"His general stance on email is off — understandably so. Who could ever have predicted our email culture? He is, for example, very up for doing email on weekends because “I’d rather answer email on Sunday and be in my pyjamas on Monday”. Unless the “Monday pyjamas” refers to working from home (which isn’t mentioned anywhere), this reads like a naive assumption that an hour tackling unending email on the weekend corresponds to going in late on Monday. Which, you know, it should. But it doesn’t.
Also, this gem: ”One of the enormous attractions of email is that it is not interruptive like a telephone.” This should be true, and is for some people, but I know that I and others struggle to restrain email checking to once or twice a day. Also, check this: ”You can process [email] at your leisure, and for this reason you may reply to messages that would not stand a chance in hell of getting through the secretarial defences of corporate, telephonic life.” I think not!"

"Rogers applies these conditions to many other types of relationships, but of primary importance to me (in my current context) is the application to learner-centered education. In Rogers' view, the teacher should embody the characteristics above, and provide resources relevant to the domain of study (as well as being a "resource-finder"). Students are then allowed to use these resources however they see fit to discover, appropriate and apply the knowledge that they believe will be most relevant to them."

Reprised at DERI 2011-12-12

via http://twitter.com/madderrabbit/status/139769061398683648

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"Rielland’s “Objects from another age” do precisely that. A tablet for sending and receiving email comes in a mailbox. A tablet for video chatting comes with a mirror on the other side. (The idea is that you're either looking at yourself, or someone else.) And a tablet for looking at e-pictures rests on a simple picture stand. When you want to print a picture, you simply slide the whole thing into a printer. By matching each object’s shape to its function -- and by making each object do only thing -- Rielland hopes to whittle away users’ techno-confusion. Spartan styling reinforces that effort."

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" Indeed I recall a colleague, maybe Harold Thimbleby5, once suggested that documentation ought to be written before any code is written, precisely to ensure simple use.""Some years ago I was reading a manual (for a Unix workstation, so quite a few years ago!) that described a potentially disastrous shortcoming of a the disk sync command (which could have corrupted the disk). Helpfully the manual page included a suggestion of how to wrap sync in scripts that prevented the problem. This seemed to add insult to injury; they knew there was a serious problem, they knew how to fix it … and they didn’t do it. Of course, the reason is that manuals are written by technical writers after the code is frozen.

In contrast, I was recently documenting an experimental API6 so that a colleague could use it. As I wrote the documentation I found parts hard to explain. “It would be easier to change the code”, I thought, so I did so. The API, whilst still experimental, is now a lot cleaner and simpler."

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"Closing keynote was from Barry Wellman, the guy who started social network analysis way before they were on computers. At one point he challenged the Dunbar number1. I wondered whether this was due to cognitive extension with address books etc., but he didn’t seem to think so; there is evidence that some large circles predate web (although maybe not physical address books). Made me wonder about itinerant tradesmen, tinkers, etc., even with no prostheses. Maybe the numbers sort of apply to any single content, but are repeated for each new context?""As is always the case presentations were all interesting. Strictly BHCI is a ‘second tier’ conference compared with CHI, but why is it that the papers are always more interesting, that I learn more? It is likely that a fair number of papers were CHI rejects, so it should be the other way round – is it that selectivity and ‘quality’ inevitably become conservative and boring?""BHCI always had a broader concept of HCI compare with CHI’s quite limited scope. That is BHCI as a place that points the way for the future of HCI, just as it was the early nurturing place of MobileHCI. However CHI has now become much broader in it’s own conception, so maybe this is no longer necessary. Indeed at the althci session the organisers said that their only complaint was that the papers were not ‘alt’ enough – that maybe ‘alt’ had become mainstream. This prompted Russell Beale to suggest that maybe althci should now be real science such as replication!"

