Lectures
The Namahn Lectures series by HCI practitioners and researchers on topics relevant to the community - now in its fourth year. On this page you can find an overview of previous lectures - upcoming lectures can be found on the news page.
- Alex Wright: "The Web That Wasn't" (1 April 2008)
- Chris Johnson: "Degraded Modes Of Operation As Causes In Rail And Air Accidents" (18 September 2007)
- Michel Bauwens: "P2P: Counting The Birds" (28 March 2007)
- Yvonne Rogers: "Calm Computing: A Critique" (15 January 2007)
- Stephen Payne: "Models Of Tasks, Devices And Activities" (28 November 2006)
- Paul Kahn: "Information Architecture of Enterprise Web Space" (19 January 2006)
- Nigel Bevan: "International Standards for HCI and Usability" (22 September 2005)
- Patricia Wright: "The Cognitively Congenial Interface" (17 May 2005)
- Luc Steels: "User-Driven Semiotic Dynamics for Peer-to-Peer Information Exchange" (22 February 2005)
- Peter Van Dijck: "Information Architecture and Intranet Development: real-life stories from the trenches" (16 November 2004)
- Jan-Christoph Zoels: "Mobile User Experience Trends" (21 September 2004)
- Tom Hewett: "What you don't know about the human factors of usability can cost you money or even kill somebody (maybe you)!" (5 May 2004)
- Louise Ferguson: "Ethnography and Design" to Namahn clients (17 February 2004)
- Jean-luc Doumont: "Understanding visual communication" to Namahn clients (20 November 2003)
- William Hudson: "User-centred design with use case methods" (4 June 2003)
Alex Wright on "The Web That Wasn't" (1 April 2008)
When the Internet opened up to commercial use in the early 1990s, the World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee was on-hand to provide an unsophisticated, open and easy markup language to link hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. But was it the best system? Were there alternatives? Could our interconnectivity experience be different? As history shows it is not always the best system or design that wins … Domination comes from a marriage of fortunate circumstances: market forces, luck and timing being just three. The same was true of the Web.
In the 16th Namahn Lecture, Alex Wright, Information Architect at the New York Times and author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, argued that history could have produced any number of alternatives. In his lecture, Wright explored the Web’s lineage and argued that by understanding what might have been, we can help shape the Web’s future.
A recurring theme in every Web precursor cited by Wright is social, collaborative, creative and transparent information sharing. This was often colored by a Utopian vision on the part of the thinker, inventor or scientist who believed, for example, that world peace could be attained or that people could be liberated of institutional constraints through knowledge sharing. However, the Web we know today was not designed for users as creators or for groups: it is the domain of the individual. Even so, with Web 2.0, a growing number of websites are trying to address issues raised time and again by the Web ‘pioneers’.
The idea of electronically sharing information on a global scale existed in the imaginations of visionaries as far back as the 19th century. The American librarian, Charles Cutter, wrote in 1883 about the library of the future. He imagined a desk with a keyboard connected by a wire to a screen. Some 50 years later, in his essay ‘World Brain’, H.G. Wells imagined a time when people would electronically share information across the globe to eventually form an encyclopedia, the “New All-Human Cerebrum”. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit, philosopher and Utopian born at the end of the 19th century, wrote about an electronic network through which all people could share information to educate themselves. The Catholic Church banned his writings, yet despite this, he developed a cult following, a situation echoed today in the case of Ted Nelson (see further).
All this was theoretical thinking. The tools did not yet exist to actually make it happen. The first person to try was the Belgian Paul Otlet, inventor of the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) system. The tense period between the two world wars provided the backdrop to his belief that by sharing information, world peace could be attained. For Otlet, libraries were too limited because they only concerned the organization of books. He wanted to organize the information within the books. His international bibliography of information, the Mundaneum, was built in Brussels and functioned between 1921 and the mid-1930s, funded by the Belgian state. Otlet’s state-of-the-art tool at that time was the index card. Nevertheless, his drawings demonstrate the first concept of a computer as substitute for the book, containing not only written but also visual (moving) and audio information. When the government cut off funding, the Mundaneum was abandoned and later destroyed by the German occupiers. All knowledge of Otlet and his creation died with him in 1944 until some 30 years later, when a student stumbled upon his old office in Brussels. Thanks to this discovery, part of the Mundaneum has been recreated in Mons and Otlet is now acknowledged as one of the forbearers of the Web. Although Otlet’s ideas were technically simple, they were in some ways more sophisticated than our Web. Otlet claimed that to understand a book you must also understand what came before and after it. He thought you could mark this relationship between documents with a “link”. He also believed this link could tell you something. Our Web has links but they do not explain why something is linked. Otlet’s web would have married top-down and bottom-up information. Examples of this on the Web today are FaceTag (an attempt to merge top-down formal classification with social bottom-up classification) and VOTELINKS, which assigns meaning to a hyperlink.
