Back from Florence. Here's some pictures :)

1. Opening Keynote
2. Design and Creative Imagination
Irena McAra-McWilliam
The Glasgow School of Art, Head of Design
Design and Creative Imagination, and how that's evolved.
Art and Science, Balance - this morning, I will talk about creativity and the imagination, and interaction design and transformation design. The work we are all involved in, the investigation of social and technical networks, where better to do it than in Florence?
We can drew attention to the fact that we can creatively synthesize those two together. That's the theme of design, in order to enhance quality of life. You can see, as you walk around, what a height of quality can be achieve when these things are done in the way they are done in Florence. Filippo Brunelleschi: ingengo, a term invented by philosophers to describe a natural ability for original invention. To render a cupulla; the birth of modernity through architecture, sculpture, art and science. The cathedral started to be built without any idea of how it could be completed.
He went on to build the cathedral, and was then named ingengo - a genius.
Today we call this innovation - a radical breakthrough in thinking and creativity to realize a solution. This is an example of the belief in the solution - the building was started before they had a solution - and that the solution would come through the process. This also realized in Florence the role of the artist, designer, as a creative genius in their own right. This did not happen before. You can see the rise of the profession of art, including what we do in terms of design. The dawn of humanism, subjectivity, experience, quality of life, and you could say - the birth of modernity. Florence is where this started.
Today I will talk about the Rose Window: the visualization of creative imagination.
If we look back in time and imagine how we have imagined the imagination, how do we think imagination works? We have images in our mind. We imagine things that do not yet exist in the real world. This drawing and illustration - a mind's eye - is how we still consider our work. It concerns embodiment and imagination. We can also learn from the visual in terms of memory. Memory palace: constructed as a place, in his mind, to remember things. At a time when there was no printing and publishing, how do you remember knowledge and information? You remember it in your head, and imagine a space, and place information within the memory palace. An information device that is a structure to imagine things.
The other mnemonic device is the rose window. This window is celebration of technology. The architects at the time were able to raise up, with a minimum amount of stone, the maximum amount of light. It would be immersive, and you would move through light. This was dramatic - a creative synthesis of the highest level of aesthetic form, with technology that enabled them to lift these weights of glass into the cathedral.
Interested in mnemonic devices, ways that help us remember. Rose windows are ways that we can remember things: there is an underlying grid, which represents a story, which has a narrative structure. Having read that, and learned it, you would remember - and then, seeing the window again, you would remember the story. In this kind of form - highly visual, and creative, and technological - is a precursor to information technology of today.
This is a rose window that can describe the creative imagination - the way we all work. We apply it structured in design, but all of us use this in our everyday life, and particularly in complex situations.
The creative imagination has to do with understanding self, motivations, interests; seeing the world; imaging possibilities.
The idea: The Object: The World: The Self
Ways of Thinking: Ways of Making: Ways of Seeing: Ways of Being
Prototyping is involved with ways of making; conceptual design in ways of thinking; ethnography, in ways of seeing; ways of being is the translation of our own desire to make a difference in the world.
Ways of being: Values, worldviews, personality, intentions, passion, experience, embedding, beliefs, attitudes. We are all here at the conference because we have the motivation to study HCI. We come to that for different reasons. It's interesting for us to interrogate reasons for us to do different things, in order to understand ourselves and build sense of self. This has to do with identity, in relationship to our own work. Motivation, and having an open mind for different possibilities.
Ways of seeing. Focus, empathy, hypotheses, perceptual guidance, breadth, participation, critical analysis and seeing through, opportunities. We find ways to do things, and to do them together. We look at empathy: Adam Smith also wrote a book about the theory of modern sentiments. One of the best uses of the imagination is to imagine what it is like to be someone else. In terms of ethnography, we are using them all in order to discover what it is like to be someone else. In order to discover that and feel that, we can do something within that world of information. Primary imagination as actively seeing the world. We can apply imaginations not just to the inside vision, but to see what is going on around us.
We all see that with a camera, we are more attentive; if we have that ability more, we are like Da Vinci, and we are inspiring ourselves by what we see. The world becomes the work and the effort becomes to see the world you are participating in. Insight, this is before the idea. It's something deeper than the idea. You see something that inspires you and on how you want to act: Perception, and possibility.
Ways of thinking. Ideas, concepts, synesthesia, large working memory, relaxation techniques, model making, metaphor, representational diversity. It's important to have lots of ideas, but also to understand which ideas are good ideas. We test our ideas, and expose them, and we make judgments ourselves about which are best. It's 50% the creation of idea, and the 50% working out how to judge which are the highest quality. Creativity, and intelligibility - the idea has to be recognized by someone other than ourselves. For it to have value, it must have social value.
Ways of making: Building, detailing, sensorility, tangibility, story-telling, scenarios, prototyping, and crafting. Making things experiencable by other groups. We have a whole language in describing the ways in which we make things in order to expose them to other people. These have become embodied, and have their life in the world. It's a great power of design, that as we make it visual in any form, it can be shared. This is why we make things early in the design process; the embodiment allows for feedback and reaction. In all of the design process research, we look at ways to prototype from day one. If you have the first sketch, it can be shown to someone. It's iteration - building and crafting and then exposure are perhaps, to some extent, over. We have design processes that are much more iterative. [[is this at odds with Cooper's measure twice, cut once?]]
Materiality - tangible computing - sits in this area. We are all familiar with the virtual, or informational.
The interesting part of a diagrammatic grid like this represents more of how we really work. It's not sequential; it feels messier, and it looks like a n overlapping and confusing system.
This is the full rose window of creativity and imagination, and how we navigate that. What is interesting in this is that first, chaos, to a certain extent, exists. Additionally, we can note that - typically - design is associated only with ways of thinking and ways of making. The levels of personality and interaction with the world is a fairly recent development, and is part of human-computer interaction and its history. Design and innovation focuses on the idea, but rarely goes "below" the waterline in order to look at ways of seeing and ways of being. Ironically, perhaps, HCI generally lives in the lower-half, and examines ways of seeing and ways of being. We can have a lead-in role of making the rose window accessible to other areas.