"What’s interesting is the interpretation of the results suggest that squeezing more information onto the screen does not improve subject perceptual and search performance.  Instead, the experiment show that there is a very complex interaction between visual attention/search with density of information of the display.  Under high scent conditions, information seems to ‘pop out’ in the hyperbolic browser, helping to achieve higher performance."

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"A lot of HCI wants to make the computer invisible, like Heidegger’s hammer. While you’re using it, you’re thinking about what you’re trying to accomplish–not about how to use the (computer/hammer). But computer science education takes the opposite approach: please, please look at the computer/hammer!""what I find so exciting about modern computer technology is that maybe there doesn’t need to be such a gap between users and programmers. As technology increasingly surrounds all of us, it’s an open question how much real control ordinary people will have over that technology. But what if we think of everyone as programmers? Think of everyone as programmers who need tools with different levels of abstraction for different tasks. The same person may use a high-level tool for one task, and a lower-level look-at-the-details-of-the-hammer tool for another a few minutes later. How can we create these tools with many levels of abstraction, but which always keep that sense of agency–I am the person doing this with the tool, rather than the tool is doing this for me."

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"my two students Michael Bernstein and Max Van Kleek, along with me and my frequent collaborator mc schraefel, carried out an extensive interview-based study to determine what drives people to put information—sometimes copied out of the computer—on pads on their desk, sticky notes attached to their monitor, scraps of paper in their wallet, paper calendars, or the backs of their hands. The results were presented in ACM TOIS. We found several recurring themes.""copy here). This means that to do one task, you often have to open up several different applications, searching in one for information I’ve already found in another, or even retyping it (since the application schemas don’t match, you can’t copy and paste). I know many of the choreographers shoehorned into my music application, but if I’m looking at the song and want to ask them a question, I have to go search for their entry in the address boob"

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"The opening “poster boaster” session was particularly energetic. There was no award for best boaster, but Cathal Hoare won an ovation by delivering his boaster as a poem:

If a picture is worth a thousand words
Surely to query formulation a photo affords
The ability to ask ‘what is that’ in ways that are many
But for years we have asked how can-we
Narrow the search space so that in reasonable time
We can use images to answer questions that are yours and mine
In my humble poster I will describe
How recent technology and users prescribe
A solution that allows me to point and click
And get answers so that I don’t feel so thick
About my location and my environment
And to my touristic explorations bring some enjoyment
Now if after all that you feel rather dazed
Please come by my poster and see if you are amazed….
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" HCIR search challenge.

From the web site:

The aims of the challenge are to encourage researchers and practitioners to build and demonstrate information access systems satisfying at least one of the following:

Not only deliver relevant documents, but provide facilities for making meaning with those documents.
Increase user responsibility as well as control; that is, the systems require and reward human effort.
Offer the flexibility to adapt to user knowledge / sophistication / information need.
Are engaging and fun to use.
Participants would be given access to the New York Times annotated corpus which consists of 1.8 million articles published in the Times between 1987 and 2007, and they would be expected do something interesting in searching or browsing this collection."

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"This project is new enough that it doesn't even quite have a coherent description, but the root is this: one time, I spent quite a long time pouring my heart out to a friend about the girl I thought I was going to marry. After what can only be described as extended angst, his reply: "I learned a new rollerblade trick. Wanna see?"

Recently, I've realized that I don't actually know very much about my patterns of communication with most of the people in my life. What do they look like? What do we talk about? When do they happen? And, can I combine cool vizualizations of conversational behavior over time with clever theories about the ways people make sense of converstaions and relationships to figure it out?

More generally, based on what I saw at CHI 2009, this project is part of what is a growing trend in HCI around developing interfaces that help people become self-aware. Whether it's activity detection and ambient awareness, deriving interesting info from financial records, tracking and visualizing personal data in general, or plain old persuasive computing, this seems like a growth area in HCI and one that has massive potential research and real-world impact."