Vannevar Bush was a science advisor to President Roosevelt, an inventor and respected thinker. However, he is most remembered for an essay written in the 1930s but published after the war, “As We May Think”, in which he imagined a fictional machine called the Memex, used by scholars to access documents on microfilm. He believed scholars should do more than just read information but relate what they read to other documents in order to build a trail that could be followed by other scholars. Eventually these trails would create a new kind of encyclopedia. On the Web today, blogs and trackbacks come closest to mimicking what Bush imagined long before digital computers even existed. Sites like del.icio.us allow you to store bookmarks and publish them for others to see.
Bush inspired Eugene Garfield, who was not interested in the content of an article but in the footnotes. He maintained that by following these, a web of influences would develop, a “citation ranking” that would help you to evaluate if the information really mattered. This ranking is still used today. Garfield’s web would have looked like Google (openly acknowledged by its creators as Garfield’s idea).
Doug Engelbart read Bush’s essay in 1945. It inspired him to develop a theory of information organization and in the 1960s he developed a revolutionary “on-line system”. He was the first person to think that a computer could be used in work and to network, not just to process numbers. His famous 1968 demonstration of this on-line system, for which he also invented the mouse, heralded the birth of the PC. The closest we come to Engelbart’s idea on the Web today are wikis and extranets. Collaborators of Engelbart went on to set up Xerox PARC, the birthplace of the PC where they invented “notecards”, precursors to hypertext.
There would be no Web if not for Ted Nelson, a controversial figure who coined the phrase “hypertext” in 1965. A visionary, Nelson also thought that computers could be used as more than just calculating machines. He created Xanadu, a hypertext system with two-way linking and protection of rights that enabled the user to edit and feedback, not just to read. Nelson is no fan of today’s Web, referring to it as “decorated directories” co-opted by companies. Like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin before him, Nelson’s views are still considered revolutionary and he has difficulty getting published.
A classmate of Nelson’s, Andries Van Dam collaborated on the first hypertext editing system, HES, used by NASA for the first moon landing. He also created IRISweb, a closed system for use in higher education. IRISweb did not use one web browser. Rather each separate tool had a networking functionality written into it. Everything networked and links worked in both directions.
Looking back on these examples, several themes occur time and again:
- A top-down/bottom-up system that creates a “social space”
- Links in both directions
- Visible trails
- Links that carry meaning
- Identity & reputation management (security)
- Users as creators
Can Web 3.0 address these themes? In Wright’s view, Web 3.0 will probably tackle identity & reputation management. Two-way sharing of information already exists, but only in contained experiences. Things are becoming smaller on the Web, more structured and with a special purpose (for example, Twitter). Yet user-generated information is radically changing the world of knowledge. Who is a journalist and who is not? The traditional gatekeeper industries are under pressure. The world is in the process of renegotiating information. A social revolution is taking place after all.
Chris Johnson on "Degraded Modes Of Operation As Causes In Rail And Air Accidents" (18 September 2007)
Who would have thought that our desire to please was indirectly the cause of tragic air and rail accidents? In a presentation in the Namahn library, Professor Chris Johnson, an accident investigator from the computer science department of the University of Glasgow, explained that when technological systems fail to perform properly, the result is a degraded mode of operation. Over time, operators develop "workarounds" that help them to cope with these degraded modes. Unfortunately, just "making do" in this way also erodes safety margins and may ultimately lead to accidents.
Johnson cites several spectacular air and rail crashes to make his point. The crash of an MD-83 and a small passenger plane at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport in May 2005, for example, was partly caused by the use of two different radar systems. Air traffic controllers had to piece together information from two different screens in order to get the full picture of air traffic movements. An operating culture which encourages performance at the cost of safety can also cause degraded modes of operation. Johnson found, for example, that a culture of "do or die" on-time running contributed to lapses that led to the Glenbrook train crash in Australia in December 1999.
