| CHI 98 Conference Program | April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, CA USA |
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Ben Shneiderman
Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland
Lab: http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/hcil/
A handwritten codex or printed book transformed society by allowing users to preserve and share information. Today, leather-bound volumes and illuminated manuscripts have given way to animated image maps and hot links. Vannevar Bush's memex has inspired the World Wide Web, which provides users with vast information resources and convenient communications. In looking to the future, we might again transform society by building a genex, a generator of excellence. Such an inspirational environment would empower personal and collaborative creativity by enabling users to:
This talk describes how a family of integrated software tools might support this four-phase model of creativity in health, education, entertainment and beyond.
Ben Shneiderman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Head of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and Member of the Institutes for Advanced Computer Studies and for Systems Research, all at the University of Maryland at College Park. He received an honorary doctorate of science from Guelph University in 1995 and was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM) in 1997.
Dr. Shneiderman is the author of Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (1980) and Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (1987, second edition 1992, third edition 1998), Addison-Wesley Publishers, Reading, MA. His 1989 book, co-authored with Greg Kearsley, Hypertext Hands-On!, contains a hypertext version on two disks. It was the world's first commercial electronic book and pioneered the highlighted embedded link. This concept was part of the Hyperties hypermedia system, produced by Cognetics Corporation, Princeton Junction, NJ. His starfield displays with dynamic queries has been implemented in the commercial product Spotfire.
Dr. Shneiderman has co-authored two textbooks, edited three technical books, and published more than 200 technical papers and book chapters. His 1993 edited book Sparks of Innovation in Human-Computer Interaction collects 25 papers from ten years of research at the University of Maryland. This collection includes Dr. Shneiderman's seminal paper on direct manipulation, a term he coined in 1981 to describe the graphical user interface design principles: visual presentation of objects and actions combined with pointing techniques to accomplish rapid incremental and reversible operations.
Alan Kay
The Walt Disney Company
History, and especially recent history, is littered with new useful ideas that have been rejected over and over again. Then, after desperate attempts to make them look like old existing ideas, they are grudgingly accepted. As Kuhn dryly noted, even in science it seems to take 25 years for a new idea framework to be accepted, because that is how long it takes for the old scientists to die off! Outside of science, it seems to take still longer.
In this talk, we will explore the nature of creativity-particularly in the computer and user interface areas-and then try to discover why what is creative to one group seems so destructive to another.
Dr. Kay, Disney Fellow and Vice President of Research and Development, is best known for the idea of personal computing, the conception of the intimate laptop computer and the inventions of the now ubiquitous overlapping-window interface and modern object-oriented programming. His deep interest in children and education was the catalyst for these ideas and continues to be a source of inspiration to him. As one of the founders of the Xerox PARC, Kay led one of the groups that in concert developed these ideas into modern workstations (and the forerunners of the Macintosh), Smalltalk, the overlapping-window interface, desktop publishing, the Ethernet, laser printing and network "client-servers." MP< Dr. Kay was a member of the University of Utah ARPA research team that developed 3-D graphics, where he earned a doctorate (with distinction) for the development of the first graphical object-oriented personal computer. He holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics and molecular biology from the University of Colorado. Kay also participated in the original design of the ARPANet, which later became the Internet. Kay has received numerous honors, including the ACM Software Systems Award and the J-D Warnier Prix D'Informatique. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society of Arts.
Michael G. Kahn, MD, Ph.D.
Rodeer Systems, Inc.
The art and science of clinical care is based on a special relationship of openness and trust which exists between clinicians and their patients. Clinicians require that their patients keep no secrets or else any hope of reaching the right diagnosis or selecting the right therapy will be lost. Patients require physicians to be non-judgmental to establish this trusting relationship. Yet at the same time, clinicians are taught to question everything they hear from patients and colleagues and to base no clinical decision on information obtained by others. How many times have you been asked the same question by many different people? Now you know why.
