A computer network is a social network The network revolution We find community in networks, not groups. Although people often view the world in terms of groups (Freeman, 1992), they function in networks. In networked societies: boundaries are permeable, interactions are with diverse others, connections switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies can be flatter and recursive. The change from groups to networks can be seen at many levels. Trading and political blocs have lost their monolithic character in the world system. Organizations form complex networks of alliance and exchange rather than cartels, and workers report to multiple peers and superiors. Management by multiply-connected network is replacing management by hierarchal tree and management by two-dimensional matrix (Berkowitz, 1982; Wellman, 1988; Castells, 1996). Communities are far-flung, loosely-bounded, sparsely-knit and fragmentary. Most people operate in multiple, thinly-connected, partial communities as they deal with networks of kin, neighbours, friends, workmates and organizational ties. Rather than fitting into the same group as those around them, each person has his/her own

The concept of affordance is popular in the HCI community but not well understood. Donald Norman appropriated the concept of affordances from James J. Gibson for the design of common objects and both implicitly and explicitly adjusted the meaning given by Gibson. There was, however, ambiguity in Norman’s original definition and use of affordances which he has subsequently made efforts to clarify. His definition germinated quickly and through a review of the HCI literature we show that this ambiguity has lead to widely varying uses of the concept. Norman has recently acknowledged the ambiguity, however, important clarifications remain. Using affordances as a basis, we elucidate the role of the designer and the distinction between usefulness and usability. We expand Gibson’s definition into a framework for design.

Movements of interfaces can be analysed in terms of whether they are sensible, sensable and desirable. Sensible movements are those that users naturally perform; sensable are those that can be measured by a computer; and desirable movements are those that are required by a given application. We show how a systematic comparison of sensible, sensable and desirable movements, especially with regard to how they do not precisely overlap, can reveal potential problems with an interface and also inspire new features. We describe how this approach has been applied to the design of three interfaces: the Augurscope II, a mobile augmented reality interface for outdoors; the Drift Table, an item of furniture that uses load sensing to control the display of aerial photographs; and pointing flashlights at walls and posters in order to play sounds.

Abstract Over the past decade, our group has approached interaction design from an industrial design point of view. In 1 doing so, we focus on a branch of design called formgiving. Traditionally, formgiving has been concerned with such aspects of objects as form, colour, texture and material. In the context of interaction design, we have come to see formgiving as the way in which objects appeal to our senses and motor skills. In this paper we first describe our approach to interaction design of electronic products. We start with how we have been first inspired and then disappointed by the Gibsonian perception movement [1], how we have come to see both appearance and actions as carriers of meaning, and how we see usability and aesthetics as inextricably linked. We then show a number of interaction concepts for consumer electronics with both our initial thinking and what we learnt from them. Finally, we discuss the relevance of all this for tangible interaction. We argue that in addition to a data-centred view it is also possible to take a perceptual-motor centred view on tangible interaction. In this view it is the rich opportunities for differentiation in appearance and action possibilities that make physical objects open up new avenues to meaning and aesthetics in interaction design. Keywords tangible interaction, industrial design, ecological psychology, semantics 1. Whilst formgiving is somewhat of a neologism in English, many other European languages do have a separate word for form-related design,

There has been an increasing interest in objects within the HCI field particularly with a view to designing tangible interfaces. However, little is known about how people make sense of objects and how objects support thinking. This paper presents a study of groups of engineers using physical objects to prototype designs, and articulates the roles that physical objects play in supporting their design thinking and communications. The study finds that design thinking is heavily dependent upon physical objects, that designers are active and opportunistic in seeking out physical props and that the interpretation and use of an object depends heavily on the activity. The paper discusses the trade-offs that designers make between speed and accuracy of models, and specificity and generality in choice of representations. Implications for design of tangible interfaces are discussed.

This article introduces a design framework for sensing-based interfaces in which designers are encouraged to compare expected physical movements with those that can be sensed by a computer system and those that are desired by a particular application. They are asked to treat the boundaries between these as interesting areas of the design space, both in terms of problems to be solved and also opportunities to be exploited. Our framework is motivated by four recent trends in human computer interaction (HCI)

Tangible user interfaces (TUIs) provide physical form to digital information and computation, facilitating the direct manipulation of bits. Our goal in TUI development is to empower collaboration, learning, and design by using digital technology and at the same time taking advantage of human abilities to grasp and manipulate physical objects and materials. This paper discusses a model of TUI, key properties, genres, applications, and summarizes the contributions made by the Tangible Media Group and other researchers since the publication of the first Tangible Bits

Abstract. Several research groups have grappled with the problem of characterizing and developing practical approaches for implementing adjustable autonomy and mixed-initiative interaction in deployed systems. However, each group takes a little different approach and uses variations of the same terminology in a somewhat different fashion. In this chapter, we will describe some common dimensions in order to better understand these important but ill-characterized topics. We will also sketch the approach to implementation we are developing in the context of our research on policygoverned autonomous systems. 1

The idea that to perceive an object is to perceive its affordances---that is, the interactions of the perceiver with the world that the object supports or affords---is attractive from the point of view of theories in cognitive science that emphasize the fundamental role of actions in representing an agent's knowledge about the world. However, in this general form, the notion has so far lacked a formal expression. This paper offers a representation for objects in terms of their affordances using Linear Dynamic Event Calculus, a formalism for reasoning about causal relations over events. It argues that a representation of this kind, linking objects to the events which they are characteristically involved in, underlies some universal operations of natural language syntactic and semantic composition that are postulated in Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). These observations imply that the language faculty is more directly related to prelinguistic cognitive apparatus used for planning action than formal theories in either domain have previously seemed to allow.

In this paper, we present a new approach to interaction modelling based on the concept of information resource. The approach is inspired by recent distributed cognition (DC) literature but develops a model that applies specifically to human-computer interaction (HCI) modelling. There are of course many approaches to modelling HCI and the motivation of this paper is not to offer yet another approach. Rather our motivation is that the recent developments in DC are so obviously relevant to HCI modelling and design yet the ideas have lacked visibility in the HCI community. By providing a model whose concepts are rooted in DC concepts we hope to achieve this visibility. In addition, we hope to provide the foundation for a programme of research that extends the DC analysis of single user systems presented here to larger units of analysis more familiar to CSCW and DC research. DC research identifies resources for action as central to the interaction between people and technologies, but it sto...