So, how can we minimise the occurrence of degraded modes of operation? Johnson believes that training plays an important role. In the Southall rail crash in 1997, for example, it was found that drivers were not trained in driving without the Automated Warning System (AWS) and that the Automated Train Protection (ATP) system had been switched off.
Ironically, our flexibility in interacting with technology, which is normally seen as a good thing, leads to more extreme degraded modes of operation. And Johnson expects it to become more difficult to spot degraded modes of operation as technologies become more complex.
Michel Bauwens on P2P: "Counting The Birds" (28 March 2007)
The greatest social revolution since the industrial age is taking place under our noses, according to social entrepreneur Michel Bauwens, invited to speak to a packed audience in the Namahn library after an absence from Belgium of four years. This revolution is neither clean nor tidy; it is messy, opportunistic and evolving in the context of abundance—in this case, the abundance of digital matter. It is a social dynamic between computers and between people, signaling the birth of a new social order: peer-to-peer (P2P).
History proves that one system of society dominates at any given time. There are four main systems: gift economy (tribal), authority ranking (feudal), market pricing (capitalism), and communal sharing (P2P). Bauwens believes that in the next 40 years, the latter will dominate.
According to Bauwens, the P2P era will mean equipotential rights for all in every field. P2P can be termed as the sharing economy: you contribute what you can and take out what you need. It is not a freeware economy: you have to give a little to have access to the whole. But in Bauwens' view, major issues facing the world today, such as protecting the planet, can only be successfully tackled by a P2P society.
Taking the example of freeware, the process is threefold: Firstly, increased ability to create value together without the intervention of the state leads to peer production. Freeware is an invitation not an obligation. The currency is not money but reputation; there is no supply and demand or prices to be set. We already have what we need; we simply develop more and better. Secondly, conflict arising from these actions means we create governance after the fact to deal with them, not before the fact. No one has imposed rules beforehand. Thirdly, the new system is protected by self-governance, the principle of freeware being "I share for free and you can use for free but if you make money from it, I want something in return".
The idea behind Google was to see how people self-select. The top links are those sites that get the most hits. No one is deciding which these top links will be except the users. Yes, it has its faults (people naturally go to the top links which get to stay at the top because they are continuously chosen) but the principle of self-selection remains.
Another example is Wikipedia: an open and free notion of knowledge—holism (the whole) as opposed to panotism (hierarchical). Just as Google, it is by no means flawless, but neither are traditional encyclopedias.
In recent years, trust in our peers is rising in parallel with falling trust in official persons, not just in Western civilizations but also in Asia. Technology is enabling us to attain massive cooperation between small teams located all over the world that work, share, create and decide together. With the arrival of Web 2.0., value is increasingly created by users, as opposed to providers. Today, companies create websites as platforms for enabling user participation and allowing people to create value themselves. As open source grows, the corporate world becomes more dependent on P2P. New incentives are not all made by corporations. People exchange ideas and innovations happen. Companies have to develop new strategies to work with these "commons" by offering something, for example sponsorship. The distribution of P2P is essential: goods made in small batches so people have control over resources. Personal fabrication on the desktop, P2P micro financing—as long as the individual has control, he can participate in any project he chooses.
What makes P2P so productive? P2P is open and free; there are no copyrights. This encourages participation, leading to licenses, leading back to P2P, allowing the system to reproduce itself. P2P is about passionate production—you have to be passionate and positive. This is a motivating system and both society and individuals morally win. Immaterial and material worlds are being affected. In open source ecology for example, scientists/designers are sharing their ideas via the Internet, resulting in concrete physical objects. Books are shared, bikes are shared, even couches are shared (couchsurfing.com) which in fact describes itself as a project "seeking to internationally network people and places, create educational exchanges, raise collective consciousness, spread tolerance and facilitate cultural understanding"—hence much more than just a cheap place to sleep for the night.
To quote Jorge Ferrer: "We are fragments working together, one is good at one thing, one is good at the other. This distributes control and choice." Bauwens' example of counting birds in the US expresses this beautifully: a communal validation activity undertaken every winter, organised by self-selection. No one decides who can or cannot count the birds.