Reflection e when do we think, and when do we have time to think?
Here in Italy, we have the "slow food" movement. If one is an interaction designer, you design the nuances of time - it's a kind of choreography. Interaction design is a design of a dynamic choreography through various visual and tactile modalities. We play with the material of time and the material of the digital. Here in Florence, in the renaissance city, we can talk of new craft. This is what we bring to Florence. This dynamic between slow and fast, and the quality of that interaction, is what HCI embodies. That has an external focus, as we look at the responses people have to our ideas. We are busy in thinking and motivating ourselves to the next step; in the creative process - our work is one that we can creatively score.
How do you do that in a world of highly pressured work environments, in which there are no dynamics of time? How do we design, as interaction designers, a new dynamic, event based time?
These are questions we can pose ourselves because our material is open to that kind of dynamic.
Balance; Werner Heisenberg pointing to the need for balance in human life between activity and reflection. We can support this kind of quality in the tools we make and work we do. The professional elite looks at highly stressed and highly pressurized, and the resource we miss the most is time, yet interaction designers are most familiar with time.
Mapping the rose window to interaction design - open the rose window. Having examined the creative imagination, we can use this as a resource. The rose window: mapped to product, craft, interaction and transformation.
Ways of making is related to craft, the move from craft-based design to product based design. The output there is to product, via the industrial revolution. In the near term comes our craft, and the new emergent discipline of transformative design - distributing the design abilities. What is the difference between craft, product, interaction and transformation? If the window is "opened" - that is, flattened - we can map a number of ideas to the various components.
Material, through craft: gold, silver, etc. They have made the material their own, and can do anything with it. "His material". Our craft is digital; software as a material, even if we can't see it directly. The world of craft has this kind of feeling about it, and everything was a one-off. If your mother has ever knitted you a jersey, it's unique and individual and craft. Interestingly, it's of high value because it's hand crafted. This is typical of craft.
Product, as an object, is craft as a discipline. Product design in the twentieth century: design studios. Here we start to think of other things, like the user. The product is ‘for' the user. Here materiality is more extensive; in making a product of more than one material, it is "for" someone. We do not expect our products to change, only to age. Things were made and built to be relatively stable and fixed, as they had to last a long time.
This is where the big break - a rupture comes - because no longer is the emphasis on material, but now on dynamics. Unstable - material and immaterial. Virtual, real. How can we imagine designing for that? How can we imaging things that are not fixed, and that people would use in different ways? Somehow we've made it our profession to try to answer that question. Systems design: the kind of networks we design that link people together through material and immaterial objects. We design for that, and somehow try to make that predictable and open and structured. This isn't a closed system; it needs to be fluid and dynamic. We've reached an interesting place, where we have a kind of chaos; it's part of the world we live in.
This, for the last twenty or thirty years or so, has been the big difference in design.
Transformation, then, is about the design of capability. If you imagine working with users to such an extent that they become designers themselves, this is what we are talking about. DIY culture; communal, or mass innovation; this language has recently been used to describe the relationship between us and the things we make, being translated into tools rather than products. It's handing over part of the design process to the user, giving them the ability to make things themselves.
If you line these up and start going across these rows, you can start to see - by looking at each area - the nature.
HCI is linked to interaction and transformation; we live in the world on the right, and will be shaping it in years to come.
So can we do this with the level of quality that is exemplified in the material and craft driven worlds?
As this history, which is one of design history, has evolved, the mentality of each period has been exemplified through the artifacts that have been created. This is the "birth of internet" - an image of the 17th century. "The Reading Machine". Combinatorial logic; a computer scientist before there were computers. When you rapidly need to look at other information, you paddle the wheel around to look it up. It's a kind of "informational device", similar to random access. It anticipates the internet, and is a beautiful example.
1938, Electro and (spotto?); 12 foot high robot. Examples are made as objects, that are not interactive. They came out and went about their business in new York, and Electro was invited to dinner parties, where he was pre-programmed to come out with one-liners during the evening. Electro was a smoker (a smoking robot?). The mores of the time - what we consciously or unconsciously include in what we make. This was sophisticated, as the robot was a world personality. The specification would include it.
A remote control, not interactivity as such - product design driven interaction.
Given that history, what is the opportunity? We can re-invigorate our abilities; we can repurpose our history. We can look at craft, and materiality, and product design, from a completely new sensibility. We can look backwards. We want to move from smooth automation, like Electro, through the world where things are not closed or perfect or finished. Anything to do with trying to finish things, and making them perfect, doesn't apply in our world of interactivity. It's always dynamic, and open ended, and we leave things open to change. We've moved the debate from smooth automation to dynamic improvisation. It's not classical movement, but jazz: it's unstable media, immaterial, changeable, upgradable, updateable, renewable. The interactive sensibility is where we make things that are unstable, imperfect, and open.
We must reconfigure practice; understanding history, see potential, imagine possibilities, and articulate system solutions. The move from product to system, and considering network computing.
By looking at the world of craft, we reconfigure practice. The center for advanced textiles, looking at image-making sensibilities and sending them to print in large cloth, silk, or wool.
Print in order to research; researching mass customization of textiles, to use open source software to create their own textiles. To make clothes like that, we are - in a sense - going back to advanced textile design being a craft again. An area of high experimentation, looking for tools to give to other people so they can make the things they want to make. Using digital manipulation for textile design. This would not have been possible without going through the interactive sensibilities.
Transformation design - the emerging area - giving people tools, and allowing them to make things for themselves. Mass creativity, or mass innovation. A fairly substantial push to investigate open tools and open media, to make things for ourselves. The focus is on capability design - allowing everyone to "be a designer". We are creating creative communities. Can we look at the user as creator, and imagine what they would like to make? The designer is not the person that comes with the solution: it's someone that comes with a box of tools for someone else to use.

