Category: Interface Design and Usability

Digital Scrapbooks

Diriks Family Scrapbooks is a Norwegian digitization project that has tries to preserve some of the scrapbook feel in the interface to the collection. While the site is in Norwegian, and hence I am not sure what the text says, the interface is interesting and, of course, scrapbooks are a less-practiced domestic art that has features we now find in blogs. Does it make sense when digitizing the scrapbook to keep the two-page spread interface? Are scrapbooks and chapbooks similar to blogs? This came from a Humanist post by Espen Ore.
Continue reading Digital Scrapbooks

StreetPrint at COCH-COSH

Two weekends ago I went to Winipeg for the COCH-COSH 2004 conference. One of the most interesting presentations was delivered by an ex-student of mine, Erika Smith and it was about some of the projects of Streetprint.org. The leads of the project, Gary Kelly and Patricia Demers asked Erika and others to create a presentation where they didn’t speak – it played.
This created a strange situation where we were watching a sophisticated PowerPoint (actually KeyNote) presentation with two people at the front staring at their screen and making sure the audio was right. As Ray Siemens pointed out, it was a bit disconcerting at first, but well enough done to work.
Continue reading StreetPrint at COCH-COSH

Interactivity and Augmentation

The Computer as Tool: From Interaction To Augmentation is an excellent paper that nicely maps the tensions between interaction and augmentation paradigms of the computer. Chris Dent, who drew my attention to his paper in a comment on a previous entry on Tool and Technology, makes a comparison that I hadn’t thought of between interactivity and the augmentation/tool model of a computer. I guess I think (thought) of interactivity as part of the augmentation tradition while Dent quotes Suchman (Plans and Situated Actions) to the effect that computers when considered interactive are being treated as social objects like servants.

Characterizing the computer as an intentional interactive artifact lays the groundwork for several problems with computer use: it grants inappropriate power to the computer in the relationship between user and computer; it creates inappropriate expectations of the computer while at the same time lowering expectations of computer use; it lowers productivity.

One can see the problem with interactivity through Suchman’s characterization of interactive systems as reactive, linguistic and internally opaque. See my paper on interactivity, Turing’s Reaction where I explore interactivity and dialogue, but don’t take the next step and contrast it with augmentation.
Continue reading Interactivity and Augmentation

XAML: eXtensible Application Markup Language

ONDotnet.com: Inside XAML [Jan. 19, 2004] is an article on Microsoft’s XML languag for interfaces in Longhorn. This is not the first such attempt. There is XUL for Mozilla and I had a MSc student develop a simple XML interface language for skinning. The idea is good, we need a standard – Microsoft might be able to promote one, but it needs to be cross platform.

Stephenson: In the beginning was the command line

In the Beginning was the Command Line is an idiosyncratic essay about interface and operating systems by Neil Stephenson of Cryptonomicon fame. It is almost a memoire and almost a plug for Linux.

I am now reading the second of the The Baroque Cycle series, The Confusion. It con-fuses two story lines that split in Quicksilver, that of Eliza and that of Jack. The prose is sinking into academic prose as Stephenson can’t avoid lecturing his reader about details of the history of culture that he has learned or invented. Eliza remains an unbelievable character who gives hand jobs to cryptographers and, of course, is beautiful. You wonder if Stephenson has met a woman who has interests other than his? I am annoyed by the tendency of science fiction writers to create women characters who are not women, but are admirable men in babe’s bodies. The prose equivalent of Lara Croft – action hero with boobs.

That said, Stephenson plays well with history in this retro scifi book, especially the history of economics and science. It remains to be seen if he can pull all the threads together in the third novel. Is he going to pull off “the ideal history of computing, the internet and commerce”?

The SINE Curve of Design

What if a curve was the design principle of a site?

The curve is a flow of digits to cityscape. Lines of text fall out in curves like poorly loosened venetian blinds.

SINEarts is the site of a “digital research hub nedtworking staff and postgraduate developments in innovative electronic projects.” SINE stands for Science Intermedia Network Environment and is a project at the University of Auckland.