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An audio interview with Michel Bauwens on "Peer to Peer: a New Economy and Civilisation" is available in the Namahn Interviews podcast section. |
Event: Yvonne Rogers on "Calm Computing: A Critique" (15 January 2007)
First came the mainframe, then the desktop PC and now ubiquitous computing (UbiComp). UbiComp—aka pervasive or calm computing—is invisible computation embedded in the environment and everyday objects, woven into the very fabric of everyday life, keeping humans informed of what's happening around us, bringing comfort and serenity but only appearing at the centre of our attention when required. In this environment, we can live uncluttered lives, accomplishing tasks without thinking of the technology. For the past fifteen years, UbiComp research and development has been heavily influenced by this calm computing vision of Mark Weiser.
But is it really the way forward and do we even want this? Yvonne Rogers argues that the time has come to take stock, challenge UbiComp agendas, propose alternatives and change direction.
Researchers have followed Weiser's model in both industry and academia. There are projects on the detection and monitoring of people's physiological and emotional responses in order to design responsive environments, research into context-aware computing, ambient intelligence (AI) and monitoring/tracking to compensate for human 'deficiencies', such as aging, ill health, memory loss, etc. Millions of dollars have been spent on developing 'intelligent' homes. These projects may have altruistic motives, but inherent to them are implications for freedom, privacy and human decision-making. They also place humans in a passive receiving role. Or as Rogers put it, calm computing wraps us in cotton wool rather than challenges us.
Rogers argued that instead of compensating for perceived human deficiencies, UbiComp should build on what we are good at. And to do this, we need new adjectives to describe computing, not just 'calm' or 'smart'. We need 'bounded' and linked computing, designed for a specific purpose as opposed to projects on a global scale. Rather than intervening in situations that already work reasonably well, computers should engage and provoke people, even make them uncomfortable in order to give them new perspectives on life. Computers should be visible, playful and used to help humans become even more creative and proactive.
In her example of the Ambient Wood project conducted in the UK with a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, engineers, artists, psychologists and teachers, Rogers demonstrated the benefits of technological devices designed to provoke, surprise and inspire. The project team spent six months wiring up a piece of woodland with devices and tools they designed themselves to help primary school children discover the wood's fauna, flora and natural history: tools for probing, measuring, listening, seeing, recording and communicating. The objective was to test the potential these tools had when used outside the classroom environment, to encourage children to explore and hypothesise. The team's convictions were confirmed by the positive response of users especially when the data collected by the children was analysed and fed back to them making their experience even more meaningful and engaging.
UbiComp could be used in next generation critical systems in a danger alert capacity, for example in domestic emergencies, when panic can sometimes get the better of good judgment.
For Rogers, calm computing lies at one end of the scale and is unrealistic. Humans do not glide through life in total safety, nor do they desire this. At the other end of the scale, engaging computing will require humans to question what technologies mean to human kind. The design of user-interfaces for UbiComp is crucially important, as is measuring the acceptability of new technologies. With technology as one of the major driving forces, the future will probably contain both calm and engaging computing. But the key underlying message must be augmenting human intellect and collaboration by using technology in appropriate ways rather than as a blanket solution. In terms of R&D, this implies working in multi-disciplinary teams, in order to arrive at a richer result.
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An audio interview with Yvonne Rogers on "Calm Computing: A Critique" is available in the Namahn Interviews podcast section. |
Event: Stephen Payne on "Models of Tasks, Devices and Activities" (28 November 2006)
Should we intentionally design user interfaces that are difficult to use? Believe it or not, sometimes we should, at least according to Stephen Payne.
Payne found that sometimes users form better mental models when it's actually harder for them to interact with a system. Through a series of experiments, he and his associates discovered that thinking steps through is more efficient than pure trial and error. Payne terms this the "Theory of Learning by NOT Doing".
In one experiment, research subjects were divided into two groups and asked to manipulate a slide number puzzle. The first group was given a 'low-cost' user interface: to move a puzzle tile, they simply entered the number of the tile. The second group was given a 'high cost' user interface: they could only move a puzzle tile after providing several pieces of information and following multiple steps. Engaging in trial and error was much harder for this second group. Yet amazingly, they actually learned faster and became more proficient at solving the puzzle in fewer moves.
Perhaps it is precisely when users are forced to construct their own mental models that the greatest learning takes place. In an experiment using video recorder instructions, Payne discovered that users who read a complete sequence of steps before executing tasks performed better than users who read the manual line-by-line and executed tasks one at a time. His explanation: when forced to digest a series of instructions, users find ways to remember the instructions by attaching meaning to them and building stories about them. In essence, they begin to develop a mental model.
