Keynote Speakers

W. Bradford Paley

Bio: W. Bradford Paley uses computers to create visual displays with the goal of making readable, clear, and engaging expressions of complex data. He did his first computer graphics in 1973, founded Digital Image Design Incorporated in 1982, and started doing financial & statistical data visualization in 1986. He has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art; he created TextArc.org; he is in the ARTPORT collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art; has received multiple grants and awards for both art and design, and his designs are at work every day in the hands of brokers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He is an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University, and is director of Information Esthetics: a fledgling interdisciplinary group exploring the creation and interpretation of data representations that are both readable and esthetically satisfying.

Three Drivers of Interaction Design & Parts of a Methodology to Map the Way

Part of that is to reveal that the “real world,” far from stultifying research or watering it down, actually requires a deeper level of analysis and innovation because the problems are so complex. (This counters the post-grad whine that “we're so smart they just don't understand us, and are too dumb to use our lovely tools.”) Fortunately these complex problems suggest and elicit solutions, so the innovation paradoxically sometimes becomes easier to do.

Another part helps to wean us from the simplified objectives sometimes set up in a lab; we need to realize that many of the things we want to study must be studied in a real-world context for them to engage the actual perceptual/cognitive mechanisms. There's a whole book pointing to the relatively new discipline of “Ecological Psychoacoustics” which turns its back on the idea that you can learn everything you want to learn about the auditory pathway by measuring threshold responses in anechoic chambers–they collectively point out that that measures sensory capabilities and building blocks, but NOT what's going on in someone's mind when they hear a branch in the woods being snapped by a nearby animal.

And a critical part that I think you allude to can be phrased altruistically by one of my mottos: “It's not a gift unless someone wants it;” or more aggressively in the statement “okay, you're done with your thesis product. WHO CARES? Will they use it–will they pay you to continue developing it?” This points to a metric sadly under-utilized in most of the research I've seen: that when you're adding value, people are willing to give you value (money) back! (And the almost-true converse, when they're not, you're not.) Money, far from being a sell-out, indicates a justification that you're doing something society cares about.

Yvonne Rogers

Bio: Yvonne Rogers is a professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Computing Department at the Open University, where she directs the Pervasive Interaction Lab. Prior to that she worked at Indiana University, Sussex University, and has had visiting positions at Stanford, Apple, Queensland University and UCSD. Her research focuses on augmenting and extending everyday, learning and work activities with a diversity of interactive and novel technologies. She has been working on tabletops and interactive surfaces for over 10 years. She presented her work on flexible collaborative interactions at the first Tabletop conference in Adelaide (2005) and is now the PI of the UK's EPSRC ShareIT project which is investigating how shareable technologies, that are designed specifically for more than one person to use at a time, can enable groups to collaborate more effectively. She is also one of the authors of the bestselling textbook “Interaction Design; Beyond Human-Computer Interaction” and more recently “Being Human: Human Computer Interaction in the Year 2020”.

Laying the table in the wild

Most research on tabletops has been done in the lab, investigating new interaction techniques and ways of interacting around shared surfaces. Recently, within HCI and ubicomp, there has been a move towards being ‘in the wild’; be it deploying and evaluating new technologies in situ or observing whatever is happening out there. As part of this trend, I will present some recent attempts at designing and placing tabletops and other interactive surfaces in the real world–illustrating how ‘wild use’ can be quite different from ‘lab use’ and the tensions and challenges that can arise when giving up control.