Interactions

Authors:
Marisa Campbell

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To meet a need for a discussion forum with a Nordic perspective in the area of HCI, the Swedish Interdisciplinary Interest Group for Human Computer Interaction in cooperation with HCI organizers from other Nordic countries have created the first Nordic conference on human-computer interaction. It will not only include researchers and practitioners from all the Scandinavian countries, but from the rest of the world as well.

Keynote Speakers

 Cooperative Design—perspectives on 20 years with "Scandinavian IT Design Model"

Susanne Bødker, DAIMI, University of Aarhus, Denmark
Dan Sjögren, Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development (NUTEK), Sweden
Pelle Ehn, Konst och kommunikation, Malmö University, Sweden
Yngve Sundblad, CID, NADA, KTH, Sweden

All the presenters took part in the "seminal" Utopia project (1981-1985), where Cooperative Design methodology, involving users very early in the design process, was invented and used. Since then the obvious idea to involve the users as early as possible in systems and interface design has become a standard to which most developers pay at least lip-service, but don’t necessarily follow it in practice.

These keynote speakers discuss reasons for this and give a number of good examples of cooperative design, and discuss strategies for applying cooperative design practices in industrial systems and product design.

 "If IT Can’t Be Used By All, We Won’t Buy IT"

Knut Nordby, Telenor, Norway
Clas Thoren, Swedish Agency for Administrative Development (Statskontoret), Sweden

This presentation will focus on accessibility to meet the diversity of user capabilities, how to take this into account in standardization and procurement, and how HCI researchers and practitioners could transfer their knowledge into the standardization and procurement processes.

Tutorials

 Natural Prototyping

Øystein Gutu & Gautam Ghosh, Objectware AS, Oslo, Norway

Natural prototyping is a new method for specifying and designing web applications in a very short time. Its purpose is to clarify goals and requirements as well as to visualize (prototype) realistic solutions quickly. It is based on active user- and stakeholder participation throughout the design process. The realistic prototypes that evolve in the process enable users with no UI experience to make complex design decisions. The method is specially suited to conceptual design and the design of small web applications. This tutorial is an introduction to Natural Prototyping. This full-day tutorial is a combination of short lectures and exercises based on a realistic case study.

 Course Content

Planning the process

• things you need to clarify before starting process
• time-frames
• what you won’t achieve
• when is the method applicable
• visual profile and other issues

 Running Joint Application Development (JAD) workshops to clarify the business and project’s goals

• ensuring active user-involvement through
• documenting the process with ObjectWallware
• defining users and roles

 Natural Prototyping with ObjectWeb

• preparing the workshops
• using the magnetic user-interface—ObjectWeb
• building a prototype step-by-step
• evaluating the prototype with users
• diagnosing the users’ input
• documenting the process
• design decisions

Workshops

 Quality and Validity in HCI Research

Olav W. Bertelsen, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark
Liam J. Bannon, Dept. of Computer Science & Information Systems, University of Limerick, Ireland

 Topic to be discussed

The field of human-computer interaction is highly inter-disciplinary involving and borrowing from a multitude of incompatible disciplines to ensure that no means are left out in aiming for the best computer solutions. In the early years of HCI an overemphasis on criteria for scientific validity in the involved "basic" disciplines dominated over the question of practical relevance of research. Today, however, this disciplining has been substituted by an equally unsound looseness with respect to method, rigor and theoretical foundation.

The aim of this workshop is to nurture the diversity of the field by making explicit the "rules" in each corner, thus making it possible for others to appreciate other researchers’ work. The aim is also not to decide which kind of HCI research is most appropriate or valid, but to make explicit the criteria in order to improve research in all sub-disciplines.

The workshop will be organized into themes taking off from the accepted workshop papers and will conclude with a collection of posters presenting a classification of the approaches to validity and quality discussed during the day.

 Workshop on Developing Educational Material for HCI

An IFIP WG13.1 Workshop

Lars Oestreicher, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University, Sweden
Paula Kotzé, Computer Science and Information Systems, University of South Africa

This workshop will investigate the possibilities to provide the HCI community with a qualitative source of educational material, which is useful, easily accessible, and affordable.

This is especially important from an international perspective, where the material can, for example, act as an affordable or cheap (money-wise, not quality-wise) source of instructional material for countries where the HCI community is smaller and where teachers experience a lack of both teaching material. This kind of material might be difficult to publish in journals, and is also in many cases too small to be published in book form, whereas a more open publication possibility could be to release smaller education packages in the form of booklets.