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"The Macintosh was designed under a number of constraints, including:

* It needed to sell to "naive users," that is, users without any previous computer experience.
* It was targeted at a narrow range of applications (mostly office work, though entertainment and multimedia applications have been added later in ways that sometimes break slightly with the standard interface).
* It controlled relatively weak computational resources (originally a non-networked computer with 128KB RAM, a 400KB storage device, and a dot-matrix printer).
* It was supported by highly impoverished communication channels between the user and the computer (initially a small black-and-white screen with poor audio output, no audio input, and no other sensors than the keyboard and a one-button mouse).
* It was a standalone machine that at most was connected to a printer.

These constraints have all been relaxed somewhat during the 12 years since the introduction of the Macintosh, but we will explore what might happen if they were to be eliminated completely.
""The designers of the Phelps farm tractor in 1901 based their interface on a metaphor with the interface for the familiar horse: farmers used reins to control the tractor. The tractor was steered by pulling on the appropriate rein, both reins were loosened to go forward and pulled back to stop, and pulling back harder on the reins caused the tractor to back up [5]. It's clear in hindsight that this was a dead end, and automobiles have developed their own user interfaces without metaphors based on earlier technologies. Nonetheless, people today are designing information-retrieval interfaces based on metaphors with books, even though young folks spend more time flipping television channels and playing video games than they do turning the pages of books. "

"Think about it: if you want to write a letter, how much of the letter do you get written on the Desktop? None. If you want to look something up in Wikipedia, how much of the searching do you get done on the Desktop? None. If you want to perform a calculation, how many numbers get crunched on the Desktop? None!

The time you spend fiddling with your Desktop to get where you need to go to get your work done is entirely wasted. You get no work done on the Desktop. It has an efficiency of 0%. Clearly, there is a lot of room for improvement on the Desktop."

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"This projects aims to shed light on patterns in social dynamics and coordinated human activity. We do so by developing and deploying an experimental social interaction sensing platform. This platform consists of portable sensing device and software tools for aggregating, analyzing and visualizing the resulting data."

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Negotiation is a complex emotional decision-making process aiming to reach an agreement to exchange goods or services. Although a daily activity, few people are effective negotiators. Existing support systems make a significant improvement if the negotiation space is well-understood, because computers can better cope with the computational complexity. However, the negotiation space can only be properly developed if the human parties jointly explore their interests. The inherent semantic problem and the emotional issues involved make that negotiation cannot be handled by artificial intelligence alone, and a human-machine collaborative system is required. We are developing a new type of human-machine collaborative system that combines the strengths of both and reduces the weaknesses. Fundamental in these systems will be that user and machine explicitly share a generic task model. Furthermore, such systems are to support humans in coping with emotions and moods in human-human interactions. For this purpose we will contribute new concepts, methods and techniques. For integrative bargaining we will develop such a system, called a Pocket Negotiator, to collaborate with human negotiators. The Pocket Negotiator will handle computational complexity issues, and provide bidding- and interaction advice, the user will handle background knowledge and interaction with the opponent negotiator."

See also http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kraut/RKraut.site.files/research/research.html and http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kraut/RKraut.site.files/pubs/books.html

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"Turns out directed communication acts as expected (people who have strong relationships tend to communicate heavily with individual friends), but passive consumption is associated with greater feelings of loneliness. Since it's a cross-sectional study, we can't tell if clicking on feed stories makes people feel lonely, or lonely people tend to click on more feed stories, but we'll be able to tease out causation in future waves of the study."

"In the early twentieth century, our understanding of physics changed rapidly; now, our understanding of biology is undergoing a similar rapid change.""Customers have come to expect updates and accept their role as an extension of developers’ QA teams, finding “bugs” that can be fixed in the next “patch.”""Flows become more important than resources. Behavior counts""As design moves into the Age of Biology and shifts from a mechanical-object ethos to an organic-systems ethos, we should reflect on how best to prepare for coming changes in practice."

"My research interests are in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing,assistive and educational technologies and medical informatics. I am very interested in issues surrounding the technology needs of people in chronic care situations."