3. Renaissance Panel
Hiroshi Ishi
- Sandscape
- Clay
- I/O Brush
Art and Science can be combined into a tangible media. Rough and rapid form giving with hand for ideation.

Dernanda B. Viegas
From Design to Infovis, and back
Graphic Design and Art History; traditional training in analog media. Film, silkscreening. How can we use the visual form to communicate? How do you use visuals to communicate a message and convey information? Moved to MIT Media Lab; everything was interdisciplinary, and exciting to get a sense of working with engineers and people who think in a different way. As a "visual person', became interested in ways to communicate information visually. 1990s, traditional infovis used to look like scientists, for scientists, and about "serious data". Trying to get insights. Compare to "lay" uses of visualizations; private data can be visualized too.
Email archives; chat conversations; mailing lists. Social data that people leave traces of, visualized. Posthistory, 2003; Themail, 2005. Real data, real people.
Once people began seeing the visualizations, they wanted to share this information with others; they wanted to play with the visualizations, and include actual life experiences as anecdotes. Was thinking of visualizations in an orthodox way, as if it is a single exploratory idea; it's actually a social artifact, in the same way that we use photographs to tell stories and reminisce about the past.
Martin Watternberg; the NameVoyager.
Many Eyes. Anyone can upload data, visualize the data, and share the data. People are visualizing data about political commentary, citizen advocacy, religious analysis, science, having fun. Naval gazing: weight loss, running logs.

Benjamin Mako Hill.
Free software, or "open source", is about control of technology. It's articulated early on as a social movement for the control of technology. Communication technologies; as people who design technology understand the power technology has. Communication technology mediates a large amount of power and ability. You can control what is said, who you can say it to, how you say it.
Users of technology anticipate their needs better than manufacturers of technology, but very difficult for them to communicate these needs.
Users have less outside reliability than firms do.
Users have the ability to collaborate and share ideas, and prototype and build and tweak their concepts.
The tools for designing technologies are laptop computers. The users of software are using the same tools as the producers of software. Through licenses, people are empowered to work in different ways.

4. Design, Marketing, Strategy? Where does User Research belong?
Irene Au, Google
Elissa Darnell, eBay
Shelley Evenson, CMU
Klaus Kaasgaard, Yahoo!
Terry Winograd, Stanford University
Christian Rohrer, Ebay
Ways to advance the field of HCI. Contributions are academic in nature; things that help us understand theoretical principles, such as information foraging, or human performances, such as Fitt's law. Also important is professional preparation and corporate effectiveness.
How well are HCI education programs preparing practicioners for jobs in industry? This is important because we are all trying to achieve a similar purpose for being in the field, and need to discuss organizational issues as a whole.
HCI practicioners need to be included earlier, and should be relevant, and should have impact on the business. Referencing Rosenberg, Ashley, etc. Typical roles on a UX team include a variety of discipline, each with its own story. User research has a bit of complexity, and the panel is represented primarily by internet companies. This is true because UX research in these companies exist in sub-business units that include data analysts, user researchers, etc - insight generation.
Because of the fast-paced nature of the industry, there are also strategists: people looking for patterns and trends, and facilitating the consumption of insights. Then, within that, there are multiple faces of research: user research, market research, etc - and they may have different roles and overlapping purposes.
Insight generators typically vary in approach and in the questions they answer. Some are concerned with beliefs, some with behaviors; also important are considering qualitative and quantitative data. A stereotypical look at market research positions it in dealing with attitudes, while data mining looks at quantitative behavior, and the user research world exists in the remainder.
Also important to consider the background and training for the people involved: methodological rigor, business relevance, and design collaboration. It's rare to find someone who has two, much less three, areas of training.
The elements of user experience, or a working definition for the discussion. UX begins with meeting a user need: the importance of being useful. Outside of that is the layer of usability, or the ability to accomplish certain tasks; then, finally we have the layer of desirability. These three elements, in the basic definition, provide an illustration of how an interactive product leads to a user experience. These are then enhanced by brand experience, and research can take place at all of these places.
Shelley Evenson, Carnegie Mellon
Where do we belong?
HCI and interaction design; but think about it from the perspective of Hugh Dubberly's model in Gain magazine: what do people desire? What can we make? What will sustain a business? This looks at the human side, the business side, and the technological side. The user model, technical model, and business model.
I think the purpose of our field is to drive the development of the user model. We need to understand the context from a social, economic sides, and need to be considerate of the value that people will deliver, and the values of the people that will be using the product or service. We also need to be responsible for collaborating with the business and technical perspectives.
Ideally, we start with a conversation between all three stakeholders from the very beginning, rather than allowing one group or another drive the development. Conversations matter: "the biggest problem in business is people don't know how to talk to other people in the language they understand" (Charles Holiday, CEO Dupont). An educational philosophy or approach: CMU's professional masters programs prepare students for their roles in these conversations. They practice the way they will actually be working. Having students work in multidisciplinary teams is critical; CS, psychology, etc.
Conversations can be managed by using models throughout the process. Models are shared representations that serve as common language, to facilitate.
Territory maps: used early to negotiate the space that teams are working in. A way of looking at what is there, and what isn't there, in the problem space. Models help negotiate the space between the disciplines. The industry should be seeded with people that have experience collaborating on complex problems across disciplines before they enter the workspace; they can lead conversations, which will help deliver new kinds of innovations to the world.
Terry Winograd, Stanford
An emphasis on internet companies and programs that have been influenced by a silicon valley view. There isn't a lot of contrast between CMU and Stanford's approach. HCI Teaching at Stanford includes PhD, Masters, Undergraduate, and d.school. The "T" shaped thinker: Design Thinking broad, and Analytical Thinking depth. Design thinking is purposely large, and there won't be a specific definition given.
Design Thinking is a way of approaching the overall product process. It's more about generating questions than refining answers, and it has a pervasive focus on a user. The questions come from the analytical side of the T. "We aim to produce trouble makers".
Design courses include team projects, open ended need finding and product definition; everyone gets engaged in all aspects, and iterative prototyping drives the process.
Irene Au, Google
UX Mission: to lead a human-centered approach to making google technology that satisfies and delights people all over the world. Considering that there are so few of us, how do we scale, and how do we lead the human-centered approach when the power exists within engineering?
The UX mission is to focus on users, and facilitate brainstorming to realize the mission. Focus on the user, and all else will follow: this is easy to say, but hard to do. We are trying to find a systematic way to allow this to happen.
Google lives within engineering, and user experience can be successful living anywhere within the organization. Closely aligned with the function that drives strategy that drives product development. This is engineering based. Yahoo is found within project management.
Engineering vastly outnumbers everyone, and the activities that are valued within google are with what gets built at the end of the day. The engineers are those that build the products, and the more UX can be associated with the act of building, the more we get recognized and have influence over the outcomes. Looking more at product integration, and at 3.0 versions of products, and growing internationally. It's one thing to do the research, as in academia; in industry, it's a means to an end. How can we build these skills to students so they can have more of an influence? Running workshops, facilitating groups. These are skills that user researchers require in order to be successful.
If the engineers don't buy into it, they won't build it. This requires that engineers come up with the ideas, and that designers act in a facilitation capacity rather than a generative capacity.