So, should we intentionally design user interfaces that are difficult to use? Payne believes that—at least during a learning phase—presenting users with a difficult user interface can enhance learning. Either way, far from eliminating the need for user-centered design, Payne's research shows that we need even better design—and conceptual models—to support learning.
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An audio interview with Stephen Payne on "Models of Tasks, Devices and Activities" is available in the Namahn Interviews podcast section. |
Event: "Information architecture of Enterprise Web Space" by Paul Kahn (19 January 2006)
One tends to think of information design as a new profession. Yet Paul Kahn gets his inspiration from visual designs as old as the Romans. According to Kahn, the Peutinger Table, a 12th century reproduction of an ancient Roman roadmap, was not drawn to scale and the north-south axis was flattened. Nonetheless, this odd-looking "squashed" map folded away neatly and communicated vital information to travellers including the location of towns, the distance between towns and the best route to take. Kahn suggests that good design focuses on the essential information and may simplify or distort it if doing so improves communication or convenience.
A more recent example comes from the London Underground. Realising that the actual curves were not important in a transport system, Harry Beck regularised the shapes in the London Underground map, making it much easier to understand and use. He also increased the space between stops in central London and reduced the space between stops outside of central London. This made it possible to get more on paper and make a pocket-sized map.
Kahn's interest in maps extends to the enterprise web space. He and his colleagues use 'glyphs' to capture and communicate information architecture. 'Glyph' is derived from 'hieroglyph' and is a compact visual representation, full of symbolic meaning. Using isometric information maps, such as the Turgot city maps devised during the 18th century, Kahn and his associates have been able to map the voluminous digital information available to clients such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Visualising information the Kahn way is demanding, but it is a good way to make information transparent and reach consensus on the most appropriate information architecture. And in Kahn's work with clients, the benefits from thinking in terms of an "enterprise web space"—all the digital assets that your company has or that exist in your field—have become clear: easier access to information, improved usability and greater interoperability.
Paul Kahn is a leading international consultant, speaker and author on web site architecture and visualisation. His activities in the United States included director of the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) at Brown University, co-founder and president of Dynamic Diagrams and adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.
After moving to France in 2001, he became managing director of Kahn+Associates, an information architecture consulting group based in Paris. He currently teaches in the Master Multimédia Interactif, Université de Paris 1 (France) and as a guest lecturer at MediaLab, University of Art and Design, Helsinki (Finland).
He is the co-author of Mapping Web Sites (with Krzysztof Lenk), which has been translated into French, German, Spanish and Korean. He is also the editor of NEW Magazine, an annual publication devoted to international verbal and visual communication.
Event: Nigel Bevan on "International Standards for HCI and Usability" (22 September 2005)
Who would ever have thought that standards for usability would be an interesting topic? Nigel Bevan, a UK-based standards expert, made it so. At the ninth library event, he patiently walked the audience through an alphabet soup of ISO and other standards, and explained the different approaches.
In the area of usability, standards can be broadly categorised as shown in the table.
| Standard Category | Examples of Relevant Standards |
|---|---|
| The use of the product (effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a particular context of use) |
ISO 9241-11: Guidance on Usability ISO/IEC 9126-1: Software Quality Characteristics |
| The user interface and interaction | ISO 9241: Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals, parts 10-17 |
| The process used to develop the product | ISO 13407: Human-centered design processes for interactive systems |
| The capability of an organisation to apply user centered design | ISO TR 18529: Human-centered lifecycle process descriptions |
Product use standards describe recommended usability measures such as task time and ergonomics. It is a ‘black box’ approach in that only the resulting usability is measured. In contrast, standards related to the user interface and interaction get into the nitty gritty of icon symbols and functions.
Process quality usability standards apply an approach similar to the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) of software engineering. ISO 15504 (SPICE), for example, defines design capability levels. “In many organisations, first you design the product then you layer on the UI,” says Bevan, “the user-centered approach integrates design for usability into the overall design process and treats it as an integrated whole rather than an afterthought.”
A promising new initiative is the “Common Industry Format (CIF)” developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US. Suppliers such as IBM, Microsoft, HP and Oracle are providing standard usability test reports to IT purchasers. CIF encourages suppliers to work more closely with purchasers to understand user needs.