The workshop will be organized as a one-day workshop where the first half will focus on the discussion of suitable types of materials to be published in this way, based on the statements in the position papers. The second half will focus on what criteria might be placed on the material, essentially creating a template for contributions to this database, and on how to implement the results practically.

 New Cultures of Writing Together

Sharing experiences of co-authoring with technologies
Tessy Cerratto, Kerstin Severinson Eklundh and Hee-Cheol (Ezra) Kim, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden

With the advent of CSCW systems, several applications have been developed to support co-authoring. Bringing both challenges and constraints to current co-authoring practices, CSCW systems open new ways of communicating and writing together. But despite the great technical improvements, studies still report little use of CSCWriting applications. Incorrect assumptions about writing and collaborative writing activities have become one of the main reasons for a lack of usage. Also, experiences of failures with CSCWriting applications have demonstrated that co-authors need to re-organize their habits and develop specific social, cognitive and technical skills in order to have real use of the applications.

The objective of this workshop is to promote the understanding and the mutual impact between CSCWriting and co-authoring practices and bring together an international group of researchers and practitioners to share experiences of the following topics:

• co-authoring practices in academia and industry
• stories of success or failures from co-authoring projects
• experiences of co-authoring over the Internet
• experiences of usage of tools for commenting and change representation
• design of computer support for co-authoring
• evaluation of co-authoring tools
• criteria for analyzing collaborative writing activities
• methods and concepts for a better understanding of collaborative writing activities

This workshop is directed to researchers and professional who are interested in the field of computer mediated collaborative writing.

Doctoral Consortium

This will be the place where lively and useful discussions enable students to receive suggestions about their on-going research and allows more experienced participants to hear some fresh ideas and view some of the new trends in the field.

Students will benefit in several different ways by participating in the consortium; primarily by presenting work to a knowledgeable audience, but also by meeting established researchers and other graduate students doing similar work.

September 10-12
CVE 2000
The Third International Conference on Collaborative Virtual Environments
Cathedral Hill Hotel
San Francisco, CA
www.ai.sri.com/cve2000/

September 10-14
VL2000 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages
Seattle, WA
www.cs.orst.edu/~burnett/vl2000/

September 11-13
Design 2000
Coventry University, UK
vide.coventry.ac.uk/codesigning//

September 13-15
i3 Annual Conference 2000
Building Tomorrow Today
Jönköping, Sweden
Contact: heide@nis.sdu.dk
i3-ac2000.informatik.uni-duisburg.de/

September 25-27
Huc 2K
The Second International Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing
Bristol, UK
www.csm.uwe.ac.uk/faculty/cpim/huc2k/

September 25-27
Online Learning 2000 Conference & Exposition
(including Performance Support 2000)
Denver Convention Complex
Denver, CO, USA
www.onlinelearning2000.com

September 27-29
HCI-Aero 2000
International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction in Aeronautics
Toulouse, France
www-eurisco.onecert.fr/events/hci.aero2000.html/

October 5-7
D:IG 2000
International Symposium on Interactive & Generative Design
Kuopio, Finland
koto/pspt.fi/digsymposium/

October 23-25
NordiCHI 2000
Design versus Design
The First Nordic Conference on Computer-Human Interaction
Royal Institute of Technology
Stockholm, Sweden
www.stimdi.se/konf/nordichi2000/index.html

October 25-26
6th ERCIM Workshop on "User Interfaces for All"
Florence, Italy
www.ics.forth.gr/proj/at-hci/UI4ALL/UI4ALL-2000/call.html

October 25-27
Third International Conference on Engineering Psychology & Cognitive Ergonomics
Edinburgh, UK
www.cranfield.ac.uk/coa/confernc/conf-4hf.htm

October 26-27
4th SSoMC
Fourth Swedish Symposium on Multimodal Communication
Stockholm, Sweden
www.dsv.su.se/~ssomc/

October 29-November 2
SIGS Conference for Java Development Conference
Fairmont Hotel
San Jose, CA, USA
javadevcon.com

October 30- November 3
ACM Multimedia 2000
Marina Beach Resort
Los Angeles, CA, USA
www.acm.org/sigs/sigmm/MM2000/

October 30- November 4
WebNet 2000
World Conference on the WWW and Internet
San Antonio, TX, USA
www.aace.org/conf/webnet/webnet2000call.htm

November 13-15
Assets 2000
The Fourth International ACM SIGCAPH Conference on Assistive Technologies
Washington D.C., USA
www.acm.org/sigs/conferences/assets00/call.htmls

November 16-17
CUU 2000
ACM Conference on Universal Usability
Washington D.C., USA
www.acm.org/sigchi/cuu/

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