5. ArtLinks: Fostering Social Awareness and Reflection in Museums
Dan Cosley, et all, Cornell University
[[Mind numbing: they've completely lost track of the "point" of art and of a museum, and have shifted the entire emphasis from the piece of art to their creation]]
Technology as a tool in museum, looks at activity centered design, which focuses on context and theoretical ways that enters design: social constructivism. Look at what patrons are doing, as well as the infrastructure. Start with a preconceived idea of what users should do, but also look at their experiences and context of use. We look at how they engage, and how the technology itself exists.
Technology must exist in the social and cultural context of what we are doing.
A traditional view of museums is that art objects are the primary thing on display; they are made by artists, are complete, and the curators role is preservation and education. This view, however, is that people are an integral part of museums. Visitors participate in the creative process, and objects are open-ended. Visitors, therefore, create experience and affect.
Tracking information transfer, including looking at where people look and move, as well as commenting and annotating. People look at objects, look "inside", etc.
Phase one: pushing information; phase two: social level. Affective presence and interactivity is the third phase. The same information on visitor patterns used for dynamic feedback tool can also generate esthetic and interpretative displays of the living presence, activity, and affect in a collaborative space.
Specifically, this "bridges the art and tool divide", and looks at how emotion exists in sensory experiences. Design ways to monitor people's emotions, so applications can work better. In this example, actually try to evoke emotion. The goal is to provoke: spirituality and presence. Affective presence in practice: imprints in the museum. Then, viewing all marks in a mosaic, in an effort to understand who was there.
Lead visitors towards awareness of the presence of other visitors and feel connected to those visitors.
ArtLinks: Fostering Social Awareness and Reflections in Museums. A system that allows visitors to consider their own reactions and impressions on the artwork, as well as other visitors impressions and reactions. Intended to be used explicitly with one piece of artwork. A visitor approaches the sculpture and sees a welcome screen that allows users to understand what other people viewing Guanyin have felt. Entering the display shows words from other visitors. Bigger words are those that have been said by the most people, similar to a tagcloud. By clicking on words, one can see the relationship between words and people.
People can "connect to other museum visitors through their shared reactions".
Floating words -> word connections -> people icons -> demographics -> meaning of icons -> meaning of words
Goals: Transparency: Explore how design elements could be both aesthetically consistent and intuitively accessible to users. Connection: lead visitors towards awareness of the presence of other visitors and feel connected to those visitors. Reflection: help visitors explicitly consider their museum expectations and reflect on art.
People became more aware and curious of other visitors, and used artlinks to explore others while also reflecting on art.
Users strongly expect information and learning technology when they enter a museum, but modern technology is out of place with Asian art. Designs that focus on social and spiritual aspects of art museums allows people to "engage on their own terms". Design for reflection doesn't mean that you have to change people's expectations - it just means that people need to be aware of their expectations. (?)

6. K-Sketch: A Kinetic Sketch Pad for Novice Animators
Richard Davis, Brien Colwell, James Landay
http://k-sketch.org
[[Very cool - simple, easy, quick way to illustrate movement and connections]]
Problem: Difficult to animate complicated systems for chemistry teachers (and other people who have needs to show systems in flux and in movement). Need extends to amateur artists, students, and professionals. Sometimes things need to be animated in realtime - in the moment - such as during a class period.
There needs to exist an animation tool that is like paper: fast, simple, and expressive.
Current animation tools are too slow (flip books), too complicated (flash), or too specialized. They may require every frame be drawn one at a time, or they may afford too much flexibility (take too long to learn, etc); or they may exist in a single discipline only, and won't generalize across needs.
Informal Interfaces (SILK, DENIM) defer the details and emphasize the use of sketching. Prior animation sketching work exists, but emphasizes interaction techniques. This work is trying to show how to choose between interaction techniques to solve problems.
Interviewed seven expert animators, and learned that many of them were interested in making prototypes. They work in a rough form before making polished work. Also interviewed eleven non-animators: people who had never used tools like this before, but had very explicit things that they would want to animate. Engineers, hobbyists, dancers, teachers.
Collected 72 examples of usage - complete scenarios of usage tasks, and animations that solve those tasks. Identified 18 primitive animation operations, used in order to produce motions that they required. Includes orient to path, move relative, copy motion, trace. One difficult is understanding which are the most important: how many of these are critical in a sketch tool? Interface optimization method, visualizing simplicity and expressivity tradeoff. Code the entire set of tools, and then compute minimal set of animation optimizations. Ultimately, need only 10 of the 18 animation operations in order to support 80% of the total scenarios identified.
Evaluation included a K-Sketch vs. Powerpoint animation comparison. K-Sketch took 1/3 the time, and it "felt" faster too. Results are statistically significant. Lower cognitive load [NASA-TLX].