Not everyone is happy with usability standardisation, however. According to Bevan, a major consumer electronics company has opposed attempts at usability standardisation for consumer products (ISO DIS 20282: Ease of operation of everyday products), claiming that “the results could be misinterpreted.”
Bevan and the audience agreed that standardisation of consumer products is woefully inadequate; the consumer only really discovers how usable a product is after it has been purchased and by then it’s often too late. So, although much progress has been made, it’s still ‘early days’ for usability standardisation.
Event: "The Cognitively Congenial Interface" by Patricia Wright (17 May 2005)
In a talk that was as intriguing as its title, Patricia Wright presented her vision for user interfaces that go beyond mere usability.
According to Wright, a user interface can not only be readable and usable, it can also be congenial. But what is congeniality? To Wright, it means providing a user interface in the desired context, via the preferred medium and in a way that the user wishes. In short, it means that the user interface is "in-tune with the way I like to do things."
As an academic at the University of Cardiff, Wright has conducted several rigorous studies to test her ideas. In a study of 189 women, for example, researchers asked whether they preferred print, video or audio for receiving information on medical topics. The answers varied widely depending upon the actual topic. For information about childhood vaccinations, 88 percent of respondents preferred print whereas for information about speech impairments only 32 percent did.
Another experiment explored how user interfaces can support decision-making. Realising that complex decision-making involves juggling multiple variables and making trade-offs, Wright and her colleagues sought to design user interfaces that could aid the process of making these trade-offs to arrive at a 'best fit'. The result was IDEX, the Interactive Decision Explorer. Wright discovered significant variations in user preferences: older people preferred using 'boring' tables to optimise their health by adjusting amongst level of exercise, cholesterol, diet and other factors whilst young men preferred sexy computer game-like user interfaces.
With so much diversity, what's an interaction designer to do? Wright notes that it's difficult to categorise heterogeneous user populations and guidelines are prone to error. Nonetheless, Wright has a simple solution: let the user decide by offering several options.
Event: Luc Steels talks about "User-Driven Semiotic Dynamics for Peer-to-Peer Information Exchange" (22 February 2005)
What does 'wogglesplat' mean?
Maybe nothing to you and me, but quite a bit to a robot.
In an esoteric—yet fascinating—presentation, Luc Steels described a new paradigm for communication between disparate entities.
According to Steels, the world is moving rapidly towards a peer-to-peer information model. Music files, scientific research papers, travel information and bookmarks are just a few examples of the information that's now being shared. However, P2P creates a mess. Everyone has their own metadata and their own way of presenting information.
Steels analysed three approaches to communication in a P2P world and then explained why user-driven semiotic dynamics may be the best.
The first approach is to index information—what Google does. But the problem with Google and the other search engines is that they know nothing of semantics. Moreover, search engines have a creeping bias—some websites rise in ranking at the expense of others—partly because of the search engine's commercial focus.
The second approach is to use ontologies—conventions for describing and categorising information. But who is going to create the ontology? And who will enforce its use? Is it even possible to foresee and formalise everything that interests humans? Steels concludes that this 'semantic web' only works for restricted domains.
A third approach is 'social software'. No, it's not about dating or mating. The idea is that a community share annotations (tags) that are used to index objects. Steels likes this approach better because there is no central control and it is user-driven. Unfortunately, however, the de-centralised nature of social software leads to a proliferation of tags. "In such a chaotic world, schema-mapping is inherently unsolvable," says Steels.
Enter 'emergent semiotics'. Despite its fancy name and arcane terminology, the idea is quite simple. Entities simply learn to understand each other through repeated interactions. Steels calls this process of coordination 'grounded communication'. The power of this type of communication is that it is grounded in perception of the real world and based on negotiation between actual 'users'. In contrast, other approaches are often based on artificial constructs or the lopsided views of a central authority—be it a particular individual, group or organisation. In the 'Talking Heads Experiment' back in 1999, two robots invented an own language that enabled one robot to describe coloured, geometric shapes (a blue circle, etc.) and the other robot to properly identify them. Moreover, these two robots were like newborn babies, they could perceive sensory dimensions but had no innate ability to distinguish between colours.
