ECDL’2000 - Lisbon, September 2000

© 2000, nmg

InteractivityDesign and Construction Paradigms

Nuno M. Guimarãesnmg@di.fc.ul.pt

2ECDL’2000 - Lisbon, September 2000

© 2000, nmg

Summary

• Illustrations of a problem• Visions of the world and language• … A way out!• Design framework

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Question

In the context of the design of interactive artifacts to used and explored by people...… which principles, motivations, methods, make the design process effective ?!

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Pixels, words, or meaning ?

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Pixels, words, or meaning ?

• …

LisbonPortugal(well, more or less…)

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Pictures of “reality” ?

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So what is this ?

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So what is this ?

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Problem/Claim

• There is no information (by itself), only data...

• We (people) “make” the information through interpretation and assignment of “meaning” ...

• “Meaning” is incomplete, shared, sufficient, ...

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Implications

• What is absolute or relative in interative artifact design ?

• More specifically…– How universal are the indexing

schemes in digital libraries ?– How far can we go in standardizing

metadata (like the “semantic descriptions in MPEG7”) ?

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Visions of world and language

• Philosophy of Language & Cognition– Wittgenstein : from a universal to multiple “languages”

– Heidegger : the rejection of the dualism objectivity-subjectivity, situated existence (dasein, throwness) and interpretations of breakdown

– Neurobiology [Damásio94] : emotion as unavoidable in “rational” behaviour

– Logic and Linguagem [Devlin97]: from language to communication

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Visions of world and language

• “Pragmatic” theories of language – Speech Act Theory [Searle69] : from language as a

logical system to language as an action and communication medium; Argumentation [Toulmin58] : from theoretical logic to the logic of argumentation

• Cognition in the Technological Context– Augmenting the Human Intellect [Engelbart66] – Understanding Computers and Cognition [Winograd86] – Plans and Situated Actions [Suchman86]

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…conclusion...

• From facts and reflection, …

… socially constructed “truths”, contextual and situated

dimensions are paramount in the design and usage of interactive artifacts...

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Myth after Myth after Myth...

• The “quality” of coded speech

• The “transparency” of distributed systems

• The “consistency” of distributed

hypermedia systems

• The “intelligence” of tutoring systems

• The “understanding” of natural language

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So...

• A framework to see the world of artifacts, and to design new ones...

– Augmentation

– Affordances, mapping, constraints and feedback

– Breakdowns

– Cognitive modes : reflective and experiential

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A design framework

• Augmentation, as in H-LAM/T - Human Using Language, Artifacts and Methodology in which he is Trained [Engelbart66], Memex…

• Affordances : functionality and behaviour that are perceived for an object; Mapping : correlation between an artifact’s interface and the (spatial or temporal) accessibility to the perceived functions; Constraints & Feedback. [Norman88, Norman92,Norman93]

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A design framework (affordances)

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A design framework

• Breakdown– Cognitive breakdown determines, or

activates, processes of interpretation

– Breakdown : blocking or progress factor [Winograd86, Suchman86]

– “The design of an artifact should be guided by the organization of the space of possible breakdowns of action ” [Winograd86]

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A design framework (breakdown)

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A design framework

• Experiential Cognition• Sensorial and mechanized tasks

• Reflective Cognition• Learning and reasoning activities, that

generate changes in the “cognitive structures” of the person [Norman92,Norman93]

• From experiential to reflective and back : management of cognitive breakdowns

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Example

Classification and Search in Video Archives“…building a universal ontology for describing AV content is probably impossible since as communities evolve, their ontologies also evolve…” [Auffret99]

• There are no universal ontologies in information (or data) classification.

• Rapid and flexible visual interaction are the main solution to effective access. Navigation and exploration are augmentation processes

• Characteristics of multimedia data (video) can be used to create interactive visual representations providing effective manipulation mechanisms

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Conclusion

• As usual “there is no silver bullet”…

• Information is “our” interpretation of data• Support people interpreting data, as fast and

easily as possible• Machines cannot understand, only mimic the

understanding of one of us (or some of us, or most of us, but not all of us)