[Tom's Home Page]
[
Professional] [Life, Fun, &c] [Tell Me...]
[
Bookmarks] [Publications List] <and many papers and essays>

Of more general interest: [Apple HI Alumni page] [Interaction Design Patterns page] [Social Computing]


 

Professional Interests

 

Overview of this page

In General...
Virtual Community and Genre Theory
Virtual Community and the Spatial Environment
Social Hypertext
Electronic Notebooks
Phenomenology and Interaction Design
Patterns for Interaction Design (see the Interaction Design Patterns home page)
Publications List
Bookmarks List

In General...

I'm interested in topics such as ethnography, urban design, real and virtual communities, everyday routines and rituals, geography and the sense of place, and the sociology of human-human interaction. Big influences include Don Norman, George Lakoff, Neil Postman, Kevin Lynch, Christopher Alexander, Erving Goffman, Donald Schön, and William Whyte, to name a few. And also many lesser-known but nevertheless remarkable colleagues.

How I do what I do: I work by studying ordinary users, identifying their problems, needs, and work practices, translating these observations into design prototypes, and then testing those prototypes (also known as interaction design). Technology areas that interest me include information retrieval and management, geographic information systems, virtual spaces, and adaptive systems.

Virtual Community and Genre Theory

One of my central interests is how (and to what degree) computer systems can support communities, and other forms of social interaction. While I've generally thought about this in terms of virtual environments and urban design (see below), I've recently become interested in applying genre theory to get a handle on these issues. I find the notion of genre interesting because it focuses more on the shared informational artifacts that are being created by groups of people, which is a bit more tractable than the various relationships amongst people that the frame of community invokes. If you're interested in reading more about this, see the paper "Social Interaction on the Net: Virtual Communities as Participatory Genre , and the draft of the next paper "Rhyme and Punishment: the Creation and Enforcement of Conventions in an On-Line Participatory Limerick Genre."

Virtual Community and the Spatial Environment

Of course, genre theory is not the only way to grapple with virtual community. I've long been interested in the ways in which physical environments support community, and its accoutrements such as ritual, history, symbols, etc., and have been exploring ways in which to support this sort of richness in virtual environments. Thus I am interested in MUDs and MOOs, etc., as well as graphical 2-D and 3-D spaces that support social. Some general reflections on how virtual spaces may be designed to support social interaction may be found in "From Interface to Interplace ." A follow on to this work was an attempt to create a publicly accessible 3-D space. This was a collaboration with the folks at the University of Minnesota who bring you internet Gopher. The collaboration resulted in a paper, "A Preliminary Design for a 3D Spatial Interface for Internet Gopher", and an alpha version of gopherVR -- a spatial interface to gopherSpace -- that runs on a variety of platforms (PowerMac, Sun, ...), and walks on a few others (68K)... for pioneers only.

I'm also interested in real spaces, and the roles they play in supporting or undermining community and human interaction. Some day I'll add my urbanism reading list, but for now the best you'll do is the bibliography of the summary report of the CHI '97 workshop on pattern languages.

See my bookmarks page for an ever growing list of virtual communities and related papers.

Social Hypertext

Although it's old hat by now (and I'm preaching to the choir here, anyway), I think that what's happening on the web is revolutionary. In particular, I believe the proliferation of personal pages on the web is the beginning of a new kind of thing: social hypertext. This ties back into virtual communities, because I think what the web is all about is the presentation of personal identity, which is another basic constituent of community.

Electronic Notebooks

The flip side to the proliferation of information on 'the net' is that there is an increasing need for people to capture, manage, store, reuse, and otherwise manipulate information for their own personal goals. Two-plus years ago I designed a personal electronic notebook for my own use, and have been continually evolving its design and reflecting on how it shapes my work practices ever since. I'm very interested in hearing from others who have developed their own versions of electronic notebooks--as far as I have been able to determine, there are no published accounts (either first person, or studies of other) of notebook usage. One day soon I will put up a version of the paper on that...and here it is! (I also hope, some day, to do a study of 'power users' of paper notebooks, since that technology is far more advanced and subtle.)

Phenomenology and Interaction Design

I was trained as a cognitive psychologist, but have found myself increasingly disenchanted with the positivistic assumptions and framework that came along with my training. The more I practice design, the more I realize that the most important aspect of design is opening myself to the experience of those who will ultimately use the design, and what Donald Schön has called reflective practice (the approach of embodying ideas in some medium, reflecting on the embodiment, and iterating).

A different approach (towards the same end) has been termed phenomenological ecology: "Phenomenological Ecology is an interdisciplinary field that explores and describes the ways that things, living forms, people, events, situations and worlds come together environmentally. A key focus is how all these entities belong together in place, why they might not belong, and how the might better belong through more sensitive understanding, design and policy-making." (David Seamon, in "Dwelling, Seeing, Designing: Toward a Phenomenologlical Ecology." State University of New York Press, 1993)

For my first attempts at making this a little less fuzzy, see my paper "Notes on Design Practice: Stories and Prototypes as Catalysts for Communication ." There is now a shorter, less academic version of this paper called "Design as Storytelling."

Patterns for Interaction Design

Tied in with the interest in storytelling and communication in design, are my interests in Christopher Alexander's pattern language, and the various attempts to apply pattern languages to other areas of design such as object oriented programming and organizational design (see the patterns home page for pointers to mailing lists, papers, conferences, etc.). I've created a home page for Interaction Design Patterns, where I hope to list relevant links. Also there is a forthcoming book chapter in which I explore how (and why) Alexandrian pattern languages might be adapted to support interaction design in particular domains, and a summary report of a CHI Workshop on Pattern Languages for Interaction Design that I lead with John Thomas of NYNEX.

Publication List

And here's the list of all my publications. Some day I will annotate it with short summaries of each paper, but I haven't gotten to it yet.

Bookmark List

And here is my bookmarks page.


[Tom's Home Page]
[
Professional] [Life, Fun, &c] [Tell Me...]
[
Bookmarks] [Publications List] <and many papers and essays>

Of more general interest: [Apple HI Alumni page] [Interaction Design Patterns page] [Social Computing]

 

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