Emergent semiotics is most effective, Steels believes, because perception will always be different across cultures, and even from individual to individual. A study comparing two island tribes—the English and the Berinmo of Papua New Guinea—found that their colour categorisation was vastly different. Steels claims that emergent semiotics will allow us to finally accept differences and instead simply coordinate. It doesn't matter if your 'red' looks like 'pink' to me, as long as I eventually understand that "Oh, that's what you mean by red."
This communication process may sound like a lot of work, and it is. But fortunately, software agents do the work for us. By using genetic algorithms, for example, the best solution literally 'evolves'. An explicit 'man-made mapping' between information sources is no longer necessary.
In this brave new world, no human intervention is required. "We will have to accept that information systems are like living organisms. We don't fully control them and they simply survive," says Steels.
Still, humans can't always leave things alone. In one of the experiments, hackers taught the robots dirty words. Researchers were embarrassed by these profane robots when groups of school children visited the exhibition.
Event: Peter Van Dijck talks about "Information Architecture and Intranet Development: real-life stories from the trenches" (16 November 2004)
What do deformed frogs in Minnesota have to do with information architecture?
A lot, according to Peter Van Dijck. He cited a website that is devoted solely to this specialised topic. Actually, it is a website within a website, or as Peter calls it a "topic page" or "mini-portal". A topic page groups and situates the available information and is typically maintained by a subject matter expert. According to Van Dijck, it is an example of information architecture (IA) that is relatively easy to implement.
Another example of easy-to-implement IA is "best bets". Van Dijck noted that search query distributions follow the power law. Queries are clustered around a relatively small number of topics and terms, and the frequency of search terms and topics rapidly drops off. So by manually optimising say the top 20 percent of all queries a company might improve search efficiency for 80 percent of all searches. Such simple, yet highly-effective strategies are already being used by Microsoft and others, Van Dijck noted.
In a wide-ranging, interactive discussion, Van Dijck also talked about portal IA (tip: structure your portal to reflect the user's information needs and not the company's organisational structure) and enterprise search (tip: cluster results). One of his most startling statements, however, was the simple observation that many people lack basic information management skills. Creators of information need skills in versioning, naming and classifying whilst users need library and search skills. Presenting in a casual style complemented by his perfect New York accent, this Belgian information architect's main point was that a company can embark on simple solutions rather than spending millions on major IA projects or complex technologies. Indeed, he began his talk by stating: "All companies have an information problem, not a technical problem."
Peter Van Dijck is a Belgian information architect specialising in metadata and in cultural and language issues on the web. He is the author of Information Architecture For Designers, developed the XFML specification, and founded the AIFIA translations group to make information architecture better known outside of the English speaking world.
Event: Jan-Christoph Zoels speaks about mobile user experience trends (21 September 2004)
Do you have an appetite for "digital delicacies"?
Jan-Christoph Zoels presented tantalising examples of how mobile technologies will change our world, and in many cases already have.
Abbreviated SMS texts, for example, are changing literacy (trend #2). The new language sounds like secret code to anyone over 22 years of age but is becoming the lingua franca of teenagers.
Teenagers will no doubt be major consumers of "digital delicacies" (trend #1: beyond speech). A "telekatessen" lets you send a personalised SMS message to your beloved, while a link with the physical world arranges chocolate bonbons, inscribed with your original "sweet nothing", for pick-up.
Video karaoke goes many steps beyond mere ring tones to offer consumers the chance to be silly, but also communicate with their friends and loved ones. "We even got a patent for it," says Jan-Christoph.
Not all the applications are for entertainment, however. Mobile technology also helps improve time planning (trend #5). An application developed by Fluid Time Data Services, for example, helps people better manage travel time, auctions, meetings or even the utilisation of appliances. It can coordinate usage of a communal washing machine; the system sends an SMS to your mobile phone to tell you how much time is left on your spin cycle and when the machine is available.
The Vocera system is an intelligent communications assistant that enables fluid communications across teams or entire organisations. Using natural speech, users speak into a badge ("Beam me up, Scottie!") to page people, schedule meetings and much more. It is already in use in hospitals in the US and is being deployed by the US military in Iraq.
In the new un-tethered world, designing with users in mind has become even more important. Zoels ended his talk by presenting ten tools for user-centered design, such as studying "extreme" characters.
Jan-Christoph Zoels is senior Associate professor at the Interaction design Institute Ivrea, Italy.
