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Vol.28 No.1, January 1996
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Vol.28 No.1, January 1996 |
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As computers become pervasive in our environment, so the problems of user interface design and computer-human interaction become ubiquitous. Since computers and the issues they raise are everywhere, the CHI community is moving towards even more diversity in its interests and greater inclusion of different user communities. Toward these ends, CHI 96 will include a special "technical track" for children, a growing user community; invited speakers from outside the CHI community on such topics as human communication, inclusion of right brain skills in a field dominated by left-brain analytical activities; the future of libraries in an age of on-line information; and a "mentoring" program for promotion of papers from outside the traditional CHI community. The conference, CHI 96, sponsored by the ACM special interest group on Computer-Human Interaction, will be held April 14 through 18 at Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It will emphasize communication and the establishment of common ground for understanding between people and between people and machines.
Common Ground is the theme for CHI 96, emphasizing the goals of the conference organizers to make the event more inclusive and to provide more conference experiences that are common across the wide spectrum of participants. Originally a small conference for psychologists interested in user interface design, CHI conferences have grown to include a more diverse participant group, such as computer scientists, engineers, psychologists, and performance artists; and to deal with larger problems such as the enterprise integration of technology and issues arising from the ubiquity of computing.
For 1996, CHI extends the trend of diversification and inclusion with the specific inclusion of children. "We need to bring kids into the CHI community," comments Allison Druin, a Researcher at the University of New Mexico. "To do this we are expanding the notion of child care for CHI 96, including children ages three and up in four programs: CDROM field trips, multi-media storytelling, technology workouts, and the CHI Kids newsroom." Sponsors for these activities include Broderbund and Knowledge Adventures. Druin has worked for many years on user interfaces and environments for children, beginning with her work on Newbie, a kid-sized teddy bear interface to computers she created for her masters thesis at MIT. In addition to the CHI Kids program itself, she will report the results of the program on the last day of the conference. CHI Kids is expected to have 30 to 50 participants for '96. It rolls summer camp, technology, and CHI into one exciting new experience for children, in which they can explore computers, technology and user interface design.
"We have a very diverse community which actively researches a staggering variety of topics," notes Kevin Schofield, Program Manager for MSN Tools and Applications at Microsoft, and General Co-Chair for CHI 96. "What we lack, though, is a common framework for linking researchers and practitioners, and the topics they are interested in, together. We need a common forum for discussing how those topics interrelate. CHI 96 is an attempt to provide that forum." Computers provide one of the important unifying aspects for this otherwise very diverse group. Schofield points out that "we have now reached the point where personal computers and other computer equipment permeate our lives. CHI 96 is a forum for discussing the technological, social, psychological, and economic aspects of that trend." Diversity is both a strength of the CHI community, and a challenge for it. Goals for the conference include increasing international participation, developing a common ground for participants in the conference, and promotion of communication between participants.
To emphasize the role of communication, Professor Herb Clark will open the conference with a talk on how people establish a common ground between themselves in order to facilitate communication. Clark is a professor of psychology at Stanford University. He has long been interested in the social foundations of language use, and such questions as how individuals establish common ground in conversation, how people collaborate in establishing references, forms of signaling in conversation, and disfluences, such as uhm's and uh's and repeated words, in spontaneous speech. "For the CHI conference," Clark notes, "I will be discussing how people manage to communicate and accomplish tasks together through different media. The mechanisms are very different in media, such as video conferencing, electronic mail, or the telephone. These mediated interactions provide varying capacities for signaling to coordinate the conversation." In face to face conversations, according to Professor Clark, we engage in a great many signaling methods, techniques which convey information about concurrence with another person's ideas, that we are about to pause for a moment, and many other similar coordinating utterances. It makes sense, therefore, to consider these "second channel" coordinating communications in designing interactive computer systems.
Schofield amplifies this point: "The theme of the conference, common ground, represents a way of thinking about communication, whether it is between a person and a computer through a "user interface", or between two or more persons with or without technological assistance. Communication requires a common understanding of basic concepts and ideas, which are used as reference points to discuss new ideas."
