itsme interact2009

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Giorgio De Michelis

Uppsala

INTERACT 2009

Designing Interaction for Next Generation Personal Computing





Situated action from an individual viewpoint





After 1984: attention switched from personal to social computing

Communication

Knowledge Sharing

Communities

Collaboration



At least within CSCW, social computing has been driven by the situated action paradigm

Frequently combined with the language-action perspective

A new paradigm



Social life

The complexity of social life has two complementary aspects:

The need for being fully aware of the social experience within which we are immersed

The need for managing several, diverse social experiences(awareness and cross-fertilization)



The second above problem can not be solved at the server side

The client side is still based on the desktop metaphor, that was invented when social computing was not yet existing

The client side



Beyond a new paradigm

A new paradigm is not sufficient

A new theory is not what we need

We need for a new metaphor allowing to figure out how the work-station will deal with the situatedness of our experiences

simple, transparent, flexible,



Stories and Venues

Social life is the intertwining of several diverse stories.

Every story involves diverse actants (people, resources, tools, …) and its evolution generates diverse objects (documents, multimedia files, …)

Both actants and objects are located in a (distributed) space, transforming it in the venue of that story



From ‘Stories and Venues’ to itsme





Designing a new personal computing system on the basis of ‘Stories and Venues’

A difficult combination of radical innovation and evolution

Users understand immediately what they have in front and what they can do

Users invent new ways of behaving



Interaction design requirements

Designing venues in such a a way that people distinguish actants and objects

Automatical updating of venues; simple mechanisms for correcting and/or modifying venues; the transit buffer

Users can create venues in accordance with different criteria (location, activity, people, time period, …)

Users can create big or small venues

Users decide when a new venues is created: the limbo space



Bringing innovation into the real world

Creating venues - the ‘highlight and link’ function

A new front end for Linux, allowing users to stay with the applications they were using before

For long time the new metaphor will coexist with the previous one, in a sort of competitive game.

Mixing old and new. Users will keep some of their previous habits while inventing new ways of acting and interacting

While used by a growing number of people, ‘Stories and Venues’ will change. We will not contrast changes, while trying to keep the internal consistency of the metaphor.



Some general qualities itsme should have

Simplicity

Multiplicity

Openness

Continuity



Thank you for your attention!

www.itsme.it

[email protected]



itsme interact2009

Technology