Clinicians will gratefully accept access to patient information which previously was not available; yet at the same time demand that that data be perfect. As the clinician's "mirror" into the system, the interface and its designers are held "responsible" to account for, or at least to make visible, the compromising sins of prior data collection, storage and computation processes that precede the user interface. "Keep No Secrets" refers to the desire to make available all information that is known about a patient; "Tell No Lies" refers to the desire to ensure that all such information accurately reflects what has actually occurred. New methods of analysis must be utilized to ensure that we can develop systems which show information which is needed and no more, and can highlight where data integrity compromises have been made-where there are secrets and maybe even lies.
Dr. Kahn received his MD from the University of California, San Diego, did his Internal Medicine internship and residency at St. Marys, a UCLA affiliate program, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Kahn was responsible for the development of a 15-hospital clinical data repository and Web-based physician interface. Dr. Kahn is a member of the Board of Directors for the American Medical Informatics Association, the Board of Scientific Counselors at the National Library of Medicine, the editorial board for the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association and the International Journal of Medical Informatics.
Mark Swain
Disney Feature Animation
Digital production in filmmaking has exploded in the 90's. The newly converted digital artists have a lavish set of 2D and 3D packages at their disposal in today's multimedia software environments. These production tools enable them to depict a wide range of expressions and special effects. The key to making these tools not feel like alien technology is to accommodate the artist's workflow by placing needed tools into the artist's hands and by providing interfaces that conform to the artist. This talk will address the impact of user interface design on digital production in the fast-paced entertainment industry.
Mark Swain has been working in digital production for over 8 years. His work has appeared in dozens of national commercials, MTV's Liquid Television, feature films, and the 1990 SIGGRAPH Film and Video Theater. Mark is currently a Technical Director/Designer at Disney Feature Animation in Los Angeles.
Brenda Laurel
Founder and Vice President, Design
Purple Moon
http://www.purple-moon.com/
The discipline of interface design is a shrinking subset of the domain of human-computer interaction. Despite our best efforts, HCI is traditionally understood as the art of slapping a friendly front-end on a functional fait accompli. Our role as advocates for "users" has been expressed in the details of the interface. But the growing pervasiveness of computers in human lives requires us to extend the scope of our advocacy; to express our values in the broader dimensions of form, structure and purpose.
In the Enlightenment, the philosophy of Humanism asserted that humans were innately improvable through their own efforts. Blind progress is humanism's evil twin. As our technologies become more profoundly formative of our future, we steal a growing portion of responsibility for our destiny from nature. Our ability to rely on nature to assert balance and wholeness appears to decline in direct proportion to the technological strides we take.
We cannot simply depend upon "human nature" or "family values" or even "the free market" to insure that the instrumentalities we develop will actually serve humanity or any individual human. If we are to advocate for humans in our technological world, how must our discipline grow? How can we do values-driven work while remaining closely attuned to actual human lives, needs and desires? The HCI community has the opportunity - and the responsibility - to make changes at the level of popular culture which will have a profound effect on the role of technology and the quality of human life.
Brenda Laurel is a 20-year entertainment software industry veteran who masterminded the four-year gender, play and technology research initiative that led to Purple Moon's creation. As Purple Moon Vice President, Design, Laurel drives the product's conceptual and creative direction toward the company mission to provide delightful and inspiring entertainment to girls ages 8-12. Laurel co-founded Purple Moon after serving as a member of the research staff at Interval Research Corporation, Purple Moon's parent company. Prior to Purple Moon, Laurel's career spanned renowned work in virtual reality, human-computer interface design and product development for companies such as Apple Computer, Atari, Activision, Fujitsu Laboratories, Lucasfilm Games, Sony Pictures and Paramount New Media.
Laurel began her career in 1977 as a computer game designer and programmer at CyberVision. She holds a B.A. in Communication and an M.F.A. and Ph.D. in theatre. She is editor of The Art of Human Computer Interface Design (1990) and author of Computers as Theatre (1991).
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