7. Media Spaces: Past Visions, Current Realities, Future Promise
Ron Baecker, Steve Harrison, Bill Buxton, Steven Poltrock, Elizabeth Churchill
Steve Harrison
A historic look at media spaces
When dealing with media spaces, new legitamacies historically arose: considering audio and video as a single thread was to be considered "strange". Additionally, understanding the idea of a metaphor became difficult: communicate with a computer, or communicate through a computer?
Some of the historic precedence and predictions were right. Video chat exists; ubiquitous video; architectural-scale display. Some things were wrong, however. The rise of mobility was not included or considered, particularly with regard to cameras. Where technology becomes adopted for audio and video, also, it focuses almost entirely on the face. And, adoption was not considered: cell phones with cameras rose at a totally unpredictable rate. Displays did not get cheap, or flat, as fast and bandwidth and computing.
Topics that are important to consider: How is that media space can exist within so many topics? Bill Buxton and Hiroshii Ishi started a strong movement, and used a diversity of approaches to consider the work. This includes the idea of information theory, as well as looking at a designer-ly approach: "We just wanted to design this thing".
Also, PARC specific ideas of "build what you use and use what you build", as well as the notion of "buy your way into the future". Spend a lot now in order to prototype what will be a commodity near into the future.
Steve Poltrock, Boeing
Lessons we can learn from videoconferencing. There's been a big market success with room videoconferencing systems. They are expensive, but offer clear advantages; the speaker can see the people on the other end, and can see behavior. Why do small-group, or individual video conferencing systems, fail continually? [[What about Skype?]] Why hasn't it been adopted, if there has been so much confident and optimistic research? In 1929, Bell Systems prototyped a video conferencing unit. 1964 Picturephone Set from AT&T. Hiroshi's clearboard, trying to recapture the use of space that exists in a face to face meeting. The technology is there, so where is market saturation?
Some potential reasons, all tied to social and behavioral norms. People want to look good, and video conferencing systems may cause them to not look good. A manager did other work during teleconferencing situations, and if in a video conference, he had to sit there and look. Additionally, people are camera shy, and the technology doesn't necessarily fit into social practice.
Norms are changing, and some of the younger audiences have a different feel for how cameras and video work. However, human nature won't, and we need to understand if human nature or norms are constraining the use of video. There is a propensity for people to communicate, and to be understood, and having video might allow them to be understood better. Additionally, people are visually dominant, and if there's a visual sense, people tend to pay more attention to that. Long distance relationships are expanding and advancing, and so there is a need to maintain these relationships. If these are normative changes that will lead to adoption, we might see a breakthrough coming.
Elizabeth Churchill, Yahoo
A problem: needed to communicate with colleagues in Japan, and build relationships across continents. Attempted to create a video link to allow the groups to get to know each other, but there's a 17 hour time difference. To address this, the attempt was to use information about what each other was doing. Displays - an asynchronous way of sharing, using the physical world as a canvas - people put notices up, and then people come and learn about those notices. This metaphor, along with "social networking" - the type of thing of facebook or twitter - is at the center of visual environments. Online and persistent sharing, along with a physical window onto those experiences, that people in a physical world could experience. The YeTI Interface, fxPal.

8. Designs on Dignity
Perceptions of Technology Among the Homeless
Goals: understand the perceptions of homeless towards technology. Homelessness isn't a single state of mind; it's complicated, and includes single families, and parents, and children, and they may be between jobs, and missed a payment or two. It's a wide range of conditions, and the best way to characterize it is something where stability in the life is what they are missing. Drunkedness, panhandling, etc - these are not necessarily part of the issue. Stability is the core issue. Where does technology help provide stability?
Additionally, a goal to understand ubiquitous computing and marginal users. Mainstream of urban life is a lot of people using ipods and cell phones; in America, we create personal space with these devices, and use these to communicate with other people with a similar bubble. What about those that are already marginalized? How do these devices affect them - how can we understand the unintended consequences of technology - people getting a hard time establishing stability, and also how it helps? Being able to get in touch with people is a positive, and a positive to those that are marginalized as well.
A tale of two centers: in order to work with the homeless was to go "in the wild" and approach individuals and begin a conversation and build trust. That's a bad idea, for a number of reasons. First, there community of homeless in Atlanta are diverse, and personal and emotional risk is high. Working with outreach centers is critical. It creates an advocacy for homeless participants, and allows for input and coaching in developing the research plan and the ethical issues. Being homeless is not something we've experienced, and the outreach center can help.
First center dealt with recovering addicts seeking treatment, and help with disability benefits. The programs were intended to help people stabilize their lives, and were involved with various programs including housing, counseling, narcotics anonymous or alcoholics anonymous.
Additionally, visited a working poor shelter. This was a timescale measured in months; people would be provided with a large box of food, and then couldn't come back for assistance within the next 60 days. This center helped make a short bridge out of a shaky situation and into a positive situation.
Many females coming into the center, generally with kids, and this created a number of stresses.
The study was going to be a photo elicitation interview. This method, taken from sociology, provides disposable cameras to those involved. They take pictures throughout the day, and were instructed to take pictures of technology in a broad sense. This might include bus passes, payphones, etc. The goal was to consider the larger issue of technology, as if it was everywhere, and not to take into account a computer as a laptop. Using the photo elicitation interview achieves a place where the "power dynamic" can be disrupted. You are introduced as an authority, because you are the interview. Taking photos, and focusing the interview around those photos, puts power back in the participants hands.
Participants would think differently about what they were doing as they tried to remember the point of the photograph and to consider their environment.
The photographs create a context, and provides access to environments that the interviewer may not have had. Additionally, useful for the interviewees, as these photos provided a way to recall memories and ground, or concrete, the interview.
Themes of technology use: Staying Connected; Mobile Telephony; Identity Management. All of these are interconnected, as they all affect one another. Staying connected: being homeless is being made invisible. Being able to call family or friends is important. Atlanta had a number of people displaced from Katrina, and the people may not have had local support systems. Staying connected is a major problem. There are organizations that offer free phone service, but access is limited and can be frustrating. Having a mobile phone is valuable, to the point where people who would pawn things would not pawn their telephone. Identity Management for the homeless is about managing stigma. There's a specific stigma associated with drug addiction, mental illness, etc: being able to present themselves in a manner in which they had control over was important. Getting on a bus, and looking rough, meant that a problem with bus fair would result in less negotiating abilities. These were all connected, as the mobile phone becomes a central way of managing these issues.
The phone is a technological todem of identity. Being able to have a phone, and put it on a table, was a way of saying "I have some stability in my life, and I can communicate on my term". This is the most important part for a homeless individual.
This means that we should recalibrate our assumptions. We are communicating with our artifacts, not just through them: it becomes a status symbol for homeless, and helps to set the framework through which further communication occurs.
Additionally describes the social cost of urban computing. The types of technologies we have are creating personal space, and we can extend those personal spaces, but it doesn't address how we affect those marginalized by technology. There is a social cost of behavior change, and it comes out of policy, and service agreements.
Finally, the thought of designing for dignity and for independence. It's a challenge, or a balance, between a number of different complicated factors. The first issue is managing consistent contact. Those living without a home may find themselves in a different place from day to day. Additionally, balancing research desires with real-life need is difficult. It takes a great deal of sensitivity and understanding the target user groups' needs explicitly. For a lot of the systems we design, the goal is to prepare a system, deploy it, study it, and rip it out. For those with deep needs, that isn't a choice: ripping the system out after the study is over not a choice.
Additionally, there is a challenge associated with the "big picture" as compared to the immediacy of need. The individual stories from people are powerful, and it's important to consider how the stories fit into a larger picture of activism.
9. Experience-centred design.
"Designing for the full range of human experience may well be the theme of the next generation of discourse about software design" - Terry Winograd, 1996.
The richness of experience. Rather than attempting to reduce user experience to looking at cognition or affect, instead try to look at the interplay between these various aspects. Additionally, the idea is to look at the moment, and the knowledge of a lifetime, and to look at sense making or meaning as the interplay between those two aspects. Finally, a goal is to avoid the tendency to avoid experience a subjective individualistic phenomenon, but as something that is shared.
What does it mean to "know the user" in the world of experience-centered design? Is it enough to look at "observing the user experience", and how can we understand how the user feels?
Empathy becomes a way of exploring designer-user relationships.
It's easy to claim that empathy is mystical, but there are many theories of empathy in social psychology. In developmental psychology, empathy is the ability to feel how another feels. Social view is to understand it as a communicative act, and to understand and identify the difference between yourself and others.
Empathy is a dialogical approach which relates subjective and interpersonal elements: it's both imaginative and communicative.
There exist a number of experience-centred methods. The important point is not the method: it's how they are used.
Experience prototyping is a way to get a fire-hand experience of what it is like to be someone else. For example, an "aging suit", intended to shock the designer. The goal isn't to have the designer "become" the user, but to experience it and then, as the position of designer, respond appropriately. The suit is a resource.
Cultural probes bring a balanced look at personal and conversational level. The goal is to draw out imaginative and creative responses from the participants. Underlying the methodology is the idea that the researcher is trying to understand the others' perspective, and designer/user enter the relationship as differently placed people. The packs, and the returns, and the design that emerges, is a conversational exchange. Both parties are engaged personally in that process; the aim is to understand by identifying points of difference and similarity, and to have the openness to be surprised.
Why can't designers draw on their own experiences to create meaningful interactions? If writers can draw on imagination and life experiences to deliver engaging novels …
Empathic imagination is not a mystical power. It is an everyday accomplishment of intersubjective understanding. It offers the possibility of a design practice which has a humanist and ethical stance emphasizing a number of different qualities. These include dialogue, a shared humanity, the value and agency of the other.
Empathy and imagination are valuable resources for HCI; practically, this allows for using similarities and the difference between real and imagined as a source of innovative thinking. Additionally, this allows for negotiating the relevance and meaning of HCI theory, principles and methods in discursive situations. Finally, one's perceptions of others can guide the practical judgment and discernment.