Find out more about the speaker by having a look at Zoels' biography (40Kb, PDF) or Zoels' personal web page on the Ivrea web site.
The Ten Mobile Phone Trends:
- Beyond speech
- Changing literacy
- Beyond Text
- Desiring personalisation
- Changes planning
- Location matters
- Enabling collective actions
- Supporting social solidarity
- Adding control
- Rethinking access
Event: "What you don't know about the human factors of usability can cost you money or even kill somebody (maybe you)!" (5 May 2004)
On Wednesday, 5 May, Tom Hewett of Drexel University (Philadelphia) presented in the Namahn library reasons why it is important to take into account human performance characteristics in designing complex systems for human use.
Hewett captured the audience's attention with his description of how limitations in human cognition resulted in several spectacular and tragic airplane crashes. The crashes were not attributable to mechanical failure, weather conditions or even any clearly identifiable pilot error. Rather they were the result of a common failure to accurately gauge distance when confronted with a featureless landscape. They were, namely, a problem of human cognition.
Hewett is a professor of Psychology and Computer Science and a world-class expert on the cognitive aspects of human-computer interaction. He asserts that many usability problems are actually the result of cognitive issues and, therefore, require "cognitive engineering."
Hewett also showed how motion makes it easier to visualise 3-D objects and how the 'magical number seven' is a rule that is often applied inappropriately.
Event: Louise Ferguson presents a workshop on "Ethnography and Design" to Namahn clients. (17 February 2004)
Did you think that ethnography was only useful for studying aboriginal tribes? Not according to UK-based interaction design consultant Louise Ferguson. At a by-invitation-only event attended by fifty Namahn clients and vendors, she showed that ethnography is not only for anthropologists; it is also an extremely useful approach to design.
Ferguson presented several case studies to illustrate how ethnographic techniques can be applied to real-world design problems. By conducting individual interviews and observing people in their typical work environment, for example, she uncovered the reasons why a wireless tablet computer was not accepted by staff in a UK hospital. The system lacked key demographic information and did not easily fit on the trolleys used by nurses. In a study of "hot-desking" in a government agency, Ferguson discovered that despite the new environment, staff members were finding ways of personalising their workspace and demarcating their territory. In an investigation into the IT "productivity paradox" Ferguson observed that users clung to analogue systems such as card files and post-it notes because they offered benefits such as immediacy, portability and sharing.
Ferguson readily admits that ethnography does not produce statistically valid results. Through a process of "triangulation", however, patterns emerge and she is able to arrive at accurate conclusions. Her study of bikers was more revealing than the reams of quantitative market research conducted by the industry. Evidently, there is no substitute for getting "down in the mud" with actual users.
Event: Jean-luc Doumont presents a workshop on "Understanding visual communication" to Namahn clients. (20 November 2003)
Visual communication is regarded as an extremely effective means of conveying a message. Indeed a picture is said to be worth a thousand words, but, as the specially invited clients learned, their real worth must be carefully evaluated. Pictures express concrete, emotional and geometric concepts better than words. On the other hand they can be ambiguous, restrictive and poor at conveying abstract concepts.Jean-luc Doumont, who is an experienced and respected speaker and consultant on structuring thoughts and constructing communication, illustrated to his audience that it is the analysis of verbal and non-verbal coding that leads to the optimum solution. The non-verbal coding of pictures need to be crafted as carefully as verbal coding of text. To be sure of getting the message across, it may be necessary to use one thousand and one words.
Event: William Hudson talks to Namahn clients on "User-centred design with use case methods" (4 June 2003)
Some forty clients gathered in the library in the Namahn offices to listen to William Hudson describe his approach to user-centred design with use cases. Hudson, a software engineer, who runs his own design consultancy based in the UK, has extensive experience in designing interactive systems as well as being a writer and lecturer on the subject.
Methodologies employed in the software development process, such as the Rational Unified Process, as well as agile processes like eXtreme Programming are fundamentally system centred. Hudson introduced his listeners, many of whom were drawn from the software development field, to the principles of user-centred design and showed how it was possible to integrate this into all stages of the software development process.
He stressed the importance of the early creation of a conceptual model focused on the user rather than implementation issues. He then demonstrated how use cases can be employed to translate this abstract model into functional specifications to ensure that user requirements are included in the final product and the interface is an integral part of it. The increased understanding and integration between software developers and usability specialists afforded by this approach provides a significant benefit.