reg:exp

HCI Comments XIII

Iterative Design of Seamless Collaboration Media, Hiroshi Ishii, Minoru Kobayashi, Kazuho Arita, Communications of the ACM, August 1994, pp. 83-9

This paper stands out in its presentation of a long-range view on the development of one particular application concept -- a distributed collaborative drawing space. The reader is taken through a history or archaeology of various prototypes, with discussions how analysis of earlier stages informed subsequent implementations. Tradeoffs emerge as unavoidable choices central to any design: a feature that enables one function (e.g., tilting the display down to facilitate writing on the surface) will hinder another one that was well supported before (e.g., looking "at" your collaboration partner vs. looking down upon him on the display).
Towards the end of the article, the authors suggest a paradigm shift from HCI to HHI - computer-mediated human-to-human communication. In 2002, eight years after the publication of this paper, Andy van Dam raised the same point in his CRA "Grand Challenge" Statement (http://www.cra.org/Activities/grand.challenges/vandam.pdf). Apparently we have not made much substantial progress in this area in the meantime.

Interacting with Paper on the DigitalDesk, Pierre Wellner, Communications of the ACM, July 1993, pp. 87-96

While the idea of turning the desktop metaphor on its head sounds appealing at first, I am not sure whether this particular implementation presents a real enhancement of a paper-based workflow. Much attention is being paid to input of paper-based information into the computer system. However, if a significant volume of output is generated by the computational task, it is not sure how this result should be integrated back into the real world. The user can write down a number or a word, but what about a page, or ten? Should the system be connected to a printer? What if such a printed document needs further revision? Should it be scanned and printed again? The proposed camera based input solution can also be improved upon: most of the discussed implementation issues resulted from the choice of overhead projection, which is incidental to the operation of the system. The previous paper introduced a better back projection method in the ClearBoard that circumvented most of the described problems. A positive point is the mention of handedness as a factor that should be taken into account in any interface that directly engages the user's hands.
At the end of the article, Wellner poses the following fundamental question: "Do we think of ourselves as working primarily in the computer btu with access to physical world functionality, or do we think of ourselves as working primarily in the physical world but with access to computer functionality?" I believe the question is misguided in the presented context. While paper is a physical object, its primary function is not as object per se, but as storage medium for intangible information (Origami is the exception to the rule). Manipulating paper-based information is thus in my mind a bad example for "working in the physical world".

Multiple-Computer User Interfaces: "Beyond the Desktop" Direct Manipulation Environments, Jun Rekimoto, In Extended Abstracts of CHI 2000: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 6-7

This short article introduces (or at least describes) the concept of MCUIs - multiple computer user interfaces. Interaction and synchronization techniques abound for sharing and exchanging data between different applications/processes/windows on one particular device - but most if not all of the techniques break down when users try to bridge the divide between different devices (of similar of different kind). The problem is certainly important. Ken Hinckley is addressing the same issue in his TabletPC research. The term "direct manipulation" appears to be overloaded with different meanings by different subgroups of the HCI community (cf. Shneiderman, for whom the term is attached to GUI data mining).