10. What to do when search fails? Finding information by association
Duen Horng Chau, Brad Myers - Carnegie Mellon
http://www.polochau.com
Feldspar is a system that helps people find things on their computers, when searching and browsing don't work. For example, find the webpage mentioned in the email from the person I met at an event. If you don't remember the specifics, you can't search. If you haven't bookmarked the webpage, you can't browse. You can, however, describe the webpage with a chain of associations: one page may be related to an email related to a person and related to an event. Psychology literature shows that this is exactly how people remember things.
Feldspar, supports associative retrieval of information.
Built on a "graph database" to store the associations between items on the computer, and then develop an algorithm for search. Google desktop allows an API to pull up seven data types from the search, and then a database is built which is a directed graph (an association graph). Algorithm that processes the query: webpages - emails - persons - events. Look at the lowest pair, and use a results generator to create new list of people. Number of generators grows quadratically, but not all combinations make sense (date related to date doesn't make sense).
Usability study to evaluate if people actually understand Feldspar, and control group looked at Outlook, Google Desktop, and Explorer.

11. Topobo in the Wild: Longitudinal Evaluations of Educators Appropriating a Tangible Interface
Research study to understand the use of tangibles in classrooms. Shady Hill School Classroom, in Cambridge. Easy for students to use, but newness was distraction for the teaching and learning. Also, considered the "fastest way to get to an idea" - straws and paperclips. Can tangible computing compete with that level of simplicity?
Exploration After School Enrichment Program. High school students; working together with a teacher, and then learning that material was too dense for speed being presented. Excitement from Topobo, but frustration at inability of the instructor to put things into action. Recommended a non-didactic approach to illustrating guidelines and examples for use. Also suggested ideas of chemical reactions, rhythm of poetry, geometry, physics, and circuit design. Topobo recognized as a method of "alternative learning", to hit on a learning style that is different or non-standard.
Kids Club After School Robotics Center. Special needs students were able to become focused for a long period of time (ADHD, Aspergers), but needed scaffolding with programming. Kids needed to be able to see what their neighbors were doing, and this enabled their learning at a much younger age than with things like mindstorms.
Boston Museum of Science. The novelty is a big attraction in museum contexts, but is necessary to constrain the system in order to make it useful. A well designed kit is seen as a limitation; the notion of distributed control" is an embodiment of how it was used in this context, as compared to the actual creation of materials.
Harvard Graduate School of Design. A user used Topobo for six months as part of his thesis on kinetic architecture. Used it as part of getting the kinetic idea across, but later was able to understand the limitations of the tool and transition to on-screen 3D modeling.
Findings. Relationship exists between time of use and user age; younger children need more time with the system, but it does actually work with people as young as four. Tangibles bring the age down for kids to play with systems concepts. Educators created more constraints in order to teach an idea with less time, and educators also require supporting materials. Finally, the role of inspirational examples contrast with reappropriation - where people will "just know how to use it".
The implications of the research is that tangibles are competing with the "efficiency of straws and paperclips". Efficiency and economy are critical: the main implication is that new technology that is complex has to introduce ideas that you could never do before. New ideas introduce new challenges. There needs to exist a great deal of teacher training, curriculae, and alignment with educational standards. Tangibles do, however, fit into educators' goals. They want transparent programming and control structure, to promote student collaboration and to be able to put dynamic materials into students' hands. The larger challenge, however, is to think about how ideas will permeate culture. To play with something new requires an acknowledgement of the friends, politics, and other layers that surround a design. This study was about "just throwing it out into the world and seeing what happens", and the major finding was that play is a uniting idea that unifies communities.

