the constraints of controlling a playable game can provide us with a fun, engaging, and useful design exercise.

Through reuse, reinvention and modification of materials, people easily prototype tangible interactive systems and redesign their everyday environments. Off-the shelf devices, such as the Nintendo Wii remote, provide one entrance into this world of hackable parts and Do-it-Yourself (DIY) activity. The Wii remote and extension controllers are a family of easily available devices whose hackability is informally supported by online DIY communities. Easy to open and containing joysticks, accelerometers, gyroscopes, Bluetooth and IR cameras, they are excellent tools for the affordable and rapid prototyping of tangible interactive systems. In this studio we hope to build some basic skills to equip participants with the confidence and knowledge to use these devices in their future prototyping and design efforts.

How do tangible systems take advantage of our sociophysical embodiment in the world? How can we use tangible interaction to better understand collaboration and intersubjectivity? We present Parazoan, an interactive installation where evocative objects collaboratively control a dynamic visual display. Our analysis of interactions with Parazoan explores our questions and discusses implications for our understanding of tangible and virtual collaboration.

Mobile technologies are deployed into diverse social, cultural, political and geographic settings, and incorporated into diverse forms of personal and collective mobility. We present an ethnography of transnational Thai retirees and their uses of mobile technology, highlighting forms of mobility that are spatially, temporally, and infrastructurally anchored, and concepts of the house as a kinship network that may be globally distributed. We conclude in pointing out several ways in which our observations and analysis can influence design.

While tangible interfaces open up new possibilities for input and interaction, they are also interesting because of the ways in which they occupy the physical world just as we do. We have been working at the intersection of three research areas - tangible interfaces, ambient displays, and collaboration awareness. Our system, Nimio, uses engaging physical objects as both input devices (capturing aspects of individual activity) and output devices (expressing aspects of group activity). We present our design and experiences, focusing in particular on the tension between legibility and ambiguity and its relevance in collaborative settings.

According to usability experts, the top user issue for Web sites is difficult navigation. We have been developing auto-mated usability tools for several years, and here we describe a prototype service called InfoScent™ Bloodhound Simula-tor, a push-button navigation analysis system, which auto-matically analyzes the information cues on a Web site to produce a usability report. We further build upon previous algorithms to create a method called Information Scent Absorption Rate, which measures the navigability of a site by computing the probability of users reaching the desired destinations on the site. Lastly, we present a user study involving 244 subjects over 1385 user sessions that show how Bloodhound correlates with real users surfing for in-formation on four Web sites. The hope is that, by using a simulation of user surfing behavior, we can reduce the need for human labor during usability testing, thus dramatically lower testing costs, and ultimately improving user experience. The Bloodhound Project is unique in that we apply a concrete HCI theory directly to a real-world prob-lem. The lack of empirically validated HCI theoretical model has plagued the development of our field, and this is a step toward that direction.