Betty Edwards, author of the text "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain", will close the conference with a presentation about the use of combined "left-brain" and "right-brain" major modes in the display of, and interaction with, large amounts of information generated by computers. At high levels of complexity, the verbal-analytic capabilities of the human brain simply give out. "I recommend that people learn to draw. Drawing, as training for the right brain, is equivalent to the training we give the left brain with reading, writing and arithmetic. Being able to use our right brain capabilities at will is valuable in any enterprise." If computer systems can organize and present large data sets graphically, we can bring the visual-perceptual capacities to bear on the problem, as well as the verbal-analytic. In her talk, titled "A New Look at the Art of Seeing", Edwards will discuss how the computer provides a common ground for the use of the two major modes in the human brain. Dr. Edwards is Professor Emeritus at University of California, Long Beach, and Director of the Center for the Educational Applications of Brain Hemisphere Research, otherwise known as Brain-Ed. She consults widely in industry, and still manages to teach students of all ages and backgrounds how to draw on the right side of the brain.
Herb Clark and Betty Edwards were chosen for the opening and closing plenary sessions in part because they are outside the traditional CHI community. "They provide a fresh perspective to the conference participants," notes Schofield, "yet they reinforce the "common ground" between the HCI community and other research fields." These speakers address key issues which are driving current research and practice: how we think, how we communicate with computers and with each other, how we get access to information, and how we (and our children) interact with computers. These ideas represent the "common ground" of thought to which all HCI research and practice relates in one way or another.
Other invited speakers at the conference include Boris Velichkovski and Andrew Magpantay. Velichkovski will present some of his work concerning head mounted displays with eye focus tracking.
Magpantay, Director of Information Technology Policy at the American Library Association will discuss the technical development of libraries as we move into an environment of increasingly on-line information. "Problems of information access and organization are fundamental, no matter what the delivery medium," comments Magpantay. "Those working in the computer-human interface field should understand these fundamentals as they tackle the problem of user interfaces to various media." One important point that should not be overlooked is that the library as a physical place will not disappear in the near future. "The physical library is still a place for people to go to to get access to technology. In the future, it will still be a common ground where anyone can seek information, and that preserves information across long spans of time." Currently most information in the world is in non-digital form. The transition from the older forms to digital multimedia will be lengthy. According to Magpantay, a large task for the librarian is to manage this transition while preserving traditional equality of access.
To encourage successful paper submission from geographical areas traditionally under-represented at CHI conferences, for '96 a mentoring program is in place. "Anyone with a potential paper for CHI could request the help of a mentor, someone to guide the submitter as to the quality and relevance of the material, how to get it accepted, and so on," comments Bonnie Nardi, Technical Program Co-Chair. About 25 people requested a mentor, according to Nardi.
Those attending CHI 96 will have a chance to meet and interact with a wide variety of individuals and expose themselves to a broad survey of the Computer-Human Interaction field. Participants are involved in different work in a common field, human-computer interaction. Workers in the HCI field try to create new and beautiful products, combining the talents and skills of a very diverse group, ranging from designers to scientists to computer programmers. HCI combines the artistic with the technological and industrial, one of the few opportunities for such a combination in the computer business. CHI 96 will be a meeting place for all those working in, or interested in the field. Features of CHI 96 include:
Tutorials at CHI 96 will present the leading edge of current practice and research in computer-human interaction, providing in-depth study of topics in a highly interactive environment. Both full-day and half-day tutorials are offered. Tutorial topics include:
CHI 96 also offers fifteen workshops covering a broad range of computer-human interaction issues. These small groups (usually eight to twenty participants) will meet for one to two days to exchange views on topics of common concern. Participants are chosen ahead of time on the basis of position papers sent to the workshop organizers.
For more information about the conference, see the CHI 96 Home Page on the World Wide Web: http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi96/, or contact the Conference Administrator:
CHI 96 Conference Office
703 Giddings Avenue, Suite U-3
Annapolis, MD 21401, USA
Tel:+1-410 263 5382
Fax:+1-410 267 0332
E-mail: chi96-office@acm.org.
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Vol.28 No.1, January 1996 |
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