12. You can Touch, but you Can't Look: Interaction with In-vehicle systems
Kenneth Back, Et Al
A number of technologies are beginning to exist in the car, pushing our attention away from the task and towards the technology. Navigation systems, climate controls, and other systems that aren't naturally part of the car (mobile phones). As a consequence of that, most countries have passed legislation to control the safety issues related.
Navigation systems are popular in Denmark, but most are based on a touch-based interface. You push certain things, buttons, screens and the interface changes appearance, looks, functionality. Interacting with these requires attention because buttons change places, etc.
Touch-based interaction has historically proven to be less useful, because it requires a high level of visual attention. While you are interacting with the system, of course, you aren't looking at the road. It's highly mentally demanding, as it changes appearance, and so you have to rethink and consider what is on the screen at each moment in time. Research seems to indicate that touch-based interactions compared to tactile interaction is not as good.
There are at least two ways of interacting without paying visual attention to the system; gesture or speech based interaction. Speech interaction is in its infancy, while gesture based interaction seems to be a better manner of interaction (ie, fewer driving errors and quicker in task completion).
This study set up three different alternative systems as a method to interact with in-vehicle systems (tactile, touch, gesture). Adapted a music player as the case system; decided to represent the tactile interaction through an off-the-shelf music player. Implemented two versions of a music player. One had a touch interface, and another was gesture-based.
Experiment set up to understand the differences between the task performance, as well as eye-glance behavior. 0.5 seconds; below that is a glance, above that includes fixation. Research shows that most drivers are reluctant to look away from the road for more than two seconds, and so eye-glance was tracked at that level.
No tactile subjects made 0 control errors, whereas 4 gesture subjects and 1 touch subject made 0 errors.
The tactile interaction was least successful, but was most useful for adjusting volume level. Touch interaction performed surprisingly well. Gesture interaction was only partly successful.

13. A co-located interface for narration to support reconciliation in a conflict
Objective: Explore the role of technology for fostering conflict resolution.
Approach include shared narration.
Specific conflict being addressed: Israeli Jews and Arab-Palestinian conflict over territory. Some Arab-Palestinians live in Israel, and are a minority. They share the aspects of life in Israeli society, and attend school in Arabic. Those living in the Palestinian authority live under harsher conditions, and attend a prescribed curriculum.
Conducted an initial study with arab-palestinians living in Israel, and Israeli Jews. Jews usually do not understand Arabic. Arabs, on the other hand, speak Hebrew.
Goal of the research: Can technology effectively support shared narration to favor change of attitudes, and is it an alternative to face to face discussions?
Looking to go beyond the "one person, one computer" paradigm; instead, the effort is to establish a collaborative task-supporting system.
DiamondTouch was developed by MERL; it is a top-projected computer display with a touch sensitive display. It's aware of who is touching where. Multi-user actions look at cooperative gestures, "enforced" collaboration, and redesigning direct manipulation actions.
Created a system where each individual sits facing each other, and speaks their own language. Allows for narration, where there is individuals contributing to a larger story, and also for negotiation. This ultimately provides a cooperative undertaking. Called the NNR-Table. Narration Negotiation and Reconciliation table.

14. Cultural Theory and Real World Design: Dystopian and Utopian outcomes
There are a growing number of presentations at chi that are indicating that cultural criticism is valid and important. These include Agre, Bohner, Sengers, et al. "Beyond Armchair Criticism": Dada (Gaver, Sengers, Sourish).
Case Study: The Swarm.
Emerging themes were about culture, style, fashion, identity, friendship and deceit. Theory is placed on interactions that live in the periphery of culture: eroding the boundaries between producer and consumer.
1. Looking toward the periphery. Look past mainstream activities, as innovation is often happening in subcultures. An example: the mobile phone as a home base (for someone without a home)
2. Digital Identity. This reflects a contemporary fragmentation of identity and person. We can construct multiple representations of ourselves through avatars and other digital creations
3. Eroding boundaries between producer and consumer. Users are becoming more active in the production and consumption of content. For example, extending creativity beyond novelty ring times and Britney Spears wallpaper. We can enhance digital presence through content, as the avatars become a wrapper for digital content.
4. Utopian and Dystopian Outcomes. There's a shared agreement that technology is one of the defining discourses of our time, but it's been pitched in a largely positive manner.

15. From the Materialistic to the Experiential: A changing Perspective on Design
Closing Plenary: Bill Buxton
I could have an alternative title for the new talk - lack of evaluation considered harmful (often), but I decided to give this talk:
On Being Human in a Digital Age. I was ranting about a book on being digital, as the challenge is being human. What does that mean, especially in a digital age? What is our role in promoting the human value in a digital age, as people who perpetrate with the best of intentions, technology that affects humanity?
There's a feeling that you have to say something wise, and I don't know what that means, and so I'll quote people that are wise, rather than myself. There's a question of saying "what drives you? How do you get stuff done?", and I have to say that the one question that drives me is that I never had security. I never had tenure, or security. I always had to prove myself, and I started to like that, because it got the best out of me, and so I put myself int hat position. There's a fundamental curiosity that drives what I do. And the fundamental issues really is what are you capable of? And then you find out what you are capable of. And then you find out, and there's no satisfaction there. And that's true of Design, too.
There's a depressing fact that as a designer, the better you do, the worse off you are because expectations rise faster than our ability to deliver. The good news is, for the young ones here, you are guaranteed to have a career for life because you never can succeed. So what can you do? And I still don't know.
Saliera - Salt Center - Benvenuto Cellini, 1541.
I read a lot of history, and I like explorers, and I like reading about people who are setting the bar, and are capable of things.
How did you accomplish so much in such a short time? The question isn't how I accomplished so much; it's how does the rest of us accomplish so little?
How is the bar set, on what we expect of ourselves? I try to look for role models. The first brilliant decision I made was to choose my parents really well. Also, I got to go to Toronto, and I met a group of people, and they set a standard where the bar was really hard. I am not a superachiever in terms of anyone in that lab, and it wasn't Ron. It came from Wes Clarke, the creator of Lincoln Lab. Ron brought that to Toronto, and it passed down. I want to talk about culture and setting expectations but the most important point is that this can be learned and can be exported. How we set our values and culture and ethics can be passed on, but it's a design problem like anything else and more important than any product.
Saliera was a goldsmith, the best that ever lived. But he wasn't happy. He was at a point where everybody else wanted to be as good as him, and he wanted to be as good as Michaelangelo. If you go downtown, you see Perseus with the Head of Medusa. He had to build the pits of sand and learn to cast, and every time, he got it wrong because you have to vent the bronze. But he did it, and this was his dream.
What distinguishes students that really excel? They were people that have the ability to deal with abstract thinking: to have their head in the clouds, but a deep sense of materialism. They have a craft of physical materials. Your feet are in the mud, and your head is in the clouds.
What can we do, is the wrong question. What should we do? As individuals? And as a group?
How balanced are we as individuals, as a group, and in a larger cultural sense?
The whole first half of my career was sound and graphics. That set the bar. The touch stuff came from down the hall. All along the way, it's learning from masters. It's not about invention; it's about taking good ideas and growing them. The social part of computing.
State of the art science. The tension that comes from designers and the technical people, going back and forth, and the part that needs to be worked on is the state of the science of the art.
We are really good at problem solving, but not very good at problem setting. Problem solving gets us faster results, but problem setting is the real and hard issue. In some sense, you need to be informed about that type of things. Ultimately, we need to think about the Renaissance. The "Renaissance Man" didn't exist even then, as you needed a venture capitol to support the arts. It was workshops and teamwork. We are a Renaissance situation, and the players have changed. Now, the question is: we can learn from the history, but the technologies are different. But we have more power. These things are cultural, and when I think about that, there's a woman named Gayle Moore, and she told me about Melvin Kranzberg (?). Kranzberg's first law is one of the most important ones for every one of us to consider. Technology is not good, and is not bad, but nor is it neutral. It will be either good or bad or both. Every time we put a paperclip into an office, we are changing culture. How prepared are we when we design that paperclip to understand the consequences, or the nature, of the social and cultural and political change that will come as a result?
Paul Dorrish has talked about this a great deal; even though we can't change the world, we should at least be aware of what we are leaving out, because there might be some small thing there that could make a difference. Kranzberg's second law is that invention is the mother of necessity.
There will always be a new thing. Everything we introduce is a cultural change. It's a bad thing to design cultures and societies? We are doing it anyhow, but blindly and without thinking. How do we manage this, and how are we to remain aware of it? SMS is a great example: it's absolutely clear that when colleagues and people I know developed SMS, they had no idea they were affecting dating and flirting. And they had no idea that American Idol had the largest motivation.
These things are cultural, and they need to inform how we think about design and how we research. These are cultural and ethical decisions, and one of the thigns we can do is have a cultural memory.
Walter Dorwin Teague. One of the first Industrial Design firms in the US in 1926. The firm is still in business, as are the other ID firms started in that time period. That's remarkable, considering it was right before the great depression. Those firms bring real value to the companies that they serve. I'm putting this picture here because there are fewer people here familiar with Teague's work than a cognitive psychologist. Cultural history is important, but we are a very heterogeneous community in SIGCHI, and each one of our disciplines has our own story and cultural history. To do this is important: we create a common ground, that makes it easy for us to communicate, and god knows we need to communicate better.
In 1930, Kodak had cameras, and you had to send the camera back. They finally made it so you could change the film, and the Brownie camera was the first one of these imaging devices. Teague had the idea to make it in colors, and release them at the same time. The materials we different, too.
I'm not saying that Jonathan Ive copied Teague. He's a really well educated and competent designer, and I've never asked him about this, but we know he knew about this. That's not ripping off: that's called progress. Flipping the long tail around to the long nose of innovation. Invention to attraction; the reason we can talk about the future is because we know from reports from the national academy of science that there's no technologies that went from 0 to a billion $ in less than twenty years. Anything that will have an impact in the next 10 years is already 10 years old. It's not about being a great genius hero inventory; it's about having the insights and refinement.
When you have a problem or design challenge, there's a repertoire of things to draw from. The iPhone came out in January 2007. Simon Smart Phone, IBM and Bell South, in 1993: a mobile phone that's smart, easy to use, single button, and a touch interface. We've forgotten about the world's first smart phone. It had a completely touch interface, one button, a note taker, a calendar, you dialed, and it had an address book. These aren't brilliant inventions; they are insights that build upon a history of design. The long nose? If we had a better knowledge of the science and the art, we could give Innovation a nose job.
When the iPhone came out, there was a "little bit of attention at Microsoft". I wrote a fake press release and circulated it to some of the senior people at Microsoft. On one side was the iPhone, and on the other was the Newton. There is no fun being in a competition with someone who is incompetent. When we are discussing design, I want to work with people and I want to have a discourse where we look at and consider the trail and notion of evolution.
What's changed is who is using computing, for what, and at what price. Where, when, why..
We have to engage the literacy of those being affected and using our devices. It's not "designer is god", and the people need to be literate enough to comment on what we do. I don't care if you are reading a review of dance, art, music, literature. It will not get into print unless it goes deeply into the political, social, and artistic framing of the work. You cannot write about art, or make art even, without deeply knowing the history. The people who listened to Mozart know the classical musicians inside and out.
I love technology. I had gadgets everywhere. I think the one laptop per child is a phenomenal piece of work. It is a wonderful feat of engineering. But the discourse around this is really hard to discuss without going through the roof. We are so enthralled by the computer and the technology and the object, that we write advertisements in the form of criticism. The cost in the hands of the kids is around 4-5 hundred dollars. Have we ever established, in any community, and there are places within driving distance of Boston and you could find the third world; even that: we come back to the sense of saying "it costs 800 to bring clean water into a village. That's two of these computers". I'm not complaining about the project; I'm complaining about the level of informed dialogue that has huge implications, and no one is speaking about it.
Someone needs to take responsibility to speak to these issues. A balanced approach: not an emotional approach.
I need someone who can help me learn.
If we don't get engaged in the public discourse, I can't think of any collection of professionals better than this one to do it? This isn't what we are set up to do it, but look at those who might otherwise do it?
I care about books. I have a friend named Roger Martin. Roger talks about a law that the actual market price of a product is determined by the lowest vendor. If the cost of goods approaches 0, the cost of the product approaches 0. That says that music piracy is not causing the decline of music being free; it's just shortening it. It's cheaper to buy the book than to print it out. Let's assume we can make a reader that's as good as paper or better, that goes out the door. Musicians should change economies? Have you ever bought a t-shirt from an author? Have you ever gone to a stadium to hear an author speak? In making a great e-reader, there's actually a problem that I don't know how to deal with. I can't design the technology without being aware that I'm affecting an entire ecosystem.

In Florence, for CHI08 :) Some quick pictures from the first day of the conference: